Faith in Exposure: Privacy and Secularism in the Nineteenth-Century United States 9781512823523

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION Our Faith in Exposure
CHAPTER 1 Infidelity
CHAPTER 2 Matrimony
CHAPTER 3 Nudity
CHAPTER 4 Conspiracy
CHAPTER 5 Hypocrisy
CHAPTER 6 Secrecy
EPILOGUE The Ends of Privacy
NOTES
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Citation preview

Faith in Exposure

EAR LY AMER ICAN STUDIES Series editors: Kathleen M. Brown, Roquinaldo Ferreira, Emma Hart, and Daniel K. Richter Exploring neglected aspects of our colonial, revolutionary, and early national history and culture, Early American Studies reinterprets familiar themes and events in fresh ways. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the period from about 1600 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Faith in Exposure Privacy and Secularism in the Nineteenth-­Century United States

Justine S. Murison

Universit y of Pennsylvania Press Phil adelphia

Copyright © 2023 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-­4112 www​.upenn​.edu​/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress Hardcover ISBN 9781512823516 eBook ISBN 9781512823523

For my parents

CONTENTS

Introduction. Our Faith in Exposure

1

Chapter 1. Infidelity

23

Chapter 2. Matrimony

54

Chapter 3. Nudity

88

Chapter 4. Conspiracy

117

Chapter 5. Hypocrisy

147

Chapter 6. Secrecy

179

Epilogue. The Ends of Privacy

211

Notes 221 Index 257 Acknowledgments 263

INTRODUCTION

Our Faith in Exposure

Though historical in its orientation, this book begins with a question prompted by contemporary law: How did the idea of a right to privacy become central to arguments both for and against sexual and reproductive freedom? From Roe v. Wade (1973) through several twenty-­first-­century Supreme Court cases— most prominently the majority opinion in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. (2014) and the dissenting opinions in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015)—contemporary legal fights over privacy reveal a strong and hardening tendency to treat religious freedom and sexual and reproductive freedom as competing, even opposing, claims on public life. The Hobby Lobby decision, for example, suggests that the practice of private reproductive choices—in this case the private use of birth control covered under an employee health plan—could be construed as an intrusion on the religious freedom of the corporation, as a privately held entity. Here, we see two significant ways “privacy” has been wielded in modern legal discourse: the sense that the individual has a right to privacy with regard to both sexual and religious choice; and that the corporation itself could be granted the rights of private individuals, including freedom of religion. And in both cases what is clear—as Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner have observed so well—is that there is “nothing more public than privacy.”1 While these conflicts over privacy, freedom, and rights have been intensifying in the decades following Roe v. Wade, their origins can be traced back to nineteenth-­century debates over the disestablishment of state religions, the abolition of slavery, the emergence of modern marriage, and the proliferation of alternative spiritual communities. My aim here is to show how, over the course of the nineteenth century, privacy came to encompass such contradictions—underpinning the right to sexual and reproductive rights but also undermining them in the name of religious freedom; and I do this through a study of the nineteenth-­century American novel as a field in which these

2

Introduction

conflicts played themselves out with a special kind of clarity. As the literary form most closely associated with modern subjectivity and the private lives of individuals, the novel was well attuned to emergent forms of privacy, and it was especially well attuned to the primary mechanism by which this emergent privacy would be constituted as the deepest, most authentic expression of the self: through the gesture of public revelation or exposure. At the risk of starting with the most obvious literary case of all, consider Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter (1850). Every time he ascends to the pulpit, Dimmesdale ardently intends to unburden the “black secret of his soul,” the adultery with Hester Prynne that led to her public shaming after the birth of their daughter. Even so, he never comes closer than generalizations, telling his congregation that he is “altogether vile,” “the worst of sinners,” and other abstract confessions to original sin that he knows will cause his parishioners to revere him all the more as a paragon of the moral order: The minister well knew—subtle, but remorseful hypocrite that he was!—the light in which his vague confession would be viewed. He had striven to put a cheat upon himself by making the avowal of a guilty conscience, but had gained only one other sin, and a self-­ acknowledged shame, without the momentary relief of being self-­ deceived. He had spoken the very truth, and transformed it into the veriest falsehood. And yet, by the constitution of his nature, he loved the truth, and loathed the lie, as few men ever did. Therefore, above all things else, he loathed his miserable self!2 Knowing full well how his seventeenth-­century Puritan congregation would receive this kind of public confession, Dimmesdale repeatedly commits “only one other sin,” the sin of hypocrisy, by grounding his admission in Calvinist theological abstraction rather than in a deeply personal revelation. From the novel’s point of view, Dimmesdale’s moral failing is not that he had an affair with Hester Prynne, nor simply that he lets her take the blame. No, it is that there is an inconsistency between his private and public selves. He hides his shameful secret while publicly preaching moral uprightness. Hawthorne does not present Dimmesdale’s hypocrisy as an uncomplicated moral failing, though; Dimmesdale is subtle at it, and he is remorseful about it. Dimmesdale loves truth and therefore hates himself. As Hawthorne implies, this is the falsest you can be, and it is the deepest truth about Arthur Dimmesdale.

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Hawthorne’s iconic tortured minister encapsulates the interrelated concerns of this study: the public morality attached to putatively private matters of marriage and sexuality; hypocrisy and the tendency in the United States to denounce it as a sin that undermines public trust; and, above all else, the role of the novel form in the emergence and dominance of a secular faith in the power of exposing such sins. My interweaving here of words we associate with religion (sin, faith, morality) with words we consider attached to the conditions of secularity (politics, public, society, and even the novel) is purposeful. One of my primary goals is to consider a widespread moral culture attached to privacy that is the foundation of mainstream secularism in the United States.3 Drawing on the interdisciplinary field of secular studies, Faith in Exposure brings a postsecular orientation to the historical emergence of modern privacy.4 As I examine it here, secularism is the ideology invested in the modern progress narrative toward rationality and away from credulity, often referred to as the “secularization thesis.”5 The privatization of religion is the story at the heart of this thesis. One of the ideology’s central myths rests on the importance of relocating to the private sphere religious beliefs and practices that are deemed to be incompatible with modernity and liberation. The Scarlet Letter—with its critique of ministerial hypocrisy, its stark re-­creation of seventeenth-­century Calvinism, and its providential end that heralds “some brighter period” in which a “new truth would be revealed”—enacts just such a progress narrative away from public credulity and toward private belief. We might say that secularism is not so much the absence of religion from the public sphere or the belief that such an absence is a good thing, but is instead a prescriptive orientation to the world that encompasses both potentially contradictory perspectives simultaneously—not only that religion ought to be banished to the private sphere, but also that, in our modern age, it already has been. Readers will find two interlocking stories about privacy in this book. The first story considers how the legal and cultural shift of religion to the private sphere gave rise to a “secular sensibility” that was especially invested in the kind of authenticity Dimmesdale fails to honor. My emphasis on sensibility follows from Talal Asad’s insight that “representations of ‘the secular’ and ‘the religious’ in modern and modernizing states mediate people’s identities, help shape their sensibilities, and guarantee their experiences.”6 It also signals this book’s overarching focus on how privacy constitutes an affect and performance of authenticity as much as a space set aside for the home and

4

Introduction

religion. The word sensibility also usefully combines this affective quality with the eighteenth-­century use of the term to imply moral and aesthetic judgment.7 Through the legal and cultural connection of religion with the private sphere, privacy became an overdetermined moral concept, informing how we encounter and debate the right to be shielded from state interference in the domestic sphere and who will be afforded or denied this protection.8 By calling attention to the organization of private life as working to produce a certain sensibility that must be apparent beyond the household, the chapters that follow continually return to marriage. During the first half of the nineteenth century, marriage transformed from a publicly recognized duty to a private contract while it was, at the same time, legally denied to enslaved people. The illegality of marriage under slavery fused the moral role of private marriage— and privacy more generally—to the public structures of white supremacy.9 The second story is literary and proceeds less from the content of Dimmesdale’s moral failing than from the form in which it is revealed. Faith in Exposure attends closely to the development of privacy as a “secular sensibility” in and through the novels of the long nineteenth century. The preoccupation of the novel form with private life, and especially its dependence on revelations of private desire and sexual secrets, made it the perfect vehicle for suggesting that exposure might be synonymous with morality itself. Though I expand on genre and methodology later in the introduction, let me forecast those here. A postsecular approach to the literature of the nineteenth century allows me to historicize the prevalence of methods of revelation, unveiling, and exposure in literary study, practices often (though I believe incorrectly) ascribed solely to “critique.” Here, I argue that the desire to “unveil” observed in literary scholarship is but one part of a larger cultural mode that dominates public discourse in the United States. I therefore do not reveal secular privacy (or critique, for that matter) to be truly religious after all; rather, I show how the production of such revelations is the quintessential function of secular morality.

A Religious History of Secularism The chapters of this book span from the 1790s to the turn of the twentieth century and have as their historical backdrop a significant epoch for religion in the United States: the disestablishment of state churches and the simultaneous proliferation of various religions and spiritualities that included but were

Our Faith in Exposure

5

not limited to the evangelical revivals of the Second Great Awakening. Disestablishment was a process that encompassed the entire nineteenth century. While the legal separation of church establishments from state governance seemed to end officially when Massachusetts disestablished the Congregational Church in 1833, that only heralded the beginning of what the historian Steven K. Green has called the “second disestablishment.” The century’s legal contests over the meaning and extent of disestablishment and the First Amendment occurred not just over state establishments; rather, as Green has argued, they were part of a larger “process that gradually exchanged fealty to the maxim that ‘Christianity is part of the common law’ with a reliance on secular instrumentalist bases for the law.”10 This transformation unfolded through a host of debates about and challenges to laws on profane swearing, church property, nonsectarian public schools, and Sunday law enforcement.11 And this legal and political background was actively on the minds and woven into the works of a wide variety of writers, both women and men.12 While the states largely disestablished religion in the early nineteenth century, religiosity (as viewed from any number of angles, including church or revival attendance, splintering of denominations, inventions of new ways of being religious or spiritual, and the persistence of occult beliefs) proliferated in what the philosopher Charles Taylor would term the “nova effect” of secularity. This proliferation has long been noted by historians of religion under different names: a “hothouse” of religious experimentation; the “democratization” of American Christianity; the “feminization” of religion away from Calvinism and into popular forms of sentimentality; and the commodification of religion in the antebellum “marketplace” of culture. And it was not only an effect of rising immigration from Catholic countries, or the establishment of the African Methodist and African Baptist Churches, or the splintering of the largely white Protestant denominations over slavery. The century also produced an abundance of spiritual affinities and practices, including Mormonism, Spiritualism, Seventh Day Adventism, Christian Science, and other popular metaphysical religions that flourished especially among the growing white middle classes.13 As scholars of American religious and cultural history have shown, the seemingly paradoxical explosion of religiosity as disestablishment unfolded is in fact constitutive and exemplary of secularism in the United States.14 One significant ideological assumption at the heart of US secularism came out of these legal and cultural shifts: the idea that religious beliefs ought to be private, that they are a matter of individual conscience, free from state

6

Introduction

interference. This is also, not coincidentally, a Protestant way to be religious. Since the Reformation, Protestants have affirmed that one’s relationship to God is personal and beyond ecclesiastic intervention; they have also affirmed, however, that the state of grace would be evident in the entire range of one’s public speech and conduct. Practice was not so much the substance of religion but a reflection of private belief, and this orientation to the public manifestation of privately achieved conviction continued to be vital to Protestantism in New England and in United States culture more generally.15 The alignment of religion with the private sphere has caused an ideological conflation of privacy with freedom in ways that have fostered technological and biopolitical influence over the spiritual, sexual, and domestic lives of individuals and groups in the United States.16 In the language of the First Amendment, the federal government has no right to abridge private conscience and the public expression of it (this was subsequently extended to the states in 1963). The logic of the First Amendment assumes that it is good for democracy to promote a transparent equivalence between citizens’ private beliefs and public selves. But the secular-­state’s investment in such transparency had—and still has—a hard limit. The US Supreme Court majority decision in Reynolds v. United States (1878), which upheld the 1862 Morrill Anti-­Bigamy Act, targeting Utah and passed supposedly in the interest of maintaining public morality, is one quite visible example. The decision overrode the defendant’s First Amendment prerogative to practice his religious belief in plural marriage. Despite its wording, the First Amendment seemed to protect only an immaterial and private “freedom of belief,” especially when religious practice challenged mainstream moral convictions about heteronormative marriage.17 Thus, private religion remained free, while the public practice of it—in the case of plural marriage—was subject to restriction by the state. One of the origins of the discursive distinction between “good” and “bad” religion so pervasive in US secularism lies precisely here. As the religious studies scholar Robert Orsi explains, “To ‘believe in’ a religion means that one has deliberated over and then assented to its propositional truths, has chosen this religion over other available options, a personal choice unfettered by authority, tradition, or society. What matters about religion from this perspective are its ideas and not its things, practices, or presences. This is not necessarily how Americans actually are religious, of course, but this account of religion carries real normative force.”18 This normative definition of religion as propositional belief took on legal importance in the disestablishment debates, and it would also undergird the theory of privacy as it developed

Our Faith in Exposure

7

in the nineteenth century. When Thomas Jefferson, for instance, denounced established churches, he targeted a system that asked citizens to support institutions even when they did not believe in those institutions’ theologies. Conversely, according to the First Amendment, to be truly free consisted in the ability to have your private convictions remain just that—private. For as Jefferson famously quipped in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), “It does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”19 Good religion (to borrow Orsi’s term) is private belief, and private belief, if we follow Jefferson, is immaterial. It affects neither your body nor your neighborhood nor the bottom line. To be clear, as Orsi stresses, it is not that lived religious experience was somehow reduced down to an immaterial private belief. To begin, this was a largely white Protestant way of defining religion, in which embodied practice and communal rites were considered secondary to private conviction. It was also explicitly set against Catholic theological emphases on sacraments, icons, and rituals. Yet as secularism laid claim, in John Modern’s words, to “that which was most natural, that which was certainly true, and that which was excessively real,” the ability to code private religion as both self-­evidently good and something that had been subtracted from the public square became a way for secular institutions to retain their Protestant structures while simultaneously disavowing them.20 Tracy Fessenden has demonstrated how this version of religion became, in her words, “unmarked” as religion, to the extent that Philadelphia and Cincinnati, among other major cities, could pass laws to endorse the teaching of the King James Bible in public schools not as theological instruction, but rather for its simple lessons in universal morals.21 This is also why, just as Protestant Bibles could stand for universal morality in the nineteenth century, Emerson’s secular vision of nonconformity could build on this Protestant framework and stretch it nearly to its breaking point. “No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature,” he declares in “Self-­ Reliance,” “Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it.”22 While Emerson imagines an interlocutor objecting that “these impulses may be from below,” his version of the private self as a moral guide is a logical extension of the grounding of morality in the self ’s assent to beliefs. The consolidation of belief as a basis for the modern legal notion of religion did not mean that theological disputes dissipated across the nineteenth century. Far from it. Even among and between white Protestant denominations, controversies and schisms abounded, and the popularity of evangelicalism,

8

Introduction

especially through the revivals of the Second Great Awakening, led to crises and shifts in denominational affiliations and theological emphases. Theological journals were rife with just such controversies. For literary scholars, the most famous is likely Emerson’s 1838 delivery of his “Divinity School Address,” which called for a “true Christianity” represented by “a faith like Christ’s in the infinitude of man” over and against what he termed “Historical Christianity,” a formal approach to Christianity that had led to a “decaying church and a wasting unbelief.”23 It inspired thirty-­six responses (not counting reprints), including one from Andrews Norton, retired Professor of Sacred Literature at Harvard and staunchly conservative Unitarian, who called Emerson’s address an “incoherent rhapsody” and an “insult to religion.”24 Despite the evident theological disagreement, what we see in these debates is a consolidation of the role of belief as the primary and foundational component of religiosity among mainstream white Protestants; and that consolidation came to define “religion” for the secular state and secular public sphere—as it still largely does today.25 In this consolidation we see an increased emphasis on true conviction, and the mental and emotional—that is, internal—processes that achieve it. The Presbyterian minister Lyman Beecher, for example, charted in a series of lectures in the 1830s the effects of what he called an “epidemic of infidelity” unleashed by the French Revolution and gnawing away at religion in the United States ever since (a specter of unbelief on Emerson’s mind too, as is evident in “The Divinity School Address”).26 Beecher’s answer to such an epidemic was to more carefully protect and shepherd the mental processes that produce belief. Various dangers, both internal and external, threatened to derail this conversion process. While theories and philosophies—the stuff of theological controversy—could cloud the truth of the Gospels, a wayward heart might form opinions through the power of “passion, prejudice, interest, and aversion.” Believing strongly in the learned ministry, he stresses the importance of “first principles, competent instruction, and study” for the religious seeker who wishes to avoid skepticism and unbelief.27 Beecher would be aghast to hear that he was aligned in any argument with radical abolitionists and ministers who challenged theological orthodoxy, like Emerson or the Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, but all partook of this assumption that belief is the preceding term to which practice points, and that these are, on a fundamental level, internal processes. The difference is that, unlike Beecher, Emerson and Parker epitomized the Romantic trust in the inner self, as when Parker asserted in 1841 that “while true religion is always the same thing, the Christianity of the Pulpit . . . has never

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been the same thing in any two centuries or lands, except only in name.”28 Publicly preached, institutionally supported, the “Christianity of the Pulpit” represents, according to Parker, the transient element that occludes the “true religion” that is “in each century and every land, in each man that feels it.”29 True religion is felt and universal, but most significantly, it is private; it is “in” each person, arising from, or more accurately constructing a sense of the private self. In secularism we thus see not the relegation of something called “religion” to the private sphere so much as the invention of “religion” as, first, synonymous with belief (and only secondarily practice), and, second, as a category of difference that is private, immaterial, and unlikely to disrupt the flows of the emerging capitalist system.30

Privacy in Public This modern, secular meaning of “religion” as internal assent to propositional beliefs had the effect of weighting privacy with an intensified moral role. As Saba Mahmood explains, “While religious morality has always been concerned with sexuality . . . their delineation as quintessential elements of private life under secular modernity has created an explosive symbiosis between them that is historically unique.”31 The wide-­ranging and urgent debates over marriage (its form, legal status, and role in maintaining white supremacy) were the most visible manifestation of this “explosive symbiosis” between private religion and secular modernity in the nineteenth-­century United States. Legal marriage constituted a “flashpoint,” to borrow Mahmood’s words, “in a number of struggles over what it means to be religious or secular in the world.”32 These struggles ultimately generated not only “what are generally taken to be a priori elements of social organization—public, private, political, religious—but suffuse[d] them with content,” giving them “a natural quality for those living within” them. Mahmood’s argument that secularism is generative of the structures of modern life—the very categories of public and private, religious and secular—is crucial to this study. But equally so is her insistence that some of the most important work secularism produces is affective; it makes the divisions of secular/religious and public/ private feel both natural and right. Given the importance of this affective dimension, it is worth clarifying the distinct words we use for private life because such terms as private, privacy, and private sphere may overlap but they are not synonymous, with

10

Introduction

some evoking more material spaces and structures and others pointing to the more abstract and affective aspects of what I have been calling a “secular sensibility.” Etymologically, “private” comes from the classical Latin privatus, and was most often used, in its earliest invocations in English, for demarcating “private persons” (those not holding public office), private property, and close, intimate friends.33 In the nineteenth century, it came to name both the domestic sphere (or even more private spaces within a home, like ­closets) and the nongovernmental capitalist marketplace. While these competing definitions can cause interdisciplinary confusion (especially when comparing the private sphere of separate spheres, where the capitalist marketplace is ostensibly excluded, with the naming of that marketplace as private rather than public) they are also interrelated. Through the historical confluence of disestablishment and the market revolution, the private sphere became the location that housed private lives, feelings, and all kinds of beliefs (religious or otherwise), and, as with the “private market,” it was supposedly a space meant to be shielded from government control. In literary history, the private sphere has been most fully explored in feminist studies of the ideology of separate spheres, especially in relation to women’s writing. Arguably, no concept has had more of an influence on gender analysis of the nineteenth-­century United States.34 Put briefly, it is one of the foundational structuring ideologies of liberalism and capitalism: that society is separated into private and public spheres, and that those spheres are gendered. The private sphere was meant to be a refuge of morality, hospitality, and maternal care for men buffeted by the public sphere of business, law, and government. This ideology also naturalized the private sphere as that which preceded the public and granted it legitimacy; it constituted, to quote Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, “a fabulous origin rather than the temporal starting point of the narrative of liberal subjectivity.”35 As many scholars of African American literature and culture have shown, the ideology of separate spheres was also thoroughly imbued with assumptions about race and class.36 Part of its fantasy was universalizing the experiences of the white middle and upper classes—those who had a private space that could form a refuge, with legally recognized family structures, and who had the financial stability and autonomy to keep women out of a workforce, free or enslaved. Both colloquially and in scholarship, the word privacy tends to name an affective orientation to the self and the world, one notoriously difficult to measure. It emerged in modern English to describe the “state or condition of being alone, undisturbed, or free from public attention, as a matter

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of choice or right.”37 Many readers may equate privacy with solitude and perhaps cite Emerson’s famous line, “I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me.”38 But as this book explores at length, privacy stands for more than the act of wandering in nature without company or the desire to be left alone. It encapsulates the feelings, beliefs, affects, and passions that constitute an “authentic” self, where that self best flourishes, and in which domestic structures it will be allowed to do so. But privacy is also, ironically enough, a performance of that authenticity; it becomes a sensibility through that mediation, by performing one’s moral and aesthetic orientations.39 It is this version of privacy that led to the twentieth-­century cases Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) and Roe v. Wade, which established it as a Constitutional right. For this reason, a central point of my argument is that privacy is not precisely synonymous with either solitude (being left alone) or secrecy (that which it would be a shame to reveal) because privacy depends on revelation—or at least the performance of it—as part of its moral work and its eventual legal claims. That privacy relies on a mechanism for public accountability—what Stacey Margolis calls its “public effects”—has been established by scholarship on nineteenth-­century privacy and interiority.40 Privacy and publicity were and are dialectically intertwined in liberalism, and that dialectic gave rise to the inner lives of liberal subjects.41 Building on these insights, I consider in what ways secularism and religion underpinned and informed that dialectic.

The Morality of Hypocrisy If privacy is publicly oriented, then its opposite is not publicity but sinful secrecy, like Dimmesdale’s in The Scarlet Letter. Privacy, therefore, enfolds a moral contradiction: to be a legally protected and culturally affirmed right, private life cannot be secret life. This is one reason hypocrites abound in the novels of the nineteenth century. Needless to say, the nineteenth century did not invent a concern with hypocrisy; its centrality to Christianity can certainly be traced to Jesus’s admonition, “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.”42 What is building through the legal and cultural fusion of religion with the private sphere, though, is an increasingly pervasive secular discourse of such accusations. We can see the

12

Introduction

roots of these in the defenses of disestablishment in the late eighteenth century. As Jefferson asserted in Notes, an established church may make someone “worse by making him a hypocrite, but it will never make him a truer man.”43 The project of what, in the eighteenth century, was often called “private conscience” was cast as freeing people from such moral hypocrisies— particularly the hypocrisy of having to publicly support a religious institution while failing to truly believe in its doctrines. Though hypocrisy is the focus of Chapter 5, it is also a keyword, like privacy, for the entire study due to its ongoing salience for our public and scholarly discourses. Canonical authors are often called to account for various so-­called hypocrisies (Thoreau’s mother did his laundry, as many an undergraduate will tell you); ironically enough, British and American narrative fiction of the nineteenth century made such accusations feel like moral work. Novels like The Scarlet Letter, which probe the seductions and moral pitfalls of hypocrisy, build characters by parsing distinctions between public and private selves. Moreover, to imagine oneself as having distinct public and private dimensions—a keynote of psychological realism—is presented in these ­novels as a self-­evident psychological truth and at the same time a grave moral problem. In effect, the most profound irony about modern privacy is that it encourages both the condemnation of hypocrisy and the unavoidable feeling that one is always a hypocrite—and this irony is a key feature of the literary and political writing of the nineteenth century. Hypocrisy is a moral concept with a long history. From Sophocles to Machiavelli, the uses and abuses of hypocrisy have animated theology, political intrigue, philosophical debate, and theatrical and antitheatrical theory. However, political theorists including Hannah Arendt and Judith Shklar discern a shift with regard to hypocrisy in the late eighteenth century.44 This is the era that invested in sincerity as a political and cultural value, and it became inextricable from the rise of liberalism and the liberal nation-­state. Sincerity was promoted in philosophical and literary texts of the late eighteenth century from Jean-­Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1782) to William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), and it was especially important to writers of the early republic, including both Royall Tyler and Charles Brockden Brown. In her subtle analysis of hypocrisy, Shklar expands on sincerity as a moral code deeply embedded in liberal societies. It is liberalism’s Achilles’ heel and the most potent weapon used to disarm opponents. Shklar cites Benjamin Franklin as a prominent example of the way hypocrisy operated on the

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precipice of this political shift. As he recounts in The Autobiography (1791), Franklin obscures his deist inclinations since it upsets others; he plays down his own role in starting big public projects in order to achieve consensus on them; he pays dues to all the Philadelphia churches; and he attends, above all, to the appearance of his virtue, from his early years (when he “took care not only to be in Reality Industrious and frugal, but to avoid all Appearances of the contrary”) to his later accounting books for virtuous living (where, tongue-­in-­cheek, he notes that he added Humility to his list but that he could not “boast of much Success in acquiring the Reality of this Virtue” though he “had a good deal with regard to the Appearance of it”).45 Franklin exemplifies a moral order much more oriented to a public self, including the relation of that self to the state-­supported religious institutions meant to foster a moral society. Yet we might actually be more precise about Franklin’s relation to the emerging moral investment in sincerity. While his narrative shows a delight in the affordances of hypocrisy, its form—the “memoir,” as the first edition explicitly named it—is exactly invested in the types of sincerity emerging in the revolutionary era. We see the moral value accorded to sincerity when he confesses his well-­meaning deceptions (and a few that were not so well-­ meaning). When a culture values sincerity, this value is not shorn of the idea of performance. In fact, the very valuation of it depends on a public performance of one’s adherence to an even more private self. Sincerity, in other words, points inward but is not a raw experience of that interiority. It is, instead, a performance of that deeper self. With this distinction in mind, we can see how nineteenth-­century American culture embraced a further investment—not just in sincerity but in authenticity. These are not opposite qualities; rather they are degrees. A thoroughly Romantic quality still highly valued in American culture today, authenticity imagines a public self that is not performing, that is as sincere as one can be to an inner truth. Valuing authenticity means despising even the roles and poses of sincerity. Its moral value rose instead from publicly displaying a strong sense of one’s authentic selfhood, which increasingly came to be synonymous with rough edges and natural emotions. Both sentimentalism and antisentimentalism valued such authenticity and taught one to read for it in others. What the historian Karen Halttunen describes as the “sentimental typology of conduct,” marked by “the belief that every aspect of social behavior should transparently display the contents of the heart,” sounds as much like Walt Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” or the confessional voice of Herman Melville’s Ishmael as it does Harriet Beecher Stowe’s and Catharine Maria

14

Introduction

Sedgwick’s heroines, as Tracy Fessenden has argued.46 That said, authenticity is not without its relation to performance, as Romantic and sentimental texts continuously show us. Moreover, urbanization and capitalism challenged these investments. A culture steeped in a language of authenticity proved to be one obsessed with peeking behind the veil and rooting out the real person behind the plausible self-­presentation, responses that came to seem like both a moral necessity and a sign of financial savvy. And as Shklar notes, such probing is also characteristic of democracies: “Because political hypocrisy is part of the rhetoric of legitimization and of the politics of persuasion, there is an uneasy fear of fraud and dissimulation in liberal democracies.”47 This is why Dimmesdale is such an emblematic figure of the secular liberal order: a hypocrite ashamed of hypocrisy; a lover of truth who knows he lies; a successfully persuasive public figure whose public role is starkly at odds with his authentic self.

Privacy, Realism, and Relatability Dimmesdale’s failure to broadcast his sins, and the novel’s encouragement of our judgment of that failure, exemplifies the rising investment in authenticity, and the role of the novel in its circulation. In her monumental study of privacy, Sarah E. Igo argues that the fundamental transition to modern forms of privacy occurred when Americans “turn[ed] from an emphasis on tangible claims to privacy—in the form of property rights and physical space—to intangible ones centered on psychological freedom, decisional autonomy, and personal identity.” This shift from space to personhood is the foundation for the “most unexpected development” of all: “the way in which the closely guarded secrets of the Victorian era moved out into the open after the 1960s” as an “older fear of exposure gave way to an embrace of disclosure, an age of discretion supplanted by an age of self-­broadcasting.”48 But how absolute is the difference between a supposed Victorian “fear of exposure” and the faith in it that characterizes what Igo calls “self-­ broadcasting”? While the nineteenth-­ century version of privacy indeed focused on reputation, its role was not simply to hide secrets in service of propriety; rather, it demanded public accounting and public transparency. Nineteenth-­century novels were already enacting the faith in self-­exposure and the fear of it as coequal aspects of modern privacy well ahead of the shift Igo traces. Hawthorne’s characterizations are again emblematic of this

Our Faith in Exposure

15

dialectic. Though Dimmesdale fears that his dark secrets will be exposed, the form of Hawthorne’s novel makes such an exposure seem not just inevitable but desirable. The nineteenth-­century novel’s penchant for revealing private character to readers was reinforced by other popular genres of the era: abolitionist exposés, city mysteries, secret histories, and more. The nineteenth century was awash in genres dedicated to telling all. Not coincidentally, as Milette Shamir has argued, storytelling itself was central to the emergence of the right to privacy across the nineteenth century. As tort law increasingly adjudicated whether or not one’s private reputation had been injured, these cases began to define and delimit who had the right to tell and circulate stories about private individuals.49 Privacy, in other words, seems to carry with it an undercurrent of paranoia. In her essay on paranoid reading, Eve Sedgwick argues that paranoia places “an extraordinary stress on the efficacy of knowledge per se—knowledge in the form of exposure.” As she suggests, “Maybe that’s why paranoid knowing is so inescapably narrative.”50 Though she does not dwell on the historical nature of her claim, when Sedgwick notes that “paranoid reading” assumes that the most effective form of knowledge is that which comes through exposure, her insights are applicable to how fiction across the long nineteenth century built a language of morality out of just such techniques. With this in mind, it should come as no surprise that this central trope of the novel form dominated the century that set Paul Ricoeur’s architects of the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, in motion. For those of us who focus on fiction, our objects of study and our methods of study have long been intertwined. This may be why exposing hypocrisies feels like moral work for scholars and students, and for the public more broadly. The claim that the novel as a form teaches readers to believe in private selves—and to desire the exposure of those selves—has a long history. Beginning with Ian Watt’s Rise of the Novel (1957), four interrelated stories of the form still endure: (1) that the novel is inextricably related to the rise of the middle class and capitalism as an economic system; (2) that the novel’s aesthetic mode in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is realism (even with wild deviations from what we might regard as “realistic”); (3) that the novel concerns itself for the most part with private life, such that stories of women are consequently the focus of so many of the earliest examples of the form; and (4) that questions of taste, manners, and private judgment structure and energize those narratives. These characteristics predominated in the fiction of the eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century Atlantic World. Literary scholars

16

Introduction

of the early twentieth century once suggested that the “romance” form was the singular contribution of nineteenth-­century American fiction, over and against British and French realism. The recovery of women’s and popular fiction has challenged this early elevation of romance and clarified the centrality of realism, or more precisely of a sentimental-­realist aesthetic (akin to the style of Charles Dickens and Harriet Beecher Stowe), to the taste of British and American reading publics even before the advent of what we now call High Realism in the novels of such authors as Henry James, George Eliot, and William Dean Howells.51 As a result, when I say that nineteenth-­ century novels—including romances like The Scarlet Letter—traffic in realism, I mean not a genre but an aesthetic mode. My interest is in identifying a transit of modes, gestures, and styles between what have been traditionally categorized as different genres to show how novels across the nineteenth century present a continuous commentary on the emerging forms of secular moral judgment: that is, the expression of privacy and the appraisal of other people’s private lives. In considering realism as an aesthetic mode that spans the century, I draw on Christine Holbro’s revision of the common narrative of American literary history. Holbro urges scholars of the nineteenth-­century American novel to shift the way they narrate the role of realism in its development. Rather than a “passage from the sentimental novel to literary realism,” this literary history is better explained “in terms of the crisis of one form of realism and the articulation of another.”52 Holbro focuses on the shifts across the century in how authors represented inequality and diversity, but her argument has a wider purchase. Picking up on her insights, my argument challenges the major divide often drawn between sentimentalism and realism by attending to how authors represented privacy, in all of its moral, material, and political complexities. With the notable exception of Melville’s Pierre, the novels that I focus on in the chapters that follow—as well as the characters that appear in those novels—tend to be developed in a style invested in an aesthetic that sought to downplay artifice. This aesthetic is evident across the century, with slight variations, from depictions of Republican heroines to sentimental novelists’ descriptions of domestic interiors to the realist gestures of the exposé genre. Yet even as these styles and forms suggest they represent an unadorned reality, they call attention (some purposefully, some inadvertently) to the problem of artifice (the gap between private self and public performance) in their very utterances. Calling attention to the discomfiting gap between fictional characters’ supposed private, authentic selves, on the one hand, and

Our Faith in Exposure

17

their public roles and expectations on the other, is one of the most common reality effects of the century’s novels. In characters, if not always in plots, we are meant to recognize something mimetic in the representations of human psychology, to see characters as having private selves that could be—and probably will be—revealed to us as a story unfolds, that characters ought to be, to use a more common language, relatable to the reader. In bringing up the popular notion of relatability, a much-­critiqued term among literature professors, I do not mean to resuscitate it for literary scholarship so much as connect its ubiquity in our classrooms and online discourse with two aspects of this study: the pervasive moral and aesthetic valuation of psychological realism and the identification it invites; and the historical roots of that in both privacy and the novel form.53 Insofar as students ascribe a positive value to this quality, they often do so to approve or criticize a novelist’s attempts at psychological realism—how narrators bring a character’s interiority to the surface and surround that character with plausible events and choices.54 Invocations of relatability are not so much a twenty-­first century imposition on nineteenth-­century fiction as they seem prompted by that very fiction and how its writers drew their characters. As a term at the intersection of psychological realism and moral judgment, character, as Susan Ryan explains, had multiple meanings in the nineteenth century, and it applied both to authors and the fictional figures they created. It constituted a “sort of moral essence” as well as “something to be achieved and maintained through the energetic cultivation of good habits and the relentless rooting out of bad ones.”55 Because of this prompt to character judgment, nineteenth-­century fiction continually lays bare its long and entangled history with Protestant theology. Both the art of writing characters with the goal of revealing their psychological interiors and the practice of reading for “literary depth” are entwined with what Ashley Barnes identifies as “a theological ideal: a claim for private unmediated revelation as the right way to access the divine.”56 The popular novel depended on the discourses of revelation that Barnes names, and these pervasive narrative structures were as instrumental as legal discourse or theological dispute to the construction of a sense of privacy. As Dawn Coleman has argued, literature gives us a unique window into these developments because “these texts can seldom be reduced to creed or anti-­creed.” As she explains, “The multivocality of novels and drama, the ambiguity of poems: these and like complexities disrupt attempts to read literature as functions of church doctrine or political ideology or sociological theory or even authorial beliefs.”57 Following Coleman, I spend time in each chapter considering such

18

Introduction

aesthetic qualities as narrative style, genre, and form to show how privacy became a secular sensibility through the medium of fiction. If realism as a narrative mode depends on certain “invasions of privacy” into characters’ homes and thoughts, and their subsequent revelation to the reader, nineteenth-­century fiction, broadly speaking, advanced a theory of how to pursue moral judgments in a secular world. Even more acutely than The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne’s other romance of Salem, The House of the Seven Gables (1851), represents how this secular faith in exposure could operate during the democratic and Romantic era of the 1850s. The narrator introduces the novel’s villain, Judge Pyncheon, almost entirely by how observers interpret his appearance as evidence of some deeper truth of his authentic self: His dark, square countenance, with its almost shaggy depth of eyebrows, was naturally impressive, and would perhaps have been rather stern, had not the gentleman considerately taken upon himself to mitigate the harsh effect by a look of exceeding good-­humor and benevolence. Owing, however, to a somewhat massive accumulation of animal substance about the lower region of his face, the look was perhaps unctuous rather than spiritual, and had, so to speak, a kind of fleshly effulgence, not altogether so satisfactory as he doubtless intended it to be. A susceptible observer, at any rate, might have regarded it as affording very little evidence of the general benignity of soul whereof it purported to be the outward reflection. And if the observer chanced to be ill-­natured, as well as acute and susceptible, he would probably suspect that the smile on the gentleman’s face was a good deal akin to the shine on his boots, and that each must have cost him and his boot-­black, respectively, a good deal of hard labor to bring out and preserve them.58 Though Hawthorne is not always grouped with the popular domestic writers for whom he infamously expressed such scorn, his description of the Judge partakes of their style. It is one of lurking immorality beneath a plausible exterior. How do we know that Jaffrey Pyncheon is a villain? The truth is there, waiting to be read! Even so, one must be a close reader of that truth, which, as it turns out means that one must be an “ill-­natured” but “acute and sensible” reader of surfaces. The narrator encourages the reader to be just that by pointing out that the Judge’s “somewhat massive accumulation

Our Faith in Exposure

19

of animal substance about the lower region of his face” is “perhaps, unctuous rather than spiritual.” If a “susceptible” reader wants to give the Judge the benefit of the doubt, the sentimental-­realist reader—acute perhaps even when not so ill-­natured—will read the literal signs of his body for a deep knowledge of his character. At first glance we might say that Hawthorne invites his audience to be surface readers, to read, in Heather Love’s formulation, close but not deep.59 And with this iconic description of the Judge in mind, we might say that “surface reading,” in turn, harmonizes with sentimental-­realist character development. But only up to a point. The narrator encourages us to read Jaffrey’s embodiment because it has been fashioned as a clear symptom of something deeper; it betrays his hypocrisy to the wary reader. The point of character description is to train the reader in the ability to imagine, predict, and judge a character’s private, hidden self. This is the aesthetic mode of sentimental realism: surface descriptions that seek to reveal hidden depths and moral truths. These conventions were so apparent to Catharine Maria Sedgwick that the first description of her villain in Hope Leslie (1827) both deploys and lightly satirizes them: His face was deeply marked  by the ravages of the passions, or perhaps the stirring scenes of life. His eyes were black and piercing, set near together, and overhung by  thick black brows, whose incessant motion indicated  a restless mind. The concentration of  thought, or the designing purpose, expressed by the upper part of his face, was contradicted by his loose, open flexible lips. His complexion had the same puzzling contrariety—it was dark and saturnine, but enlivened with the ruddy hue of a bon-­vivant. His nose neither turned up nor down, was neither Grecian nor Roman. In  short, the countenance of the stranger was a  worthless dial-­plate—a practical refutation of the  science  of physiognomy; and as the infallible art  of phrenology was unknown to our fathers, they  were compelled to ascertain the character (as their  unlearned descendants still are) by the slow development of the conduct.60 While the narrator ends this passage about Sir Philip Gardiner with a pointed sarcasm about the “science” of physiognomy and the “infallible art” of phrenology, the description certainly does not accord with the injunction

20

Introduction

to wait on his conduct to know the man. At every turn, the narrator delineates a seemingly positive quality only to quickly qualify it in such a way as to undermine it: his “concentration of thought” also potentially betrays a “designing purpose,” both of which are set against his “loose, flexible lips.” His complexion is both dark and light, but lest the reader align his “whiteness” with qualities that white supremacy usually ascribes to it (innocence, purity, cultured elevation), she describes his ruddiness as the “hue of a bon-­ vivant.” Hawthorne’s and Sedgwick’s observant reader of surfaces is always on the hunt for depths. Whereas in Hawthorne’s and Sedgwick’s novels (and, as we will see, across any number of others in the nineteenth century) secrets can be betrayed by one’s clothes, body, and decorative choices—the clues that allow one to discern that the “smile on the gentleman’s face was a good deal akin to the shine on his boots”—the narrator of the later nineteenth century makes clear that to discern, for instance, the villainy of Jaffrey Pyncheon on first glance is but the opening to the complexities of interior life. Consider Henry James’s introduction of Olive Chancellor in The Bostonians (1886): “But this pale girl, with her light-­green eyes, her pointed features and nervous manner, was visibly morbid; it was as plain as day that she was morbid. Poor Ransom announced this fact to himself as if he had made a great discovery; but in reality he had never been so ‘Boeotian’ as at that moment. It proved nothing of any importance, with regard to Miss Chancellor, to say that she was morbid; any sufficient account of her would lie very much to the rear of that.”61 We watch in this scene as Basil Ransom pats himself on the back for discovering the most surface information about his cousin, Olive. This passage is notable because the structure is similar to Hawthorne’s about Jaffrey. After all, as readers will certainly know, Basil is not wrong. Olive is morbid. But the narrator hints that to be more discerning than Basil requires finding out what is to “the rear” of this insight—that is, what is even more private and hidden from a first glance. Whereas in the passage from Hawthorne we end with a sufficient accounting of the Judge, here we must keep reading to find out what more there is in Olive beyond noting her morbid exterior. In James’s fiction, surfaces may be a start, but they are insufficient. Yet what we do get in this passage is a clear sense of Basil’s morality. He is a hasty judge of Olive, and a mean one to boot. In other words, while the narrator of The Bostonians begins as if he is providing an understanding of Olive, what we have instead is a sense of Basil, the limitations of his cursory judgments and the provinciality of his mind. These too prove to be accurate of Basil’s character.

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I am pausing on the continuities in styles of judgment between novels that are often categorized into separate genres (a romance, a sentimental novel, and a realist novel) to allow us to see how they depend not simply on character judgment but on narrative tricks of exposure, albeit ones that differ in nuanced ways. Yet we might deem all three novels to be deploying modes of realism in that they present mundane surface details for judgments, and for judgments on others’ judgments. And all three use the narrative voice as a guide toward better and worse close reading. In this way, nineteenth-­century fiction staged and helped build the complexities of modern privacy, complexities we feel urgently today as any number of controversies over it indicate. This complicated terrain, which I expand on in the chapters that follow, is most visible when we see fiction wrestling with the moral and spiritual dimensions of privacy and private life, and especially with marriage’s relation to both. While this introduction has dwelled at great length on Hawthorne’s fiction, I have also turned to Sedgwick to highlight one last intervention Faith in Exposure makes: tracing a more complete literary history of secularism, bringing popular novels—including by women writers—into conversation with the authors most often named in studies of the secular, perhaps most especially Herman Melville. While each chapter anchors the argument to one or two authors—such as Charles Brockden Brown, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Frank J. Webb, and Harriet Beecher Stowe—they also place these major figures into a wider context of popular fiction (including antipolygamy novels and city mysteries) and periodical press debates over issues such as abolition, modern marriage, and women’s fashion. The chapters of this book proceed chronologically, spanning from the debates about deism and disestablishment in the 1790s to the first explicit legal articulation of a “right to privacy” at the turn of the twentieth century. Several narrative strands thread their way through all of them: the outsized role that fears over radical thought played in the mainstream secular imagination; the explicit invention of “traditional marriage” in response to critiques of the institution; the growing prominence of accusations of hypocrisy and conspiracy in attacks against reform movements, most notably in the debates over slavery; and, above all, the important role that the form of the novel and styles of its narration played in this larger history of privacy. To quote Saba Mahmood again, the “explosive symbiosis” of private religion and secular modernity proved just that—explosive—and that explosion became quite literal in the fight against slavery and the lead-­up to the Civil War. Finally, the study ends where most studies on privacy begin, with Samuel Warren

22

Introduction

and Louis Brandeis’s 1890 Harvard Law Review article “The Right to Privacy,” which narrates in miniature the thesis of this book: privacy’s sacredness as a result of the secularization of the spiritual, its conflation with the domestic sphere and, most importantly, the self. From the fears over religious infidelity to what constituted a modern marriage to conspiracy theories about abolitionists: these contests helped privacy emerge as a sensibility and a right in modern, secular America.

CHAPTER 1

Infidelity

In an 1804 aquatint engraving by James Akin (produced in Newburyport, Massachusetts), Thomas Jefferson’s reputation as a philosopher came under, shall we say, deep suspicion. Condensed into one telling image, Jefferson’s claim to philosophical stature and his sexual reputation collide. As “cock of the walk,” Jefferson struts his opinions (including, according to the caption, “’Tis not a set of features or complexion or tincture of a skin that I admire.”) and is appreciated with a sidelong glance by Sally Hemings, who sports a white turban on her head, which, along with her black feathers, signify an exotic “Africanness.” The two figures connote sexual arousal in their upturned tail feathers, an arousal that undercuts Jefferson’s stately visage and famous red locks even as he gazes confidently out to the viewer. This image skewers Jefferson as both a man who potentially does not believe in God (by linking him to French philosophes like Rousseau, Voltaire, and Diderot, all with reputations as atheists) and a man who is attracted to African women. However, as much as this image testifies to the contemporary knowledge of Jefferson’s relation to Hemings, it does not offer a particularly cutting critique. It does not suggest that the sexual violence that sustains the institution of slavery is immoral. Instead, it polices Jefferson’s taste; his flashiness and his sexual desires signify his twinned infidelities. An abolitionist image this is not. What this image does evince is the insistent coupling of disordered private morality with deism, a connection built out of the political and religious debates of the 1790s and a locus of concern in Jefferson’s election in 1800. A century of bad-­faith conflations of deism (at its simplest, the belief in one God who is not directly involved in daily life) with atheism came to a fever pitch in the 1790s United States due in large part to the French revolutionary government’s seizure of church property and the Jacobins’ Festival of the Supreme Being, campaigns largely perceived as attacking religion wholesale.

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Chapter 1

Figure 1. “A Philosophic Cock.” James Akin, 1804. Image courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

While the convulsions in France sparked Federalist paranoia about secret deists and cabals of Jacobins working to undermine the new Constitution, this paranoia was out of all proportion to the actual number of proclaimed deists or members of secret societies like the Masons. As the historian Christopher Grasso explains, Federalists proved to be “ultimately less concerned about the heterodoxy in plain sight than about the strong hints of a vast subterranean reservoir of doubt.”1 But the paranoia itself was real, and its impact lingered in the culture well beyond the 1790s, and indeed every reform movement through to the Civil War (whether radical or not) tended to be greeted as the new Jacobinism. Deism was never the threat that the Federalists feared it was, but the paranoia about it—and the attempts by the Federalists’ opponents to parry accusations of infidelity—was a main impetus behind two aspects of privacy that this book charts: first, the way private religion, and eventually privacy, became conflated with both freedom and purity; and second, that a style of authenticity became a warrant for one’s right to public trust. Together, they laid the foundations for and assumptions of what I am naming the secular sensibility of privacy, the way privacy constitutes an affect and performance of an authentic—and authentically moral—self as much as a space set aside for the home and religion. As this chapter considers it, this sensibility’s

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origins can be found in the paranoid reaction to deism during and following the French Revolution. While the story of Jefferson’s twinned infidelities—religious and sexual— bookend this chapter, the person who did the most to consolidate the public figure of the feared deist was Thomas Paine. I turn first to Paine and the furor around the publication of The Age of Reason (1794–1796) to develop how his style became, for his detractors, a ready signifier for the moral disorder his support of deism threatened to unleash. I follow the aftermath of this denigration of Paine into two novels published in the 1790s that thematize deism: Royall Tyler’s Algerine Captive (1797) and Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond; or The Secret Witness (1799). While The Algerine Captive displaces the threat of infidelity onto a caricature of Paine and offshore to Algeria, Ormond brings the threat home, right on the eve of the election of 1800. In concluding the chapter, I turn back to Jefferson’s election to show how the logic of privatized religion worked on both sides of the political divide. Though arguments about religion’s legal place in the new nation form a crucial aspect of this chapter, what follows is not so much a legal story as it is a cultural and, especially, a literary one. While any number of novels from the 1790s center fears over deism and religion’s role in the new nation, The Algerine Captive and Ormond both offer something beyond the figuration of infidelity; they allow us to see how early styles of novelistic realism used techniques of revelation on the level of both style and character. The Algerine Captive and Ormond are formally disjointed in comparison to the third-­person omniscient narratives that would come to dominate the nineteenth-­century novel. Their first-­person narrators and their odd formal structures make the operations of exposure more explicit. The Algerine Captive, for example, consists of two parts that are radically different in style and even in genre. And, as I will expand on in the chapter, Paine-­as-­deist shows up at precisely the moment of transition between the two, when Updike Underhill’s narrative moves from a comic picaresque to a realist memoir. While Underhill’s involvement in the slave trade and his own enslavement in Algeria prompt the novel’s tonal shift, Paine’s deism operates as a fork in the road for the novel, splitting the two parts of the novel and representing a route Underhill ultimately refuses. The form of Brown’s novel is perhaps even stranger than Tyler’s. As anyone who has tried to summarize it knows, Ormond’s plot is dizzying and its style is convoluted. It nonetheless helps us see the attractions and problems of the emerging sensibility of authenticity. And, as I go on to explore, it is because of rather than despite the strange stylistic qualities of the

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Chapter 1

novel that makes Ormond such a compelling representation of the complications of a secular sensibility invested in authenticity.

Pure Religion Debates over the legal and cultural role of religion in the new nation were at the heart of the successive crises of the 1790s. While the disestablishment of state churches had been well underway before the Constitution was debated and ratified in 1787, the legal question of established churches ran headlong into the paranoia about the French Revolution in the 1790s. Over the course of the fifty-­year process that we gather together under the single term disestablishment, states outlawed a variety of practices that knit a church or churches into civic life: the use of tax money to support the clergy of a favored sect or sects; religious tests for office holding; government control over theological issues and ministerial appointments; and mandatory church attendance, among other practices.2 As the historian Steven K. Green has shown, the First Amendment’s establishment clause was not an attempt by the anti-­ Federalists to protect state establishments but was of a piece with the broader shift away from them that was already underway.3 The movement in various states to disestablish state churches (with taxation and religious tests as the most prominent targets) had, by 1790, achieved many of its goals in all but three (Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire). I come back to some of the arguments in Virginia and elsewhere in support of disestablishment to consider the version of religion suggested in them and that is crucial to the book’s argument. In general, though, the overall position of the United States directly after ratification was a movement away from establishment, and the religious language pervasive in the founding documents affirmed, at most, a gestural natural religion that was common among many of the framers who, due to class status and background, were much more likely to be heterodox or deists than the population as a whole.4 By 1791, then, what Steven Green has called the “first disestablishment” was nearly completed: the financial and political disestablishment of most state churches and the ratification of the First Amendment. It is important to state clearly what this meant: the question was not whether belief or religion should be banished from politics, but whether organized religion (i.e., a church) should be supported by and involved with the state. To the extent that this is a secularization process, we should think of it as the process by

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which religion became redefined as private for the nineteenth century, with both sides drawing on longer histories, theologies, and philosophies to new ends. We can see a discursive consolidation emerging in which private religion (or, the term that was often favored in the period, private conscience) became the dominant way to define religion. “Private conscience” expressed the overriding emphasis (Protestant as it was) that religion began and was substantively made up of belief, primarily a mental consent not an embodied practice. If religion was immaterial in this way, though, it also seemed vulnerable, especially to the influence of other beliefs and more especially one’s passions; it was therefore something to be protected, nurtured, and purified. Disestablishment laws therefore did not banish religion to a private realm; rather, collectively they reimagined the definition, expectations, and lived experiences of both religion and privacy—something often more apparent in the fiction of the era than in the legal and political debates. The political defenses of disestablishment at both the state and federal levels helped attach to religion these qualities: it was private and ought therefore to be free from state interference; and it was vulnerable to corruption and therefore needed to be cordoned off from the state for its protection and purity. For instance, in his “Memorial and Remonstrance” to the Virginia Assembly in 1785, James Madison asserted that religious freedom was a natural right, and he rested his claims on a Protestant sentiment that he universalized: that to pass church establishment laws was to deny people a fundamental right to a personal relationship with God. A grammar of freedom and tyranny—the language of both anti-­Catholicism and the Revolution—shaped his argument, and he singled out church establishments for particularly charged critique: “What influence in fact have ecclesiastical establishments had on Civil Society? In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of the Civil authority; in many instances they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny: in no instance have they been seen the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wished to subvert the public liberty, may have found an established Clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just Government instituted to secure & perpetuate it needs them not.”5 Corruption already riddles church establishments, Madison implies, and these established churches become the means through which political tyranny asserts itself and solidifies its power. Relegating religion to private conscience, in turn, helps to fight tyranny and keep religion free. Just as Madison concentrated on established religion’s “malignant influence on the health and prosperity of the State,” Thomas Paine began The Age of Reason precisely with this premise:

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Chapter 1

“All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.”6 Establishments led to enslavement, whereas the American Revolution heralded “a revolution in the system of religion” that would produce a society in which “man would return to the pure, unmixed, and unadulterated belief of one God, and no more.”7 In Paine’s hands (and he would not be alone in this claim), private religion was not only free but “pure.” This language of purity pervaded arguments for disestablishment, and it helped to construct an equivalence between privacy and purity that was perhaps most visible in the growing concern about women’s chastity (which would shift from a largely middle-­class issue to dominate the entire culture in the nineteenth century) and the fate of the nation at the center of such genres as the seduction narrative. Joining republican voices such as Paine’s and Madison’s in the fight against established churches, denominations from Baptist to Unitarian advocated removing state establishments—to which they were often losing church revenue—based on the need to protect private conscience. As the Danbury Baptist Association wrote to Thomas Jefferson, congratulating him on his election in 1800, “Our Sentiments are uniformly on the side of Religious Liberty—That Religion is at all times and places a Matter between God and Individuals—That no man aught to suffer in Name, person or effects on account of his religious Opinions—That the legitimate Power of civil Government extends no further than to punish the man who works ill to his neighbour.”8 In the Danbury Baptists’ letter, religious liberty is cast as private conscience, and civil government is not meant to adjudicate belief, only action. Underlying this definition of religion is a widespread if tacit anti-­Catholicism whereby religion is a “Matter between God and Individuals” rather than church hierarchies and ritual practice. As Elizabeth Fenton argues, religious pluralism and the “logic of privacy as freedom” emerged in the postrevolutionary era against an imagined Catholic other.9 This definition of religion as belief is also why we see so much emphasis on hypocrisy, perhaps most notably in Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia in which he claimed that the “constraint” of an established church “may make [someone] worse by making him a hypocrite, but it will never make him a truer man.”10 Paine also asserted that the real risk of established churches is hypocrisy: “Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.”11 In other words, religious freedom freed citizens not to be hypocrites about their moral

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beliefs. Unlike Jefferson, Paine drew more dire conclusions about the hypocrisy lurking in societies with established churches. Not only did it encourage superstition and “priest-­craft,” it was the real source of infidelity. “When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind,” he writes, “as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.”12 For both Jefferson and Paine, religious freedom was constituted by a rejection of secrecy, and, in action, it stood for the opposite of hypocrisy. But we should not speed too quickly past Paine’s turn of phrase for this type of hypocrisy: corrupting and prostituting the “chastity” of the “mind.” When religion is imagined as consenting to a series of propositional beliefs, the wholly internal workings of this process can be threatened by passions and other unregulated ideas and urges. Paine assumes that the goal should be to purify and protect them. While there is no doubt that Paine is being metaphoric here, the prominence of private life as a zone of sexual chastity will become more pronounced in the following two centuries, and it would eventually structure late twentieth-­ century privacy law. The sacredness of marriage as an intimate contract that precedes civil society will become doxa in liberal secularism, and, as Chapter 2 explores, this position for private marriage will be built on the precedent of private religion. Here, it is notable for its absence; marriage in its relation to religious liberty was rarely mentioned by Paine or Madison, or in other republican defenses of disestablishment. In this debate, privatized religion guaranteed the purity of one’s mind because it freed one from hypocrisy. In other words, privatizing religion was imagined as producing moral sincerity. This logic was widespread in public discourse. Lyman Beecher famously turned from an entrenched opponent of disestablishment to its defender (once the Connecticut law was passed in 1818), and his defense of private religion traded in the same language that structured his previous opponents’ arguments. In his 1819 sermon The Design, Rights, and Duties of Local Churches, Beecher recast Connecticut’s disestablishment law as an opportunity for Protestant denominations to band together for evangelical influences, and to rout out infidelity. “It is only the influence from above,” he advises, “maintained by religious institutions, breathing their benign influence into systems of legislation, and extending their all pervading efficacy through every relation of social life, that men are qualified, and inclined, to enjoy the blessing of a free, mild, efficient government.”13 Private religion, as maintained by institutions not the state, was both benign and all pervading; this ubiquity was the guarantor of freedom, according to Beecher. This

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“benign influence” was only possible because of the separation of church and state; conversely, as he darkly intoned in his Lectures on Scepticism (1835), “The union of church and state in Protestant nations has been a fruitful cause of scepticism.”14 The role of the independent churches was to provide a bulwark between the church and the world, to keep the church an embodiment of purity, and, in doing so, to prevent “a loose morality and formal worship, antinomian fatality or Arminian laxity of doctrine, both of which alike grieve the spirit and abandon man to his own heart’s lust.”15 Beecher’s invocation of “lust” was a concern that grew in the antebellum period (this lecture is from 1835), as privacy, marriage, and regulation of sexual morality become more firmly tied together. We might see in it the shift from Paine’s phrasing, the “chastity of his mind,” to a more literal concern about what was at stake in making religion an elemental part of private life.

Tom Paine, Infidel The language of private religion as the guarantor both of individual religious sincerity and political freedom helped consolidate a language of secular morality, seemingly shorn of sectarianism. Running through it, though, was both a thread of anti-­Catholicism and a growing concern over the need to keep one’s private beliefs uncontaminated. This defense of private religion in many ways won the discursive battle. That said, the 1790s also experienced rising levels of paranoia around what was often dubbed “infidelity.” Infidelity, as Gretchen Murphy usefully explains, was a purposefully imprecise word for unbelief that became prominent in the eighteenth century: “Prior to the eighteenth century, a heretic was someone perceived as a cultural insider fomenting unorthodox belief, while infidel denoted someone perceived as a cultural outsider, such as a Jew or Muslim, with an entirely non-­Christian belief system. But in the eighteenth century, usage of infidel eclipsed that of heretic by absorbing its sense, so that it could connote either disbelief, or unorthodox belief, or religious dissent, assigning foreign menace to them all.”16 Accusations of infidelity were on the rise in the 1790s, but this should not be confused with a groundswell of skepticism. As Christopher Grasso points out, at the end of the eighteenth century, “Christians worried about the foreign contagion of British deism and French infidel philosophy” even as the “number of Americans who had imbibed such notions was probably small.”17

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Fueling this paranoia was the French Revolution, particularly its anticlericalism and the violence of the Reign of Terror. It generated a stark partisan divide between the Federalists and Democratic-­Republicans, and the specter of infidelity became a standard wedge wielded most often by Federalists for both political and religious goals. Federalists feared that, without either state churches or a belief in revealed religion and divine retribution, citizens would become vulnerable to the seductions of atheism, as they had in France.18 As the historian Amanda Porterfield explains, “Painting religious skepticism as a danger to the country, advocates for religion succeeded in muting [it] by equating it with moral depravity.”19 As Grasso also notes, “the open profession of unchristian beliefs,” according to the critics of deism, “weakened the bonds of union” and while “liberty of conscience might have to be stretched far to contain the sectarian diversity of America,” it could not go “beyond the bounds of what many considered to be common sense: morality rested in a belief in a God who would punish bad behavior even when the state could not; this belief, in turn, relied on the recognition that the Bible was God’s revealed Word and that its warnings were true.”20 In this environment, the threat that any belief could slide into no belief became, as Eric R. Schlereth argues, “a limit to tolerable expression” and “the periphery of the acceptable” and thus infidelity “helped believers of various denominations define themselves in more general or generically ‘Christian’ terms.”21 Grasso and Schlereth pinpoint important distinctions and limits that were central to the discourse of the 1790s. Even as there seemed to be a growing acceptance that established religion may not survive legally (albeit with several Federalist holdouts, among them Lyman Beecher), Christianity (privately held and publicly adhered to) remained in the popular imagination the guarantor of private morality and national stability. Thomas Paine came to symbolize the seductive threat of infidelity in the 1790s for the new nation, and he continued to do so well into the nineteenth century. When he published The Age of Reason, his stated intention was a defense of private conscience against French revolutionary attempts to dechristianize French nationalism. It was read, however, as an attack not just on organized religion but on revealed religion and therefore a grave threat to the morality of the nation. Paine’s dedication of The Age of Reason to his “fellow-­citizens of the United States of America” draws on what had become a fairly typical defense of disestablishment: “You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the Right of every Man

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to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.”22 In his dedication, Paine forecasts the very terms on which he would be attacked. On the one hand, he is in utter agreement that religion is private, and that it is largely structured by belief. That said, he uses the word opinion, and thus lowers religious belief to any type of opinion rather than reserving for it a special role in society. And finally, he imagines that an encroachment on private opinion is tantamount to enslavement and tyranny. The Age of Reason was both popular and controversial, but not because Paine gave voice to new ideas. Indeed, Paine’s argument for natural religion was not unique; Hume, Bolingbroke, and others had thoroughly canvassed these topics before him. What separated The Age of Reason from its cohorts was its style and wide circulation. Paine finished part 1 just as he was arrested by the French revolutionary guard, and he handed the manuscript to Joel Barlow quite literally on his way to Luxembourg Prison. Barlow managed to publish part 1 in London, where it sold for the very cheap rate of one shilling. American editions of part 1, according to Eric Schlereth, “appeared in the shops of booksellers from Boston to Philadelphia during the summer of 1794.”23 The second part of The Age of Reason had a similar trajectory, but also included Paine’s self-­financed shipping of 15,000 copies to the United States. Additionally, seventeen editions would be published by 1797 in the United States, and the Democratic-­Republican printer and editor Benjamin Franklin Bache printed the two parts together in 1797, selling 100,000 copies in that year alone.24 By 1800 The Age of Reason had gone through twenty-­one American editions.25 All that said, The Age of Reason was not a best seller as such, proving to be most popular among college students and with urban literary circles. For instance, looking back on his entrance to Yale College in 1793, Beecher recalled that it was “the day of the infidelity of the Tom Paine school. . . . Most of the class before me were infidels, and called each other Voltaire, Rousseau, D’Alembert, etc., etc.”26 Likewise, the Friendly Club, whose members included Charles Brockden Brown, Elihu Hubbard Smith, and William Dunlap, had “many hearty laughing-­spells” while reading the second part of The Age of Reason, which contained the majority of Paine’s barbs about revealed religion.27 Not quite seeing the joke that the Friendly Club did, Paine’s opponents responded anxiously to what they perceived to be a print world saturated with Paine’s attacks on organized religion, revealed religion, miracles, and the Bible

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as the Word of God, along with his defense of natural religion and deism. Thirty-­five responses to The Age of Reason came out within a decade of the publication of part 1 in 1794, and denunciations continued strong through the first decade of the nineteenth century. The responses from ministers were often long and thorough, and they took special issue with Paine’s critiques of both organized and revealed religion. According to Shirley ­Samuels, these replies consistently “link[ed] an ‘infidelity’ of religious thought with infidelity within the family and, by implication, the state.”28 Richard Watson (Anglican Bishop of Llandaff and Paine’s most well-­circulated critic in the Atlantic World), denounced The Age of Reason as “the poison of infidelity” and targeted Paine’s logic about the salutary benefit of following private belief over trust in organized religion and a learned ministry: “It’s a maxim of every law, human and divine, that a man ought never to act in opposition to his conscience: but it will not from thence follow, that he will, in obeying the dictates of his conscience, on all occasions act right. An inquisitor, who burns jews and heretics; a Robespierre, who massacres innocent and harmless women; a robber who thinks that all things ought to be in common, and that a state of property is an unjust infringement of natural liberty:—these, and a thousand perpetrators of different crimes, may all follow the dictates of conscience.”29 Private conscience with no established church to help guide it, in his account of world history, leads not to a moral society but to the Inquisition and the French Revolution. (Needless to say, Watson does not put much stock in Catholic Church establishments). Watson, along with many others attacking The Age of Reason, was suspicious of elevating an unchecked private conscience above all else. In his words, Paine has “given the reins to the domination of every passion,” and the result of passions set loose will be “a state of corrupted morals.”30 Uzal Ogden, an Episcopalian minister from New Jersey, sounded the same alarm: “When the restraints of religion are dissolved, what can be expected, but that men should abandon themselves to the impulse of their passions? Human laws and penalties will be insufficient to restrain men from licentiousness, where there is no just sense of the Deity; no regard to a future state, or to the due punishment of vice, and the rewards of virtue hereafter.”31 For both Watson and Ogden, private belief is not always reliable. Just because it is an internal voice, that does not mean it is for the good. Passions are also internal, and they are as likely to steer one astray as not. Watson’s argument against relying on private conscience alone was part of his larger defense of established religion (in this case, the Church of England).

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Paine’s American detractors like Ogden, on the other hand, often voiced the fear that the unregulated passions unleashed by infidelity would subject citizens to a new tyranny. According to Ogden, Paine’s treatise will “plunge us into ignorance and error; superstition and idolatry, and fix on us the fetters of slavery.”32 Slavery is the endpoint of a journey that begins with questioning revealed religion, Ogden and many others implied. For Federalists who feared infidelity, as Shirley Samuels has argued, the intense popularity of seduction novels provided a ready narrative in which religious infidels and Jacobin radicals were easily cast as seducers and villains.33 This fear of seduction was visible in some of the most prominent American responses to deism in general and The Age of Reason in particular. In The Age of Revelation; or, The Age of Reason Shewn to Be an Age of Infidelity (1801), Elias Boudinot warns the young men of the United States, “The boldness of impiety is often mistaken for knowledge, founded on an independent spirit, and thereby saps the necessary defence of simple innocence and unsuspecting modesty.”34 Paine worried that established churches led to corruption and specifically would corrode the “chastity” of people’s minds. Boudinot drew on similar metaphors of seduction, but in his case the victims’ “innocence” and “unsuspecting modesty” might fall under the sway of the “boldness of impiety.” Aligning Paine’s and Boudinot’s matching metaphors, we see how, on both sides of this debate, religious belief was imagined as vulnerable to seduction. What Paine’s critics also sought to undermine was his narrative of liberation. In his addresses to Yale College graduates, subsequently printed as The Nature and Danger of Infidel Philosophy (1798), Timothy Dwight attempted to turn the seductive tide of deism, and he did so by rewriting the debate into an exposé of immoral and sexual acts. Blasting ancient, non-­Christian philosophers for drunkenness and sodomy, he turns to modern infidels’ personal, private sins. Dwight then cautions his auditors that what is most seductive about deists is their confident style of writing, which is bent on convincing readers that to believe in deism is to be free: “It is boldly asserted, that the world has hitherto lain in a state of ignorance and infancy; that it has been chained by authority, and influenced by superstition, but that it has, at the present time, broken at once its bonds, roused itself into manly exertion, and seized intuitively upon the whole system of truth, moral, political, and natural.”35 Like Boudinot, Dwight insists that the problem is “boldness,” that is, the clarity as well as force by which deism is pronounced. By pretending to the name of emancipators, deists like Paine confuse unwitting American undergraduates into subscribing to irreligion. And the endpoint of such folly

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would be to tear down, in the hyperbolic words of Jedidiah Morse, “the most perfect, the best administered, the least burdensome, and most happyfying [sic]” government in the world.36 As the outcry against The Age of Reason makes clear, Paine’s book was popular for his style as much as his substance. As Schlereth notes, “Reactions to The Age of Reason clearly held that Paine’s pernicious influence stemmed from his writing’s seductive power, which was enhanced by his early political fame.”37 Paine’s detractors therefore attempted to counter not just his logic but his style. And they did so, curiously enough, through ad hominem attacks. In fact, a pattern emerges in many of the responses to The Age of Reason: Paine’s taste indexed his morality. And “taste,” it should be said, was quite literal. Ogden speculates that perhaps Paine turned deist because “the refulgent light of Divine Revelation, gave too much pain to his reddened eyes of intemperance” and adds a footnote, in case the reader was not yet clear on his meaning, that “this expression alludes to a well known fact, that, unhappily, Mr. Paine is a drunkard.”38 Or as asserted in an article in the British Review, which circulated in American magazines, “From the time of his imprisonment in France . . . his drunkenness, brutality, and the pestilential filth of his person, added greatly to the detestation in which he began to be held by all mankind, even by the partizans of revolution and blood.”39 These attacks on Paine’s personal vice, I want to suggest, are of a piece with the attacks on his easy and seductive style of writing, which, to quote Grasso, had the effect of “shov[ing] deism out of the gentleman’s salon into the taverns frequented by artisans and laborers.”40 One article in the American Monthly Review bemoaned Paine’s “dashing way”; another critic classed Paine with William Godwin as one of “those illiterate, vulgar, ignorant scribblers.”41 William Cobbett, Paine’s most vociferous foe in the United States, denounced Paine’s “clumsy battered pen” and declared that The Age of Reason “is as stupid and despicable as its author. The wretch has all his life been employed in leading fools astray from their duty, and, as nothing is more easy, he has often succeeded.”42 And the British Review article I cited above went so far as to say: [Paine] had the merit of discovering, that the best way of diffusing discontent and revolutionary fanaticism, was by a broad display, in their naked and barbarous forms, of those infidel and anarchical elements, which sophistry had, till his time, refined above the perceptions of the vulgar. By stripping the mischief of the dress, though still covering it with the name and boast of philosophy, he rendered it as

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familiar to the capacity as it was flattering to the passions of the mob; and easy to be understood in proportion to the ascendency of the baser qualities of the mind.43 This heated critique brings together the various strands we see across reactions to The Age of Reason. The reviewer joins others in attacking Paine’s style by deploying clothing as his favored metaphor (no doubt an allusion to Paine’s first job as a stay-­maker). Paine’s book offers “a broad display” of revolutionary ideas, brought forward “in their naked and barbarous forms.” Though Paine claims to cover his crime with the name of “philosophy,” what he has done is strip “fanaticism” down for all to see. In doing so, he has made his attack on, among other things, Bible truth and revealed religion too easy to follow and thus too seductive for those artisans and other “vulgar” types who before could not follow the philosophical arguments. As this critic concludes, “The turpitude of moral as well as natural deformity should not be exhibited, without a little drapery to satisfy the demands of ordinary decorum.”44 What both these reviewers suggest is that Paine has tempted the lower classes with a strumpet tricked out to look like a philosopher. But what is worse, he has done it boldly, for all to see. While hidden deists haunt the Federalist imagination, these responses to Paine are also upset by too much plainness. This might well be the crux of the problem of private religion for Federalists like Dwight and Boudinot. That religion is constituted by sincerely held belief is as old as Protestantism, but that is also why Federalist ministers were concerned about the effects of disestablishment. Without organized religion, supported by the state, how would individuals navigate a swirl of passions and ideas and opinions? Passions, not just beliefs, constitute one’s private self; they are powerful, if invisible, and they can absolutely lead you astray. To be sure, these are particularly Federalist criticisms, and they have a political as well as religious axe to grind. Even still, what they articulate in their response to Paine is a persistent problem that would animate conversations not just about the role of privately held religion in public life but the meaning of privacy itself. It is also the question at the heart of the two novels to which this chapter now turns.

A Slave’s Attire The result of finding Paine’s style seductive is to be plunged into slavery. Or so Uzal Ogden, Timothy Dwight, Elias Boudinot, and Jedidiah Morse all

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asserted. Royall Tyler structures the plot of The Algerine Captive to represent just such a slip from infidelity to enslavement, placing Paine at the transition between the two volumes of his novel.45 The second half of the novel changes not just the trajectory of the plot but the style and form in which it is narrated. Whereas volume 1 is a comic picaresque, volume 2 draws on the genres of spiritual autobiography and travel narrative, emphasizing Updike Underhill’s internal conversion to Christianity and his accounts of Algeria, Islam, and enslavement (both his own and the Africans he enslaves via his duties as doctor on a slave ship). The Algerine Captive is but one example of the longer history of borrowing from the spiritual autobiography to construct the novel form. As Jordan Alexander Stein has argued, one of the effects of this convergence was the tendency to cast character via negative figurations (of “humility, self-­effacement, and subjective vulnerability before God”) that were increasingly packaged as a narrative arc.46 Underhill’s character, as expanded on in volume 2 of the novel, partakes of this tradition, and Tyler ends by affirming the importance of private Christian belief for the stability of the new nation. Underhill meets Paine at the critical turning point of the latter’s reputation, which saw him transformed from the celebrated writer of Common Sense to vilified Jacobin and atheist after his defense of the French Revolution and his publication of part 1 of The Age of Reason. Paine, in this context, is an object of fascination and denunciation, so much so that Underhill can opine, “Omitting the lions in the tower, the regalia in the jewel office, and the other insignia of British royalty, of which Englishmen are so justly proud, I shall content myself with mentioning the most singular curiosity I saw in London. It was the celebrated Thomas Paine, author of ‘Common Sense,’ ‘The Rights of Man,’ and other writings, whose tendency is to overturn ancient opinions of government and religion.”47 Meeting Paine at the house of the painter John Trumbull, Underhill opens with a long description of his “singular” person: Thomas Paine resembled the great apostle to the Gentiles, not more in his zeal and subtlety of argument, than in personal appearance; for, like that fervid apostle, his bodily presence was both mean and contemptible. When I saw him, he was dressed in a snuff-­coloured coat, olive velvet vest, drab breeches, coarse hose. His shoe-­buckles of the size of half a dollar. A bob-­tailed wig covered that head which worked such mickle woe to courts and kings. If I should attempt to describe it, it would be in the same style and principle with which the veteran

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soldier bepraiseth an old standard—the more tattered, the more glorious. It is probable that this was the same identical wig, under the shadow of whose curls, he wrote ‘Common Sense’ in America many years before. (88) Calling him an English “curiosity” worthy of tourism, and thus a figure of both obsolescence and nostalgia, Underhill goes on to underscore these qualities through a description of Paine’s clothes. Clad in the dullest and coarsest of cloth (“a snuff-­coloured coat, olive velvet vest, drab breeches, coarse hose”) and sporting accessories long out of fashion (“shoe-­buckles of the size of half a dollar” and the same wig “under the shadow of whose curls he wrote, ‘Common Sense’ in America many years before”), Paine is so behind the fashions that he resembles not a man in 1790s London but (ironically enough) Paul, the apostle. He is a memento of a time to be praised but one long passed. By adding this element of belatedness, Tyler suggests a temporal lag that reflects the diminution of Paine’s own reputation and influence in these years. When turning to the controversial publication of The Age of Reason, Underhill opens by noting that he never actually heard Paine rail against religion and that he was under the impression that Paine wrote the first part as a sop to the French revolutionary government, to get him out of Luxembourg Prison. “When the reign of the terrorists ceased, an apology was expected, and, even by the pious yet catholic American, would have been received,” Underhill explains, but instead “no propitiatory sacrifice was made. This missionary of vice has proceeded proselyting” (91–92). Publishing the second part of The Age of Reason and infamously attacking George Washington, Paine secured a new and degraded reputation.48 Underhill explains: “A tasteful, though irreligious scholar might tolerate a chastised scepticism, if exhibited by an acute Hume, or an eloquent Bolingbroke. But one cannot repress the irritability of the fiery Hotspur, when one beholds the pillars of morality shaken by the rude shock of this modern vandal. The reader should learn, that his paltry system is only an outrage of wine; and that it is in the ale house he most vigorously assaults the authority of the prophets, and laughs most loudly at the gospel when in his cups” (92). Paine’s personal style is obsolete, and his writing and drinking are likewise anachronistic, betraying a ruder time and taste—he is Hotspur or a vandal. In fact, here again we see the two meanings of “taste” intertwine: Paine’s taste for wine begets his untasteful writing. Had he been more stylistically sober, as Hume and Bolingbroke were, the crime would not have been so egregious.

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After dismissing The Age of Reason as produced by an old, obsolescent man in his cups, Underhill embarks as doctor on a slave ship heading to West Africa, a narrative shift that will result in his own enslavement and an affirmation of his private Christianity in the face of pressure to convert to Islam. From Underhill’s dialogue with a Mollah to his reactions to enslavement, the novel consistently turns to the importance of privately achieved conviction. The chapter in which Underhill consults with the Mollah is written in the form of a philosophical dialogue, and, as Elizabeth Fenton observes, it continually ends in a stalemate.49 The Mollah counters Underhill’s claim to “good evidence for the truth” of the Bible, with his own claim to the same about the Koran; Underhill opines that Islam is a violent religion, but the Mollah refutes this by recounting the history of Christian violence; and, finally, echoing John Locke, the Mollah points out that theology is learned, not inherent in the soul. Yet theology is not the issue of this dialogue at all; if Underhill converts, he can escape slavery. Thus, when the Mollah concludes his appeal to Underhill, he does so in the language of liberty: “Throw off the shackles of education from your soul, and be welcome to the joys of the true believer” (136). The Mollah suggests that Underhill might escape both a metaphoric and literal enslavement by converting to Islam—by becoming yet a different kind of “infidel” than Jefferson or Paine were accused of being. Tyler thus returns infidelity to its original meaning, and poses it as a choice that Underhill then refuses: “I have thus given a few sketches of the manner of this artful priest. After five days conversation, disgusted with his fables, abashed by his assurance, and almost confounded by his sophistry, I resumed my slave’s attire, and sought safety in my former servitude” (136). In this passage, Underhill embraces the language of revealed religion, one of Paine’s main targets in The Age of Reason. Because he has no recourse in natural religion to counter the Mollah’s arguments in favor of Islam, he rewrites the Mollah’s evidence and argument as “fables” and “sophistry.” Underhill cannot engage in a Habermasian public debate about the comparative merits of religions, a debate that was beginning to occur with more regularity in the Anglo-­American world (albeit in a way that centralized Protestant Christianity).50 Instead, he retreats into the position of “slave,” which, like the position of “woman,” ideologically represented the prepolitical private, as Elizabeth Maddock Dillon has argued.51 Choosing slavery to affirm his Christianity therefore represents the ultimate expression of private religion. The style by which Underhill rejects Islam and embraces Christianity is therefore crucial. Donning the “attire” of the slave, Underhill expresses his Christianity. On the face of it, this is a very

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old trope in Christian thought, in which outward poverty bespeaks inner moral riches. But this is also in keeping with the new emphasis on the purity of private religion. Underhill’s simple attire reflects his refusal to hypocritically embrace Islam.52 The style by which Underhill rejects Islam allows us to consider the ­novel’s formal elements more broadly. As representative of private moral purity, the “slave’s attire” retrospectively speaks to the reason Underhill is in Africa in the first place: the Atlantic slave trade. Tyler’s representation of the slave ship closely ties together the moral question of slavery with both privacy and a private self. Underhill’s job as physician is “to inspect the bodies of the slaves, to see, as the captain expressed himself, that our owners were not shammed off with unsound flesh” (96). In other words, Underhill’s role is to discover the truth behind what seems an outward bearing. Thus, the foundational violation of slavery as represented by the novel (though, needless to say, not the only one) is the stark and violent public exposure of enslaved Africans’ privacy: “The man, the affrighted child, the modest matron, and the timid virgin were alike exposed to this severe scrutiny, to humanity and common decency equally insulting” (96). Underhill’s description lingers on the process by which what ought to be private is made public, of stripping “modest matrons” and “timid virgins” of control of what parts of their bodies are seen and by whom. Yet he both does and does not claim responsibility for this public shaming. As he says at the end of the chapter: “I cannot reflect on this transaction yet without shuddering. I have deplored my conduct with tears of anguish; and, I pray a merciful God, the common parent of the great family of the universe, who hath made of one flesh and one blood all nations of the earth, that the miseries, the insults, and cruel woundings, I afterwards received, when a slave myself, may expiate for the inhumanity, I was necessitated to exercise, towards these my brethren of the human race” (96). This retrospective account is articulated in the negative formation of the spiritual autobiography (he “shudders” when he reflects on his transgression; he “deplores” his conduct with “tears of anguish”; and he prays to God for atonement). But, of course, here in his prayer to God, where critics have read Underhill’s first articulation of antislavery sentiment, we see instead a hedge, betrayed by his use of the passive voice. He “was necessitated to exercise.” Underhill is both responsible for and not at all responsible for the added humiliations inflicted on enslaved men, women, and children. On top of which, his prayer to God offers a type of bargain: he asks that his own enslavement expatiate for his involvement in the slave trade.

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A few chapters later, when Underhill is himself enslaved within the diegesis proper, he does pronounce a more ambitious, activist response: Grant me, I ejaculated, once more to taste the freedom of my native country, and every moment of my life shall be dedicated to preaching against this detestable commerce. I will fly to our fellow citizens in the southern states; I will, on my knees, conjure then, in the name of humanity, to abolish a traffic, which causes it to bleed in every pore. If they are deaf to the pleadings of nature, I will conjure them, for the sake of consistency, to cease to deprive their fellow creatures of freedom, which their writers, their orators, representatives, senators, and even their constitutions of government, have declared to be the unalienable birth right of man. (106) Ed White sees in this moment a “fleeting Christian antislavery sentiment,” one that, in its abandonment, only affirms that the novel’s overarching ameliorative approach is best produced “privately and secretly.”53 Fleeting is too true. Unlike in the earlier passage, when Underhill asks God to atone for his involvement in the slave trade by weighing it against his time as a slave, this is no retrospective voice. He is bargaining with God in the present tense of the narrative. And he is desperately bargaining, to boot: he describes his willingness to enact his own physical abasement (that he will plead with the southern states “on his knees”) and stirringly invokes the French Revolution and Paine (he will force them to adhere to the “right[s] of man”). In other words, Underhill’s retrospective voice, as we saw earlier, has already asked God to exonerate him, claiming “time served,” so to speak; his plea here is in the present tense, a description of how he felt upon his enslavement, not how he feels as he writes the narrative later. When we align these two pleas to God, we see Underhill (both before and after conversion) thinking of religion as one of negotiating his personal atonement with a personal God not as a transcendent and demanding system that compels public action. Indeed, Underhill returns to the United States a moral man—and a confirmed Christian—calling for a Federal unity of the nation. Abandoning calls for either sympathy with enslaved people or the rights of man, Underhill represents and reinforces the ideal effect of diffusing the threat of deism. By repositioning as antiquated those advocates for a type of religious freedom that challenges Protestant Christianity (Paine is a “great apostle” and the Mollah spins “fables”), the novel can thus champion

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a private Protestant morality as “freedom.” This shift exemplifies the logic of disestablishment, in which even its opponents like Beecher came to see that there was a great opportunity in equating private religion with Protestant investments in moral purity.

An Uncouth Garb In The Algerine Captive, Thomas Paine appears as a marker between two generic modes: the comic picaresque of volume 1, and the travel narrative and spiritual autobiography of volume 2. In both modes, though, Tyler sidesteps a narrative through-­line that, while not universal to eighteenth-­century novels, was becoming increasingly so: the marriage or seduction plot. In volume 1, Underhill is too comic to be a serious match; in volume 2, the emphasis on his enslavement and spiritual conversion likewise positions The Algerine Captive outside of these plots. The novel tests out the strength of private conscience when a white protagonist faces literal enslavement, but it barely dips a toe into the implications of privatized religion for sexuality. While the association between the two were often metaphoric (recall Paine’s claim that someone forced to submit to an established church had “corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind”), we should recall that even the most radical calls to protect private conscience cast doing so as a bulwark against social disorder, often imagined as being marked by debauchery and libertinism.54 But Tyler need not pen that novel. For if ever there was an author who regularly represented the complexities of the sexual and marital risks of infidelity it was most certainly Charles Brockden Brown. Brown’s Gothic novels all intertwine specters of unbelief with representations of sexual passions. Prone to express themselves in double negatives that must be carefully unwound for comprehension (sentences like, “The drudgery of a shop, where all the faculties were at a stand and one day was an unvaried repetition of the foregoing, was too uncongenial to his disposition not to be a source of discontent”), Brown’s first-­person narrators spin tales with plots embedded in conspiracies nestled in digressive stories framed by retrospection.55 On the level of style and form, then, Brown’s novels are obsessed with the distinction between privacy, a moral function, and secrecy, which begets hypocrisy. No Brown novel arguably serves up more occasions for the consideration of privacy than Ormond; or, The Secret Witness. Narrated by the protagonist’s dear friend Sophia, Ormond layers together a dizzying number

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of plots: the imposture and fraud practiced on Constantia’s father, Stephen Dudley, by the forger Craig that results in the family’s poverty; Constantia’s management during and survival of the yellow fever epidemic of 1793; her meeting with what would become one of her love interests and eventually her violent enemy, Ormond, a radical free thinker who rejects Christian belief and conventional marriage; Constantia’s fleeting but passionate attraction to Ormond’s long-­lost, revolutionary sister, Martinette; and the reunion with the true love of her life, the narrator Sophia herself.56 While Ormond’s plots seem to spin out of control, Brown holds the novel together through its thematic preoccupations. Ormond obsessively considers constructions of private spaces and the threats to them. As Hana Layson observes, there are “seven alleged, attempted, or successful seduction and rape stories” in the novel.57 The recurrence to these plots matches the structure of the novel as a whole. According to Mary Chapman, “the novel’s conclusion” draws “Constantia into progressively narrower worlds and more private spaces.”58 Yet even though Ormond is a novel that repeatedly stages sexual violence and the invasion of private spaces, it is still decidedly not a pat representation of infidelity as a threat to either morality or privacy.59 Indeed, while Ormond may be a villain, he is no simple villain. Discerning even basic facts about Ormond from the novel proves quite difficult. Sophia introduces Ormond to the reader by demurring that she “know[s] no task more arduous than a just delineation of the character of Ormond” (125). Never giving a direct account of Ormond’s actual person (is he tall? short? dark? fair?), she shifts between what can only be described as Ormond’s ardent dual commitments to power and aesthetics. “No one could entertain loftier conceptions of human capacity than Ormond,” Sophia explains, “but he carefully distinguished between men in the abstract, and men as they are” (127). He sees men as “beings to be impelled, by the breath of accident, in a right or wrong road” and that “the principles of the social machine must be rectified, before men can be beneficially active” (127). His conspiracies concentrate not on the individual—he certainly has no respect for something like liberal rights—but on a panoptic vision of invisible power, and his “political projects are likely to possess an extensive influence on the future condition of this Western World,” as Sophia darkly warns (126). He is, as so many scholars have pointed out, the “secret witness” of the novel’s title—surreptitiously listening in on Constantia’s conversations; stalking the streets dressed as a Black chimney sweep; and observing the world in order to direct and control people.

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Ormond’s political conspiracies suggest his interest is ultimately not happiness, property, or liberty, following from a Lockean theory of individual rights, but in creating systems. “System,” as Clifford Siskin argues, was itself an Enlightenment genre, one that attempted to define, explain, and master a field of thought through deductive methods.60 Brown bases the attraction between Constantia and Ormond on a mutual attraction to and development of such systems. Constantia was educated by her father in a way that reinforced the merits of this epistemological project. While other girls learned French and music, she studied the systems of Newton and Hartley (62). When her ­family’s fortune is lost, Constantia immediately embarks on an economizing project, in which “her music and even her books were not spared,—not from the slight esteem in which they were held by her, but because she was henceforth to become an economist of time as well as of money” (54). Perhaps most telling, Sophia relates how Constantia’s approach to morals had been shaped by this upbringing. She writes that Constantia “had learned to square her conduct, in a considerable degree, not by the hasty impulses of inclination, but by the dictates of truth. She yielded nothing to caprice or passion” (52). Like Constantia, Ormond is also an “economist of time”—at one point in the novel he announces that his dinner will last exactly six minutes (159)—and he seeks a wife “whose character was squared, with mathematical exactness, to his situation” (140). In deploying the same mathematical expression for both Constantia’s morality and Ormond’s desire, Brown signals the attraction between them as founded on system, an attraction borne out in their subsequent dialogues on love, marriage, and morality. All of this is in keeping with Ormond as a representative of the feared Jacobin deists of the 1790s, a member of a secret society modeled on the Illuminati and bent on destroying religion and installing governments dedicated to a radical atheist democracy. Ormond’s vision of power and control, though, is never revealed to the reader in such a direct way: “Ormond aspired to nothing more ardently than to hold the reins of opinion,—to exercise absolute power over the conduct of others, not by constraining their limbs or by exacting obedience to his authority, but in a way of which his subjects should be scarcely conscious” (180). A Benthamite in philosophy, Ormond seeks not to lead a visible revolution but to change society’s course in secret, invisible ways. Of course, this very invisibility is what makes his radical politics so obscured in the novel—and so dangerous for Constantia. Being “unacquainted with religion” (182), she was vulnerable to Ormond’s brand of infidelity—in both senses of the word. As the novel unfolds, we learn that

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he combines deism with an “anti-­nuptial creed” (183). “His disbelief was at once unchangeable and strenuous” (183) and it is a force that will assail Constantia’s poor moral training. As Sophia bemoans, Constantia’s “habits rather than her opinions were undevout. Religion was regarded by her, not with disbelief, but with absolute indifference” (182). This distinction is, of course, a red flag. What starts as a qualification—it is just her habits, not her private thoughts that were undevout—ends with a frank statement of Constantia’s “absolute indifference” to religion. And we know where that leads in the 1790s imaginary: seduction and social disorder. If one is indifferent to religion, one is liable to be seduced into either one or the other type of infidelity. Though often alluded to, in the end the radical nature of Ormond’s politics is mainly represented in the novel through his private life (his mistress Helena Cleve, most prominently) and his negative opinions on both women’s intellectual capacities and the desirability of marriage. And these opinions have a stylistic corollary. “His income was large,” Sophia explains early in her introduction of Ormond, “and he managed it nearly on the same principles as other men. He thought himself entitled to all the splendour and ease which it would purchase; but his taste was elaborate and correct. He gratified his love of the beautiful, because the sensations it afforded were pleasing, but made no sacrifices to the love of distinction” (128). On the scale between Paine’s threadbare poverty and Jefferson’s cocky flash, Ormond is definitely another Jefferson. And like Jefferson, he is a bit of a romantic: he eschews “pompous equipage and retinue” but still insists that his attendants be clad in a style “after the model suggested by his imagination,” a model “not in compliance with the dictates of custom” (128). While Ormond may be surrounded by servants dressed to his exacting, if unusual taste, his presentation of self is a study in the opposite. Above all, Ormond’s etiquette is unadorned. According to Sophia, Ormond “treated with systematic negligence the etiquette that regulates the intercourse of persons of a certain class. He everywhere acted, in this respect, as if he were alone, or among familiar associates” (128). Again, Brown emphasizes the language of system: Ormond is negligent of etiquette, but he is negligent in a systematic way. His refusal to change his comportment to reflect his company is meant to testify to his democratic sincerity. Constantia certainly feels this part of Ormond’s character during her first conversations with him. She tells him, “You clothe your thoughts in a garb so uncouth, that I know not in what light they are to be viewed” (162). Much as Paine’s Age of Reason was faulted for laying bare deist tenets for lower-­class readers, Ormond’s thoughts are not

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dressed up, or to the extent that they are, they are in an “uncouth garb”; he refuses verbal finery in order to suggest a level of “authenticity.” Sophia, for instance, reports, “There was something in the tone, but more in the tenor, of this address that startled [Constantia]. There was nothing in this man but what came upon her unaware. This sudden effusion of confidence was particularly unexpected and embarrassing” (160). Sophia’s distinction between “tone” and “tenor” here is important. Ormond’s ability to startle and embarrass suggests that one cannot separate his style from his substance; his aspiration is to startle, to come upon his interlocutors “unaware,” not just to display his hearty democratic spirit. Above all else, Ormond presents himself as a follower of the school of sincerity advocated by William Godwin. As Godwin expounds in An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), sincerity “extirpates the low and selfish principle” and “compels me to regard the concerns of my species as my own concerns.”61 Godwin placed the benefit of this strict code of sincerity in its rejection of hypocrisy: “He that, having laid down to himself a plan of sincerity, is guilty of a single deviation, infects the whole, contaminates the frankness and magnanimity of his temper (for fortitude in the intrepidity of lying is baseness), and is less virtuous than the foe against whom he defends himself; for it is more virtuous in my neighbour to confide in my apparent honesty, than in me to abuse his confidence.”62 Hypocrisy is an infection that disrupts Godwin’s entire system of sincerity and virtue. Sophia echoes these sentiments when she reports, “That in which [Ormond] chiefly placed his boast was his sincerity. To this he refused no sacrifice. In consequence of this, his deportment was disgusting to weak minds, by a certain air of ferocity and haughty negligence” (129). Sophia’s invocation of “sincerity” makes further sense of Constantia’s impression that Ormond means, above all, to startle her. “Weak minds” catch only a “certain air of ferocity and haughty negligence,” but not the political goal of his style and deportment, meant to undermine the common usages of polite society. Ormond counts on the association of sincerity with an unadorned style that is in many ways akin to Underhill’s adoption of a “slave’s attire.” That is, it operates as a sign of his purity. On the surface, then, Ormond actively resists a disjunction between his feelings and his manners. As Ormond would tell you, he is no hypocrite. Not despite but because of his emphasis on sincerity, though, Ormond is the exemplary figure of hypocrisy in the novel. Ormond’s (and Godwin’s) insistence on sincerity suggests the value of being in public who you are in private; yet sincerity also needs proving. It is a performative public stance

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that points to a “deeper” private self. That sincerity hides this performative nature is clearly what Brown explores in his characterization of Ormond. As Sophia explains, “It was natural to suppose that the character of this man was easily understood. He affected to conceal nothing,” however, “a somewhat different conclusion would be suggested by a survey of his actions. In early youth he discovered in himself a remarkable facility in imitating the voice and gestures of others” (129). This power, like Carwin’s in Wieland (1798), “enabled [Ormond] to gain access, as if by supernatural means, to the privacy of others, and baffle their profoundest contrivances to hide themselves from his view. It flattered him with the possession of something like omniscience” (130). Ormond uses his imitative skills to spy on Constantia, most vividly when he dresses as a Black chimney sweep to get inside her home, in an episode Julia Stern correctly names “Ormond’s blackface masquerade.”63 At the end of the novel, we glimpse what Sophia means when she says that he possessed “something like omniscience.” It becomes clear that he has eavesdropped on Sophia and Constantia’s tear-­filled reunion and encouraged Thomas Craig to murder the latter’s father, and he culminates the whole plot by threatening Constantia with rape. He has, in other words, not just spied on but orchestrated the events that the other characters experience; he has become “omniscient” at the moment when the narrator steps from her seeming third-­person position to become a central character in the plot. Ormond disappears and, in turn, becomes the explanatory force behind the scenes for the events that occur within the story. In the interchange of Ormond and Sophia, Brown turns the fears of secret infidels and their conspiracies into a narrative function. As the seeming director of the novel’s final events, Ormond stands analogically for the deist conspiracy that must be expelled. That said, this does not mean that Constantia is “saved” for marriage when she escapes Ormond’s clutches. Too much like Ormond, she is a figure uneasily brought back into a marriage plot. If we keep in mind that Sophia’s narrative about Constantia—that is, the whole retrospective novel she narrates—explains the actions of a murderess to a third person, we begin to suspect that Constantia has somehow fallen outside of the moral logic of the era. Equally important to understanding the finale of Ormond, the plot promises a revelation that, in the end, it refuses to deliver. Sophia’s penultimate paragraph is couched in such ambiguous terms that they recall again the subtitle of “the secret witness”: “It is sufficient to have related events, which the recentness of your intercourse with her hindered you from knowing, but by means of some formal narrative like the

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present. She and her friend only were able to impart to you the knowledge which you have so anxiously sought” (276). What Sophia has to tell is a secret known only to herself and Constantia, and that secret potentially positions Constantia as a hypocrite. Her public persona as an innocent woman obviously does not quite square with her tragic past. Brown also understands that the tight relation between formal narration and exposure cannot help but implicate Constantia, even when there might be nothing left to tell. Like Clara Wieland, Constantia must leave the country at the end of these violent episodes. Unlike Clara, she is not reserved for marriage, and for a fairly clear reason: she has participated in the violence, and that violence seems to point to a reprisal for Ormond’s threat (maybe fulfilled?) of rape. The “chastity of her mind” may well be compromised. Constantia’s brush with religious infidelity corrupted her, made her somewhat impure herself.

The Counterrevolution of 1800 For Underhill and Constantia, transforming comically peripatetic or religiously indifferent characters into Republican men and women depended on a rejection of deism and other secret “infidelities” abounding in the 1790s. Moreover, just as Ormond’s secret conspiracies against Constantia must be made public by Sophia, privacy as a realm for morality was not meant to be secret; instead, it had to testify publicly. And here we might return anew to Akin’s 1804 “The Philosophic Cock,” seeing in the caricature of Jefferson’s style the evidence of both his sexual and philosophical tastes. Yet, unlike Paine, Jefferson’s reputation survived these attacks and that is due, in no small measure, to how his supporters structured their defense of his religious beliefs during the election of 1800: they would assert continually, despite all contemporary (and current) evidence to the contrary, that Jefferson’s public persona was indeed an accurate reflection of his personal conscience and private life. The election of 1800 pitted Jefferson’s Democratic-­Republican Party against Adams and the Federalists, with the final round of voting taking place in the House of Representatives, who were called on to break the tie between Jefferson and Aaron Burr (it took thirty-­six separate votes).64 The Federalist hysteria surrounding Jefferson’s candidacy centered on whether or not he was a Christian, with a string of jeremiads picking up the strains of paranoia from the 1790s, inspired by the French Revolution, the publication of The Age of Reason, and the supposed Illuminati conspiracy.65 Democratic-­Republican rejoinders

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sought to defend Jefferson’s claims to Christianity and offered, in like measure, full-­throated arguments about the need to keep church and state separate. The election of 1800 solidified this common defense of disestablishment—one that culminated in Jefferson’s postelection letter to the Danbury Baptists in which he described the First Amendment as constructing a “wall of separation” between church and state—and it anticipated the terms by which cultural struggles about the morality of slavery would play out in the following decades. The anti-­Jeffersonian and pro-­Jeffersonian pamphleteers came to their respective conclusions by becoming the first close readers of Notes on the State of Virginia (1785). William Linn, the first chaplain to the House of Representatives and author of the most widely read and disputed denunciation of Jefferson during the 1800 election, used Notes to argue that Jefferson was an atheist and thus should never be president. As Linn keenly knew, Jefferson had articulated his dashing defense of private religion in Notes: “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. . . . But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”66 Linn strongly disagreed with this vision of privatized religion: “Does not the belief influence the practice? How then can it be a matter of indifference what a man believes? The doctrine that a man’s life may be good, let his faith be what it may, is contradictory to reason and the experience of mankind. It is true that a mere opinion of my neighbour will do me no injury. Government cannot regulate or punish it. The right of private opinion is inalienable. But let my neighbour once persuade himself that there is no God, and he will soon pick my pocket, and break not only my leg but my neck.”67 Linn walks a fine line in this argument. Like many Federalist ministers, he agrees that the “right of private opinion is inalienable,” as articulated in the First Amendment, but he asks how to draw the line between belief and action. Linn chooses his words carefully: “opinion” signifies something lower than “belief ”; “belief ” and “faith,” in turn, are of a more serious order. Belief shapes action: if one does not believe in a final retribution, one is liable to break a neck and steal a wallet. And do you want that kind of person to be the nation’s president? Linn articulates, in other words, an argument against the relegation of belief to the private sphere and its rebranding as “mere opinion.” For him, religion is not the same as opinion, and believing in God is foundational to right moral action in public office as well as in personal life. By turning to Notes as their main source for Jefferson’s deism, critics like Linn depended on the cultural and political efficacy of exposure. They sought

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to reveal Jefferson’s irreligion to those who had not yet read Notes. While Linn and others singled out several moments in Notes in which they found proof of Jefferson’s infidelity (including his discussion of fossils and the flood), the point that received the most attention was Jefferson’s infamous passage in “Laws” on race. In this chapter, Jefferson provides an early example of the kind of scientific racism that would proliferate in the nineteenth century. He “advances” as a “suspicion only” that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind. It is not against experience to suppose, that different species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, may possess different qualifications. Will not a lover of natural history then, one who views the gradations in all the races of animals with the eye of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the department of man as distinct as nature has formed them?68 Linn and others denounced this passage as one of the most irreligious of the book.69 According to Linn, Jefferson flirts here with an outright denial of Acts 17:26, that God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.” This passage gets Linn especially heated: Can any man now doubt of Mr. Jefferson’s real opinion, and of that opinion being directly opposite to divine revelation? In his conclusion he betrays, like a true infidel, an inconsistency with himself. Having labored to point out physical and moral distinctions between the Whites and the Blacks, he advances it at last ‘as a suspicion only,’ that the latter were inferior to the former; having expressly asserted, that the distinctions mentioned, ‘prove a difference of race,’ now he modestly conveys the doubt, ‘whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances.’ Would a man who believes in a divine revelation even hint a suspicion of this kind? The last sentence, however, though curious, is clear enough as to Mr. Jefferson’s real sentiment. It seems that he views his discussion as ‘an effort to keep those in the department of man as distinct as nature has formed them,’ and he prays to be excused. Observe that he pleads only for a department, a distinct one. Will the philosopher promise, if we indulge him, not to use his arguments hereafter in favor of the Ourang Outang?70

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Outraged at Jefferson’s flirtation with a denial of Black humanity, Linn sees in it both the end result of infidelity and the means by which slavery could easily be defended. In order to highlight his indignation, Linn re-­creates his own reading experience, interspersing sarcasms as he quotes from Notes. Linn deploys adverbs for their power to emphasize (Jefferson “expressly asserted” only to backtrack and “modestly convey”), and his liberal italics convey his frustration (“he prays to be excused. Observe that he pleads only for a department, a distinct one”). Tonally and typographically, Linn’s outrage leaps off the page, an anticipation of David Walker’s more famous reading of Notes in 1829. Linn’s anger over Jefferson’s denial of Black humanity arises as much from the style in which Jefferson advances this argument as it does from the argument itself. Linn calls attention to Jefferson’s pusillanimity, the way in which he hedges his bets, much as Underhill did in his description of his time on the slave ship: Jefferson offers a “suspicion only”; he “supposes” his hypothesis and calls on other natural historians to verify it. Linn eventually drops his sarcasm. “The matter is too serious to jest with,” Linn finally proclaims, “Sir, we excuse you not! You have degraded the blacks from the rank which God hath given them in the scale of being! You have advanced the strongest argument for their state of slavery! You have insulted human nature! You have contemned the word of truth and the mean of salvation! And, whether you will excuse us or not, we exclude you, in your present belief, from any department among Christians!”71 Linn’s urgency about Jefferson’s blasphemy and justification for slavery inverts Jefferson’s neutral, speculative wording. Ultimately, though, Linn’s problem is that there is simply nothing to expose. His anger is in direct relation to the fact that Jefferson’s racism and infidelity are simply right there on the page, and he cannot believe others are not as outraged about them as he is. Responding to Linn, Democratic-­Republicans repeatedly asserted that the purpose behind the separation of church and state was, in fact, the defense of religion. “Religion and government are equally necessary, but their interests should be kept separate and distinct,” argued Tunis Wortman, “Upon no plan, no system, can they become united, without endangering the purity and usefulness of both—The church will corrupt the state, and the state pollute the church.”72 Purity is the watchword of Jefferson’s defenders: in order to be “true” and “pure,” religion cannot mix with the political realm. The New York politician DeWitt Clinton opened his response to Linn by regretting Linn’s own partisan argument: “Our honest zeal for religion is thus to be perverted into the impure channels of faction, and the name of its holy author

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is to be blasphemed, by being coupled with the rise and fall, the struggles, victories, and defeats of contending parties”73 While Linn has sullied a thing called “religion” by “perverting” it into the “impure channels” of politics, Clinton and Jefferson’s other defenders are activated by “honest zeal” to keep the two unmixed. The Democratic-­Republicans claimed to be the party that could better maintain public morality by working sincerely to keep religion and faith private and, because private, pure. Jefferson’s defenders thus sought to turn the tables on the Federalists, claiming themselves as the true protectors of religion. Thus, a typical response to Linn’s scathing denunciation of Jefferson’s racism and defense of slavery was to reverse his accusations. For their evidence of his private belief in God, several of Jefferson’s defenders turned to a passage in “Manners,” in which he shifts out of the naturalist’s voice of the other parts of Notes: “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.”74 Citing it, Wortman practically shouts from the page, “Is this the language of an infidel! this the zealous exclamation of an enemy to God? O fye Sir, shame upon your head! How dare you attempt to deceive your congregation! . . . —And would you, Sir, with all your meekness and piety, and humility, mingle your blood with that of the blacks?”75 While he begins by asking whether an avowed atheist would imagine God’s Providence and wrath, Wortman shifts from philosophical debate to personal attack. He takes advantage of the paradox at the heart of privatized religion: its overarching concern with purity and, because of that, the way it can easily be turned around on opponents through exposures of their immorality. Wortman implies that Linn can either be pious or he can desire interracial sex. Painting Linn in a way that anticipates Akin’s cartoon of Jefferson in 1804, Wortman challenges him either to align his public politics and private morality or to admit that his attack on Jefferson is nothing but hypocrisy. The debate over Jefferson’s potentially secret deism is an early indication of the terms on which morality will be adjudicated in the nineteenth century: first, that public trust is granted when public character matches private morality; and second, that political opponents are most successful when they can expose—or invent—hidden deviations. It is important to note that Paine and his critics as well as both Jefferson’s opponents and his supporters

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all equally participated in building this logic. As a legal and cultural process, disestablishment successfully redefined religion and its relation to the state in terms of purity. That is, entering the nineteenth century, we see an emerging cultural agreement that religion is purer when not mingled with the state, and, despite Linn’s objections, its role should be to facilitate merely private moral purity. As the emphasis on sincerity in the eighteenth century gives way to a nineteenth-­century investment in authenticity, this role for religion would begin to house internal contradictions. To be one’s authentic self would increasingly put pressure on the role of religion to guide people away from passions and toward authentic living; this tension would explode politically, sexually, and spiritually in the antebellum decades. The deist threat so widespread and worrisome in the 1790s, though, must have seemed diffused by the second year of Jefferson’s administration, at least to its most vivid novelizer. Charles Brockden Brown’s sentimental novel Jane Talbot (1801) reimagines Ormond, but in this case the marriage plot triumphs. Henry Colden converts to Christianity from his former deism and marries the eponymous Jane. We might say that Jane Talbot gives Ormond the “happy” ending Brown could not fathom in 1799. Jane Talbot’s marriage plot points to a shift in the fictional treatment of deism across the first three decades of the nineteenth century. The rise in popularity of the domestic novel, with its moral lessons and happy endings, would seem to be the fulfillment of private morality as the guarantor of both religious belief and sexual purity. But, as we will see in the next chapter’s attention to the genre, it was not always the safest narrative choice for expelling infidelity from the “hothouse” spiritual environment of the antebellum years.76

CHAPTER 2

Matrimony

When the British writer Frances Trollope swept through Cincinnati in 1828 on her tour of the United States, she took in a lecture by her radical friend Frances Wright, sounded off on Thomas Jefferson’s hypocrisy, and tried not to take umbrage at the anti-­British sentiment of a Fourth of July celebration. As her first real taste of western American life, Cincinnati proved surprising to Trollope in many ways. In the end, though, the most sensational public event she witnessed was not the town’s pig markets, nor was it Wright’s radical prolabor, antislavery, and women’s rights lecture. It was a religious revival. Like many a British or European visitor, including Alexis de Tocqueville, Trollope was struck by the religious landscape of the new nation. A firm advocate for the High Church of England, Trollope quipped that the “un-­national church of America required to be roused, at regular intervals, to greater energy and exertion.”1 The revival also solved another, more secular problem. There was not much for middle-­class white women to do in town: “It is thus the ladies of Cincinnati amuse themselves; to attend the theatre is forbidden; to play cards is unlawful; but they work hard in their families, and must have some relaxation.”2 As is apparent, Trollope was no fan of white Protestant evangelicalism, but her acerbic description helps us see how the revivals proved a remarkable mixture of the religious and the secular: “The congregation was, in general, extremely well dressed, and the smartest and most fashionable ladies of the town were there; during the whole revival the churches and meeting-­houses were every day crowded with well-­dressed people.”3 But unlike a dinner party or a ball, religious revivals demanded more than displaying a new hat or chatting wittily across a dinner plate. They demanded self-­revelation: “When the room is full, the company, of whom a vast majority is always women, are invited, entreated, and coaxed to confess before their brothers and sisters all

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their thoughts, faults, and follies.”4 Beneath these confessions, Trollope hints, is a potentially licentious interest on the part of hypocritical preachers. As waves of women mount the anxious bench, “from every corner of the building arose in reply, short, sharp cries of ‘Amen!’ ‘Glory!’ ‘Amen!’ while the prostrate penitents continued to receive whispered comfortings, and from time to time a mystic caress. More than once I saw a young neck encircled by a reverend arm.”5 The caresses, the emotions, the prompt to these women to publicly confess themselves: all of these add up to something more untoward than “the coarsest comedy ever written.” And this coarse display leads Trollope to wonder: if “the men of America” really valued “their women as men ought to value their wives and daughters, would such scenes be permitted among them?”6 We might call Trollope’s view of the revivals “secularizing” in that she saw them prompted not by an intrinsic or transcendent religiosity so much as by boredom. In her depiction, though, we might also recognize exactly the type of religiosity that was ascendant in antebellum secularism: emotionally expressed and connected to a personal conversion pointing to an ever more private and authentic conviction. In effect, Trollope observed the secular sensibility of moral authenticity, the valuation of a transparent relation of private self to public world. And she also pointed to its potential to unleash sexual energies that undermine privatized religion’s claim to keep religion—and people—pure. We may not fully trust Trollope to convey the inner spiritual workings of the evangelical revivals with generosity, but her account sets up the focus of this chapter: the relation of privatized religion to private marriage, especially in her nosy and insincere concern about the “men of America” and the sanctity of their marriages. The intense religiosity on display in Cincinnati was, indeed, a sign that private religion had affected married life in the United States, but probably not in the way that Trollope thought. Caught up in the fervor of romanticism and reform, Americans were experimenting with alternative marital formations, and they were often doing so in response to the types of conversions and confessions Trollope witnessed. This chapter turns to the second, more modern meaning of infidelity, as betraying one’s marital commitment, to examine the vital role that the privatization of religion played in the debate over what constituted a modern marriage. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the moral status of marriage moved beyond a reflection of personal rectitude—which arguably had been in place since the rise of the middle class—to become a bulwark against the potentialities unleashed by liberalism, in its promotion of representative democracy and market

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capitalism. But it did so via, rather than in opposition to, that very liberalism, most apparently through the growing acceptance of marriage as a private contract. Marriage came to be at the center of debates over what constituted a modern free society, and, as such, debates over marriage were also debates over religion, secularism, and modernity. Out of debates over marriage— ones that involved journalists, philosophers, and free love and women’s rights advocates—new histories of the institution emerged in this era, but so too did the first explicit articulations of what we now often refer to as “traditional” marriage. This debate about modern marriage was also profoundly shaped by the institution of slavery and the racial segregation of the North, which Chapters 4 and 5 take up in more detail. This chapter first turns to several white radical figures who questioned Christianity and promoted free love. I highlight how these advocates cited freedom of religion as a defense of freedom in (and from) marriage and how their critics responded by positing a version of marriage that they named as modern and free but which we often call “traditional” today. The chapter then concentrates on a selection of popular and obscure domestic novels by white women that grappled quite explicitly with irreligion (the lingering specter of infidelity increasingly represented, as we will see, by such figures as Frances Wright and Stephen Pearl Andrews) and with the alternative spiritual and utopian communities rising to prominence in the antebellum era. If the debate over free love was focused on the role of marriage in secular modernity, domestic novels—in which the marriage plot organizes the horizon of readers’ expectations—proved a particularly useful vehicle for thinking through the relation of private religion to private marriage. Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s fiction anchors this chapter, especially her novel of infidelity and utopian religiosity, Redwood; A Tale (1824). The daughter of the Federalist senator Theodore Sedgwick, Sedgwick was one of the most prolific authors of the antebellum period. Best known for her novel Hope Leslie (1827), she authored over fifteen novels and long didactic fictions, and over one hundred short stories. Sedgwick was wildly popular in her own day, and she even pleased that exacting critic, Edgar Allan Poe. In his “Literati of New York City” (1846), Poe listed Sedgwick alongside Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant, and James Fenimore Cooper as one of the country’s “literary pioneers.”7 Before she became famous for her fiction, she had converted from the New England Calvinism of her youth to Unitarianism.8 As both Gretchen Murphy and Ashley Reed note, this conversion was not without her issues with Unitarianism, foremost of which, as Murphy

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explains, was “how to practice broad-­minded tolerance without dissipating zeal and drifting toward infidelity—or toward the ‘fragilization of faith’ that Charles Taylor has associated with secularity.”9 Sedgwick’s novels, including Redwood and A New-­England Tale (1822), treat alternatives to mainstream Protestantism with compassion and understanding, especially those like the Society of Friends that emphasized what the religious studies scholar Robert Orsi termed “good” religion—that is, religion as private, founded on propositional belief, and privileged by secular institutions like the courts and academia. However, like her novelist predecessors in the 1790s, to quote Murphy again, Sedgwick makes “Jacobin-­inflected disbelief a serious problem” rather than “a neutral selection in the widening gyre of free religious choice.”10 This chapter pairs Sedgwick’s fiction with antipolygamy novels written in response to the rise of Mormonism. In doing so, I focus on a particular tension between these fictions’ style and their aims. Generically speaking, these are the most invested in didactic work of any in the book. For that, they are particularly useful as a guide to understanding how popular writers squared the demands of sentimental realism with those of leading readers to private moral conviction. Both Sedgwick’s fiction and antipolygamy novels were written in the pervasive sentimental-­realist narrative style, in which, as Gregg Camfield has argued, writers, “at best, tried to represent not the simple physical reality of the world, but the psychological reality of how we perceive it,” a reality that “begins, they said, with natural senses providing the mind with complex categories of perception, and these categories in turn provide categories of understanding based on the associations we accumulate through life.”11 Sentimental writers sought to model the movement from empirical observations to right moral judgment. For these writers, novelistic realism was an opportunity to reach everyday readers and to place their characters in real moral dilemmas. That very realism, however, would also prove to be a moral problem, as its attention to the material world skirted too close for comfort to beliefs and practices that could be categorized as “sensual”: Catholicism, Free Love, and Mormonism. One way they navigated this problem was to detail characters’ emotional conversions. The plots, though, are not driven by such revelations. After all, is there any suspense about the outcome of the love affairs in a domestic novel?12 The genre is filled with revelations, less so with surprises. That said, the novels under consideration here do offer surprises—just not in their marriage plots. While a typical marriage plot in domestic fiction might pose various marital options to the heroine, who must pick the correct one, for the novels this chapter explores, it is not

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other suitors but other belief systems that threaten to draw the heroines or other characters away from their expected marriage destinations.

Private Marriages and the Female Tom Paine It should come as no surprise that Frances Trollope expected that her old friend, Frances Wright, would generate controversy in Cincinnati during her visit. Casting herself as the foe of both institutional religion and institutional marriage, Wright was often referred to as “the female Tom Paine.”13 She exhorted her audiences to “turn your churches into halls of science, and devote your leisure day to the study of your own bodies, the analysis of your own minds, and the examination of the fair material world which extends around you!”14 She followed her own advice, paying $7,000 for the old Ebenezer Baptist Church in New York City in order to transform it into a “Hall of Science” dedicated to “universal knowledge” and “free enquiry,” with portraits of Paine, Godwin, Shelley, and other “infidels” in the front window.15 Wright’s person (her tall stature, her dress, her demeanor) came under attack as she crossed into the public to argue for the destruction of the principles that underlay the very separation between genders and spheres. Her public lectures constituted, as Michael Warner argues, “a violation of deep instincts about sex and gender.”16 Wright’s lifelong commitments exemplify Warner’s theory of “counterpublics”—particularly in her advocacy for New York City’s working men’s groups—and the more literal instantiation of alternative publics: utopian communities. Wright and her partner at the Free Enquirer, Robert Dale Owen Jr., were at the center of two experiments in communal living: Nashoba and New Harmony. Nashoba, a community founded in 1825 in Tennessee by Wright, sought to model how emancipated men and women could become industrious farmers. In practice, it turned out to be, as Celia Morris puts it, “for the most part a dream on paper.”17 Trollope had planned to spend several months visiting Wright there, but found that Nashoba was not quite what she had anticipated: “Desolation was the only feeling—the only word that presented itself.”18 Even worse than ineffectual, Nashoba, in the end, was just another plantation worked by enslaved people and with corporal punishment as an answer to the breaking of community rules, a system implemented in Wright’s absence after she embarked on a tour with Owen for her health.19 Yet this was not what ruined the reputation of the Nashoba experiment. Popular outrage was stoked when James Richardson, one of Nashoba’s

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trustees, published his log in the Genius of Universal Emancipation, with the entry: “Met the slaves—James Richardson informed them that, last night, Mamselle Josephine and he began to live together; and he took this occasion of repeating to them our views on color, and on the sexual relation.”20 A footnote to this entry explains that “Mamselle Josephine” is “a Quarteroon [sic], daughter of Mamselle Lolotte,” who was the school supervisor and a free person of color from New Orleans. As Holly Jackson explains, “It seemed that Nashoba’s white leaders intended not only to practice their avant-­garde sexual ideas but also to require them of the women under their control.”21 The scandalized response was perhaps predictable. As one article, also published in the Genius of Universal Emancipation, put it, Nashoba was “one great brothel,” merely reproducing slavery rather than solving it.22 (And this critique was lodged well before Wright’s own decision—without, it seems, input from the formerly enslaved men and women at Nashoba—to emigrate them to Haiti after the experiment failed). In her published defense, Wright chose not to shy away from the scandal that Richardson had sparked. Across several issues of the New Harmony Gazette (and recirculated elsewhere), Wright laid out the philosophical and political project of Nashoba. What is most intriguing is not so much her claims about the mutual relation of equality and liberty in the abstract, nor that she stakes out a thoroughly antislavery and anticolonization position; rather, it is that she turns first to the “tyranny” of “the matrimonial law.” In 1828, when she wrote her defense of Nashoba, the laws of coverture, based in common law, were still fully in effect in the United States. Wives and daughters had no legal standing to own property or enter into contracts, being “covered” in law by their husbands or fathers. But at Nashoba, she writes, “no woman can forfeit her individual rights or independent existence, and no man assert over her any rights or power whatsoever, beyond what he may exercise over her free and voluntary affections.”23 She speculates that the perniciousness of common law “had probably its source in religious prejudice, or priestly rapacity, while it has found its plausible and more philosophical apology in the apparent dependence of children on the union of the parents.”24 Wright locates the inequities of marriage law in a Catholic past of “religious prejudice” and “priestly rapacity.” She thus implies that marital relations should also shed the tyranny of Catholicism for a liberal present, aligning her proposed reforms with both the Reformation and religious freedom in the United States. Wright is an early example of the increasing tendency to connect the liberalizing of marriage with the arguments for freedom of

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conscience that we saw in Chapter 1; and like those arguments, she depends on a Protestant logic in which freedom is couched in anti-­Catholic rhetoric.25 Wright’s public advocacy of equality, marital freedom, free thought, and racial and sexual integration placed her in a position even to unseat Paine’s notoriety. Her detractors argued a line of thinking about the status of marriage in liberal society that Carole Pateman would later describe as the “sexual contract.” Pateman’s argument still usefully articulates the way nineteenth-­century liberalism imagined the split between public and private: “The private, womanly sphere (natural) and the public masculine sphere (civil) are opposed but gain their meaning from each other, and the meaning of the civil freedom of public life is thrown into relief when counterposed to the natural subjection that characterizes the private realm.”26 What is crucial about Pateman’s theory of contract for this study is how the sexual contract achieved a level of tacit assumption by the nineteenth century. In calling that common sense into question, Wright provoked a heated response. For instance, a writer for the Souvenir frets, “From what we learn, it appears to be [Wright’s] object to engage in a crusade against revealed religion, and the ties of matrimony, which in every age, and every nation savage or civilized, have been held in veneration—and the abrogation of which would immediately convert the world into an Universal Aceldama—or field of blood.”27 Wright’s critiques of revealed religion and matrimony are of a piece, this critic explains. The article counters her arguments by universalizing both: “every nation savage or civilized” believes in revealed religion and monogamous marriage. Imagined thus, Wright’s attacks on the institution threaten to drag Western civilization down further even than “savage” nations; her utopia is a “universal” graveyard. In these heated denunciations of Wright, oath-­taking and marital vows consistently appear as twinned guarantors for social stability and civilizational endurance. Writing in the American Monthly Magazine, James Lanman contended that Wright constituted more than a troublesome figure of reform; instead, her critiques of religion and marriage constituted a wholesale attack on social peace. According to his argument (a very typical one for the era, as Eric Schlereth has noted), for the civil compact to work, the public sphere depended on oath-­takers’ fear of a future retribution if one perjured oneself.28 As Lanman opines, “The necessary consequence of [Wright’s] system is to break down all that is valuable in social life, and to transform mankind into a herd of sensual and savage beasts. Believing in those broad democratic principles on which our government is founded, and in those

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rights which are guaranteed by the Constitution to the American people, we protest against the efforts of the demagogues and fanatics who would overthrow all law and religion.”29 Without the fairly specific doctrinal Christian belief in heaven and hell, Lanman alleges, people lose any pretensions to either the civil or sexual contract, or even to the status of human: they become beasts, coupling at will. Arguments like Lanman’s make visible the effects that religious disestablishment had, not just on private life in general but on marriage specifically. To avoid social disorder sparked by too much spiritual freedom, marriage must be protected; for marriage to be protected, private religion must be promoted. This circular logic explains the most common casual and malicious response to Wright: “Had the philosopher been a pretty girl, the honest mother of a numberless family had been made, of what is now a sterile spinster, fruitful only in crazy theories, and unsexed atheism.”30 Sterile spinsters threaten society not so much because they do not reproduce but because they reproduce the wrong things: crazy theories and “unsexed atheism.” The wish by this commentator (and others like him) to domesticate Wright, imagining her as prettily perched with a brood of children, is not just a testament to the challenge she posed to women’s long-­standing and traditional roles as mothers, though it is certainly that. Less obviously, what both she and her detractors were in a struggle over was a transformation in the role of marriage beginning to be felt in this era: the shift of marriage into a language of private contract rather than public good.31 As the legal scholar Hendrik A. Hartog explains, “All participants in the antebellum Anglo-­American legal culture understood what marriage was. At least until the middle years of the nineteenth century, being married meant subjecting oneself to a known and coercive public relationship.”32 The status of marriage as a public identity led to strange results in the actual court records, as Nancy Cott has shown, in which a perceived collusion between husband and wife in suing for a divorce was more harshly dealt with than cases of bigamy.33 The change, then, was toward marriage as the basic foundation of the private sphere and as a contract, freely entered into, that bound that sphere together. Yet, in this midcentury moment, viewing marriage as an utterly private contract was still controversial. By passing divorce laws (very strict ones, as in New York, or lenient ones, as in the famed “divorce mill” of Indiana), state legislatures often sought to reaffirm the public role of marriage even as these very laws seemed to erode it. “By declaring what behavior broke the bargain of marriage, states were reiterating what composed it,” Cott explains. “Rather

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than inviting husbands and wives to pursue marital freedom, the states in allowing divorce were perfecting the script for marriage, instructing spouses to enact the script more exactly.”34 This consolidation of what would count as a proper and private marriage did not resolve but rather highlighted the brewing contradictions. Private life came to encompass increasingly competing mandates: moral purity, religious freedom, companionate marriage, and authentic selves. The next section of the chapter will examine the instability of this version of private life, as the mandate to be authentically oneself increasingly competed with the mandate that married life represent one’s morality and stabilize a moral society.

Antimarriage Theory Frances Wright was not alone in questioning marriage law. In these same decades, the nascent women’s rights movement sought to liberalize coverture laws. This was a piecemeal effort, much like disestablishment was, because these acts eroded coverture unevenly across different states, and they targeted different aspects of the common law tradition (property ownership during a woman’s lifetime, the ability to make wills separate from husbands or fathers, the ability to enter into contracts). More radical than these efforts, the 1840s and 1850s picked up on Wright’s absolute critique of marriage. The marriage between women’s rights activist Lucy Stone and Henry Browne Blackwell— who together wrote and published vows that explicitly protested coverture laws—is perhaps the most famous instance of this critique.35 What was often called the “anti-­ marriage theory” tied together several disparate radical groups, including Wright, Stone and Blackwell, John Humphrey Noyes’s free love community at Oneida, Shaker religious communities, and the anarchist and free love community Modern Times, founded by Josiah Warren and Stephen Pearl Andrews.36 Though in many ways distinct from these radical and free love groups in our contemporary cultural imaginary, Mormonism was invariably lumped in with them at the time. In this upwelling of variations on domestic organization and free love, advocates for both tied religious privacy and private marriage together. Rather than drawing on arguments for free speech or freedom of the press—analogies that will become more popular in the 1870s—freedom of religion was the first step, and analogical kin, in arguments in favor of freedom of and in marriage relations. What we see from free love advocates, most prominently Andrews and Mary Gove and Thomas

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Low Nichols, is twofold: first, the placing of contemporary marriage law in a cross-­cultural and historical context, with the goal of undermining any claim like that in the Souvenir that marriage is universal and ahistorical; and, second, the use of religious freedom to explain free love. In 1852 the free love advocate Stephen Pearl Andrews created quite a buzz when he sparked a debate on marriage between himself, Henry James Sr., and Horace Greeley (editor of the New-­York Tribune). The debate played out in the press, and Andrews published the entire exchange a year later in Love, Marriage, and Divorce, and the Sovereignty of the Individual: A Discussion (1853). In his responses to James Sr. and Greeley—both of whom argued for conventional marriage—Andrews rests his analysis on the modernity of their era: “I take the position which, saving the judgment of my critics, is exceedingly new in the world, that I have no better right to determine what it is moral or proper for you to do, than I have to determine what it is religious for you to believe; and that, consequently, for me to aid in sending you or another man to prison for Fornication, or Bigamy, or Polygamy, or a woman for wearing male attire, and the like, is just as gross an outrage in kind, upon Human Rights, as it would be to aid in burning you at Smithfield for Protestantism or Papacy, or at Geneva for discarding the doctrine of the Trinity.”37 Andrews claims that his argument is novel, and in one respect it is. This is a very early invocation of the twentieth-­century concept of human rights. Foundational to that universal right, he implies, is the religious freedom expressed in the disestablishment of state churches, as opposed to the religious wars of the past. From there he makes his leap to marriage, suggesting that those set against such a right are simply participating in a new version of an old zealous mob, engaging again in as irrational and bigoted an act as burning Protestants or Catholics. As Andrews’s analogy suggests, the potential for alternative and radical revisions to marriage is the endpoint of a secularization narrative. Presenting marriage as having a history, and therefore a future, was a popular move for radical thinkers. In Marriage: Its History, Character, and Results; Its Sanctities, and Its Profanities; Its Science and Its Facts (1854), the free love advocates and health reformers Thomas Low and Mary Gove ­Nichols lay before their readers the history of marriage, noting in the introduction that the definition of marriage itself is multifaceted and historically contingent, that “we might define marriage as the legal union of the sexes, were it not that concubinage is also legalized in many countries; and were it not also, that in many others, marriage is a simple matter of custom or usage.” They settle on the definition that marriage is “defined as being, in any society, the form of the

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sexual relation, having the sanction of custom or law,” a definition that rests on variation and historical contingency.38 To mount this history, the Nicholses extend Andrews’s comparison of free love to private religion. They open their introduction by noting that the world has “more freedom” in this age, and, like those who argued for disestablishment at the turn of the nineteenth century, they align this freedom with a shift away from religious despotism: “Under a despotism of Church and State, ‘pure and simple,’ there can be no discussion of any question of religion or politics, or of any social institution depending upon them; for so long as the despotism remains, no such discussion can be of any practical use. Whenever a people begin to investigate, despotism is in danger.”39 Once just such an establishment is lifted, however, free investigation can follow. For the Nicholses, disestablishment not only unleashes inquiry, it is also a model for free love: “Once, if a man prayed contrary to law, he was burnt. In most countries, a man opposes the government at the risk of being shot or hanged. Now, in many of our States, a man who loves contrary to law, or otherwise than has been prescribed in some statute, is sent to State-­prison. . . . In Maine, or Massachusetts, the right to vote, to pray, to do many things freely, is acknowledged and guaranteed; but not the right to love.”40 The secularization thesis is here in a nutshell: first, religious freedom, which paves the way for, second, political freedom, which, in turn, opens out to the struggle of the present moment: free love.41 Those who responded to the free love argument invented a version of “traditional marriage.” As Horace Greeley would conclude in his response to Andrews, “true Marriage” is “the union of one man with one woman for life, in holy obedience to the law and purpose of God, and for the rearing up of pure, virtuous, and modest sons and daughters to the State.”42 Monogamous marriage and monotheism are sacred trusts, he explains, and the goal is in raising “pure, virtuous, and modest” children. The purity of religion, matrimony, and child-­rearing depend on each other. But Greeley’s language of purity is not imagined as a formation of a more virtuous past, now sadly gone. Rather, he relies as equally as Andrews and the Nicholses do on a narrative of historical progress, albeit with a different telos: “From the remotest heathen antiquity, nearly every savage or barbarous people has acted far nearer to your principles than to ours. Polygamy, Divorce at pleasure, and still wider Licentiousness, are all nearly as old as sin, and have very generally gone unwhipt of human justice. It is our doctrine that crime should be dealt with in the egg, and not suffer the vulture to attain his full growth—that it is

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better to Prevent than Punish—that is relatively novel, with its Maine laws, anti-­Gambling laws, penalties for Seduction, etc.”43 Modern, liberal society, according to Greeley, has moved away from the sexual sins that he accuses Andrews of promoting: polygamy, easy divorce, and licentiousness. Liberal society puts in place laws intended to mold one’s potential for private virtue before vice has a chance to take root. Marriage laws that enforce monogamy between one man and one woman—and barriers to easy divorce—are signs not of an antiprogressive traditionalism but of secular modernity. Greeley does not offer an argument that we must return to a better, older model of “traditional marriage,” but that a heterosexual, monogamous form of marriage is the most modern and free version there could be.

French Flowers and Tarnished Mirrors Stephen Pearl Andrews and Mary Gove Nichols joined Frances Wright as visible radicals who, like Paine, signified the threats to social order that needed to be controlled and contained by the very forces that put them in motion—private marriage and private religion. This is certainly how Wright signifies in Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s short story “Matty Gore.” “Matty Gore” offers in miniature the way domestic fiction navigated the moral terrain of private marriage. First published in Lydia Sigourney’s 1845 Religious Souvenir, and therefore expected to offer readers a Protestant moral, the story follows the Gore family as father and son become seduced by “infidel” philosophy until Matty flees with her fiancé to Michigan, leaving her father in the arms of his lover. Before these events play out, the story opens with a debate between Matty and her brother Harry over the public amusements of New York City. Harry suggests that Matty dispel her blues by “go[ing] to the theatre with me, and to the public balls, and Miss Wright’s lectures,” to which Matty, aghast, counters, “I don’t like your going to the theatre, but I would rather you would go there every night, than go to hear infidel lectures.”44 What is worse than frivolous entertainment in Matty’s estimation? Lectures by the likes of Wright! Wasting time at balls and plays, according to the logic of Sedgwick’s story, is better than lending an ear to political and philosophical infidelity. It is just this course that has caused Harry and Matty’s father to lead the family to ruin: “After he went to town, he fell in with some clamorous skeptics, and had not the ability, or, alas! the inclination to resist their specious arguments. They were, like Gore, uninstructed men, but they

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could quote the names of Hobbes and Hume, and Gore’s vanity pleased itself with the idea that his preconceived opinions were in accordance with these great mens’. Wo to the ignorant, who are not intrenched [sic] in the strongest hold of Christianity, a deep, heart-­felt conviction of its truth, resulting from an experience of its adaptation to the wants of humanity!”45 Presumably, a reader could face Hobbes and Hume if already deeply convicted, but the light reader of Christianity is, in turn, ready soil for infidelity. To be sure, Gore is not really convinced by philosophical arguments; instead, he succumbs to the pretensions of philosophical discourse, the names of Hobbes and Hume, nineteenth-­century invocations of skepticism. Worse yet (though entirely predictable if one infidelity begets another), Gore abandons the principles of marriage in his newfound skepticism. Like a follower of such utopian free love theories as those promoted by Wright and Andrews, Gore rejects the marriage contract entirely: “He had placed at the head of his household a very pretty and flippant young woman, some months Matty’s junior, whom he called his wife. Matty had painful reason to suspect that this marriage was merely one of those fragile, and evanescent ties substituted for the holy one of God’s appointment, and advocated by a few of her father’s new associates.”46 Matty draws on her Christian convictions for the courage to object to this new arrangement, and Gore’s insistence on the relationship ultimately drives Matty from the house. When the story resumes three years after Matty has fled, the narrator guides the reader through an array of domestic materials that index the immorality of the home—which includes an affair occurring between Gore’s “wife” and his son: The simplicity, neatness, and precision that, under [Matty’s] regime, had seemed the type of her well-­ordered mind, had given place to slatternliness, disorder, and finery. A crazy auction pier-­table, with tarnished gilding, occupied the place of the spotless waxed mahogany table with falling leaves, a Fairtown friend. The old family Bible had disappeared, and in its stead was a vase of French flowers, with a cracked shade. The new Mrs. Gore had substituted for the honest, old Windsor conveniences which she condemned as ‘too Presbyterian,’ defaced and rickety mahogany chairs, that looked as if they had mouldered at a pawn-­broker’s. Over the mantel-­piece had hung, time out of mind, (for it was an heirloom from Matty’s maternal ancestors,) the picture of a tree bearing symbolical fruit, each apple labelled with

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the name of one of the Christian graces. Its perpetual verdure was preserved by an angel who was watering it, while the evil one stood in the background menacing it with a scythe. This picture, which Matty looked upon with almost a Catholic’s love, had been much derided by Gore’s new friends; and with a reluctance that he was half ashamed of, he had consented to the substitution of a tarnished chimney mirror.47 It is worth quoting this passage in full for the extravagant lengths to which Sedgwick goes to affirm simple taste as a moral trait. The ersatz “Mrs. Gore” has betrayed her moral colors via her decorative selections. Rejecting the simple and tasteful (which she tellingly deems “too Presbyterian”), she chooses instead furniture tricked out to seem expensive but that inevitably looks old and cheap, bought at a pawnbroker’s after much wear. Tarnished, moldering, cracked, and French, the new furniture and decorations testify to a disordered morality begot by French atheism, “anti-­marriage theory,” and women’s rights. She has replaced, in her ultimate act of sacrilege, the painting over the mantle—a material manifestation of belief and virtue itself (Sedgwick references Matty’s almost Catholic adoration of the painting, a point I will return to in a moment). In place of this painting, Mr. Gore’s wife has placed a tarnished mirror that endlessly reflects the moral disorder of the home. Sedgwick’s point is hard to miss: Atheism and antimarriage theory together destroy the home, in an almost literal fashion. In turn, private conversion will prove the only conceivable counter to this domestic disorder. Gore begins his conversion through the replacement of infidel philosophy with the words of Matty’s letters to him, which are at once both tangible and sentimental. When Gore reads about Matty’s travails (including the death of her husband and infant, and the loss of the Michigan farm), and her ongoing Christian forbearance in the face of them, Gore experiences a conversion: “‘Amen!—amen!’ cried Gore, clasping his hands, while tears poured like rain down his cheeks. It was a sleepless but a blessed night to him. Silence and solitude are powerful enforcements of conscience. Gore had never felt the influence of religion. . . . For the first time since he had come to man’s estate, he, that night, bent his knees to his Creator!”48 When reunited after the tribulations both sides of the family experience, Matty and her father repair their house: “The waxed table, the old clock, and the Bible are in their accustomed places. But the Bible no longer seems to Gore a mere piece of furniture. He reads it daily, and with the earnest and humble mind befitting him who knows he reads the oracles of the living God.”49 Removing the tarnished and

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molding furniture and replacing above the mantle the painting that had been taken down, the Gores reinstate moral order. The properly organized domestic space neutralizes the threat of atheism as represented by Frances Wright and the men at the pub. The country home reflects Gore’s newfound “earnest and humble mind,” with the material and spiritual presence of the Bible symbolizing the rejection of unbelief and antimarriage theory.

Public Shakers and Secret Hypocrites Sedgwick’s representation of the disorder and reclamation of the Gore family uses the decorative arts as metaphors for both infidelity (in both senses of the term) and Protestantism. With the painting that reappears in the final scenes, Sedgwick grapples with a serious question provoked by Protestantism’s emphasis on belief and thus its tendency toward immateriality: How can one represent fictionally the process of Protestant conversion without resorting to the excessive materiality that Protestants tended to ascribe to Catholicism? What Sedgwick confronts is the difficulty of rendering in the idiom of fictional realism that which is meant to be, to borrow Tracy Fessenden’s formulation, “unmarked.” Fessenden argues that to be secular in the nineteenth-­ century United States is to inhabit the practices and beliefs of an unmarked Protestantism. But what are the risks of being “unmarked”? After all, it seems the privilege of hegemony to exert itself in just such a way. Yet if the tarnished gilt table and chimney mirror suggest the immorality of Gore’s “wife,” what do we make of the attractions to a waxed table, an old clock, and, above all, a painting that trains the eye to worship the virtues? As Jenny Franchot argues, the language surrounding Catholicism (from anti-­Catholic polemic to the American Protestant’s Catholic conversion) suggests a “conflicted response of repulsion and longing, a fear of corruption and a hunger for communion,” one form of which was the desire for aesthetic sensuality. At the same time, Catholicism offered a severe challenge to the formation of privatized marriage in its continuation of monasteries and convents, with nuns, for instance, who “claim[ed] autonomy from marriage and motherhood.”50 Even as the plot of “Matty Gore” rushes teleologically toward the Protestant household, the attractions of that virtuous household still suggest desires for aesthetic pleasure and haptic engagement that far exceeded Protestant aesthetics. While this chapter does not take up the challenge Catholicism posed and the way it operated to further associate Protestantism with the secular—a

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subject canvassed so well by Franchot, Tracy Fessenden, and Elizabeth Fenton—Sedgwick’s invocation of Matty’s adoration of the painting does suggest the sensual attractions and, as Ashley Barnes has argued, the model of communion over revelatory love that Catholicism came to represent for liberal Protestants in the nineteenth century.51 It is important, then, that the painting be largely textual—Matty is worshipping words, not an image of Mary. Sedgwick’s flirtation with this Catholic mode of worship to express Matty’s piety unites the textual and the material together, a match for Gore’s Bible, which is no longer “a mere piece of furniture,” but read daily and devotionally. As in “Matty Gore,” Sedgwick’s solution in Redwood to the problem of unmarked Protestantism is to have characters achieve their religious conversions by way of their emotional connections to material texts. This textual materiality is meant to help characters avoid the threat of atheism, on one side, and improperly organized religiosity on the other. Two plots organize Redwood. The main one concerns the heroine, Ellen Bruce, an orphan whose mother died when she was quite young, and who has been raised by family friends; her father, at the beginning of the novel, is unknown. As such, she is a typical heroine of domestic fiction, and the plot of the novel will finally reveal her father to be Henry Redwood. The novel’s early chapters are focalized through a trip through Canada and rural upstate New York that Redwood has taken with his other daughter, Caroline. An accident waylays them after they cross the border from Canada to New York, and it is through this accident that we meet Ellen and the other characters of this rural setting. The second plot centers on the Allen family, good friends to Ellen Bruce. Members of the family have joined the Shakers, famous for communal living, celibacy, and a female prophet elevated to messianic status. The subplot of the novel concentrates on young Emily Allen’s route back to her family and into marriage. We get to know the Allen family at the beginning of the novel through the death of Edward, Emily’s brother. The story of Edward’s death is at once romantic and religious. He died of the heartbreak of unrequited love but also of the “backsliding” of his sister Emily, who has joined the Shakers with her Aunt Susan. As Mrs. Allen grieves over Edward’s corpse, she laments how his woes exceeded a spurned love and even his parents’ deaths: “All of these were dust on the balance; time to eternity compared with the backsliding of Emily; his root withered when this branch was lopped off. Oh, my dear boy, how often have I heard you say you would die for her if thereby you could bring her back from idolatry.”52 Mrs. Allen’s lament suggests that the family has been torn apart by Susan’s and Emily’s conversions. The excessive,

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nearly overstated phallic imagery—Emily has “withered his root”; she is a “branch lopped off ”—points to the threat Shakers pose to heteronormative marriage and reproduction, and, for readers, to the expectation of a marriage plot. Domestic privacy, patriarchal family, and sentimental novels all wilt in the face of the Shakers. Representing the Shakers as shattering traditional family structures and undermining masculine privilege is not wholly unexpected. After all, Shaker theology was built on an antireproductive and antimarriage theory. When novitiates entered the community, Shakers (as Elizabeth A. De Wolfe explains) “separated biological families to lessen kin ties and redirect individual loyalty towards the Shaker group. Any property brought into the village was distributed, as all items were owned communally.”53 As Sedgwick exposits in Redwood, members were “clothed from one store-­house, fed at the same board, and perform[ed] their domestic worship together” (2:178). Shakers, in other words, kept religion public, and they did so in two ways: first, in the sense that there was no space for religion to reside in discrete heterosexual family units; and second, that what visitors saw was a relentless publicness of communal spaces coupled with an aesthetic that took the ­Protestant simplicity of the Gore’s reconstituted household to an extreme. To cite one of the most memorable (and caustic) of visitors to the Shaker settlement in Lebanon, New York, Charles Dickens wrote that the village was marked by an unrelenting aesthetic homogeneity: “We walked into a grim room, where several grim hats were hanging on grim pegs, and the time was grimly told by a grim clock.”54 Shakers represented a repellant domesticity precisely because of their aesthetic, which he describes as an undifferentiated grimness. The famed Shaker aesthetic is no aesthetic at all, according to Dickens; or, put differently, the attraction of simplicity has its limits, and the Shakers constitute the point at which the elegant simplicity of the Gores’ country home transforms into a grotesque homogeneity. I do not choose the word “grotesque” randomly. Shaker religious rituals like the dance they performed together thrilled and disgusted more than one visitor, including Dickens, who indeed called it “grotesque.” Take, for instance, Sedgwick’s description of the dance, from Redwood: “A small knot of brethren and sisters remained in the centre of each room, shouting strange music to the dancers, and slowly turning so as to keep their faces always towards the procession, which moved on with a uniform shuffling step, as if it was composed of so many automatons, their arms rising and falling mechanically; and their monotonous movements, solemn, melancholy, or stupid

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Figure 2. “Shakers, Their Mode of Worship.” D. W. Kellogg and Co., ca. 1830– 1842. Image courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

aspects, contrasting ludicrously with the festive throngs which are usually seen stepping on ‘light fantastic toe’” (2:191). The Shaker dance deindividualizes. The dancers become “mechanical” “automatons” whose “monotonous movements” stand in stark contrast to the expectations of liberal subjectivity and its concomitant dance of romantic courtship (“tripping the light fantastic”).55 D. W. Kellogg’s lithograph from 1830 visualizes the uniformity of the Shaker dance, but this was not the only way in which Shakers appeared in text or image. Despite Dickens’s negative appraisal of Shaker women, writers of popular fiction strove to romance this scene. The era’s print culture was rife with fantasies of saving pretty “Shakeresses,” including in stories by Sedgwick and Caroline Lee Hentz, as well as numerous romantic poems dedicated to pretty young girls caught in the grips of Shaker communalism. If the Shakers were too damnably public in their social organization and religious worship, and certainly quite open to tourists and visitors, they were also at once too secret, akin in the antebellum imagination to Masons and Mormons. In other words, where they lacked a private space, they instead created the possibility for secrecy. Apostate narratives about Shakers promised to “expose,” “reveal,” “unveil,” and “unmask” the group.56 It is therefore not

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simply that Shakers challenged the privatization of religion by being too public so much as that they upended entirely the public-­private axis developing out of disestablishment. They were both too public and too secret, which also meant that they were not properly private. Shakers scrambled the new logic of privatization, in which domestic spaces managed the sexual and spiritual acts of married couples and their families. And for this, Shakers were seen as “fanatical” and “absurd,” to quote Robert Baird’s Religion in America (1842).57 Yet the power of disestablishment and private religion, Baird predicted, would ultimately triumph. The Shakers will “in time utterly disappear,” not an unreasonable conclusion for a community founded on celibacy: “We prefer letting them alone, under the conviction that, all things considered, it is better to do so, and with the hope that the light that surrounds them, and with which they must come into contact in their intercourse with the world, will, in God’s own time, reach their minds.”58 A direct challenge to the Shakers was unnecessary, he suggests; in “letting them alone,” members would, through comparison, realize their own absurdities, or, as he implies here, simply dwindle without a theological or social prompt toward literal reproduction. The risk of secrecy in such a publicly oriented religion is the main driver of Redwood’s subplot about Emily Allen. In this story, Sedgwick picks up on the capacity for and risks of religious hypocrisy. While in Chapter 1 we saw how religious hypocrisy was imagined as a problem produced by established churches, Redwood’s hypocritical villain Reuben Harrington—a Shaker elder with licentious designs on Emily and criminal designs on the community’s treasury—represents a slightly different threat appropriate to the era of state disestablishment. Religious hypocrisy, as we saw in Trollope’s account of the revivals, has not been solved by disestablishment; indeed, in a social world organized around authentic private religious belief and its public expression, that gap is a perfect opening for a confidence man. And Reuben is certainly that. According to the narrator, he “bore no marks of having disobeyed the instincts of nature by any mortifications of the flesh.” Corpulent and with “bushy black hair, that absolutely refused to conform to the sleekness of his order,” and “a wide mouth, with the corners sanctimoniously drawn down,” Reuben “presented a combination and a form to awaken the suspicions of the most credulous, and confirm the strongest prejudices against a fraternity that would advance such a brother to its highest honours” (1:134–135). The narrator could not be plainer about Reuben: you can see his hypocrisy right there on his face. His body points to his villainy.

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That said, Reuben’s hypocrisy passes well in a religion organized, as Sedgwick depicts it, around both public performance and secret rites. And he takes advantage of this disjunction by announcing that he has been required by God to save Emily, and to do so “in private conference” (2:193). Reuben means these private conferences to prepare her to abscond with him, and he assumes Emily, so passive and heartsick, will comply: “for Reuben, in common with all thorough hypocrites, was quite incredulous as to the existence of goodness, and believed that the seemingly upright only wanted the opportunity and the motive to turn aside from the straight and narrow way” (2:195–196). When Reuben reveals his plan, it shocks and disgusts Emily, and it colors her relation to the whole community: “Her belief of Harrington’s hypocrisy, countenanced and confirmed as it was by Susan, had shaken her faith in the monstrous pretensions of the believers: she fancied she saw deceit lurking under many a broad brim” (2:207). By creating the space for secrecy, Sedgwick’s narrator implies, the Shakers have opened the door for hypocrisy. Yet what makes Sedgwick’s attention to the Shakers unique in Redwood (and in her subsequent articles on the community) is the degree of sympathy with which she represents them, despite casting the villain of the novel as a Shaker hypocrite. The larger arc of Redwood certainly restores Emily to the marriage plot and “saves” her from celibacy. Yet Sedgwick does not condemn them, nor does she simply ridicule the community as so many other commentators did. Aunt Susan’s lengthy narrative in Redwood about her conversion is a strong retort to such comically dismissive accounts as Dickens’s and even Sedgwick’s own depiction of the sect’s “insane worship” (2:191). Following a logic of religious tolerance, Sedgwick ascribes to Shakers an equal ability with other Protestant denominations to access spiritual truth. As she puts it in one of her articles, “The Shaker has no monopoly of truth or holiness, but we believe he has enough of both to light a dusky path to heaven.”59 Through the voice of Susan, Sedgwick describes conversion to the Shaker ascetic as one of elective affinity, that is, of religious choice, albeit a choice that necessitates, as Susan puts it, “the last struggle of nature” against her love for a young man (2:174). Susan’s story does not inspire Emily with the same desire, though. Indeed, Sedgwick’s narrator immediately reports that Emily “felt that the faith which exacted such sacrifices, and produced such effects, was stern in its requisitions, and cruel in its consequences” (2:175). Emily’s reflection on Susan’s conversion does not cancel Susan’s sincerity but it does lead her to question her own. She cannot believe in a faith that demands

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“such sacrifices” of “natural” love. Emily’s journey back to sexual and religious fidelity marks heterosexual, monogamous marriage not simply as a private organization that one may elect to join, but a free and natural one. As we saw in “Matty Gore,” materiality could help reinforce belief, but only so long as that materiality is also textual. In Redwood, Sedgwick materializes the tug Emily feels to the outside world’s vision of domestic happiness by way of a letter from her suitor, James Lenox; she drew “from her bosom the precious little scroll which linked her to the world. All that was there written was more legibly inscribed on her heart, but still she loved to look on it. The sight of it touched her imagination like a conjurer’s wand, and brought before her all those images she most loved to dwell upon” (2:214). The letter secreted in her bosom—and the preposition “in” is very important here—“touch[es] her imagination like a conjurer’s wand.” Emily no longer reads the letter but looks at it as an enchanted object. It has taken on a meaning that exceeds the words on its page. The metaphor of the “conjurer’s wand,” though, reinforces the difference between Emily’s reawakened belief and actual credulous belief in magic. Her protection of the letter is not superstitious so much as “natural,” and thus the opposite of how she perceives Susan’s celibacy. In turn, Lenox’s letter inevitably has ripple effects on Emily’s faith: “Her fidelity to this strange religion hung, as it were, by a hair—its vibration at the mercy of every passing influence” (2:175–176). As we saw in the debates over church establishments in Chapter 1, religious belief was increasingly imagined as vulnerable to corruption or erosion. While the direction of Sedgwick’s metaphor suggests that Emily’s Shaker faith will be readily uprooted, she draws on a wider concern about religion: that faith, like sound, vibrates and potentially dissipates; that it needs protection from “every passing influence.” Sedgwick means to build a less vulnerable faith on the natural outpouring of authentic love, but what she registers is a profound fragilization, not only of belief (as Charles Taylor has described it) but also of marriage.

The Locked Casket Like Emily’s transformation from Shaker faith to private marriage, the story arc for the novel’s heroine, Ellen Bruce, imagines the ability of the material world to lead wayward Protestants back to belief. Ellen’s plot is organized around a “locked casket,” the lone item she has inherited from her mother. This casket contains the proofs of her legitimacy, a miniature of her father,

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and other sentimental tokens that her mother bade her not to open until she was of age or engaged to be married. As Gretchen Murphy so aptly puts it, “The box provides a connection of powerful feeling between Ellen and her dead mother, one that elicits and sustains a faith built upon no examination, no inquiry, and no reason.”60 The casket also hides the secret of the novel’s plot: that Ellen Bruce is the older daughter of the rich Virginia planter, Henry Redwood, who had secretly married Ellen’s mother and then abandoned her in favor of dissipated travel in Europe. The lurking scandal therefore is not that of the seduction and fall of her mother, nor her own illegitimacy; instead, the scandal that the casket will disclose is that Ellen’s father is an atheist, a convert to the writings of Paine, Voltaire, and Hume. Ellen’s mother discovered this fact when, as Redwood embarked for Europe, he sent her a package of letters addressed to his skeptical college friend Alsop by mistake. As the letter from her mother discloses, “Your father was an unbeliever; not merely that he rejected the truths of revelation, but that he could even treat a future retribution and the hope of immortality as childish illusions” (3:249). Henry Redwood does not believe in revealed religion, and he therefore certainly does not believe in life after death; hence, any oath he may take, including his marriage vows, could not be trusted. Ellen’s mother consequently hid the news of Ellen’s birth from everyone. As she explains, she chose not to risk “expos[ing]” Ellen “to the danger, the almost inevitable certainty, of alienation from the christian hope” in order to secure a few pennies from Redwood’s family (3:254). The secreting of unbelief into a casket in Redwood suggests that it is unsafe and inappropriate, even if disclosed in private. The information, in other words, is the opposite of Lenox’s letter to Emily. Unbelief is scandalous; it has to be hidden in a box, shielded from the young, and only perused by mature eyes. The form of the novel seems to mirror this opinion about unbelief. It takes three volumes for Ellen to finally open the casket. Considering this long buildup, it is strange that the revelation is so anticlimactic. Only a reader completely unversed in domestic fiction would have had doubts as to the relation between Redwood and Ellen, after all, and readers are introduced to his atheism in the opening chapters. So, when Ellen finally opens the casket, its discoveries are, in fact, no discoveries at all. While the disclosed materials represent public legitimacy, that information is entirely belated, for Ellen’s marriage plot has in no way hung on them. Ellen finally reads the contents of the casket when she is engaged to be married to Charles Westall. Their marriage—as I will come back to

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later—promises to reconstitute her father’s broken promises to her mother. It is a sentimental convention, of course, to posit marriage as the moment of maturity, but in Redwood we see how the promise of a new private, domestic coupling is also the moment when Ellen can be thought of as mature enough to handle infidelity. When Ellen finally holds the casket’s contents—which had been stolen by her jealous and conniving half sister, Caroline—she clasps “the miniature, the certificate, and [her mother’s] letter—the last she kissed again and again—[Ellen] poured over it a shower of tears, and not daring then to trust herself to look in it, she placed it in her bosom” (3:231–232). The enchantment is erotic here, hyperbolically so. She kisses the miniature, certificate, and letter “again and again”; as Emily did with Lenox’s letter, Ellen places her mother’s package “in” her bosom (not on, not against, but “in”). The preposition “in” connotes protection, and they are hidden for a second, vibrating, presumably, with her heart and breath. The letter symbolizes materially and textually her mother’s Protestant belief and its triumph over her father’s infidelity. Ellen likewise achieves Redwood’s conversion through a material and textual object, this time the more conventional choice of the Bible, which Ellen has given to him as a gift and, as we learn later, he has kept beneath his pillow (3:90). As she did in “Matty Gore,” Sedgwick’s attention to the materials that prompt belief is crucial to the novel’s didactic work. Equally crucial is the emotionality with which they are received: affect and text, materiality and belief, all are fused in Sedgwick’s fictional representation of what is an otherwise unmarked Protestantism. The promotion of these emotional and textual conversions and the private marriages they make way for depend, in Redwood, on forswearing the hints of other desires and domestic arrangements. The Shakers’ commitment to celibacy is the most visible; less visible is the way the marriage plot between Ellen and Westall at the end of the novel repairs the broken tie between her mother, Mary, and Henry Redwood. Their alienation is also due to textuality, this time to the packet of letters between him and his skeptical friend Alsop that Henry mistakenly sent her. He had meant to send Mary his letters to his cousin to demonstrate his fidelity to her (she had been worried that Redwood had affections for his cousin), but instead the Alsop letters testify to his religious infidelity. But these letters also disclose more than his skepticism. In them, the narrator suggests another secret desire possibly animating Henry, one for his neighbor, Edmund Westall (who would become the father of Ellen’s fiancé). As the narrator explains, “There was an authority in [Westall’s] example that could not well be evaded, and a persuasion in his goodness that touched

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Redwood’s heart. He felt it like an exorcism that conjured out of him every evil spirit” (1:57). Westall, and not Mary, represents the moral center of Redwood’s early life. He is a force as powerful as an exorcism—that is, a force aligned in the Protestant imaginary with a Catholic ritual of demon expulsion—but this invocation of Catholicism is meant not to sully the elder Westall’s Protestant example. Rather, it borrows metaphorically from Catholicism to combat a modern demon, atheism. As Henry describes it to Alsop, Westall’s moral force is a threat to his atheism, making him “the blind and willing dupe of goodness, (I mean what the moralists call goodness,) embodied in a form that might soften a stoic, convert an infidel, or perform any other miracle.” And the fact that this goodness is embodied not in Mary, the woman he plans to marry, but in Westall, only emphasizes Henry’s disorder. This disorder is also betrayed by his glib, dismissive description of Westall’s influence. Is he worried that Alsop will feel sexually and emotionally betrayed by his desire for Westall? Indeed, Mary seems conjured out of thin air to “straighten” the queer attractions of Redwood to Westall and Alsop. Ellen’s marriage to Westall thus performs a triple function: first, it saves Redwood from his lifelong atheism through Ellen’s Christian influence; second, it symbolically reconstitutes the broken tie between Ellen’s mother and her father, rent asunder by his disbelief; and third, as with Emily’s marriage to Lenox, it reaffirms the equation of private religion and heterosexual, monogamous marriage.

The Marriage Plot, on Repeat In domestic novels of the early nineteenth century like Redwood, heterosexual marriage and Christian conversion mark the characters’ horizons as well as those of the narrative itself. Sedgwick veers from this model only slightly, but the way she does reveals quite a lot. The suspense of much of the plot in Redwood rests not on Ellen’s marriage but on the rescue of Emily from the Shakers and the reclamation of Henry Redwood from infidelity. And this structure also points to how the plots of more typical domestic novels operate in relation to privacy, religious or otherwise. Privacy is not an originary assumption in them; rather, the narrative achieves privacy for the characters with the fulfillment of the marriage plot. The curtain falls on the married couple. Redwood makes more literal, and material, the important role of private religion in this narrative—including the processes of conversion and the emotional engagement with texts as aids to belief. Redwood thus suggests

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how religious privacy and private marriage could together curtail the wild varieties of religion and pleasure in the antebellum era, especially those religious variations that reconceive the sexual and social organization of society. Which brings us to the Mormons. If ever there was a group that was the inverse of the Shakers, it was the Mormons. Both offered antebellum Americans alternative spiritual, social, and sexual organizations, but in ways that markedly diverged. In the cauldron of religious revivals in upstate New York, Joseph Smith developed the theology of the Latter-­Day Saints. Mormonism’s development and attraction as a religion makes perfect sense historically, as Sarah Barringer Gordon argues: “Mormonism was born in a culture saturated with religious messages,” yet the “decision to become a Mormon was also a commitment to step out of the profane world and into a new powerful spiritual realm.”61 Smith’s Book of Mormon offered Americans the promise of the Second Coming, one that combined biblical and American history in a millennial vision. Likewise, Mormonism fit well into the culture of democracy in a slave society. As Gordon explains, Smith “erect[ed] a hierarchy on top of a democratic priesthood composed of all men.”62 As Nancy Bentley, Bruce Burgett, and Peter Coviello have all pointed out, while Mormons sought to locate divinity and sacred time in the national imaginary, the nation was far from easy about including them within it. After Brigham Young made public the practice of plural marriage in 1852, the panic surrounding Mormonism (already apparent in Joseph Smith’s assassination in Carthage, Illinois, in 1844) increased every year until the practice was renounced to gain Utah statehood in 1896. While the later renunciation implied that plural marriage may not have been theologically necessary to the religion, the practice made sense when put in the context of Smith’s theology as a whole. Central to that theology was a materialization of God and not just texts that lead to God, as we saw in Sedgwick’s fiction. As Gordon explains, in Mormon theology, “God was a material being, who progressed from manhood to godhood through gradual stages of celestial life; that procreativity continued in multiple celestial kingdoms as on earth; that Jesus was sired by a physical act; and that he appeared in the New World as well as the Old.”63 Mormonism depended on filling the void of unmarked Protestantism that so concerned Sedgwick. God was, as Coviello puts it, “a being with a history, a kind of biography: that God was a man who became a God,” and each male member of the church had the ability to progress through similar stages to achieve divinity.64 As Coviello argues, the emphasis on embodiment

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in Joseph Smith’s late theological writings was a form of sexuality occluded by the relentless backward glance of secularism. Smith attempted to articulate “how you might live out the unfalleness, the already-­present but as-­yet-­ insufficiently apprehended divinity, of your body” in a way that resonated with Thoreau’s and Whitman’s works.65 Plural marriage followed logically from these theological premises, but it is also worth noting that Smith’s revelation on it constituted a radical critique of the privatization of both marriage and religion. While the final portion of the revelation was pointedly addressed to his wife, Emma, its argument pushed against privatized, contractual marriage as it was developing in the mid-­nineteenth century. Smith critiques both the emerging emphasis on belief over lived action in secularism and, in the realm of marriage, the growing emphasis on private contract over public union. Indeed, the revelation opens not with the biblical history of plural marriage or the justification of plural wives but with a claim about contracts: And verily I say unto you, that the conditions of this law are these: All covenants, contracts, bonds, obligations, oaths, vows, performances, connections, associations, or expectations, that are not made and entered into and sealed by the Holy Spirit of promise, of him who is anointed, both as well for time and for all eternity, and that too most holy, by revelation and commandment through the medium of mine anointed, whom I have appointed on the earth to hold this power (and I have appointed unto my servant Joseph to hold this power in the last days, and there is never but one on the earth at a time on whom this power and the keys of this priesthood are conferred), are of no efficacy, virtue, or force in and after the resurrection from the dead; for all contracts that are not made unto this end have an end when men are dead.66 As the revelation lays out, only contracts sealed by Smith will be binding in the next world. D&C 132 thus aimed a blow at the contractual center of liberalism. The point of contract law is that it is secular—it does not deal with the sacred. Contracts bind one to secular institutions and secular time. Smith’s criticism of the marriage contract zeroed in on its secularity. For Smith, marriage was becoming too secular, that is, it was becoming too much a private agreement that was not answerable to a church or a faith: “If a man marry him a wife in the world, and he marry her not by me nor by my word, and

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he covenant with her so long as he is in the world and she with him, their covenant and marriage are not of force when they are dead, and when they are out of the world; therefore, they are not bound by any law when they are out of the world.”67 Smith declares that those who do not have a spiritual marriage will, in the afterlife, be “ministering servants, to minister for those who are worthy of a far more, and an exceeding, and an eternal weight of glory.”68 According to Smith, to choose a purely secular, private marriage is likewise to choose—that is, to consent to—eternal enslavement, and if we follow the racial logic of the era, it is to choose for eternity to dispense with one’s own whiteness and the privileges of freedom it provided. If Smith’s original D&C 132 suggested not just “hetero-­reproductivity run celestially amok” but a “scene of an expansive lateral sociability far less easily coded back into heterosexualizing frameworks,” as Coviello describes it, the Mormons’ detractors saw the threat inherent in the expansion of domestic and marital organization as synonymous with the threat to secular modernity itself.69 And precisely for the same reasons that spurred condemnations of Wright and that underwrote the marriage debates between Greeley, James Sr., and Andrews: because contractual, privatized marriage had become the seat of moral identity and thus the social stability of a modern secular society. While Smith’s revelation suggests that those who refused spiritual marriage will live an eternity of service, the question of consenting to unfreedom— that is, the unfreedom of plural marriage—on the part of first wives became an obsession for the non-­Mormon culture. The 1850s saw the emergence and solidification of a peculiarly nineteenth-­century genre: the antipolygamy novel. With the publication of Maria Ward’s Female Life Among the Mormons: A Narrative of Many Years’ Personal Experience (1855), Alfreda Eva Bell’s Boadicea; the Mormon Wife: Life-­Scenes in Utah (1855), and Metta Victor’s Mormon Wives: A Narrative of Facts Stranger Than Fiction (1856), the reading public avidly consumed tales of wives caught unexpectedly in the snares of plural marriage. As Nancy Bentley argues, “Consent is an obsessive theme of antipolygamy fiction,” and even more particularly, “The specter of white women apparently choosing to enter polygamous marriages confounded fundamental beliefs of the novel-­reading public.”70 If consent to marriage is the hallmark of the sentimental novel, its faith rested in, to use Nancy Bentley’s description, “the transformative ability of consent in marriage to make or unmake a new world.”71 Redwood exemplifies this role in both of its “infidelity” plots: Emily is saved for her companionate marriage and Henry Redwood recovers from his unbelief to openly acknowledge his legitimate older daughter.

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Just as Sedgwick attempted to imagine choosing celibacy in the character of Aunt Susan, authors like Ward and Victor sought convincing enough representations of desire that could account for the consent to such a differently organized private life, even if the goal of their novels was ultimately to reject or undo that consent. The challenge, though, was quite different from Sedgwick’s. Whereas Sedgwick could pose both Shakerism and infidelity as too abstract, too denuded of the emotional and physical world that the sentimental novel, at its prime, exemplified, the writers of antipolygamy novels faced the opposite task. These novelists contended with too much desire, too much intimacy in Mormonism. The restorative promise of the marriage plot seemed to be betrayed by Mormons, who threatened to enact it over and over again. Plural marriage was much like rereading: enjoying the marriage plot just a little too much. Antipolygamy novels needed to work in reverse of Redwood to realign belief, consent, and marriage. The plots tend to open with a love match, not unlike those that end Redwood. Early in Mormon Wives, for instance, Victor represents the story of Margaret, whose love match with Richard Wilde becomes undone when he converts to Mormonism and marries her best friend, Sarah Irving, as well. Victor represents Margaret’s desire for Wilde in terms that swerve away from private contract and rational consent. When Sarah declares that she will never marry, Margaret councils that she hopes Sarah will not marry “until, like me, you have met the man whom you can not help obeying when he commands you to unsay that.”72 Love matches obviate the need for consent. In a similar fashion, Maria Ward (a pseudonym) must envision a contract that lacks consent (a moment in which you “can not help” but obey) in the fictional autobiography Female Life Among the Mormons. Meeting the man in a stagecoach that she will quickly marry, the narrator explains how his very address and bearing compelled her: “At this time I was wholly unacquainted with the doctrine of magnetic influence; but I soon became aware of some unaccountable power exercised over me by my fellow traveller. His presence seemed an irresistible fascination. His glittering eyes were fixed on mine; his breath fanned my cheek; I felt bewildered and intoxicated, and partially at least lost the sense of consciousness, and the power of motion.”73 Later Maria will suggest that Mr. Ward had mesmerized her, a practice the novel insists was central to early Mormon rites; but as with so many antebellum invocations of mesmerism, the erotic subtext is barely hidden. Mr. Ward’s breath “fanned” her cheek, his “glittering eyes” made her feel “bewildered and intoxicated.” As Michael Warner and Bruce Burgett both

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show in relation to temperance and antipolygamy novels respectively, this conflation of “intoxication” with erotic excitement was a central trope of the reform novel.74 Mormon marriages in these novels are studiously imagined as anything but contracts freely entered into. The metaphors of intoxication and magnetism represent an erotic experience in which passion overrides will. Whereas such passion saves Emily for her heteronormative marriage in Redwood, it betrays Margaret Wilde and Maria Ward. Female Life solves this problem through intense iteration. While there are central characters in the plot, including a gender-­bending Mormon woman named Mrs. Bradish, the effect of the novel as a whole depends not on the fates of these characters but on the repetition of their stories. Ward piles story on story of betrayed first wives and of Brigham Young’s tyranny and treachery; the plot repeats exhaustively until Maria Ward runs away to freedom in the final chapter. In this way Female Life reads less like a domestic novel, even though it contains (at least) three major marriage plots, than a travel account in which incident and sketch replace overarching plot. Ward breaks with the generic conventions of the domestic novel while, at the same time, serving up iterations of melodrama that risk reproducing one of the major problems antipolygamists denounced about plural marriage—the desire for constant and new stimulation. Victor’s approach is notably different. Mormon Wives is perhaps the most fully realized of the antipolygamy novels of the 1850s. It focuses on only a few characters, following the fates of Margaret and Richard Wilde, Margaret’s best friend Sarah Irving, and Margaret’s brother Harry, who is rejected by Sarah at the altar. Victor uses every available racial trope to characterize the difference between Margaret and Sarah, including this about Margaret on her deathbed: “If Richard could have seen Margaret at this time, the comparison would hardly have been in favor of Sarah. One was gorgeously beautiful as an Indian vase, with the fire and smoke of incense burned before a false god, flickering within; the other was like a snowy and slender vase of the most fragile porcelain, in which some waning star was imprisoned, waiting to escape to its native sky.”75 The racialism is unmistakable (Margaret is “snowy” and like “fragile porcelain” while Sarah is a “gorgeously beautiful Indian vase”). Equally important, and deeply connected, is how they are coded in terms of belief: the Indian vase is surrounded by sacrificial incense to a “false god.” Sarah Irving may be an Indian vase or a tempting but false religion, but she is also the most stylish and vital of all the characters. In her depiction of Sarah, Victor navigates the ways that a sentimental-­realist style of description

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is meant to provoke emotionality and identification with the equally pressing need to make plural marriage unattractive to her readers. Sarah’s racialization is one way that Victor addresses these competing claims. Struggling with her desire for Richard, Sarah launches on a romantic but ill-­advised ride: “No Indian maiden of the forest rode her steed with a wilder grace, or decked herself out more gorgeously with flowers and scarlet leaves; she would ride like the winds across the plains, or sit quietly on her horse and send forth her sweet, clear voice in trills of melody, such as were never heard in that remote wild before.”76 Sarah’s darkness indexes her racialization and reinforces, like her uninhibited ride, her refusal to conform to the social codes of Protestant marriage; she may be in a domestic novel, but she does not desire a domestic life. Upon her arrival in Utah, Sarah builds a grand house for herself rather than marrying directly into another’s. As she puts it to Richard when he visits the building site, “See the sunlight streaming over the plains, turning the lake into an ocean of burnished gold, and bathing the mountains in rosy, evanescent hues. Oh! this is the place to be wildly, madly happy in. Here, free from the cold bonds, the chilling orthodoxies of the world, with a love-­breathing, kindly, fascinating religion, and lavished by the indulgent hand of nature all about us, why can not our souls revel in life as it was designed to be? why can not we be free as the winds, bright as the flowers, happy as the birds?”77 Sarah shifts from a transcendental, exclamatory appreciation of natural beauty (the sunlight on the plains, the lake as “burnished gold,” the mountains in roseate hues) to the desire for freedom and happiness, implying the correlation between free love and free nature. Of course, it is exactly against the claim that plural marriage might be “free” or “natural” where antipolygamy novelists worked the hardest. While Victor represents Sarah’s body and style as romantically attractive enough to make the second marriage to Richard seem narratively inevitable, she must also find a way to cause this attractiveness to curdle. One way is certainly through racializing Sarah as an “Indian maiden” and an “Indian vase.” As Burgett points out, this racialization works hand in glove with Sarah’s desire for Richard. “Lust,” Victor’s favored term for desire, “produces both polygamists and infidels.”78 It is important to note, though, that Sarah Irving was an “infidel” long before she joins Richard in plural marriage. In her youth, she had spent time reading “about ‘Free Love’ and ‘Psychological Twinships,’ ‘Passional Attractions,’ etc., etc.” Added to this eager perusal of Fourierism, she had also incautiously read “the works of two or three women of genius” (one presumes this refers, at the very least, to Mary Wollstonecraft and Frances

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Wright) who have “expressed only poison from the bright flowers of their fancy, and pressed it, with smiles of eloquence, to youthful lips.”79 Sarah’s first sin, then, is not so much her illicit desire for her best friend’s husband as it is her philosophical questioning of monogamous marriage itself. In her soliloquy at Margaret’s grave, Sarah again invokes her early reading in “infidel philosophy” and how it primed her to accept polygamy: It was easy for me, after I had tainted the sweetness of womanhood, by yielding a belief to the philosophy of Socialism, to take the other short step into Mormonism. The difference is too little for a mind which has received a downward impetus to stop at. Whether it be holier for a man to change his wife with the caprice of passion, or to institute a harem and have a dozen at the same time, is not much of a question. Whether the doctrines of Stephen Pearl Andrews be better than those of Brigham Young it takes not long to decide. The soul acknowledges no difference, unless it be in favor of the latter. It was the first who led me on—oh, terrible consequences which have befallen me! It is so easy to blind those whom passion has already made dizzy! It is not wonderful that their converts are many.80 The logic of Sarah’s outpouring folds together the elements we have seen across the landscape of experimental communities, private marriage, and the “unmarked” Protestantism at the center of secular culture. Sarah reiterates how compelling, even enthralling, these philosophies were to her. Socialist and free love “sophistries” fed her passions and made her “dizzy”; they were the gateway drug to plural marriage. But she pivots here to affirm that, while there may, in the end, be no difference between Stephen Pearl Andrews and Brigham Young in respect to their beliefs on marriage, the soul does incline toward Young. What makes Mormonism more compelling to the soul than free love, Sarah implies, is that it does not dispense with religion; rather, the “soul” finds spiritual nourishment even as the sexual organization of the community is about the same as in Andrews’s utopian community of Modern Times. But here again Victor and the other antipolygamy novelists come up against the same problem that Sedgwick did—that is, the need to make secular Protestantism and private marriage more than words but now something less than lust. And like Sedgwick (and Susan Warner and Harriet Beecher Stowe), Victor turns to the body of the mother as a sign of the faith that Sarah has lost: “Why did not my dead mother come to me in her shroud, and warn

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me that not thus with miserable sophistries were the hearts of the happy and pure women of her day corrupted—that safety was only to be found in the straight and narrow path?”81 Yet, unlike Ellen Bruce, Sarah’s mother does not feel near to her. She did not show up, even in the form of a keepsake, to warn her daughter about the threat of infidelity and polygamy. The mother’s casket in Redwood is rendered a mere novelistic trope in Mormon Wives—a wished for but unrealistic event from sentimental fiction. Through this metafictional moment, Mormon Wives suggests its realism—mothers do not really show up to warn their daughters to avoid the writings of Wright and Andrews. In fact, mothers seem completely ineffectual as guarantors of private morality in the antipolygamy novels. If they are not being turned into “first wives,” they are back East, or dead. The sentimental tropes of Redwood prove unavailable to writers attempting to counter polygamy through domestic fiction. Sedgwick flirts with a vibrating, tearful, feeling body to imagine conversion. Yet wandering out of a narrow path, this is also the body of Joseph Smith’s theology, as Coviello shows us. The privatizing of religion and marriage are not options for combating polygamy, because, again, taken to its extreme, what else is plural marriage but one potential endpoint for private religion and private marriage, despite Smith’s own theological argument with them in D&C 132? While Smith’s revelation contests the trend toward both, it is also its logical conclusion. As Laurel Thatcher Ulrich points out, the private as well as theological language of polygamy, as it developed after Smith’s death, was as attuned to marital happiness as it was to patriarchal order.82 This contradiction is especially apparent in Female Life Among the Mormons. When the narrator, Maria Ward, meets her future husband, he reassures her that it matters not that she does not believe in Mormon theology. Ward asks her, “You would not repudiate an honest man for his opinions?” and promptly answers for her, “You cannot, Miss B—, you are too much of a republican.”83 By presuming on Miss B’s “republicanism,” Ward invokes a commitment to private religion and religious tolerance as an antidote to church tyranny. Their marriage contract likewise depends on the “free exercise” language of the First Amendment. Ward tells her, “You are to have perfect liberty to believe as you see fit; to attend the Mormon meetings only when you see proper. I require the same liberty; if granted all will go well.”84 Ward’s repetition of “opinion” and its conflation with “belief ” suggests that Mormons take advantage of the abstractions of private religion under disestablishment. You can believe what you believe, and I can believe what I believe. It does not matter because it is all just private “opinion.”

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Unlike the Shakers, who were most often encountered by the 1840s as a tourist attraction and a relic of an enthusiastic moment of revival, the Mormons exerted a pressure on the understanding of the nation as such. This difference had as much to do with the fact that reproduction was the aim of one and not the other as it did with how Mormons, along with free lovers, exposed the logical conclusions of private religion and private marriage. Robert Baird, for instance, felt safe in assuming that Shaker converts would finally go extinct, but he warns that “the time for sympathy” with Mormons “is passed” and predicts that, “Should the community continue to exist till the day comes for the admission of Utah into the confederation as a State, there will be a decided crisis; for it can not for a moment be believed that it will be received so long as polygamy is not only allowed, but sustained by the sanctions of a pretended revelation from heaven.”85 As Baird implies, Mormons cannot expect to have religious freedom so long as their religion challenges the private organization of national life. This is one of the major challenges that Mormons posed. They undermined the narrative, dear to US secularism, that monogamous heterosexual marriage is the apogee of a free and tolerant society—and also its bulwark. Francis Lieber, for instance, urged in 1855 that Utah not be admitted to the Union by arguing that monogamy is one of the primordial elements out of which all law proceeds, or which the law steps in to recognize and to protect. Wedlock, that is, the being locked of one man in wedding to one woman, stands in this respect on a level with property. Property antecedes law, as values, and with them a currency, or circulating medium long precede money. Wedlock, or monogamy marriage, is one of the ‘categories’ of our social thoughts and conceptions, and, therefore, of our social existence. It is one of the elementary distinctions—historical and actual—between European and Asiatic humanity. It is one of the frames of our thoughts, and moulds of our feelings; it is a psychological condition of our jural consciousness, of our liberty, of our literature, of our aspirations, of our religious convictions, and of our domestic being and family relation, the foundation of all that is called polity.86 Like many an antipolygamy novelist, Lieber relentlessly racializes and orientalizes Mormons as “Asiatic.” In turn, he asserts both private marriage and private property as the twin antecedents of Western society and law. He bases

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his defense of monogamous marriage on “common law,” but it is not common law marriage that fuels his opinion so much as the new private, contractual marriage coming into being, which he repositions as “primordial.” The fact that he, like Horace Greeley, must continually define the terms of this marriage certainly undercuts his claim that it is either common sense or “primordial.” The ahistorical positioning of monogamous marriage helps Lieber assert it as something natural and internal: it is a feeling, a sensibility. As he describes it, monogamous marriage frames thoughts and it molds feelings; it is a “psychological condition” that cannot—or more aptly, should not—be viewed directly as a material, embodied practice. A lot like Protestantism, it is best when unmarked and immaterial. It is, in other words, symbolic of secular sensibility itself. Yet it may well be that unmarked Protestantism failed spectacularly to distinguish its version of “true” religion—what Theodore Parker claimed was the same “in each century and every land, in each man that feels it”—from what millennialists and Mormons and Shakers all claimed was their truly felt experiences of religion.87 And as we saw with the contemporaneous debate over free love and the outraged response to Mormonism, the 1840s and 1850s were decades of struggle over what marriage and religion would and could mean in modern, liberal society. Coming into focus is the redefinition of monogamous marriage as private, modern, and secular, in sharp response to challenges that drew the conclusion that private religion opened the space for the rethinking of marriage. The domestic organization of private life as the foundational component of personal and national morality had two further aspects that the next two chapters explore more thoroughly: Melville’s representation of the risks and contradictions of the language of authenticity at the core of the secular sensibility of privacy; and the role of private marriage in the construction and maintenance of white supremacy.

CHAPTER 3

Nudity

We tend not to describe the mid-­nineteenth century as an era prone to public nudity. Outside of Walt Whitman’s famous proclamation in his 1855 Leaves of Grass that he will “go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,” literature of the period nearly always represents the body clothed.1 Yet, as this chapter will show, both the clothed and the naked body were central to the construction of privacy. The assumption that one can read exteriors for a clue into interior character was at the heart of the sentimental-­realist aesthetic popular in domestic fiction, as the last chapter demonstrated. It is also an assumption, as this and the next chapter explore, deeply invested in and supportive of gendered and racial hierarchies. This chapter turns to the physical body, both clothed and undressed, to consider the moral questions raised by an aesthetic dedicated to reading surfaces. Fashion and clothing, as we will see, were instrumental in producing a sense of privacy by giving shape and attaching moral expectations to that which lay just beyond their layers. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, according to Karen Halttunen, fashion and self-­presentation operated as a “sentimental typology of conduct, the belief that every aspect of social behavior should transparently display the contents of the heart.”2 For the middle classes especially, clothing signaled one’s “deep,” private morality. While too fashionable of an exterior invited accusations of hypocrisy and pretension, especially against white woman and all people of color, a completely naked body—like Walt Whitman’s speaker by the bank of the woods—could not be hypocrisy’s opposite. To perform one’s private, authentic moral nature in the nineteenth century required not stripping down but an elaborate attention to layers upon layers of clothing, particularly for middle-­class white women. Clothing did not follow as a necessity of privacy so much as it constructed an understanding

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of privacy, with all the moral weight attached to the term. (It might also be noted here, in passing, that the word “privates” became a synonym for genitals in the early modern era and rose to more ubiquitous use in the subsequent centuries).3 Making his name penning novels of South Seas adventures with many an unclad body, Herman Melville, the focus of this chapter, returned throughout his fiction to the paradox that clothing produced the private body. Melville saw with an especial clarity how this private body was constructed in and through culture but, despite that obvious construction, was meant to serve as a measure of a person’s moral worth. As early as Typee, Melville’s sensitivity to comparative moralities (and the hypocritical immoralities of evangelical missionaries) challenged the culture’s tendency to judge a person’s surface appearance or domestic arrangements as a clue to their moral nature, and Pierre is the novel in which he most thoroughly develops this critique.4 Pierre is, among many other things, a satire of the increasingly prevalent investment in knowing and judging authors’ private lives and moral character, a moral economy of authorship that Susan Ryan demonstrates was ascendant in the 1840s and 1850s. Melville’s parody of “the era’s investment in authorial respectability” is but one aspect of his broader concern about the role of morality in shaping what counts and does not count as private.5 Indeed, Pierre offers one of the most compelling fictional representations of privacy as it was emerging in this period, compelling, first and foremost, because Melville keenly perceived and represented the way aesthetic surfaces became rife with competing moral meanings.6 Pierre Glendinning seeks to live a life free of middle-­class hypocrisies—the types of hypocrisies that Sedgwick used to great effect in her depiction of Reuben Harrington and which Melville targets in Typee—yet in pursuing this goal he is thrust into a secret life outside of the norms of private marriage. Put differently, the quest for an authentic private life leads in the novel to a secret one. I first situate Typee and Pierre in a culture obsessed with women’s clothing and that was actively debating the relation of fashion to hypocrisy, a culture I follow into an array of popular fiction, both sentimental and sensational. I then turn to an in-­depth study of Melville’s fictions of naked women (Typee) and excessively clad men (Pierre, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” and The Confidence-­Man). As the conclusion of this chapter shows, Melville’s attention to the role of clothing in constructing and mediating private morality also gave him insight into the opportunities—and the opportunities for fraud—that the belief in authentic selves creates.

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Dress and Dishabille If ever there was a nineteenth-­century novel that refused to keep with the emerging moral sensibility of privacy, it was Herman Melville’s Pierre. We can see how morally disturbing Pierre was by paying attention to a telling pattern in its reception: namely, the desire that Melville return to the Pacific for his materials. Evert Duyckinck, for instance, complained that “the writer of a mystic romance, in which are conjured up unreal nightmare-­conceptions, a confused phantasmagoria of distorted fancies and conceits, ghostly abstractions and fitful shadows, is certainly but a spectre of the substantial author of ‘Omoo’ and ‘Typee,’ the jovial and hearty narrator of the traveller’s tale of incident and adventure.”7 Likewise, John R. Thompson, in the Southern Literary Messenger, longed to be reading Typee as he struggled through Pierre, for, unlike the latter, Typee “presented us with fresh and delightful incidents from beyond the seas.”8 The New York Herald may have summed this desire up best when it wondered why “Mr. Melville desert[ed] ‘that bright little isle of his own,’ in the blue waters of the Pacific? Is Polynesia used up?”9 In the most famous—and infamous—of these reviews, George Washington Peck likewise condemned Pierre’s extravagant style (“A bad book! Affected in dialect, unnatural in conception, repulsive in plot, and inartistic in construction”) and, at length, excoriated Melville for the incest plot of the novel (as Paul Hurh notes, Peck faulted Pierre “for two major indecencies: the treatment of incest and the mistreatment of the English language”).10 Yet unlike Melville’s other critics, Peck did not call on him to return to the Pacific. “A few years back,” he explains, Melville “gave to the world a story of romantic adventure; this was untrue in its painting, coarse in its coloring, and often tedious and prolix in its descriptive passages. But there was a certain air of rude romance about it, that captivated the general public. It depicted scenes in a strange land, and dealt with all the interests that circle around men whose lives are passed in peril. Nor were appeals to the grosser instincts of humanity wanting. Naked women were scattered profusely through the pages, and the author seemed to feel that in a city where the ballet was admired, ‘Typee’ would be successful.”11 Peck’s condemnation of the semiclad women of the ballet was, by the 1850s, fairly old-­fashioned of him. But it serves his larger argument that Pierre and Typee both display the “grosser instincts.”12 In Peck’s estimation, Typee antici­ pated the moral and stylistic problems he sees in Pierre, only (as he implies) other reviewers overlooked this similarity because they were more comfortable with nudity and immorality in Typee’s exotic setting.

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While Peck’s scathing review has long amused Melville scholars, it is perhaps worth noting that Peck is not wrong in at least one of his assessments— there are a lot of naked women in Typee. The opening chapter alone tells two stories of women stripped (one by force and one by her own hand) and the second chapter introduces the Marquesan women who climb on board the whaler. This is long before we read Tommo’s scandalous account of his Marquesan love interest, Fayaway, who strips off her dress to use as a sail for their skiff on the lake. Of course, while Peck certainly objected to Fayaway’s depiction, this was not really his concern. He used the undress of the Pacific (and the sexual looseness implied by it) to condemn the moral laxity of such northeastern cities as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Peck’s moral outrage calls our attention to a wider context in which ­women’s bodies—both clothed and unclothed—served as a flashpoint for antebellum debates over morality and modernity. This was not so much a debate specifically about the propriety of the ballet but what ballerinas’ revealing skirts heralded for those not on stage: what to do about women’s popular fashion. The open secret of antebellum fashion was that clothing not only hid a woman’s body but produced it for public view. The layers of a middle-­class

Figure 3. “Bloomerism—An American Custom.” 1851, Punch. Image courtesy of the New York Public Library.

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woman’s public costume, beginning with the corsets, crinolines, and stockings, fashioned a silhouette of a body that at once obscured and replaced the real flesh beneath. Ideally, this was a disappearing act. Because clothes had such an overdetermined moral meaning, it should come as no surprise that, by the mid-­nineteenth century, the effects of women’s dress became a vast, if sometimes derided, subject of debate. Targeting the unhealthy effects of women’s corsets and crinolines, dress and health reform advocates printed alternative fashion plates and patterns in such venues as the Water-­Cure Journal and the women’s rights periodical, the Lily. These plates included the “reform dress” or “Bloomers” with hiked skirts and pantaloons. Mainstream organs such as the Knickerbocker or the Democratic Review, in turn, published alarms (at times earnest, more often sarcastic) about both reform and fashion, while Punch cartoons circulating in Britain and the United States suggested that “Bloomers” would turn women into men. The uproar over women’s dress seems to confirm Thoreau’s suggestion in Walden that “there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience.”13 But in scanning these debates, we might say (pace Thoreau) that women’s clothing was a battleground over the changing nature of morality in its relation to privacy. The common trope of a glimpse beneath women’s skirts—which we see in the comic valentine “Convenient Fashion”—came to stand for the revelation of one’s private morality more generally. Whether women wore the reform dress, as in the Punch cartoon, or the new cage crinoline (or “hoop skirt”), jokes centered on what parts of women’s bodies could be seen by men in public. But lurking beneath these jokes was a particular anxiety about the role of fashion in maintaining—or challenging—the “separate spheres” distinction between public and private and the moral role that women were meant to play in the private sphere. In the 1840s and 1850s, advocates for women’s rights and health reform like Mary Gove, (who we met in Chapter 2 as an advocate of antimarriage theory with her husband, Thomas Low Nichols) assailed female fashion, the clothing, that is, that the middle and upper classes wore in public.14 Their criticism betrayed the general knowledge that clothing not only concealed but shaped the bodies beneath. As Patricia A. Cunningham explains, the “outward appearance of women was quite dependent on what was worn underneath the fashionable garment.”15 By 1850 layer upon layer of undergarments (stockings, drawers, chemise, undershirt, six to eight petticoats, corset, corset cover, and then finally a gown made up of a skirt and bodice) provided

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Figure 4. “Convenient Fashion.” Ca. 1840– 1880. Image courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

the shape of middle-­class women’s public bodies, and, until the invention of the hoopskirt, numerous petticoats created the effect of a voluminous skirt.16 While Godey’s Lady’s Book might make women’s costumes look effortless, the entire effect could weigh up to twenty-­five pounds.17 For women’s rights activists like Nichols, Amelia Bloomer, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (all of whom advocated versions of dress reform as central to women’s rights), two aspects of women’s undergarments came under particular censure: the corsets and the petticoats. As Amy Kesselman explains, “Women’s rights activists saw conventional women’s dress as a ‘badge of degradation’ and recognized its role in enforcing female passivity.”18 The corset had long been a target for those in health reform who worried about its compression of women’s organs. Gove, for instance, urged women to lay aside the corset before they became “miserable victim[s]” of an “absurd fashion,” with ribs collapsed and lungs crushed.19 In including an illustration of a woman’s

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Figure 5. Godey’s Unrivalled Colored Fashions. Godey’s Lady’s Book, November 1858, frontispiece. Image courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

collapsed torso in her health reform manual for women, Gove seems to have come very close to offering women readers an anatomically faithful image, straight through the chest, of the inside of their bodies. That said, though the body is definitely a woman’s, by cutting off the figure’s head, lower arms, and bottom half, it also erases any individualizing markers.20 Though less hazardous to women’s health, the numerous petticoats posed a more visible problem and were therefore more widely discussed. They were perceived as unclean and cumbersome, collecting dirt and mud through the streets of the city and restricting women’s movements, the latter point more often voiced by women’s rights advocates. The volume of the skirts (made of crinolines) also became a standard joke in both Britain and the United States. The jokes did not stop with the introduction of the hoopskirt (a reform that replaced the layers of crinolines). They ranged from the claim that hoops were unwieldy—having a penchant for knocking things off tables—to a more common trope, that they could potentially give men a peek beneath women’s skirts. More seriously, crinolines and the hoopskirt also posed a significant danger, of catching fire when too close to a fireplace. The fad for caged crinolines became a means to chastise servants’ dress, as such fires were often connected to a woman in service who was cleaning near a fireplace. What became known as “Bloomers”—after Amelia Bloomer posed for an illustration of herself in the “new costume”—were meant as a corrective

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Figure 6. Illustration in Lectures to Ladies on Anatomy and Physiology. Mary S. Gove, 1842. Image courtesy of David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University.

to these two major infelicities by eliminating the corset, hiking up the skirt, and removing the layers of crinolines. A correspondent to the Lily, who was asked to give an impromptu lecture in London after being spotted in the “new costume,” argued for the “great moral considerations that were stirring the women of America to dare and do in this and many other matters.”21 Yet while the comic cards “Ain’t you a pretty pair” and “Convenient Fashion” suggest that women’s fashionable skirts provoked sarcasm and scorn, derision went in the other direction as well, directed at reforms of these very fashions.22 The editorial staff of Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-­Room Companion, for instance, kept up a running count of Bloomers passing their office.23 Even august figures such as Henry Ward Beecher and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. felt the need to weigh in on these debates.24 Women’s rights activists soon abandoned dress reform, deciding that it was a distraction from their central concerns of access to suffrage, education, and the professions. Upper-­and middle-­class women—whether avidly following the latest Parisian fashions or attracted to dress reform—seemed (not for the last time) to be caught in

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Figure 7. “Miss Crinoline.” Ca. 1840–1880. Image courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

a web of contradictory advice. While some articles told them that their fashions were quite literally killing them, or at least making them ridiculous, others suggested that reforms, at best, made them objects of scorn, and at worst, “unsexed” them. And these contradictory articles were quite often published in the same periodicals. Too many skirts, too few skirts. Presenting one’s private body for public consumption meant threading a needle very carefully. The extent to which fashion was an index of private morality—and a game that women simply could not win—was readily apparent to a writer like Fanny Fern (Sara Payson Willis). In her fictionalized autobiography, Ruth Hall (1854), Fern expertly deploys moralized fashion metaphors. On hearing that her daughter-­in-­law Ruth is the popular author “Floy,” the uncharitable Mrs. Hall abruptly declares Floy’s book “immoral” and speculates that the money Ruth made “will be invested on her back, in silk gowns, laces, frumpery, and such things.” And she goes on in this vein for several paragraphs:

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Figure 8. “Ain’t you a pretty pair of bloods.” Ca. 1840–1880. Image courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

“Yes, laces and feathers, feathers and laces. The children, too, all tricked out like little monkeys, with long ostrich legs, and short, bob-­tailed skirts standing out like opery girls, and whole yards of ribbin [sic] streaming from their hair, I’ll warrant. . . . Shouldn’t be astonished any day to hear Ruth kept a carriage and servants in livery, or had been to Victory’s Court in lappets and diamonds.”25 Mrs. Hall, who dislikes Ruth in general, objects here specifically to the public nature of Ruth’s profession and the accrual of wealth it provides, and she reaches for fashion metaphors to express that distaste: lace lappets, silk gowns, ribbons, feathers—“frumpery”—such that she imagines that the only end to Ruth’s money will be to transform her daughters into “opery girls,” that is, brazen, public women not unlike Peck’s ballerinas. Of course, Fern also deploys fashion as a way to moralize on Hall’s brother, Hyacinth (a thinly veiled Nathaniel Parker Willis), who is a perfect dandy. Ruth’s publisher and trusted confidante says of him, “Fashion is his God; he recognizes

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Figure 9. “Amelia Bloomer, Originator of the New Dress.” T. W. Brown, September 27, 1851, Illustrated London News. Image courtesy of the University of Illinois Library.

only the drawing-­room side of human nature. Sorrow in satin he can sympathize with, but sorrow in rags is too plebian for his exquisite organization.”26 This dovetailing of high and low—that the pretensions of social aspirants make them into “opery girls”—has long been central to the middle-­class imaginary, in which the middle classes, by not being taken in by “frumpery,” represented the most moral of classes and the most transparent: their clothes always signaled who they were in private. Or, to put this differently, the middle class built their respectability by exposing others’ hypocrisy. As Halttunen explains, “The fear of hypocrisy expressed in mid-­nineteenth-­century conduct manuals ran deep: these archetypal hypocrites threatened ultimately, by undermining social confidence among men and women, to reduce the American republic to social chaos.”27 Concern over urban spaces arose out of such an ideology: “In an open, urban society, the powerful images of

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the confidence man and the painted woman expressed the deep concern of status-­conscious social climbers that they themselves and those around them were ‘passing’ for something they were not.”28 This is the charge of hypocrisy at the heart of Mr. Walter’s attack on Hyacinth, that he is passing as a moral man while being solely concerned with status. The urban setting, in which there are multiple interactions with an anonymous public, sparked concern over how to accurately read the social cues of fashionable clothing. Not only were the middle classes expected to present themselves in such a way as to provide a transparent window to their private, authentic morality, that obvious expectation could easily be exploited by a hypocrite like Hyacinth or a confidence man out to swindle naive and trusting citizens. It should come as no surprise, then, that the city mystery genre most often staged scenes of dressing and dishabille, playing on the difference between public and private dress as an index for the immorality lurking underneath urban public spaces. Popular on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1840s, city mysteries were sensational and melodramatic, and their stock-­ in-­trade was exposé.29 For instance, George Thompson promises, on the title page of his City Crimes; or, Life in New York and Boston (1849), a “mirror of fashion, a picture of poverty, and a startling revelation of the secret crimes of great cities” (a “volume for everybody,” the title page assures, even as chapter 1 follows the hero, Frank Sydney, as he sleeps with a prostitute before helping her escape an unhappy marriage to a pimp). Thompson’s subtitle assumes that revelation is morality—that to expose the hypocrisies of fashion, the hidden vulnerabilities of poverty, and the “secret crimes” of the city is to counter and resolve them. The plot, like so many in this genre, also ironically depends on disguise, but the disguise of the hero is only used to reveal others’ secret sins. Not only does Sydney disguise himself to move undetected in lower-­class circles, but the titillating voyeurism of the city mystery genre depends on continually disrobing women to reveal their or others’ hypocrisy (from the Courtezan’s mother, who is found by her daughter in an amorous embrace with a Baptist minister, to Frank’s wife, who hides a premarital pregnancy with her Black servant via wearing loose dresses). In a similar fashion, George Lippard’s Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall (1847) has the hero, Luke Harvey, elude detection via elaborate costumes. Luke’s penchant for disguise is represented as moral, yet it exists in tension with the immoral disguises of villainous characters such as the gentleman forger, Colonel Fitz-­Cowles. Before his servant, Dim, adds the extra padding to his calves and hips (“Just large enough to make my frock coat set out in the

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skirt”), Fitz-­Cowles’s “slender form, attired in the rainbow morning-­gown and close fitting drawers, though well proportioned, and graceful in its outlines, by no means displayed that perfection of symmetry, which distinguished the person of the millionaire in broad daylight, along Chesnut street. For instance, the Colonel was thicker around the waist, thinner about the hips, smaller in the region of the calves, than was usual with him, when arrayed in full dress.”30 The difference between Luke and Fitz-­Cowles, though, is a crucial one for the genre: Luke takes on personae to expose crime; Fitz-­Cowles produces a fashionable exterior in order to pursue it. While male disguise is central to the plots of city mystery novels, the genre is nearly unique in these decades for its unclad women. Thompson’s City Crimes is emblematic when it invites readers directly into a women’s boudoir. In a chapter promising to “expose” the “crimes of the Aristocracy,” we begin with the “partially denuded form [that] exhibited all the matured fullness of a ripened womanhood” of the rich widow Lucretia Franklin, and her favorite daughter, Josephine. Thompson introduces these characters while they dress for a masquerade ball, and he thus situates them as both undressed and improperly dressed. Josephine “had just drawn on a pair of broadcloth pants, and was in an attitude of graceful and charming perplexity, unaccustomed as she was to that article of dress. The undergarment she wore had slipped down from her shoulders, revealing voluptuous beauties which the envious fashion of ladies’ ordinary attire, usually conceals.”31 Pulling on the costumes of a “Royal Middy” and an “Oriental Queen” for the ball, the two women discuss how they murdered Mr. Franklin to access these “voluptuous pleasures.” (It should be noted that “voluptuous” is one of Thompson’s favorite adjectives). These scenes (multiplied any number of times across city mystery novels) ultimately pivot on the power of unveiling: the voyeuristic pleasures afforded the reader in watching characters as they undress or dress. At first glance, then, this genre fits more comfortably within a twentieth-­and twenty-­first century conception of what constitutes privacy. For a twentieth-­century legal description of privacy, nudity is central, as when the legal scholar Richard Posner claims that “people dress not merely because of the effect on others but also because of the reticence . . . concerning nudity and other sensitive states; that reticence is another reason for giving people a privacy right with regard to places in which these sensitive states occur.”32 For Posner, privacy is the location of nudity and “other sensitive states,” and people dress because nudity belongs at home. The clothing one wears in public points to the possibility of its absence in private. With the aid of Fern, Lippard, and Thompson,

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we might amend this theory for a more accurate understanding of antebellum culture. Being publicly clothed was not the opposite of being privately naked exactly; rather, clothed hypocrisy is its opposite. But that does not imply that nudity, in turn, represents transparency. As we have seen in the city mysteries, nudity represents betrayed secret identity, the hidden sin. The forger’s unpadded hips, the women’s heaving “globes”—these signify that hypocrisy has been revealed. On the other hand, to be nude in public—that is, to be authentically your actual private body in a public space—is simply unrepresentable. Unless, of course, one is writing of the Pacific.

Typee’s Denuded Moralities A throwaway joke in Thompson’s City Crimes has the licentious Baptist minister, Balaam Flanders, appear later in the plot to collect money for the “Society for Supplying Indigent and Naked Savages in Hindustan with Flannel Shirts.” This incidental satire skewers both Flanders’s hypocrisy and the missionaries’ myopic morality, yet it is worth noting that Thompson’s novel is as much a participant and promoter of the moral logic satirized here. Presented under the sign of “condemning” urban vices, readers of City Crimes indulge in titillating descriptions of all kinds. So, when George Washington Peck objects to Melville’s naked women—and to the ballet and other “licentious” amusements of New York City—he does so with the full force of what nakedness ought to mean, as it figures in city mystery novels and in the caricatures of women’s fashion. One represents the body in dishabille in order to make a moral point; to celebrate or encourage the freedom of the body (as the Bloomers or Walt Whitman might be accused of doing) was to wander into incomprehensible immoralities for a white middle-­class culture of sentiment. The unclothed body brings us back to Melville, specifically to the naked women in Typee to whom Peck objected. Despite Peck’s outrage, Melville’s anecdotes of undressed women (most pointedly those in the first chapter) function as more than voyeuristic fare for admirers of the ballet. They operate, instead, as foundational to Melville’s critique of evangelical missionaries.33 His criticism of the missionaries in Hawaiʻi is sharp and incisive—and, above all, seeks to reveal their moral hypocrisies, how Native Hawaiians “had been civilized into draught-­horses; and evangelized into beasts of burden.”34 The New England missionaries Melville targets first arrived in Hawaiʻi in 1820,

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and in the following decades they sought conversion and influence through, among other things, the management of the body and the redefinition of the family.35 To effect such a change, they had to contend with kapu practices that could not help but puzzle and potentially subvert their assumptions about the relation of privacy to morality. In Hawaiʻi, two kapu systems—one, older Polynesian tradition (of the makaʻāinana), and a more recent one based on the sacred nature of the chiefs (the aliʻi)—organized social life around rank, gender, and kinship. Upon the arrival in Oahu in 1820 of the first ship funded by the American Board of Commission for Foreign Missions, Liholiho (Kamehameha II) had just broken the eating kapu (the ʻai kapu), which separated men’s and women’s dining spaces.36 The missionaries interpreted this as an act of Providence, as God having (in the words of one missionary) “prepared the way for their reception among a heathen people, by bringing about a revolution, as wonderful as it was unprecedented.”37 The missionaries found an alibi in Liholiho’s breaking of the eating kapu to attack other kapu practices, claiming to be championing women’s rightful relation to public and private spaces, and “freeing” women to inhabit heteronormative privacy—to live in a house and eat at a table with only one husband. The missionaries also worked tirelessly to “free” women to wear Western clothes. Covering up Native Hawaiians was a crucial first step for reorganizing the public and private spheres of the culture, as Thompson satirized in his city mystery novel. The missionary Clarissa Chapman Armstrong’s drawings of her visit to the Marquesas and her life on Maui illustrate just such a preoccupation with clothing the body. In her depictions of Marquesans, we peek into the missionary unconscious, drawn to exposed and tattooed bodies, and particularly to Marquesan women’s bodies, in a way that anticipates the erotic orientalism of a painter like Paul Gauguin. The tattoos Armstrong draws are interesting in the context of nudity: they cover the body in ink yet expose its parts all the same. They constitute a double exposure, both of tattoo and body. From Armstrong’s point of view, both nudity and tattoos symbolize the Marquesans’ unconverted status, and her drawings of converted Hawaiians resolve this disorder, as in her depiction of Bartimea Lalana Puaʻaiki (known as Bartimeus), whom Hiram Bingham would describe in an American Tract Society pamphlet as having become a “private Christian.”38 In fact, it was the role of women missionaries like Armstrong to ensure this transformation from public nakedness to private Christianity, and the laws passed in Hawaiʻi in the subsequent decades reinforced this new order of privacy, from sexual behavior to family life to women’s explicit exclusion

Figure 10. “Titihuta: Native Marquesan.” Clarissa Armstrong. Watercolor. Image courtesy of Hawaiian Mission Houses, Digital Archive, N-­3002-­C.

Figure 11. “Bartimea Puaʻaiki: Blind Preacher of Maui.” Clarissa Armstrong. Watercolor. Image courtesy of Hawaiian Mission Houses, Digital Archive, N-­0375 Color.

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from government. For instance, in the first letter believed to have been sent from the islands by a missionary, Maria Thomas Loomis wrote in 1820, “We have been engaged ever since we came on shore in making coats pantaloons gowns &tc. for the chiefs. Even the Governor sent us his pantaloons to be made and though we have scarce had time to breathe yet we think it a duty to leave all and sit down and do all work of this kind. . . . We think it favorable that they should have a taste for dress.”39 Julia Spaulding likewise wrote her parents from Lahaina in 1832 that they hoped to buy a loom, for “if we can get something of this kind into operation, it will be of great service in furnishing employment for the females and prevent them from falling into those temptations which are ever attendant on idleness. . . . The chiefs and as many of the people as can dress in cloth brought by the foreigners, but many of them cannot obtain it and wear tapa (the native cloth).” She concludes that “we feel it a duty to set them a good example of neatness and plainness in dress and endeavor so to do.”40 We see in Spaulding’s letter both the labor relations being introduced to the island (the women need to work so that they do not fall into sexual “temptation”) and the material replacement of Hawaiian clothing material (tapa) for cloth. In other words, to demonstrate a regulated morality, Native Hawaiians must make and wear Western clothes, and the goal, as we also saw in “Matty Gore” in Chapter 2, is to achieve an aesthetic of “neatness and plainness.” A “taste for dress” and a “good example of neatness and plainness” would become indices of private Christian morality in Hawaiʻi and other outposts of empire. It is no coincidence, then, that when Tommo jumps ship in Typee he grabs a “few yards of cotton cloth” rather than a sufficient supply of food (36). No reader would accuse Tommo of wanting to clothe the Typee, yet Melville depends on the same chain of associations that appear in Loomis’s and Spaulding’s letters, even as he critiques their missionary aims. We can see this when we return to the two stories of women in the opening chapter. The first is a tale of the wife of an “intrepid missionary,” not unlike Clarissa Chapman Armstrong, intent on converting the Marquesans. While the “islanders at first gazed in mute admiration at so unusual a prodigy, and seemed inclined to regard it as some new divinity,” they soon “sought to pierce the sacred veil of calico in which it was enshrined, and in the gratification of their curiosity so far overstepped the limits of good breeding, as deeply to offend the lady’s sense of decorum. Her sex once ascertained, their idolatry was changed into contempt and there was no end to the contumely showered upon her” (6). This opening vignette is both a literal and metaphorical

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unveiling. Melville invokes religious language only to subvert it: the missionary’s wife moves from “some new divinity” enshrined in a “sacred veil of calico” to a contemptible, hypocritical woman when the Marquesans disclose the human female body beneath the calico. The second story, of the Nuku Hiva queen, inverts that of the missionary’s wife. She and the king board a French frigate arrayed in a combination of Western dress and native plumage. These outward trappings, though, prove a flimsy cover. The queen, fascinated by one of the sailor’s tattoos, “hung over the fellow, caressing him, and expressing her delight in a variety of wild exclamations and gestures. The embarrassment of the polite Gauls at such an unlooked-­for occurrence may be easily imagined, but picture their consternation, when all at once the royal lady, eager to display the hieroglyphics on her own sweet form, bent forward for a moment, and turning sharply round, threw up the skirt of her mantle and revealed a sight from which the aghast Frenchmen retreated precipitately, and tumbling into their boats, fled the scene of so shocking a catastrophe” (8). As with the first story of the missionary’s wife, this is almost too literal: the colonial subject moons the representatives of empire.41 Inverting the forced revelation of the missionary’s wife, the Nuku Hiva queen rejects imperial hypocrisy by throwing off her Western garb. Juxtaposed together in the opening chapter, these stories also promise a “peep” at the islands, in all of their undress. The anecdotes prepare readers for Melville’s revelations of the inaccuracy of fabulating travel writers and the hypocrisies of missionaries. Naked women operate as a Barthesian reality effect for the novel, as seemingly extraneous details that nonetheless testify that Melville’s narrative may well shock but that it is an authentic, unvarnished account. In this way, Typee also announces its distance from the sentimental-­realist aesthetic we saw in Sedgwick’s fiction in Chapter 2. In pursuing this effect, the novel highlights a lurking problem in the logic of privacy as it was developing in the nineteenth century: if private selves publicly testify to morality, what do we do with public nudity? Rather than demonstrating one’s private morality through public actions, public nudity suggests an alarming comfort with sexual acts and sexualized parts of the body that ought to be secret and subject to shame. Conversely and ironically, though, public nudity also suggests a complete lack of hypocrisy—one’s public and private selves are, symbolically speaking, the same. In other words, public nudity both faithfully enacts the aim of private morality—that one’s private morality is one’s public persona—but in doing so it upsets the private

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function of Protestant morality so central to secularism as it was accruing power and meaning in the nineteenth-­century United States. Yet while Typee symbolizes its critique of Western hypocrisy through unclad women, it does not quite challenge how questions of morality attach to the debates over fashion and clothing and through them to an understanding of the private self. In the end, the novel is still attached to unveiling hypocrisy—that is, it aims to undermine missionaries’ claims to moral virtue by revealing to the reader their cruel, rapacious hidden practices. In contrast to this, the transparency of the Typees—their very undress—signals their innocence. Melville simply inverts who the virtuous are. As such, while Typee announces in its aesthetics an attempt to shock any readers with strong Protestant convictions, to whom missionary work remained a vital pursuit, it reinforces rather than undermines the growing secular sensibility of privacy—that privacy operates as an affect and location for moral work. And that may be one reason why a majority of the reviewers of Pierre fondly recalled Typee as they read the later novel. For in Pierre, and in much of his fiction in the 1850s more generally, Melville suggests alternative modes of privacy that challenge the normative secular version he identifies but does not undermine in Typee.

Dressing Pierre If Typee presents so much undress, Pierre is certainly its opposite—it is excessively, elaborately clothed, first and foremost in Melville’s extravagant prose style. And he matches this “affected” and “inartistic” style about which Peck and others complained with a recurrence to clothing metaphors throughout the novel. It is not simply that the two women Pierre lives with by the end of the novel are explicitly associated with clothing (Isabel is that “sewing-­ girl,” according to Mrs. Glendinning, and Lucy’s last name is Tartan); rather, throughout the novel, clothing operates figuratively to evoke the embedded relation of privacy and morality. Early in the novel, the narrator describes Pierre as “the complete polished steel of the gentleman, girded with Religion’s silken sash”; Mrs. Glendinning describes Lucy as “the very pattern of all that I think amiable and attractive in a girl of seventeen”; Pierre wonders about Lucy, “I to wed this heavenly fleece? Methinks one husbandly embrace would break her airy zone, and she exhale upward to that heaven whence she hath hither come, condensed to mortal sight”; Isabel tells Pierre that her “soul is

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stiff and starched” to whatever plan he has concocted for them; and perhaps most memorably, upon hearing from Pierre that he has married Isabel, Mrs. Glendinning proclaims: “My own only son, false to his holiest plighted public vow—and the wide world knowing to it! He bears my name—Glendinning. I will disown it; were it like this dress, I would tear my name off from me, and burn it till it shriveled to a crisp!”42 This is but a small sampling of a recurring metaphor—a leitmotif in a novel crammed with many more. Piling up, though, these clothing metaphors help us see how the textual and social effect of privacy is created externally. The novel depends on the typology of fashion—that one’s clothing can accurately represent one’s inner morality— and uses that ideology to imagine privacy as outer layers that can be seen, touched, marred, and even stripped off or destroyed. The relation of clothing to private morality takes on a more prominent role in the second half of the novel, after the introduction of Plinlimmon’s pamphlet, a copy of which comes into Pierre’s hands when it is left behind in the stagecoach that he, Isabel, and Delly Ulver had taken to the city. As the narrator comments, the pamphlet (titled “Chronometricals and Horologicals”) was “more the excellently illustrated re-­statement of a problem, than the solution of the problem itself ” (210). That problem is how to be moral in a secular age. The pamphlet argues that one need only key one’s actions to that of the world’s sense of morality (that is, in secular time), not to God’s. Moreover, the pamphlet’s description of worldly (horological) morality depends on the logic of privacy that I have been tracing in this book: If a man gives with a certain self-­considerate generosity to the poor; abstains from doing downright ill to any man; does his convenient best in a general way to do good to his whole race; takes watchful loving care of his wife and children, relatives, and friends; is perfectly tolerant to all other men’s opinions, whatever they may be; is an honest dealer, an honest citizen, and all that; and more especially if he believe that there is a God for infidels, as well as for believers, and acts upon that belief; then, though such a man falls infinitely short of the chronometrical standard, though all his actions are entirely horologic;—yet such a man need never lastingly despond, because he is sometimes guilty of some minor offense. (214) The argument here depends on limiting morality to a private function; that is, Plinlimmon gives voice to the role of morality after state disestablishment.

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First, good works (much as it seems in Emerson’s description of charity in “Self-­Reliance”) are best limited to the sphere of one’s own private home and neighborhood.43 Even more “especially” (in the words of the pamphlet), one must act from the relativity of private conscience—that what others believe is fine for them, even when they do not believe in God at all. Unlike Ishmael in Moby-­Dick, one need not “turn idolator” in order to respect another’s religion; one simply needs to leave others alone, the hallmark of a popularly defined version of privacy. What religions add up to in the end are simply just differences of “opinion,” as Jefferson’s famous quip about religion suggested (“It does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg”).44 To challenge this common sense is to contravene the right of someone else to privacy. But, of course, this is not quite all, for Plinlimmon’s philosophy ultimately assumes that the reader’s morality is always comfortably aligned with the dominant morality of the social world. This very logic is what Thoreau attacked in “Slavery in Massachusetts” (1854) when he decried the inefficacy of electoral politics for redressing slavery: “The amount of it is, if the majority vote the devil to be God, the minority will live and behave accordingly, and obey the successful candidate, trusting that some time or other, by some Speaker’s casting vote, perhaps, they may reinstate God.”45 In other words, while the pamphlet seems to advance a liberatory philosophy, in which everyone’s right to private conscience is respected, it resolves ultimately into a uniformity that protects the status quo. If we take Thoreau’s argument as a cue, Plinlimmon’s pamphlet makes it difficult—if not nearly impossible—to mount a moral argument against slavery, or any other form of injustice, when the opposing side sincerely holds their own beliefs. And that makes it a rousing defense of moral and political complacency. Melville emphasizes this contradiction in the figure of Plinlimmon himself: “Though the clothes worn by this man were strictly in accordance with the general style of any unobtrusive gentleman’s dress, yet his clothes seemed to disguise this man” (290). Melville suggests a parallel between Plinlimmon’s description of morality and his clothing. The banality of his clothes somehow “disguises” the banality of his private morals by placing them on public display. There is nothing hidden. Plinlimmon is all surface and thus he inhabits most comfortably—and contradictorily—the secular sensibility of privacy. What is so fascinating about the Plinlimmon pamphlet, then, is not simply that it states the basic moral problem of the secular age—should the average person live up to an otherworldly standard of conduct?—but also that

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it represents that moral problem in such strikingly material terms as conveyed and embodied in the “curious paper rag” (another reference to cloth) on which it is written and the garment in which it is eventually concealed. If clothing figures privacy as a realm of moral virtue and stripping is the response to hidden sins that threaten the moral function of privacy (Peck’s desire to “strip” Melville or Mrs. Glendinning’s fantasy of stripping her tarnished name and burning it) then there is little more telling in the novel than the fate of the rag of paper on which Plinlimmon’s morality is printed. After finally encountering Plinlimmon in person, Pierre seeks to reread the pamphlet but cannot find it: Yet—to anticipate here—when years after, an old Jew Clothesman rummaged over a surtout of Pierre’s—which by some means had come into his hands—his lynx-­like fingers happened to feel something foreign between the cloth and the heavy quilted bombazine lining. He ripped open the skirt, and found several old pamphlet pages, soft and worn almost to tissue, but still legible enough to reveal the title—“Chronometricals and Horologicals.” Pierre must have ignorantly thrust it into his pocket, in the stage, and it had worked through a rent there, and worked its way clean down into the skirt, and there helped pad the padding. So that all the time he was hunting for this pamphlet, he himself was wearing the pamphlet. (294) Melville’s metaphor is again too obvious. Pierre has had Plinlimmon’s pamphlet on his person during the whole of the second half of the novel. He is literally wearing his own moral conundrum. Yet the pamphlet is not in a pocket or tight against his skin (like the letters in Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Redwood) but inside the coat’s lining. Helping to “pad the padding,” Plinlimmon’s pamphlet is both something “foreign” to the coat yet integral to its purpose of warming. When I say that this metaphor is too obvious, then, I do not mean to criticize it. Instead, I want to call attention to Melville’s placement of the moral problem—between the surface and the lining of the coat, not visible but not a purposefully hidden secret. Morality in a secular age pads and it warms; it is not a secret even if it is not always visible. And while privacy keeps you warm at night, it is not meant to burden you with undue moral responsibility. That Pierre is searching for and cannot find this pamphlet alone testifies that it is not fulfilling that office for him. Pierre seeks, instead, to live without this

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padding at all; his quest, ultimately, is for an unhypocritical existence, which, ironically, leads him into unanticipated levels of secrecy and obfuscation. The location of the pamphlet, then, is obvious. But what I want to suggest is that, because it is so apparent, the location of privacy is not the most pressing question in Pierre. For while this description of Plinlimmon’s pamphlet promises to answer the question of where private morality ought to be located, it instead prompts us to query when it will appear. There is a parallel chronometrical metaphor to the one that organizes Plinlimmon’s argument. As the narrator introduces and reintroduces the pamphlet, time extends beyond the bounds of the novel’s diegesis while also looping back to the middle of the story. The narrator in the passage above anticipates an event that will remain beyond the action of the plot—the used clothing salesman winding up with Pierre’s coat. And this anticipation recalls the introduction of the pamphlet itself, when the narrator hints, in Melville’s typical litotes, that Pierre “may not in the end be entirely uninfluenced in his conduct by the torn pamphlet, when afterwards perhaps by other means he shall come to understand it” (210). Just as the pamphlet suspends a solution to the problem of morality in a secular age by positing two incommensurate parallel timescales (God’s and the world’s), Melville’s temporal pacing stretches the unresolved moral question at the center of the novel beyond the events of the plot. If conventional privacy is yoked to morality, its style is linear; that is, privacy precedes the public and becomes its own evidence of the moral subject. One never need act morally in the present moment as long as the moral self exists in a private past. In contrast, the temporal looping and recursions that Melville builds into the passages about Pierre’s coat upset this linearity and anticipate instead Pierre’s inability to live outside of the hypocrisy that the coat and Plinlimmon’s pamphlet symbolize.

An Eminently Decorous Person While Pierre critiques the increasingly evident fact that privacy is provided only for those engaged in performances of morality, like Plinlimmon, the ending of the novel offers a fairly pessimistic view of attempts to produce alternative private arrangements and to live without the complacency that Plinlimmon’s pamphlet promotes. Domestic life at the Temple of the Apostles—where Isabel, Lucy, Pierre, and Delly live together in an arrangement decidedly outside of heteronormative formations—can be thought of as a utopian community

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akin to the Mormons’ plural marriage or the Shakers’ communes, but, as with the Shakers, it is not one that offers much hope of reproduction. The main characters, after all, die at the end. As Christopher Castiglia so aptly notes, Pierre never realizes that he has found the alternative domestic arrangement that he has sought all along.46 This alternative yet failed domesticity is mirrored, according to Cindy Weinstein, in the way “Pierre’s language stalls, gets obstructed, and repeats itself,” the goal of which, she notes, is “the disintegration of anything remotely representing a family, including not only the bonds of consanguinity (Pierre and his mother; Lucy and her mother; Delly and her parents), the relations that are entered into by choice (Pierre and Isabel; Pierre, Isabel, and Delly; Lucy and Pierre), but even the words on the page.”47 But it may also be the case that this strange recursive style prefigures Melville’s exploration of alternatives to the secular sensibility of privacy—that which Plinlimmon so easily embodies—in his later fiction, most notably in “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and The Confidence-­Man. If Pierre enacts the disintegration of the traditional family, his prose style and penchant for clothing metaphors also suggest an accretion, a building up of alternatives to the complacency of moral privacy. His most radical vision of this emerges in “Bartleby, the Scrivener”—first published a year after Pierre, in the November and December 1853 issues of Putnam’s—in which the narrator (who announces in his opening statement that he is a “rather elderly man” with a “snug business” in a “snug retreat”) cannot seem to apply the logic of privacy with which he is so comfortable to his new employee Bartleby.48 The story follows the lawyer’s increasingly desperate responses to Bartleby as he systematically “prefers not” to copy the law documents he has been hired to reproduce through to his death in the Tombs, the nickname for the Manhattan prison. Bartleby’s passive resistance thwarts, at every turn, the lawyer’s attempt to resolve him into a private individual and a private home (from asking him probing questions about his past to, in the end, inviting Bartleby to live with him). In turn, Bartleby refuses, as Milette Shamir puts it, “to turn private contents into a tradable story.”49 Bartleby’s challenge to the lawyer’s sense of privacy, though, moves well beyond a resistance to public self-­expression, such that the lawyer fleetingly considers his cadaverous employee through the lens of the scandals of Typee and Pierre: namely, nudity and sexuality. When the lawyer discovers, on the way to see a “celebrated preacher” at Trinity Church, that Bartleby has taken up residence in his law office, he frets most of all over Bartleby’s possible state of relative undress: “I was full of uneasiness as to what Bartleby could possibly

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be doing in my office in his shirt sleeves, and in an otherwise dismantled condition of a Sunday morning. Was anything amiss going on? Nay, that was out of the question. It was not to be thought of for a moment that Bartleby was an immoral person. But what could he be doing there?—copying? Nay again, whatever might be his eccentricities, Bartleby was an eminently decorous person. He would be the last man to sit down to his desk in any state approaching to nudity” (22). We can see in this passage that the privacy Bartleby practices provokes the narrator’s curiosity in a way that ultimately demands investigation (and he will within a few pages rifle through Bartleby’s desk and “savings bank”), but the narrator senses that his understanding of what happens in private spaces does not adequately explain Bartleby. While privacy may seem to be the space for “nudity and other sensitive states,” the narrator doubts very much that Bartleby is copying in the buff, much less engaging in even more “indecorous” activities. Bartleby’s privacy, unlike Pierre Glendinning’s, does not seem to be about nudity, let alone sex. As the lawyer puts it, he “was not an immoral person.” Added to that, Bartleby refuses a sense of the correct temporal pacing for his own privacy. Instead, he makes the lawyer wait for him (the lawyer loops around the block while Bartleby gets dressed). Rather than accepting the mandate to account for his eccentric choices with respect to both space (the lawyer’s office) and time (a Sunday), Bartleby upsets the lawyer’s own temporal goal for the day, which is, not coincidentally, to go to church. Despite his attempts to conform Bartleby into a liberal subject responsive to private property claims and eager for domestic spaces, the lawyer faces, at the end of the story, the failure of privacy as a secular sensibility. It does not pad and warm. What is more, Bartleby’s refusals disrupt even the conclusion of the story, such that the lawyer must add a “sequel”—that is, a temporal as well as textual addition to the original tale—that attempts to provide Bartleby with that missing private history. Hearing a rumor that Bartleby had sorted mail for the Dead Letter Office in Washington, DC, the narrator muses on the affective weight of temporal missions gone astray: “Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring:—the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-­note sent in swiftest charity:—he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death” (46). Just as the narrator’s Sunday morning plans are disordered by Bartleby, the dead letters represent a failure to adhere to their conventional

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spatiotemporal role: namely, arriving at their destinations. But because this failure is still linear—still speeding toward an end—the narrator can use it to fix what Bartleby’s unsettling privacy ultimately means: the finality and despair of death. Yet if we return to the opening words of the sequel, we realize this attempt to place Bartleby back into a private story is itself a fiction. The lawyer instructs the reader to “conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters, and assorting them for the flames?” (46). The sequel seems to suggest that this is the private history that the lawyer has long sought, but the wording upsets that assumption from the beginning. “Conceive a man” is an entirely hypothetical suggestion.

Transparent Disguises Unlike Plinlimmon—whose unobtrusive clothes “seemed to disguise this man”—with both Pierre and Bartleby, Melville crafts characters who refuse to perform their morality publicly. That Plinlimmon is the “success” while both of these “authentic” characters die evinces how Melville dwells on the logical but impossible endpoint of imagining that one’s public presentation can always reflect and point to one’s private moral character. When Melville turns to his final novel, he concentrates not on characters attempting to live authentically so much as how many frauds could be enacted through the mandate to do so. In The Confidence-­Man (1857), Melville takes to humorous lengths Plinlimmon’s sleight of hand—in which clothing suggests transparency while making the subject disappear. Critics have long noted how the only consistency of character in this novel “is largely accomplished through eccentricities of body and dress, demographic stereotyping, as well as long dialogues that, given the ever-­present potential for dissimulation, cannot be trusted to indicate deeply held feelings or thoughts,” to quote Maurice S. Lee.50 Readers, though, are “able to distinguish him, or the set of his avatars,” Rachel Cole notes, and thus the claim that the novel “dissolves” identity is not quite apt.51 Instead, by taking the premise of Pierre and “Bartleby” to its logical end, The Confidence-­Man satirizes the sentimental-­realist aesthetic, in which the private moral self is indicated by one’s public surface and is simply waiting to be revealed in full. Considering just how pointedly gendered the question of clothing and disguise is (as this chapter has shown), it is important to state the obvious

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from the start. Like the heroes of the city mystery novels and Plinlimmon, Melville’s men are the ones to have recourse to disguise. If we follow the logic of disguise and transparency in The Confidence-­Man, we might say that Melville is not unaware of this. One of the places where his satire is in fullest force is in the story of John Ringman, the “man with the weed” who works his con on the merchant, Mr. Roberts. Melville’s satire targets two aspects of the sentimental culture of privacy: first, its insistence on private marriage as the only moral organization of private life; and second, on the way clothing and expression must testify to this privacy. Ringman tells Roberts a “tale of singular interest, involving calamities against which no integrity, no forethought, no energy, no genius, no piety, could guard.”52 It is, in short, a story of a disordered private sphere, in which his supposedly malevolent wife, Goneril, is the villain. As the narrator describes her, Goneril is a mannish woman with a “trace of moustache”; she is “lithe and straight, too straight, indeed, for a woman” (60). Her “secret delight” seems to be in breaching the zone of private space by touching young men in company as they converse (to which the narrator, punning, calls this “a touching case”). Added to this, Ringman accuses Goneril of being a “maternal hypocrite” (62). In private she is a jealous, vindictive mother but in public she is a sentimental woman. Goneril sues Ringman for divorce and custody of their child, and, what is more, she wins. “Woman’s-­rights women” swoop in and, with a good lawyer, Goneril convinces a judge that actually Ringman, with his strange insinuations about “touching,” is the one who is insane. At the heart of the story about Goneril is the question of morality and privacy. On the face of it, Goneril’s appearance points to gender disorder, and she seems to refuse her role as a sentimental woman, that is, she refuses to be the moral center of the private household. Yet she deploys its clichés publicly to her advantage. All that said, the revelation of Goneril’s hypocrisy is not the point of this story. After all, this is a con, and relaying a story about disordered privacy and women’s private eccentricities pays out: “As the story went on, [Roberts] drew from his wallet a bank note, but after a while, at some still more unhappy revelation, changed it for another, probably of a somewhat larger amount” (21). Readers might be put further on their guard by keeping in mind that the tale of Goneril is one of the most heavily mediated stories of a heavily mediated novel. The story is first told to Roberts by Ringman, but we as readers do not overhear it, we just glimpse the bills that get exchanged; the story is then told by Roberts to the agent of the Grand Rapids Coal Company, the next confidence man to appear; and it is finally told directly to the

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reader via the narrator. These layers of narrative mediation indicate that the story of Goneril should not be read naively. This is not a story of a disordered private space and a disorderly woman so much as a story about how such stories work because they invite moral judgment. Roberts gains the satisfaction of helping Ringman return to his daughter and reconfigure his household without Goneril (we might think here of Mr. Gore’s conversion back to Protestantism in Sedgwick’s “Matty Gore”). But Roberts gains more than just a simple self-­satisfaction. According to the narrator, in giving his money to Ringman, Roberts avoids any “sentimental pity”; instead, he gives with an “air studiously disclamatory of alms-­giving” (21). Roberts can feel as if he has retained his dignity even as he provides money to Ringman because he has fallen for Ringman’s disguise, which depends on an audience versed in interpreting clothing through the sentimental-­realist aesthetic. The disguise publicly announces a private grief (the death of Goneril has led him to adopt mourning weeds), and this public adherence to his own privately failed marriage is repeated in his facial expressions as he prepares to tell his story: “The man with the weed suddenly assumed a seriousness almost painful. What might be called a writhing expression stole over him. He seemed struggling with some disastrous necessity inkept. He made one or two attempts to speak, but words seemed to choke him. His companion stood in humane surprise, wondering what was to come. At length, with an effort mastering his feelings, in a tolerably composed tone he spoke” (21). The expression of great emotional trial must be registered on the face and point to deeper, greater pain below. The man with the weed appears to be “deep” precisely by struggling not to narrate, not to name the depth and pervasiveness of his experience. In other words, his facial performance must make his disguise disappear, just as Plinlimmon’s unremarkable clothing hides him from public scrutiny by making him transparently available. Making one’s disguise disappear is, of course, the art of the confidence man’s performance. What I want to suggest is that it works because the moral mandate of secularism is that one’s private and public selves be typologically aligned. The performance of the “man with the weed” is twofold: first, his mourning clothes announce personal grief; and second, his struggle to narrate, as evinced on his face, expresses the degree to which he truly, authentically feels his emotional pain. There is an inverse relation between emotion and narrative here, and in struggling to narrate, the confidence man produces authenticity. The disguise disappears. Melville’s fiction points to a useful gap between privacy’s demand that one be transparently readable as moral and the potential use of such a disguise to

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turn authenticity against its own mandates. Yet the success of this endeavor depends on whether the tale and context conform to heteronormative private morality. Where John Ringman succeeds, Pierre Glendinning spectacularly fails. As do most of the women in the city mystery novels, their bodies betraying so much disorder only to be revealed and shamed by the more correctly disguised male protagonists. Similarly, Ruth Hall in Fanny Fern’s novel may be the photographic negative of Ringman. Authentically sentimental and maternal, and truly in love with her husband, Ruth is brought to poverty by a perfect storm of propriety and hypocrisy: Ruth’s family refuses to spare money from their own coffers for her upkeep, and her mother-­in-­law spreads rumors that Ruth’s marriage (despite all public appearances) was secretly unhappy, and that Ruth is a “maternal hypocrite” like Goneril. Women’s bodies do not easily allow for such a disappearing act. Ruth Hall’s critique of the way the language around hypocrisy can bind women is a reminder that Melville is not the only author to critique some of the clichés of sentimentalism as they emerged in tandem with the secular sensibility of privacy, in which a promotion of authentic self-­expression (including emotionality) and Protestant belief sit uncomfortably together as markers of privacy. We saw the hard limit, as I noted in Chapter 2, in the violent response to Mormonism. What Typee especially reminds us, as well, is that privacy was—and continues to be—a racial construction. Surface signs of racial difference—in terms of bodies and the clothing that encases them—became indices of one’s character, a problem that follows from the sentimental-­realist aesthetic that Sedgwick, Stowe, and others all deploy. That the protections of privacy are only afforded to those who stay within the bounds of white middle-­class propriety has long been understood. The next chapter builds on those insights about privacy and morality to consider how they fuel a related phenomenon: The tendency to weaponize many of the elements of the secular sensibility of privacy (the emphasis on authenticity, the equation of unseen with secret and sinful). As I will examine, the faith in the moral work of exposure, so apparent in the city mystery genre, also helped foster the conditions for widespread accusations of abolitionist conspiracies and defenses of white supremacy and slavery.

CHAPTER 4

Conspiracy

The antebellum United States was a violent place. Of its many sites of violence, the most pervasive and brutal were in the slave system of the South, but this penchant was not contained there. From the political violence that Joanne Freeman has charted to the anti-­Catholic hysteria that ended in the 1834 burning of the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts, to the mob violence that forced the Mormons from Missouri to Illinois and finally to Utah, following one’s convictions, one’s party, or even one’s favorite theater actor could be physically dangerous in the antebellum North and West as well. But no group in the North was subjected to more frequent and severe mob violence than African Americans. Riots in New York and Philadelphia, among other places, operated as violent enforcements of a brutal color line in the cities’ geography and public spaces. In Philadelphia, for instance, riots against both the Black community and the growing multiracial abolitionist movement broke out in 1834 and 1838, the latter culminating in the burning of Pennsylvania Hall. And violence broke out again in 1849, in riots that were immortalized by George Lippard in The Killers (1850) and by the writer at the center of this chapter, Frank J. Webb. Conspiracy theories stoked these riots, and it is to both the logic of conspiracy and the attempts to confront it on the part of abolitionists that this chapter turns. The 1834 riot in New York provides a particularly illuminating example of how conspiracy theory and mob violence worked together in the antebellum North. The riot erupted in reaction to plans to commemorate the abolition of slavery in the state. The event, which was to coincide with the Fourth of July and to be held at Chatham Street Chapel in Manhattan, had been organized by Peter Williams, the first African American Episcopal priest in the United States, along with the white abolitionists Arthur and Lewis Tappan.1 Before the commemoration could even take place, the public had been

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enflamed by months of rumors about the newly formed and integrated American Anti-­Slavery Society, founded by William Lloyd Garrison and Arthur Tappan. Accusations screamed from the white press that the American Anti-­ Slavery Society encouraged “deluded” white women to “defile” themselves, to “act out a living martyrdom” from a sense that it is “her Christian duty thus to mortify and crucify her antipathies and prejudices on the altar of abolition principles.”2 These panicked accusations, in turn, prompted the Tappans to explicitly and publicly deny that their goal was the sexual integration of society. For instance, under the headline “It Is Not True,” the Tappan brothers’ antislavery newspaper the Emancipator rejected, among other rumors, that “abolitionists have asked their daughters to marry colored men,” that “Mr. Arthur Tappan has divorced his wife, and married a colored woman,” or that “‘fifty of those’ colored lads ‘who belonged to a Sabbath school before the abolition measures commenced,’ deserted it and went ‘parading the street with their canes and dandy dress, seeking white wives.’”3 Amid this cacophony of fear and outrage, and the cowardly retreat and denials of the white abolitionists, one rumor stands out: the dandy, with his cane and fancy clothes, seeking a white wife on Broadway. As a common stereotype in anti-­abolitionist texts, the Black dandy was symptomatic of a broader paranoid orientation toward antiracist and antislavery activism in the North, and he represented in both visual and literary forms an alleged conspiracy brewing among northern activists: a conspiracy to enforce “amalgamation,” the midcentury racist term for a sexually and racially integrated society. According to Tavia Nyong’o, what we see in panics around amalgamation as they played out in northern cities is akin to Foucault’s thesis about sexuality in the Victorian era. Rather than banning or making “amalgamation” unspeakable, anti-­abolitionists continually expressed, imagined, and called into being representations of interracial sex even as their ostensible goal was to banish the possibility entirely. An “incitement to speak of sex,” Nyong’o explains, “accompanied the first broad struggle the young democracy had regarding black equality.”4 And it was not just sex in general but the potential for interracial legal marriage that fueled this paranoia. In this chapter, I spend time with the conspiracy theory about practical amalgamation, and the real-­life violence that was its result. Conspiracy theory is a genre that sits uncomfortably close to modes of realism central to the novel form. As I have been arguing throughout this book, revelation structured both secular morality and realist modes in nineteenth-­century fiction. The aesthetic underwriting conspiracy theories (like the supposed

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secret abolitionist plan to institute “practical amalgamation”) is that of a specific realist gesture: the revelation of secret corruption hidden from the public but known to the privileged few. This is the form by which Sedgwick brought forth her villains’ true characters. It is also the structuring conceit of George Lippard’s and George Thompson’s city mystery novels. And revelation was how Melville’s confidence men worked their marks. As anyone living in the twenty-­first century knows, conspiracy thinking is very hard to confront. It proved extremely taxing to abolitionists, whose most popular genre was, after all, the exposé, through which they called attention to the crimes of slavery.5 Like the related genre of the city mystery novel, which Chapter 3 explored, the abolitionist exposé was a form fully answerable to the private function of morality in antebellum secular society. It assumed that exposing the private corruptions, crimes, and sins of the powerful would lead inevitably to reform. In hijacking this common realist mode, conspiracy theory exemplifies the way the gesture of revelation, rather than the facts revealed, is what creates authority and trust. As such, conspiracy theory gains its credence from but also puts pressure on the secular sensibility of privacy. If privacy is a displayed sensibility, one that is meant to perform a deeper, more authentic moral orientation, secrets (as we have seen in many ways) are its opposite. Outing secret sins feels like moral work, and that is how conspiracy theory accrues a sense of facticity. Revelation feels like truth, and it encourages moral judgment; whether the facts are actually facts is less important. Abolitionists were forced to confront a variety of paranoid conspiracies about their movement and the rhetorical modes they drew upon to do so often fell beyond or outside of the popular exposé genre, though that genre remained the abolitionists’ favored form, most apparent in the slave narrative. This chapter concentrates on Frank J. Webb’s Garies and Their Friends (1857) as a powerful fictional representation of the violence that conspiracy thinking can foment. Written in the sentimental-­realist mode, The Garies and Their Friends tackles the challenges posed to antislavery activists by the gesture of revelation so central to conspiracy theory, and, in doing so, Webb considers the real limitations of that aesthetic in a political environment shaped by paranoia. Webb was born into the Black community in Philadelphia and, according to Eric Gardner, was in the clothing business (probably as a tailor) before he wrote The Garies. His first wife, Mary, was well known as a talented elocutionist, dubbed in her prime as the “Colored Siddons” or the “Black Siddons.” Stowe condensed Uncle Tom’s Cabin into a dramatic reading, The Christian Slave, expressly for Mary to perform on stage, which she did in

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both the United States and Britain in 1855 and 1856, presumably at the same time that Webb composed The Garies, which was published in 1857 in London with prefaces by Stowe and Henry, Lord Brougham.6 Webb’s concerns are not unrelated to the urgent question of the southern slave system, but The Garies lingers instead on the place where many slave narratives end—the North—and on the challenges to Black life and community there. The novel traces the stories of two families: Clarence and Emily Garie who move from Georgia to Philadelphia at Emily’s behest; and the Ellises, whom the Garies befriend upon their arrival in the North. In Georgia, Emily is both enslaved and married to Clarence, a white plantation owner, and by moving north she hopes to gain legitimacy for her marriage and legal freedom for her two children (also named Clarence and Emily). Once in Philadelphia, the Garies are embraced by the Ellises and the larger African American community. Before they can really settle in, though, a riot fanned by racism, greed, and a personal vendetta against the Garies by the archvillain of the novel, George Stevens, leaves Clarence and Emily dead, and sets their two children on very different courses: Emily joins the Ellises and stays in the Black community; Clarence goes away to school and passes for white. Clarence’s race is finally revealed by George Stevens’s son, which cuts short both his engagement to a white New York belle and his young life. The plot of The Garies thus deals with two conspiracies across two decades: first, the actual conspiracy that culminates in the riots that kill the elder Garies; and second, the paranoid fantasy of a conspiracy of “practical amalgamation” supposedly being plotted by abolitionists. In tackling the representation of conspiracy, The Garies and Their Friends helps us think about the role charges of hypocrisy played in the debates over slavery. As Robert Reid-­Pharr points out, Webb targets “not simply the hypocrisy of white bourgeois characters but also the means by which codes of bourgeois domesticity enable this same hypocrisy.”7 Webb, though, examines this hypocrisy from within the sentimental-­realist aesthetic that was popular in the era, in which surface details about characters and their homes were meant to signal deeper truths about the self. Sentimental culture, from fiction to fashion, imagined that surfaces indexed authentic psychological and moral depths. This authenticity, as Webb knew, was performative even as the ideology insisted on it as true. And it was raced. As Carla L. Peterson explains, the very language of the sentimental culture of clothing was always already coded as white.8 As such, self-­performance in antebellum African American writing is not just found in the “spectacular performances” that

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Daphne Brooks describes as the “cultural excesses, layering aliases and costumes, devices and genres atop one another” but also in the “disappearing acts” of middle-­class respectability that Peterson identifies. These latter ones can be described as a type of “dark sousveillance,” Simone Browne’s term for the “tactics employed to render one’s self out of sight.” Building on Steve Mann’s theory of “sousveillance” as “watching from below,” Browne defines these as “strategies used in the flight to freedom from slavery” that are “necessarily ones of undersight.”9 We might think of respectability politics as a type of “undersight,” as Browne defines it, because, as Peterson explains, it challenged through subdued personal presentation the linking of respectability to whiteness: “If this elite’s assimilationist ideology was on one level complicitous with the dominant culture, on another level it sought to subvert this culture, condemning its failure to uphold its stated ideals and asserting the African American’s right to both political freedom and cultural distinctiveness.”10 In pointing to the way even authenticity was not truly authentic, Black authors understood much better than their white counterparts how expectations of moral authenticity were explicitly raced, and always performative. In this way, African American uses of respectability politics challenged a white moral performance that coded as morally authentic while obscuring its role in white supremacy. In The Garies, Webb does not simply expose white hypocrisy—though he certainly does that. Rather, he fictionalizes a particularly devilish rhetorical problem evident in the rash of anti-­abolitionist attacks that promised to reveal the “real” conspiracy of the abolitionists: how the use of that realist gesture of revelation potentially disarmed a common abolitionist tactic, namely, the revelation of southern hypocrisy with respect to the sexual violence that pervaded the system of slavery. The novel ends with the appearance of perhaps the quintessential vehicle of the revelation of secrets, a detective who sorts out the conspiracy and reveals the dirty dealings of the villainous George Stevens. The detective seems, at first glance, to be the ultimate realist trope. Yet, as this chapter explicates, he too is scrutinized for the limitations of revelation as a mode of activist and novelistic resolution. Joining other Black abolitionist texts of the era, The Garies and Their Friends challenges conspiracy accusations not merely by marshaling “more facts” but by exploring other rhetorical modes that partake in subterfuge and “undersight”—including irony and sarcasm—as means of confronting the stalemate of exposé and conspiracy theory.

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Practical Jokes and Practical Amalgamation in The Garies The Garies and Their Friends opens with a dinner table discussion of a practical joke. The setting of the novel’s first chapter is Georgia, where the Garies, a “family of peculiar construction,” listen to Winston, Emily’s cousin, tell a story of passing in the North. We join the tale midway through, as Clarence Garie, in near hysterics, asks, “so you say, Winston, that they never suspected you were coloured?” Winston responds: I don’t think they had the remotest idea of such a thing. At least, if they did, they must have conquered their prejudices most effectually, for they treated me with the most distinguished consideration. Old Mr. Priestly was like a father to me; and as for his daughter Clara and her aunt, they were politeness embodied. The old gentleman was so much immersed in business, that he was unable to bestow much attention upon me; so he turned me over to Miss Clara to be shown the lions. We went to the opera, the theatre, to museums, concerts, and I can’t tell where all. The Sunday before I left I accompanied her to church, and after service, as we were coming out, she introduced me to Miss Van Cote and her mamma. Mrs. Van Cote was kind enough to invite me to her grand ball.11 The joke that tickles Clarence Garie so much is how, inadvertently, this white family has enacted “practical amalgamation” so thoroughly without ever knowing they have: inviting Winston into their home, allowing him to accompany their daughter not only to the theatre but to church. The presentation of the moral self, tied as it was to other performances of middle-­ class respectability like visiting museums or attending concerts and balls, was in the proper alignment of bodies and public space to testify to private moral arrangements. Winston has enacted the greatest fear of a fevered anti-­ abolitionist imaginary: promiscuously mingling in private and public white spaces as a potential suitor to a white woman. Clarence had provided Winston with a letter of introduction into the Priestly family and, it would seem, has played a joke on them, never mentioning that Winston was not white. His amusement arises from upturning the racist claims of the father, who “prides himself on being able to detect evidences of the least drop of African blood in any one; and makes long speeches about the natural antipathy of the Anglo-­Saxon to anything with a

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drop of negro blood in its veins” (45), and who “has published two of them in pamphlet form” (46). Clarence chuckles about writing Mr. Priestly a letter to congratulate him on his “great change of sentiment,” delighting in the image of him reading the letter with “his hair almost on end  with disgust” (45). Clarence has targeted for his joke a man who holds the very assumptions of physiological revolt and moral opprobrium that structured attacks on and conspiracy theories about the American Anti-­Slavery Society. Yet the practical joke has a completely different effect on Winston, who sees more than the comeuppance of a racist old man: The introductions with which Mr. Garie had kindly favoured him, had enabled him to see enough of Northern society to convince him, that, amongst the whites, he could not form either social or business connections, should his identity with the African race be discovered; and whilst, on the other hand, he would have found sufficiently refined associations amongst the people of colour to satisfy his social wants, he felt that he could not bear the isolation and contumely to which they were subjected. He, therefore, decided on leaving the United States, and on going to some country where, if he must struggle for success in life, he might do it without the additional embarrassments that would be thrown in his way in his native land, solely because he belonged to an oppressed race. (54) Winston’s peek inside the private world of white New Yorkers merely revealed to him the moral hypocrisy of the urban North. He decides that there is no place for him there. Passing carried too high a risk and the segregation and oppression of Black citizens made, in Winston’s opinion, civic life cramped and inhospitable. His solution is to move to Europe—which he does, disappearing entirely from the novel’s plot. Winston, Webb makes clear, was not wrong to be suspicious. For Clarence’s practical joke comes back to haunt his own family. As the opening chapter unfolds, we know that the Garies are a “peculiar” family of the very type of “practical amalgamation” already occurring in the South. Their hope that the North will be more hospitable to their family is ultimately rooted in a form of what Lauren Berlant has called “cruel optimism.”12 Emily longs to move to Philadelphia so that she can be part of a larger civic and social community: to have her own friends and give her children freedom. To be “out” as a legitimately married couple is Emily’s dream. Yet when they arrive, they

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immediately face the severe racial segregation of the North when a white minister refuses to marry Clarence and Emily. From the marriage ceremony, eventually conducted by a Black minister, to their interment—which must occur in a “colored” burial ground at the Episcopal Church if they are to be buried together—all of the stages of private life are strictly segregated, with the white side of the line policing and excluding those with any hereditary connection to Blackness. The white urban North, as Winston had already discovered, worked hard to avoid amalgamation, even in death. Webb’s novel reflects on this drive to sort private property and private life according to racial belonging, working with the conventions of the marriage plot to “unravel,” as Tess Chakkalakal argues, “the idea that a legal marriage could also count as a guarantee of civil freedom.”13 The Garies and Their Friends thus fits into the larger pattern Ann duCille identified in her groundbreaking work, where she notes how the barriers to and emphases on legal marriage—and their idealization in white literary forms—played a central role in the first century of African American writing, creating a “coupling convention” through which African American writers “inscribe, replot, subvert, exploit, and explode the middle-­class wedlock ideal.”14 As we saw in Chapter 2, the debate over marriage as a private contract—and the freedom to potentially leave that marriage, as free love advocates called for—culminated in the invention of “traditional marriage” as a moral order for private life. This largely white and northern debate was part of a larger, more complex question about marriage as an institution in a slave society. Private marriage certainly did not offer freedom to enslaved men and women, who were barred from legal marriages in the first place, nor was it a guarantee of moral standing and assimilation in the North. Webb seems at his most skeptical about interracial love and marriage as a model for private life when he kills off the older Clarence and Emily and has their third child die at birth. Webb depicts a symbolic stillbirth, an unmistakably pessimistic conclusion about life in a segregated and racist North.

Secularism and Amalgamation The growing violent clashes in the North, as Webb depicts them in The Garies, were rooted in two related phenomena: the economic and racial tensions of northern urban centers and a growing radicalness and visibility among white abolitionists. The shift for many white abolitionists away from gradual

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emancipation and colonizationist schemes to embracing immediatism followed in the wake of William Lloyd Garrison’s founding of the Liberator in 1831. Influenced by Black abolitionists like David Walker, David Ruggles, and Thomas Van Rensselaer, Garrison first pitched the Liberator to the Black community, and he depended on Black subscribers for its early success.15 As the immediatist movement grew among a small number of white northerners, most apparent in the founding of the American Anti-­Slavery Society, the violent backlash was swift and intense. According to Elise Lemire, early arguments by white abolitionists like Garrison and Lydia Maria Child against racial prejudice in the North sparked a pointed campaign against “practical amalgamation,” which came to symbolize white northerners’ reaction to a new terrain of antislavery activism. By this term, northern anti-­abolitionists sought to object not simply to a feared unleashing of interracial sex but to legalized interracial marriage.16 As a word that recast abolitionism as a scheme to promote interracial marriage, the accusation of amalgamation exemplifies the moral idiom of secularism. Derived from metallurgic terminology, amalgamation implied an association to alchemy, the mixing and transforming of metals and substances through a combination of magic and science. As Nyong’o argues, “Practical amalgamationists, like medieval alchemists, were accused of meddling in the ordained and regulated order of things with their heretical doctrines and obscure practices.”17 In this way, abolitionists’ opponents claimed for themselves the position of secular morality; they asserted themselves to be the rational, modern Protestants in contradistinction to the superstitious and medieval practices of the abolitionists. The reference to alchemy in the accusation of “practical amalgamation” sat in an uncomfortable tension with the other term in the pairing: practical. While the word amalgamation hearkened back to an imagined era of medieval superstition, the insistence on the word practical was an invocation to scrutinize hypocrisy. “According to their opponents,” Lemire explains, “if abolitionists were not already married to black spouses as a means of ‘practically’ combating prejudice, this only proved that, in addition to having radical and dangerous ideas, they were hypocritical.”18 As Lemire shows, anti-­abolitionists borrowed from the “rhetoric of practice from the Puritan tradition of the Covenant of Works to argue that the abolitionists could only really fulfill their stated goal” by making a “practical testimony” of their own “lack of prejudice.”19 The word practical does not simply point to a waning Calvinist theology, though; the Protestant emphasis on making one’s public practice a signifier of private belief was

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central to secularism. Hypocrisy, here, is less an ostensibly religious moral code than it is an immanent form of moral accusation, not worried about souls so much as votes, economics, and legislation. Equally apparent in the term practical amalgamation is that it acts as a flashpoint in the development of privacy. In the backlash against the abolitionists, we see an important conflation, as practical and sexual came to mean the same thing. What this shows is how, as religion and marriage were both privatized, “morality” narrowed to mean solely sexual morality. That said, the fear here is not sex in general but the legitimizing of interracial sex through legal marriage. This conflation is apparent in Edward Clay’s series of satirical illustrations from 1839, “Practical Amalgamation,” produced in response to the 1838 riots in Philadelphia. In one illustration from the series, “The Wedding,” Clay creates a stylistic amalgamation that exemplifies the panic his etching was meant to induce. At the center, a white woman drawn in a sentimental style, with tasteful clothes and head demurely turned down, holds the hand of a Black dandy rendered in the conventional style of racist caricature. As Lemire puts it, “For Clay the two different races belong to two different art forms.”20 The groom and his attendants, one of whom seems to be a Haitian ambassador, are not dressed in the current mode for men, while Clay dresses William Lloyd Garrison on the far right (from behind) in the more typical trousers of the day. Clay’s depiction therefore insists on two ways in which the groom is out of place: his minstrel caricature is reinforced by his passé style. He is sartorially and racially a threat to modernity and morality as embodied by the white bride, who is, in turn, as white as her wedding dress. The panic around interracial marriage found in Clay’s series was everywhere evident in accusations against the abolitionist movement in these decades. For example, in the wake of the 1834 Fourth of July riots in New York City, the New York physician and general gadfly David Meredith Reese wrote A Brief Review of the “First Annual Report of the American Anti-­Slavery Society” (1834) in which he obsessed over what he saw as “amalgamation meetings.” In such meetings, he explained to his white readers, white and Black abolitionists are seated “promiscuously,” a word he repeats throughout the pamphlet, as he does in uncovering such race mixing in “one or more dining parties . . . given for whites and blacks promiscuously, and in several of the churches,” where “coloured persons had been introduced into the pews with white people, nolens volens.”21 No reader would miss Reese’s suturing of “promiscuous” with interracial public assemblies. While the word had meant generally “undiscriminating” since at least the sixteenth century, by the turn

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Figure 12. “Practical Amalgamation. (The Wedding).” E. W. Clay, 1839. Image courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

of the nineteenth century promiscuous increasingly referred to being undiscriminating in one’s sexual relations.22 The sexual meaning, in other words, increasingly came to the forefront in an era that sought to regulate sex acts more directly and would produce, by the end of the century, modern sexological discourse. Yet what seems uppermost in Reese’s mind is less identity and desire than legal legitimacy. Reese rests his outrage over the “promiscuous” meetings in what he sees as the function of marriage in liberal secular society: “All civil and political equality is founded upon social and domestic equality, and the universal experience of mankind will demonstrate, that intermarriage lies at the foundation of both. He therefore who aims at producing the former, in any aspect, must consent fully to the latter, whether it enter into his plans and purposes or not, since it is necessarily included.”23 Reese’s polemic follows a logic we have seen before. He opens by asserting that “civil and political equality is founded upon social and domestic equality,” and that to produce both, one must allow for intermarriage. In this context, Reese is

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arguing that “intermarriage” (by which he means nonincestual marriage) is the foundation of a stable society, and that it ultimately produces equality. Just as in Chapter 2, where women’s marriages were imagined as resolving the disruptions of their political and spiritual wanderings, here segregated marriage produces white male equality. At the heart of Reese’s formulation is an important addition to Joan Scott’s argument in Sex and Secularism (2018), in which she demonstrates how arguments for secularism in the nineteenth century depended on enshrining gender inequality.24 Here, Reese assumes that secular liberal society must be produced through marriage, but since liberal society is also white society for Reese, that society can only be guaranteed by outlawing interracial marriage. But there is a further contortion here that warrants mentioning, and that is Reese’s accusation that white abolitionists, on this score, are rank hypocrites. Reese claims that if one consents to this proposition and one is an abolitionist, then one must logically practice (and not just condone) interracial marriage. Because if intermarriage is the foundation of an egalitarian society, then the integrated society of the abolitionists’ political program demands that they embrace “practical amalgamation”: “When any of those advocates of immediate emancipation who publicly disclaim the doctrine of amalgamation, are pressed in private conversation with the necessary and unavoidable connexion between political and domestic equality, and they are constrained to admit that the former cannot in the nature of things be attained without the latter; they will invariably agree, that if intermarriages must be allowed in order to the elevation of the coloured race, to equal rights, that elevation ought to be effected, without regard to consequences.”25 In the growing anti-­abolitionist sentiment, white abolitionists were all hypocrites unless they engaged in practical amalgamation. For both Reese and Clay, it is not simply that one must be ideologically consistent in public; rather, private life—and more importantly, private, sincere feeling and desire—must fully and completely evince one’s public stance. In other words, to undermine the political assertions and moral authority of white abolitionists, Reese invited readers to look at how those abolitionists organized their private lives. Anti-­ abolitionists like Reese could not imagine that white abolitionists would sincerely, privately believe in the benefits of interracial sex and marriage. And many white abolitionists like the Tappans confirmed Reese’s racist assumptions by precipitously retreating from such accusations. In this retreat, white abolitionists also seemed to consent to Reese’s and others’ underlying argument: that privately they rejected sexual equality

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because they were naturally repulsed by the idea. They played right into the hands of those decrying “practical amalgamation” and who were building the foundations of scientific racism. Consider the feverish racism of A Sojourn in the City of Amalgamation, in the Year of Our Lord, 19— (1835), written by Jerome B. Holgate but pseudonymously published under the name “Oliver Bolokitten.” In the eponymous “city of amalgamation,” technology intervenes to help white people overcome a “natural” disgust with African Americans, including through a perpetual motion contrivance composed of “fans and little vials,” with “its object being to protect the husband from those disagreeable evaporations exhaling from the odiferous spouse,” or applying the whole body to the “Great Boiler,” meant to dissipate “every heinous feeling” and prejudice from the blood of whites.26 Imagined here as a physiological barrier and a natural disgust, white racism is so intertwined with white bodies that there is no way for white abolitionists to be anything but hypocrites. Equally important to their depictions of white disgust, anti-­abolitionists claimed for themselves the realm of secularity by rooting their arguments in a supposed scientific facticity. And, to return to where we started with The Garies, this is exactly what tickles Clarence. He has upturned the physiological defenses of racism by the likes of Reese and Holgate, but his joke is not at all funny to Winston. Indeed, Winston’s ability to pass as white has not caused him to chuckle. Instead, it merely revealed the private world of the North’s white supremacy in all of its revolting ugliness. The anti-­abolitionists’ supposed exposés gained rhetorical power from their repurposing of the word practical in the term practical amalgamation. The term accrued a double meaning. It simultaneously invoked both the sexual act (a secret sin that is hidden) and the real (that sex is the basic truth of everyone). They then drew on an ideology of scientism, backing their claims up with supposed facts about physiology. Their version of “race” was thus both surface and depth, based on what is visible but also what is purportedly deep in the body. Of course, Clay’s, Reese’s, and Holgate’s polemics about an abolitionist conspiracy to make interracial marriage the foundation of society were outlandish on the face of it—after all, few white abolitionists were free enough of their own racism to actively support such a plot. Yet it was a powerfully insidious inversion and projection of the open secret of white enslavers’ sexual violence against enslaved Black women. By relocating the facts of interracial sex from the slave system to the abolitionists, Reese and other anti-­abolitionists conveniently covered over one secret and pretended to expose another.

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Abolitionism Unveiled! Abolitionists both Black and white depended on techniques of exposure, and the exposé was their most popular genre—which included but was not limited to the slave narrative. Their rhetorical emphasis on the revelation of facts and crimes, as Jeannine DeLombard has argued, was drawn from the law: “a new interracial cadre of abolitionists redirected the legal tactics of earlier reformers into the mass medium of print, converting antebellum print culture itself into an alternative tribunal.”27 Reports, trial transcripts, correspondences from witnesses on the ground, and memoirs from and by formerly enslaved men and women: the Anti-­Slavery Society depended on a number of genres that together insisted on facts as a way to combat ignorance and disinformation about slavery.28 To take one example, Theodore Weld’s American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (1839) suggests that there are facts to be uncovered—there is an “as it is” as opposed to a “how it can be imagined.” Equally ubiquitous was the claim that “truth was stranger than fiction,” which echoed across the antislavery press, in titles and subtitles, prefaces, and speeches. It is the title of Josiah Henson’s 1858 reprint of his memoir (which opens with an introduction by Harriet Beecher Stowe). It is the narrator’s defense in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851) when, in the final chapter of the novel, Stowe reunites the far-­flung members of Eliza’s and George’s families: “The note-­book of a missionary, among the Canadian fugitives, contains truth stranger than fiction. How can it be otherwise, when a system prevails which whirls families and scatters their members, as the wind whirls and scatters the leaves of autumn?”29 Perhaps most memorably in William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853), it is the title of chapter 23, “Truth Stranger Than Fiction.” Anti-­abolitionists thus adopted the most common abolitionist genre and turned it back on the abolitionists. Exposés of abolitionism screamed from headlines and presses North and South, starting after Nat Turner’s Rebellion and not ending even with the beginning of the Civil War.30 After the burning of Pennsylvania Hall in 1838, William Wilcocks Sleigh published Abolitionism Exposed! Proving That the Principles of Abolitionism Are Injurious to the Slaves Themselves, Destructive to This Nation, and Contrary to the Express Commands of God (1838), which opens with a realist claim: “Mankind has ever been disposed to be carried away with names and words, with the representation of things, rather than with things themselves: and that portion of mankind thus apt to be deceived by mere sound, is generally the most

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innocent—the best—the most unsuspecting—the most charitable—these very qualities rendering them the easy victims of design and imprudence.”31 Sleigh’s privileged position is to see truth even when it is obscured by sophistries. There are “things” and then there are “representations,” he claims, and to get at the truth of slavery one must unveil the hypocrisies of the abolitionists, rooted in their selective championing of the rights of men, and “all of the infidels on the face of the earth!”32 (It will not be surprising to readers of this book that Sleigh ties abolitionists to Thomas Paine, Robert Owen, and Frances Wright). When one unveils the true facts of abolitionism, he insists, we find infidelity and hypocrisy, not earnest morality. Just as a slew of “anti-­Tom” novels tried to turn the genre of sentimental fiction against the popularity of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, these exposés responded to abolitionists’ own exposés of the crimes of slavery, and they sought to reveal instead the hypocrisies and conspiracies of abolitionists. In Bigotry Exposed: or, A Calm Discussion of the Abolition Question (1835), the writer opens by accusing “an association of fanatics in the non-­slaveholding states” of “indulg[ing] in the most absurd feelings and opinions in regard to the question of abolishing slavery in the United States; and who spare no pains, and use every means, to raise an excitement among the people upon this subject.”33 Tracts by the American Anti-­Slavery Society are the works of “insurrectionists” who “deserve no better name than traitors who excite the slave to cut the throat of his master and his helpless family.”34 As he winds himself up, he ultimately calls the antislavery campaign a “witch hunt,” in which “constitutions, laws, justice, oaths—the safety of the union—the peace of society, must all bend to their mawkish sensibility.”35 Here, we see a juxtaposition that had long structured antisentimentalism: the further away one gets from feeling, the closer one gets to fact.36 In this way, Reese, Sleigh, and other defenders of slavery began in the 1830s and 1840s not simply to foment a panic over interracial marriage; rather, they began to build a conspiracy theory about it. While taking up the common position of the secular, rational seeker of truth, anti-­abolitionists repositioned their opponents as indulging in a “mawkish sensibility” and stoking irrational emotionality in their readers. By revealing abolitionists’ alleged conspiracy to institute a society of “practical amalgamation,” they claimed the secular rational ground, one supposedly based in hard physiological facts. All told, these conspiracy theories worked in the real world. The northern urban riots had one goal: the reassertion of a stark segregation in urban geography and social life and the attempted economic, political, and social suppression of a rising Black middle class.

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Genres of Undersight The pressure of these conspiracy accusations over “practical amalgamation” proved both an evidentiary and formal problem for abolitionists. Underlying the abolitionists’ fight to end slavery was an epistemological struggle over what counted as “fact,” and that struggle was mediated by the genre of the exposé, which promoted the gesture of revelation as the way in which these facts became trusted as authentic. This is not to say that both sides had equivalent “facts.” While abolitionists endeavored to reveal slavery for what it was, anti-­abolitionists drew on the mode of revelation to spin conspiracy theories. The stalemate was not so much empirical as it was formal and rhetorical. While abolitionists responded in these decades with more facts and more exposés, they also very often drew on what Frederick Douglass called “scorching irony.” As he put it in “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” (1852), “At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-­day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke.”37 Though Douglass names this rhetorical shift as a result of the stakes of the fight in 1852, “scorching irony” is, in fact, an apt description of a major strain of abolitionist style across the previous two decades. In his introduction to American Slavery as It Is, a text that announces in its title a dedication to facticity, Theodore Weld confronts the accusation that his book will be “incendiary” and “libelous” (not to mention “bigoted” against the South) not by marshaling facts, but by extended sarcasm: “The man who robs you every day, is, forsooth, quite too tender-­hearted ever to cuff or kick you! True, he can snatch your money, but he does it gently lest he should hurt you.”38 Weld aims directly at the bad faith of slaveowners’ protests over exposés of cruelty, and he does so here not by exposing that bad faith directly but via irony. Without directly saying it, Weld seeks to convey what an unbelievable defense of slavery this is. Stowe is more famous as a sentimentalist, but her sentimentality depended on a sharp sense of irony, which can be seen in her chapter titles (“In Which it Appears that a Senator is But a Man” and “In Which Property Gets into an Improper State of Mind”) and in her narrative voice, as when, after waxing on about the Christian promises of Africa in a romantic racialist strain, the narrator interrupts herself to ask: “Was this what Marie St. Clare was thinking of, as she stood, gorgeously dressed, on the verandah, on Sunday morning, clasping a diamond bracelet on her slender wrist? Most likely it was. Or, if it wasn’t that, it was something else; for Marie patronized good things, and she was

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going now, in full force,—diamonds, silk, and lace, and jewels, and all,—to a fashionable church, to be very religious. Marie always made a point to be very pious on Sundays.”39 Stowe here skewers Marie for her religious hypocrisy by way of her fashion, but the final line—“Marie always made a point to be very pious on Sundays”—is pure deadpan rather than character revelation. Weld, Douglass, and Stowe were far from the first to deploy irony as a response to anti-­abolitionist attacks. In fact, irony had long been a fellow traveler with the realist genres of the movement. An early and expert example of the tradition of abolitionist irony can be seen in David Ruggles’s response to David Meredith Reese’s paranoid screed against “practical amalgamation.” Reese’s pamphlet participated in building, to quote Peter Coviello, whiteness as an affective relation and “an identification from which one increasingly could not demur.”40 Because of this affiliative expression and audience address, Reese never imagined Black readers at all, just as the Priestly family did not entertain the idea that Winston might not be white. David Ruggles, though, eavesdropped on this conversation. A prominent abolitionist in New York, Ruggles was a writer and general agent for the Tappan brothers’ antislavery newspaper, the Emancipator, and eventually he founded and wrote his own magazine, The Mirror of Liberty. He was also an active member of the New York Committee of Vigilance (whose reports Ruggles published in The Mirror of Liberty). Attacked frequently in the white press for his activism, Ruggles helped many fugitives from slavery reach safer regions, including Frederick Douglass upon his arrival in New York City. Ruggles’s activism took a toll economically and physically. Bankrupted in his attempts to rescue William Dixon, who was kidnapped into slavery, Ruggles sued for back pay from the Committee of Vigilance, found himself denounced in the pages of the Colored American for this public breach, and lost his eyesight after his imprisonment following the Darg Case, one of the most sensational of the committee’s cases (an attempt to free an enslaved man, Thomas Hughes). Ruggles moved to Northampton, Massachusetts, and tried the water cure for his various ailments, eventually becoming a water cure specialist himself (Sojourner Truth was one of his patients).41 Published not two months after Reese’s attack on the American Anti-­ Slavery Society, Ruggles’s “Extinguisher” Extinguished! Or, David  M. Reese, M.D. “Used Up” (1834) was, according to his biographer Graham Hodges, a “historic event,” as one of the “first black American imprints” in a print world hostile to Black writing and publishing.42 In it, Ruggles attacked Reese’s argument via two rhetorical routes. First, he turns the tables on Reese, calling him the hypocrite by pointing out that practical amalgamation is already

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happening: “Now as amalgamation seems to be the only bugbear that can be held up against abolitionists, let every candid man ask himself this question— What is the cause of amalgamation between white and colored persons? and after reviewing the North and South he must come to the conclusion that slavery is the cause. Then if he wished to check that base and damning prostitution that is fast making the United States ‘a nation of mullatoes and mongrels,’ would he not annihilate slavery?”43 Pointing out where the real “amalgamation” occurs (the slaveholding South), Ruggles positions himself, as Reese did, as the true voice of morality. However, he shifts almost immediately into studied exaggeration: “To me nothing is more disgusting than to see my race bleeched [sic] to a pallid sickly hue by the lust of those cruel and fastidious white men whose prejudices are so strong that they can’t come in sight of a colored skin; ah no! his natural ‘prejudices’ forbid it! Oh delicacy thou hast run mad, and chased thy sister chastity out of the bounds of the Southern States! Thou has frightened the Doctor too, for not a word does he say about the virtue of Ebon virgins—virgins reared for—. But I forbear.”44 Ruggles’s sarcastic, hyperbolic style here is not simply pointed but funny. Apostrophes and interjections—“ah no!” and “Oh Delicacy”—inflate his language, which is then amplified in the satiric formality of “thou hast run mad” and “Thou has frightened the Doctor too.” Likewise, the exclamation points, italics, and dashes omit, “for delicacy’s sake,” the violation of rape by calling excessive attention to that which is being omitted, and why. While Ruggles claims “as to elegance of style, or diction, I have none,” he is clearly aware of his powers to perform and to mock. As Ruggles proceeds through Reese’s argument, these powers of sarcastic outrage become even more engaging. (At one point, Ruggles makes an aside to clarify that he uses the word “sword” metaphorically, just in case Reese took him literally.) He piles on when confronting Reese’s fears of promiscuity at the antislavery meeting: “It is a wonder that the seats had not sunk under them, and buried them promiscuously in a promiscuous heap of ruins! I wonder if when they come to the judgment seat to hear their doom, if they would stand or sit promiscuously, and if they were all so happy as to receive a blissful portion in seats of happiness, I wonder if the seats would be promiscuous!”45 Ruggles’s riff on Reese’s obsession with “promiscuity” repeats the word, needless to say, promiscuously. In this one passage it appears four times, with a close repetition—“buried them promiscuously in a promiscuous heap of ruins”—in case the reader did not get the joke. Here, Ruggles’s style achieves what argument might not, that is, it makes Reese’s obsession absurd,

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calling attention to the way he compulsively repeats the word that represents the practice he seeks to stamp out. When Ruggles more directly attacks Reese’s polemic against “practical amalgamation,” his argument comes from a position that Reese could not have predicted. In the long passage quoted above, Ruggles unequivocally announces, “To me nothing is more disgusting than to see my race bleeched [sic] to a pallid sickly hue by the lust of those cruel and fastidious white men whose prejudices are so strong that they can’t come in sight of a colored skin.” Rather than using irony to suggest indirectly, Ruggles openly rejects “amalgamation,” establishing that rejection on his moral outrage over the rape of enslaved women. But he brings to that denunciation a revision of a common racial aesthetic hierarchy. Much as Melville would later explore in Moby-­Dick (1851), Ruggles here lingers on the unappetizing aesthetics of whiteness, “a pallid sickly hue.” Ruggles’s aesthetic judgment overturns Clay’s vision in “Practical Amalgamation.” The white bride’s body no longer seems translucent but pallid, ghastly rather than angelic. Ruggles’s indictment of whiteness thus goes beyond the stalemate of dueling exposés. It is, instead, a rejection of white supremacy on both moral and aesthetic grounds, achieved through scorching irony. Irony is indirection, and in Ruggles’s and other abolitionists’ hands, it operates as a rhetorical version of what Simone Browne calls “undersight”: it hides its meaning in tone, not text. The effect of irony is that it is not so much on the page but a conclusion achieved in a reader’s mind. Abolitionists’ irony thus has something to say to the broader exploration of realist modes in this book. While irony can convey moral claims, it does so in almost the exact opposite way than they are made in the sentimental-­realist aesthetic: the surface is not meant to be where the fact or the real lies. In turn, the minute someone “explains the irony,” the implicit joke is lost. Thus, the revelation of irony does not work either—a quality intrinsic to the mode itself. Irony is the literary mode of Browne’s “undersight,” and abolitionists like Ruggles used it to counter the white supremacist surveillance implicit in the secular sensibility of privacy.

Style and the Market for Information Ruggles’s irony, like Douglass’s, responded not just to conspiracy thinking but to the weaponization of style against Black abolitionists. At the center of the fevered dreams of practical amalgamation was the minstrel figure with which

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this chapter started, the Black dandy as scapegoat for the New York riots. In the nineteenth-­century United States, the figure of the dandy differed from its European counterparts, and these differences were racialized. Rather than a celebrated figure of style as Beau Brummell was in Regency England, or Charles Baudelaire or Oscar Wilde would be later in the century, the white dandy in the early United States was most often associated with an artifice that hid a threadbare existence.46 They were imagined as targeting women with a false appearance of gentlemanly attire and authentic heterosexual love. Fortune hunters who depended on corsets, false whiskers, canes, and richly cut suits, sought, so the stories went, their economic stability in the bedroom. Yet because of this—not despite this—white dandies were also tightly associated with “confirmed bachelors,” positioned culturally outside of a reproductive matrix, even as marriage was imagined to be their ultimate goal. Consider Asa Greene’s chapter on dandies in A Glance at New York (1837), in which he surmises, “Dandies are supposed, by many, to be on the increase in New York. But of that we are not certain. The truth is, the race is not particularly admired, and especially by the ladies. The consequence is, that they have ­little chance of getting married and thus propagating the species. It is believed, therefore, that in time they will run out. That the race will become extinct; and, like the mammoth, leave nothing behind them but their bones.”47 If the white dandy seemed to be an innocuous threat destined for extinction—too laughably fake, poor, or queer to be a cunning fortune hunter— the Black dandy would rise in the white imagination as its opposite, able to tear down the edifice of white civilization around him via legal marriage to a white woman. Yet while it is easy to see the image of the Black dandy as he appeared in Clay’s “Life in Philadelphia” and “Practical Amalgamation” series as simply a distorted minstrel figure, Monica Miller argues for a more complex ­understanding of the ubiquity of this type: “Though blacks were practicing different forms of dandyism—sometimes firmly within social conventions, sometimes independent of respectable society’s strictures—parody subsumed them into a cycle in which racism, sexism, and classism tried to keep up with the various forms black agency could take.”48 Taken out of this caricature, the “dandy” can be recast through Carla Peterson’s examination of Black modernity in the antebellum North. The correspondents to Frederick Douglass’ Paper, she argues, highlighted and debated “Black self-­fashioning” to counter the racist caricatures of Edward Clay, and in doing so, they positioned “the Black urbanite whose taste, following the tradition set by Addison, Steele, and Irving” as “a crucial marker of modernity” and a central figure

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of Black citizenship.49 Webb’s dandy, Kinch, is a good example of both Miller’s and Peterson’s arguments about taste and self-­fashioning as vital to Black modernity and citizenship. A minor, comic character for much of the novel, he is Charlie Ellis’s best friend and the sometime-­antagonist of (and then fiancé to) Charlie’s cleanliness-­obsessed sister, Caddy. Kinch is first introduced to the narrative in the idiom of middle-­class respectability by Charlie’s other sister, Esther, when she tells their mother that Charlie regularly shares his food with “that dirty Kinch” and other boys who cannot afford to bring their suppers to school (58). Webb clearly wants the reader to see beyond this early appellation, though, continually dubbing him the “redoubtable Kinch” (99) or the “all-­sufficient Kinch” (98), calling attention even in these narrative monikers to a certain excess and formidableness in his character. This characterological excess transforms later in life into sartorial resplendency: “Kinch the invincible—Kinch the dirty—Kinch the mischievous, now metamorphosed into a full blown dandy, with faultless linen, elegant vest, and fashionably cut coat. Oh, Kinch, what a change—from the most shabby and careless of all boys to a consummate exquisite, with heavy gold watch and eye-­ glass, and who has been known to dress regularly twice a day!” (325). At Charlie and Emily Garie’s wedding, Kinch arrives to be groomsman in a “dazzling” costume: his “blue coat was brazen with buttons, and his white cravat tied with choking exactness; spotless vest, black pants, and such patent leathers as you could have seen your face in with ease” (353). Webb creates continuity in what seems a complete metamorphosis of this character through Kinch’s overblown position in Charlie’s imagination (“Kinch the invincible—Kinch the dirty—Kinch the mischievous”). Kinch’s “choking exactness” in fashion is an extension of his childhood exploits, which often got Charlie in trouble, but they tend to be affirmative rather than disciplined by the novel’s plot. Whereas Charlie is the quintessential hero of domestic fiction, and the younger Clarence is tragic, Kinch is comic relief, a match for Caddy’s “household tyranny.”50 The wedding between Emily and Charlie brings this comedy to its climax. After the women admire Charlie’s new wedding suit, Kinch declares: “That is owing to me—all my doings,” said Kinch exultingly. “He wanted to order his suit of old Forbes, who hasn’t looked at a fashion-­ plate for the last ten years, and I wouldn’t let him. I took him to my man, and see what he has made of him—turned him out looking like a bridegroom, instead of an old man of fifty! It’s all owing to me,” said

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the delighted Kinch, who skipped about the entry until he upset a vase of flowers that stood on a bracket behind him; whereupon Caddy ran and brought a towel, and made him take off his white gloves and wipe up the water, in spite of his protestations that the shape of his pantaloons would not bear the strain of stooping. (353–354) The comedy of this scene turns on the politics of respectability. The narrator burdens the description of Kinch with adjectives and adverbs: “said Kinch exultingly”; “the delighted Kinch.” Kinch’s sartorial and expressive excesses extend to his carriage and comportment. While describing how he had bestowed on Charlie his knowledge of how to procure bespoke suits, Kinch overturns a vase in slapstick style. Caddy, comically obsessed with cleanliness throughout the novel and now engaged to Kinch, runs for a towel and forces Kinch to clean up the spilled water. By having Kinch fret that this domestic labor will ruin the “shape of his pantaloons,” Webb highlights the tension between the dandy’s style and the actual labor of respectability. Together, then, Kinch and Caddy provide a comically overblown response to respectability politics; but even in their excesses, the jokes are still ultimately supportive of their inclusion in the Black community. We can see this in the role that Kinch plays, earlier in the novel, in the revelation of the conspiracy behind the riot that ended in the Garies’ deaths and the maiming of Charlie Ellis’s father—a role enabled by his position as the son of a used clothing storeowner. The riot is ginned up by the villainous George Stevens, the neighbor to the Garies upon their settling in Philadelphia. While initially hoping to get in the good graces of the rich southerner, the Stevenses instead ostracize the Garies when they discover that Emily is not white. Of the many harms they inflict, they secretly plot to have the Garies’ children expelled from the unintegrated school they attend, and Stevens stokes the riot in large part to destroy them. Conveniently, in targeting the Garies, Stevens also enriches himself. He has discovered that he is Clarence’s cousin and therefore the only lawful white heir to the Georgia plantation. After the Garies die in the riot (Stevens shoots Clarence himself), Stevens presents himself as the heir, and Mr. Walters (one of the leaders of the Black community who will eventually marry Esther) and Mr. Balch (a white friend of the family) scramble to find a way to protect the Garies’ children, Emily and Clarence, from poverty. Kinch supplies the crucial evidence for their desperate attempt to maintain some sufficiency for the orphans in the face of Stevens’s villainy.

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This evidence hinges on used clothing. To blend into the mob of the lower-­class whites he has stirred to riot, Stevens heads to a used clothing store owned by the father of “our redoubtable friend” Kinch. First insulting the store’s stock and Kinch by calling him “Snowball” (speaking of style, Kinch’s response to this is tart and satisfying: “My name is not Snowball, and this ain’t a curiosity-­shop”), Stevens proceeds to ask for the “worst you’ve got” (195). As Webb narrates, “Kinch handed out, quite mechanically, a coat that was but slightly worn. ‘Oh, that won’t do—I want something like this,’ said Mr. Stevens, taking down from a peg a very dilapidated coat, of drab colour, and peculiar cut” (195). Finding a pair of ragged trousers to match, Stevens changes his clothes at the shop and leaves dressed as a poor man. It is at this moment that Stevens learns the lesson that clothing makes the public man, so to speak. Wearing this coat of a “peculiar cut” proves dangerous as Stevens navigates the city. The coat, it turns out, is a fireman’s club coat, and he is taken for a member of a club that had made itself “highly obnoxious to some of the rival factions on the borders of their own territory” (197). Discovered in it, Stevens is beaten and tarred by the members of the rival club, and his “lips were swelled to a size that would have been regarded as large even on the face of a Congo negro, and one eye was puffed out to an alarming extent; whilst the coating of tar he had received rendered him such an object as the reader can but faintly picture to himself ” (200). In other words, the used coat leads to a racial transformation of Stevens, albeit a temporary one. In imagining the power of clothing to lead to such a reversal, Webb challenges the racial imaginary of Clay’s Life in Philadelphia and his “amalgamation” series, in which clothing reveals inappropriate Black ambition.51 Here, instead, Stevens has misread white working-­class sartorial signals and they are reenforced with brutal violence. But if Stevens’s temporary racial transformation—a transformation, we might note, that has no profound effect on his morality—has captivated scholars, Kinch’s transformation into a dandy has largely gone unremarked. Yet Kinch’s position in the used clothing shop is critical to his role within the riot scenes. Kinch is on hand to smooth the passage of information. In the process of transferring the contents of his pockets from the old suit to the new one, Stevens drops a piece of paper with a list of places for the rioters to target, a discovery that becomes significant to the novel’s plot. When Kinch’s father finds the list, he hands it to Mr. Walters who discovers, with Kinch’s help, that it belonged to Mr. Stevens. While the white establishment refuses to stop the riot or protect the Black community, Walters can alert most of

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the rioters’ targets, and use the information, later, to shield Clarence and Emily from further deprivations at the hands of Stevens. Webb thus ties together the market for clothing and the market for information. While the rag of paper that Stevens drops proves crucial evidence, the “undersight” that clothing allows for operates (like irony does for Ruggles) to counter the conspiracy. Likewise, we see in these chapters what allows Kinch to become such an expert at sartorial signaling later. Webb describes the doorway of the used clothing shop as a palimpsest of fashion history: The doorway was hung with coats of every fashion of the last twenty years, and all in various stages of decay. Some of them looked quite respectable, from much cleaning and patching; and others presented a reckless and forlorn aspect, as their worn and ragged sleeves swung about in the evening air. Old hats, some of which were, in all probability, worn at a period anterior to the Revolution, kept company with the well-­blacked shoes that were ranged on shelves beside the doorway, where they served in the capacity of signs, and fairly indicated the style of goods to be purchased within. (194–195) In this passage, used clothing occupies the intersection of historicity and respectability. The store jumbles temporal periods: the prerevolutionary hat sits next to the well-­blacked shoes. The moral horizon of the clothing is also threaded into Webb’s description. While some of the coats look “respectable” through attention to cleaning and patching, “others presented a reckless and forlorn aspect, as their worn and ragged sleeves swung about in the evening air.” The coats themselves—wholly independent of the bodies that might wear them—express a moral nature, “reckless and forlorn.” If Pierre Glendinning is never around to learn the “lesson” of the hidden pamphlet in his surtout, the lesson of the used clothing store will not be lost on the adult Kinch: clothing has a “capacity of signs” that are at once temporal (fashionable) and moral (respectable).

A Thief of Affections With Kinch’s character, Webb transforms the language of an authentic moral self into a spectacular performance (to borrow Daphne Brooks’s term) that, at the same time, symbolizes the circuits of information in the Black community

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that made life in the urban North livable amid continued violence. In Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-­Century New York (2011), Carla L. Peterson charts how the Black community in New York founded and operated institutions (however precarious they sometimes were to outside pressure) to counteract the segregation of the city. Webb represents these institutions indirectly, in keeping with the genre of domestic fiction, by way of marriage and the Black family. Yet rather than concluding the novel on the triumph of transparency and revelation as domestic fiction like Sedgwick’s Redwood did, Webb’s ending speaks in a mode of “undersight,” one that challenges the secular force of authenticity even as it makes clear that Clarence Garie’s attempt to pass for white is an unhealthy and destructive decision, both for him and his intended bride. Webb’s novel challenges in important ways the privatization of marriage. Indeed, as Tess Chakkalakal argues, “Marriage, for Webb, is not just a contract between two individuals; it is in fact a contract between three parties: man, woman, and society.”52 As we will see, Clarence’s choice to pass is destructive because he thinks he can inhabit a version of privacy (both in marrying a white woman and in keeping his race to himself) not only unavailable to him because of white supremacy but also politically suspect in a novel that affirms the public institutions of the Black community. The final chapters of the novel, set years after the events of the riot, are structured around the reconstitution of the Black community through the marriages of Charlie and Emily and Esther and Walters. But the plot of these final chapters, as is so often the case with domestic fiction, is not about who will marry whom—which is barely ever in doubt—but by the exposures of life-­changing secrets: Stevens’s secret about the murder of the senior Garie; and Clarence’s passing in New York City, a situation that circles the novel back to the opening practical joke about Winston and the New York belle. If the novel’s marriages confirm the public role of private life, these two final revelations return to the conspiracy theories about amalgamation that stoked the riot earlier in the novel and examine how that violence continues to disrupt the private lives of the younger generation. The more straightforward story in these final chapters is that of Stevens, who we learn is being blackmailed by McCloskey, an Irish criminal he commissioned to kill Clarence Garie (but who, in the end, lost his nerve so Stevens himself committed the deed). It turns out that McCloskey has the missing Garie will and has been periodically showing up at Stevens’s residence in New York to collect more money. Overhearing their exchange,

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Stevens’s kindhearted daughter Lizzie learns the full horror of how the family inherited the Garie fortune. Drawn into the conspiracy, she goes in search of McCloskey in Philadelphia to beg him to stop torturing her father, only to arrive too late. Dying of typhus, McCloskey has confessed all and handed the will over to Father Banks and Mr. Balch, who commission a police detective to find Stevens and arrest him. Missing the train back to New York, Lizzie does not get to her father in time to warn him. The “grey-­eyed” detective arrives first, and, seeing that his secret was known, Stevens flings himself from the window to his death. While this seems like a plot that justifies a chapter titled “Murder will out” (as chapter 34 is named), to piece together the order of these events requires rearranging the chapters. For much of the revelation about Stevens does not come in the “Murder will out” chapter. Not only does the reader know the secret the whole time (having been privy to the events of the riot) but the revelation of it within the plot occurs before and after chapter 34. In fact, while the events of chapter 34 are highly paced, beginning with Lizzie pressing her father to make restitution to the Garies’ children to her flight to Philadelphia to beg McCloskey to leave off his blackmail to her missing the train, they do not constitute a revelation at all. The police emerge in a plot that has, up until this moment, been sorely lacking in state protection, even when Walters begs the mayor for help during the lead-­up to the riots. Lizzie encounters the detective—who remains unnamed in the novel—when she reaches the hospital too late, after McCloskey has confessed and then died: “Ere Lizzie could answer [the hospital janitor’s] question, a man, plainly dressed, with keen grey eyes that seemed to look restlessly about in every corner of the room, came and stood beside the janitor. He looked at Lizzie from the bow on top of her bonnet to the shoes on her feet; it was not a stare, it was more of a hasty glance—and yet she could not help feeling that he knew every item of her dress, and could have described her exactly” (346). The only effective police presence in the novel appears to enforce revelation (in the dictum that “murder will out”), and much like Inspector Buckets in Dickens’s Bleak House (1852), this grey-­eyed detective’s skill is in sizing up character from the bow on top of one’s bonnet to the shoes on one’s feet; he, of course, remains unreadable—scrupulously unnamed and unidentifiable, down to his plain dress. If the chapter ends with Stevens’s suicide, what is revealed is a new level of enforcement of guilt and innocence in the form of the detective. While the presence of a detective seems to imply that the law will finally mete out appropriate justice, Webb’s detective does not really do so.

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The detective does not get—as Dupin does in Poe’s ratiocination tales—an extended monologue to point to the culprit. Instead, the conspiracy’s exposure occurs in chapter 35, “The Wedding,” when Banks and Balch are called away from celebrating Charlie and Emily’s nuptials to attend McCloskey at the city hospital. The confession (which the reader does not hear firsthand) is not tied to the revelation of a murder but to the scene of a wedding. By positioning the revelation of crime under the cover of a wedding plot, Webb inverts the riot that led to the elder Garies’ deaths. State-­sanctioned private life and state-­sanctioned law enforcement—the public, however idealized— can be the only antidote to the growing tendency toward conspiracy theories. The chapter that promises a revelation does not deliver one; the chapter that punishes the novel’s villain is covered, instead, by the wedding of Emily and Charlie. Public alliances replace the desire to expose secrets. The second plot central to the final chapters of the novel returns to the purported abolitionist conspiracy to spread “practical amalgamation.” Clarence’s story not only responds to the conspiracy theories about amalgamation but effectively reverses them. Clarence has been passing for white from the moment of his parents’ death, first at school, and then through his life in New York and his engagement to Anne Bates, whom he calls “Little Birdie.” His secret is revealed by George Stevens Jr. when the latter happens to meet Clarence in the company of Anne and their friend Miss Ellstowe. When Stevens Jr. tells Anne’s father about Clarence, Mr. Bates rages, “I’ll kill him, the infernal hypocrite! Oh! the impostor to come to my house in this nefarious manner, and steal the affections of my daughter” (334). As Mr. Bates moves quickly from “hypocrite” (someone who is not privately what they are publicly) to imposter (a confidence man dressed to cheat) to thief, we see that the outrage is especially sharp because of the intimate nature of the crime (he is a thief of affections). When Mr. Bates confronts Clarence directly, his accusations continue to pivot on the way in which hypocrisy codes as a betrayal of private morality: There are laws to punish thieves and counterfeits—but such as you may go unchastised, except by the abhorrence of all honourable men. Had you been unaware of your origin, and had the revelation of this gentleman been as new to you as to me, you would have deserved sympathy; but you have been acting a lie, claiming a position in society to which you knew you had no right, and deserve execration and contempt. Did I treat you as my feelings dictated, you would understand

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what is meant by the weight of a father’s anger; but I do not wish the world to know that my daughter has been wasting her affections upon a worthless nigger; that is all that protects you! (335–336) What Clarence has contravened is a rule about privacy, and because of that it cannot be adjudicated in court. Rather, it should be taken care of secretly: by ruining Clarence’s social standing through gossip, by heaping on him a bad reputation. But we might note that this is not something Mr. Bates chooses to do. The revelation of his lie—that the truth is not simply that Clarence is “Black” but that he knew—reverberates back on the Bateses’ own private moral standing. Thus, Mr. Bates wants to make it a secret lest the whole of white New York society know that his daughter nearly became an unwitting participant in “practical amalgamation.” The end of The Garies and Their Friends is a rush of revelations, which is not unusual for domestic fiction. But the ending produces a secret too, at least among the white community: Clarence’s passing is buried by Mr. Bates. That said, the secret is neither hidden from Webb’s readers nor from the characters in the story: it is both there and denied at the same time. If the frightful culmination of Clarence Garie’s story is the revelation of his race, we might take the moral of the novel to be that one should not lie and, in the words that Emily writes to Clarence, not make one’s life among the oppressors rather than the oppressed. But Webb is up to something more here, and that is apparent not in the accusations of hypocrisy and imposture, but in the narrator’s apparently inconsequential details across these scenes. Clarence’s secret, weighing on his conscience as it was, was turning him “paler and thinner each day” (328). While secrecy whitens Clarence, the revelation spreads color—first in Clarence’s own burst blood vessel (an obvious metaphor in a cultural imaginary that relentlessly linked race to “blood”), and into a succession of responses from Mr. Bates after George Stevens Jr. tells him the dreaded information: “‘He is A Coloured Man,’ answered George Stevens, briefly. Mr. Bates became almost purple, and gasped for breath” (334). Being a “coloured man” is typographically and visually set apart in the sentence. The secret information about race spreads to Mr. Bates, who turns purple with fury. Bates declares that he will confront Clarence with “his face flushed, and his white hair almost erect with rage” (334). When Bates and Stevens do confront Clarence, the physiological changes on Bates’s face can be read by Clarence: “When he observed the dark scowl on the face of Mr. Bates, and saw by whom he was accompanied, he knew his secret was discovered; he

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saw it written on their faces” (a line that Clarence repeats out loud—“I see my sentence written on your face!”) (335). Clarence’s secret has infected others, first Mr. Bates and then Little Birdie, his fiancée. Earlier, the narrator had exposed how Anne Bates shares her father’s repulsion at the possibility of “practical amalgamation.” One evening, she entertains Clarence with a story out of the New Orleans Watchman about a “mésalliance” between “the Hon.—, who represents a district of our city in the State legislature” and the “Qauteroon [sic] daughter of the late Gustave Almont” (318). When Clarence suggests that the choice may have a simple explanation—love—Anne seems repulsed: “‘Love a coloured woman! I cannot conceive it possible,’ said she, with a look of disgust; ‘there is something strange and unnatural about it’” (318). Anne repeats the racist language of physiological disgust that we saw in Clay, Reese, and Holgate, the very same logic that Clarence Garie’s practical joke at the beginning of the novel sought to subvert. Yet when her fiancé turns out not to be white, Anne’s response is not disgust. This is not to say that her body does not register the effects of his secret, but Webb underscores how, like Clarence, this emotional trauma drains her body of life and color: “She moved about like one who had received a stunning blow—she was dull, cold, apathetic. She would smile vacantly when her father smoothed her hair or kissed her cheek; but she never laughed, or sang and played, as in days gone by; she would recline for hours on the sofa in her room gazing vacantly in the air, and taking apparently no interest in anything about her,” and, in Webb’s allusion to Stowe’s Little Eva, she “kept her hand constantly upon her heart” (364). Clarence’s letter begging for her to come to his deathbed charges her body back to life. Webb writes that she “started up after reading it, and rushed wildly through the hall into her father’s library” (364). And her plea to visit Clarence is couched in the very words she earlier dismissed as repulsive: “You bid me give him up,” and because her father had the final say on her marriage, she says she “knew you would never let it be. Yet I have never ceased to love him. I cannot control my heart, but I could my voice, and never since that day have I spoken his name” (365). This expression is pure sentimentality: love and the heart are reflexes that cannot be controlled. But considering that Webb invokes this sentiment to unseat the physiological disgust in the discourse of practical amalgamation, it is not so easy to dismiss, nor is Webb’s insistence that Little Birdie refuses any bodily barriers when she finally meets Emily, whose hands she presses and kisses (366).

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On the surface, then, the lesson is that of straightforward sentimentalism: Little Birdie has learned that love does triumph over racism. Except in the logic of the plot it does not, really. As Robert Reid-­Pharr rightly argues, the novel rejects “liberal interracialism” at every turn.53 Indeed, there will be no sentimental reunion. Missing the chance to say goodbye to Clarence on his deathbed by mere seconds, Little Birdie “walked about mournfully for a few years, pressing her hand upon her heart; and then passed away to join her lover, where distinctions in race or colour are unknown, and where the prejudices of earth cannot mar their happiness” (366). Clarence’s secret has made Little Birdie even more the stereotype of white femininity, but Webb makes clear that this version of moral, private white femininity is actually deadly. The Garies and Their Friends fictionalizes the role that conspiracies—actual and imagined—played in the violent public struggles over slavery and racism in the antebellum decades. Webb reshapes a genre and aesthetic we have seen in other chapters—domestic fiction and its typical sentimental-­realist style— not only to give voice to those scapegoated in the anti-­abolitionist print culture but to represent a problem that unites the structure of most popular novels to that of conspiracy theories: that both realism and conspiracy theory position revelation as the way to access deep truth. In turn, abolitionists deployed irony, exaggeration, and “undersight” to provide access to facts when exposés seemed not to be enough. Webb’s novel concludes with nonrevelations, crystallized in the figure of a detective who does not sort it all out for the reader. As conspiracy theory shows, revelation itself can become a gesture, and the faith in its exposures depends on the prior skepticism it affirms: do not trust your eyes or those who have experience, here is the real truth. We can add to our understanding of this emerging secular sensibility that this faith in exposure can end in epistemological and moral stalemates, especially because of the tight generic connection between realism and conspiracy theory. The next chapter picks up on the theme that white abolitionists were just rank hypocrites—an accusation used as a defense against the common charges of slave-­ owning religious hypocrisy—to explore further how the debates over slavery were the most important flashpoint for the consolidation of the secular sensibility that unites privacy with a faith in exposure.

CHAPTER 5

Hypocrisy

When the Southern Literary Messenger decided to review Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)—which it did three times in as many years—it had sharp words for both the novel and its author. The second of these reviews, likely written by George Frederick Holmes and lasting for eleven double-­column pages, called the “thesis” of Stowe’s novel “the very evangel of insubordination, sedition, and anarchy,” and warned that these are “dangerous and dirty little volumes.”1 The review asks at the end, “Is it not either willful hypocrisy or deliberate perversity, when a solitary crotchet of sentimental morality is conceived to transcend all the commandments of the decalogue, all the prescriptions of the Bible, and all the laws of man? Yet all this is done,—purposely, systematically, continually, and malignantly done in that immaculate encyclopedia of fictitious crimes—Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”2 We should not be surprised that the review was scathing. The Southern Literary Messenger, after all, had no incentive to join the transatlantic celebration of Stowe’s surprise best seller. But what is perhaps more important is the way the novel, and its author, are targeted. The review turns on a revelation of religious hypocrisy. It elaborates at great length on the seditious, irreligious, and dirty novel hiding behind a plausible, sentimental Christian cover, and the reviewer seeks to expose to view Stowe’s own hypocrisy and secret perversity. Considering that Stowe’s novel itself promised to expose the treatment of a “race hitherto ignored by the associations of polite and refined society,” as she put it in her preface, we might say that the Southern Literary Messenger and abolitionists like Stowe were playing out of the same moral handbook by the 1850s. As the last chapter indicated, the abolitionist movement—and the backlash it provoked—was the most significant flashpoint for the consolidation of a secular sensibility that united privacy with a faith in exposure’s moral work. This chapter finishes that story about the role of the debates over

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abolition in the formation of privacy. While historians such as Mark Noll and Molly Oshatz have attended to the use of the Bible in these debates, my interest is in the main moral judgment of secular political debate, which has been present since the opening chapter of this study: hypocrisy.3 As we saw in the previous chapter, anti-­abolitionists attacked white abolitionists for their hypocrisy, for not living privately and sexually their theories of racial equality. The fevered attempts to “uncover” an abolitionist conspiracy to enact “practical amalgamation” evinced the narrowing of “practical” morality to private sexual choices, and more specifically marital choices. The gap between white abolitionists’ calls for emancipation and their private, sexual choices showed an inconsistency that became, under the new logic of secular morality, a wide-­open target available to the defenders of slavery. Frank J. Webb shaped his novel The Garies and Their Friends as a response to these conspiracy theories, and this line of attack also shows up in the writings of other Black abolitionists, including in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative (1845), William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853), and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Pointing out the hypocritical and overwrought language describing white women’s purity supposedly under threat, these authors argued continually that fears over “amalgamation” whitewashed the brutal sexual violence of domestic slavery. This outrage, they explained, was never concerned about all cross-­racial sexual alliances. Just white women’s potential for it. While continuing the examination of white abolitionists’ hypocrisy I began in the previous chapter, I concentrate in this one, first, on the role of gender, and particularly white womanhood, in the prominence of accusations of hypocrisy in secular forms of morality; and second, I examine what constituted the ideal of anti-­hypocrisy, or “disinterested benevolence,” and how John Brown came to stand for that orientation to private moral order. The increasing violence of the 1850s—which Brown symbolized—challenged the sentimental and pacifist ethos at the heart of a lot of white abolitionism, and the term disinterested benevolence came to operate as a particularly gendered alternative to it. The first sections of the chapter consider the paradoxical relation of sentimentalism to authenticity—both a product of the secular sensibility that promoted it and liable to be accused of falling short under its very terms—before turning to how Harriet Jacobs navigated these challenging waters to try to represent the open secret of the slave system’s sexual exploitation of Black women. The chapter then turns back to Stowe, who was a lightning rod for accusations of hypocrisy. She responded to them, and to the changing landscape of abolitionism in the 1850s, in her third novel The

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Minister’s Wooing (1859), which I situate in the context of John Brown’s raid and trial. Across Stowe’s antislavery novels, she was clearly grappling with the same challenges that her white male counterparts were, thinking through the morality of slave revolt in Dred (1856) and, as I will concentrate on here, what constituted “disinterested benevolence” in The Minister’s Wooing (1859), and whether such benevolence was a practical solution to the problems inherent to sympathy and sentimentality.

Stowe, Sentimentality, Secularity While the Southern Literary Messenger’s review of Uncle Tom’s Cabin ended by attacking Stowe’s private morality, it opened with the reviewer’s thoughts on the recent trend in novel writing. In his opinion, Stowe’s novel exemplifies a distasteful departure from the form’s previous aim “to kindle and purify the imagination, while fanning into a livelier flame the slumbering charities of the human heart.” In “these late and evil days,” the reviewer laments, novels instead engage “in the coarse conflicts of life, and mingling in the fumes and gross odours of political or polemical dissension, it has stained and tainted the robe of ideal purity with which it was of old adorned.”4 It would surprise readers of the twenty-­first century to see Uncle Tom’s Cabin characterized as a novel that sought not to fan “into a livelier flame the slumbering charities of the human heart” but one “mingling in the fumes and gross odours of political or polemical dissension.” But, as Susan Ryan has effectively argued, for “nineteenth-­century commentators, moral purpose operated within aesthetic registers.”5 From the perspective of the Southern Literary Messenger, the slip from romance to coarse realism in contemporary novels signified a deeper moral rot, and Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the latest and worst example of this regrettable development. Holmes’s review—as well as others canvassed later in this chapter—challenges not only the twenty-­first-­century tendency to separate moral from aesthetic judgment; it also, on a more foundational level, upsets assumptions about what genre Stowe was writing in to begin with. Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s penchant for romance or realism, depending on the reader, seemed to promise to reveal something morally deep, often about Stowe herself. There is no more exemplary figure of sentimental romance in contemporary scholarship than Harriet Beecher Stowe, nor an author more often called to account for hypocrisies (perhaps rivaled only by Henry David Thoreau). As the response

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to her novel in the Southern Literary Messenger indicates, accusations of hypocrisy accompanied Stowe’s whole career. As Gretchen Murphy notes, “It is no new insight to learn that Stowe did not always live up to her own ideals.”6 But it is useful, this chapter aims to show, to consider why Stowe came under such intense focus for her own personal morality in the first place, and what that tendency can tell us about the role of abolitionism in the construction of the secular sensibility of privacy and that sensibility’s dependence on moral judgments about hypocrisy. Writers of sentimentality, and particularly women writers of it, were simultaneously at the center of the development of secular forms of morality and targeted by them, Stowe perhaps more so than any other nineteenth-­ century author. Early critical reappraisals of sentimentality in the twen­tieth century tended to equate the genre with hypocrisy, as the “sentimental peddling of Christian belief for its nostalgic value,” as Ann Douglas put it, or as James Baldwin memorably described it, “the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotions.”7 Lauren Berlant’s work helps us see why sentimentality could be so open to charges of hypocrisy. As Berlant explains, sentimental discourse placed authenticity at its foundation: that pain, suffering, and trauma operate as a “preideological nexus of overwhelming feeling,” producing a discourse running through “women’s texts” that locates “the ideality of femininity in fantasies of unconflicted subjectivity in a flowing and intimate world.”8 Sentimentality thus has a strained relation to the demand for moral and emotional authenticity. It positively values this authenticity and is structured around our capacity for it, but the products of it—sentimental texts—risk in their formal gestures reducing these, through their repetition, to clichés, to the inauthentic and the hypocritical. Berlant’s analysis of sentimentality, though, does not quite speak to Holmes’s review of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its supposed coarse realism. Indeed, understanding the charges of hypocrisy flung at Stowe demands seeing sentimentality not just in relation to authenticity but to realism. As Cindy Weinstein convincingly argues, “Not all sentimental fictions unself-­ consciously reproduce formulaic requirements (the child suffers the loss of her parents and is recompensed at the novel’s end by getting a spouse), but rather they have the capacity to interrogate their generic foundations.”9 One of the ways in which these texts vary is precisely over what constitutes “feeling right” and how to represent that realistically.10 The critical tendency to flatten sentimental texts that Weinstein challenges has a lot to do with the historical emergence of sentimentality. The accusation that sentimentality simply boils

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down to hypocrisy was part of the genre’s very origins in the eighteenth century. To be sure, the capacity for sympathy found support in biblical passages, and theology was often invoked to shore up its claims. Especially potent in the moral arsenal of abolitionists was Jesus’s call, “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them,”11 and his second commandment, which abolitionists likewise invoked, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”12 But it is in the eighteenth century that sentimentality emerged as a moral vocabulary in both England and its colonies through the rise of moral philosophy, as June Howard has demonstrated.13 What the eighteenth-­century culture of sentiment added to the Christian inheritance was an emphasis on sensibility, in which sentiments, as Glenn Hendler helpfully explains, are cultivated into a “moral and proper repertoire of feelings, a sensibility.”14 The eighteenth century, in other words, inaugurated a pivot from biblical injunction to moral sensibility that was cast as both involuntary (“feeling”) and cultivated (as in Stowe’s famous call to her readers that “they can see to it that they feel right”). Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) provided the philosophical underpinnings of this cultivated feeling. Sympathy, Smith claimed, depends on the imagination: “Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers” but “by the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them.”15 This imaginative extension, Smith asserted, is the basis for “fellow-­feeling for the misery of others,” and thus a social desire to alleviate suffering. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, of course, exemplifies the fictional use of sympathy to induce fellow feeling, most obviously in her direct addresses to the reader: “If it were your Harry, mother, or your Willie, that were going to be torn from you by a brutal trader, tomorrow morning,—if you had seen the man, and heard that the papers were signed and delivered, and you had only from twelve o’clock till morning to make good your escape,—how fast could you walk?”16 In attempting not just to represent emotionality but to inspire it in these ways, Stowe was and continues to be charged with inauthenticity. This interpretation too has its roots in the rise of sympathy as a moral sensibility. From the start, antisentimentalism—the accusation that sentiment was spurious, hypocritical emotionality—emerged alongside sentimentality, and it played a

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decisive role in defining what would constitute “serious” literature, from Henry Fielding and Jane Austen in the eighteenth century to Henry James in the later nineteenth.17 Antisentimentalism became a rhetoric of realism—“truth” and “reality”—as opposed to those spurious sentimental feelings that only index a writer’s hypocrisy. The need to navigate sentiment and fact, and avoid accusations of hypocrisy, was knit into the genre of sentimental novels, and it shaped a wide swath of abolitionist writing, particularly by women. The following sections situate writing by and about abolitionists in a culture that valued both realism and sympathy and used the one to judge the shortcomings of the other. These judgments ultimately position privacy as a sensibility in need of protection and as a weapon to be used against those who dared to expose the open secrets of the slave system.

Open Secrets While any number of charges of hypocrisy could be lodged against slaveowners, the most forceful involved hypocrisies of Christianity and sexuality. In a world organized around private morality these are, of course, conjoined accusations.18 David Ruggles’s Abrogation of the Seventh Commandment, by the American Churches (1835) staked this ground quite early. In it, he addressed “Fellow Christians,” but more especially white northern women, to denounce the subjection of African American women “to violation in the most flagrant forms of turpitude, without the possibility of complaint or redress.”19 The churches not only turned the other way at the violations but in papering them over, they condoned them: “This hypocritical system imposes upon Christian ladies in New England,” and it is only by revealing the crimes that they can be addressed; Ruggles thus seeks to rouse the “female members of our Northern Christian churches” to “openly exemplify their indignant detestation of that system which levels the female sex particularly with the beasts that perish.”20 The system is a threat to both the “marriage relation and the seventh commandment” (“Thou shalt not commit adultery”), and women were therefore not only justified but compelled, as the guardians of private morals, to take up the task.21 In like fashion, William Wells Brown structured the plot of Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter (1853) around slaveowners’ moral hypocrisies— Jefferson’s daughter sold into slavery, committing suicide in the shadow of the Capitol—and in the layout of the title page of the novel, which includes the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence. Brought together, these

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implicated any patriotic white readers in the moral hypocrisies of slaveowners. Frederick Douglass also memorably drew on these hypocrisies in his 1845 Narrative, placing the brutal sexual violence of domestic slavery at its center, from the opening descriptions of the torture of his Aunt Hester to his depiction of Covey as an infamous slave breaker who loudly proclaimed his Christianity while building his wealth on the abuse and violation of a woman named Caroline. In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs navigated the burden of being the victim of this sexual and religious hypocrisy and producing herself as the object of suffering for white readers, all while maintaining authorial power. In the preface, she bridges the necessity of conforming to the exposé genre’s mandate of revelation while also concealing facts that would tip her from object of sympathy to reproachable fallen women. She writes, “Reader, be assured this narrative is no fiction. I am aware that some of my adventures may seem incredible; but they are, nevertheless, strictly true. I have not exaggerated the wrongs inflicted by Slavery; on the contrary, my descriptions fall far short of the facts. I have concealed the names of places, and given persons fictitious names. I had no motive for secrecy on my own account, but I deemed it kind and considerate towards others to pursue this course.”22 A series of dichotomies structure this address to the reader: “incredible” adventures that are “strictly true”; descriptions of horrors that actually play down the facts of the case; and the final juxtaposition of fictions that create secrecy on one’s own account as opposed to those that show consideration toward others. Jacobs is caught in a bind, as Saidiya Hartman forcefully put it: “To speak of the foul wrongs committed against her is to enact the indecent and unveil the unspeakable.”23 Jacobs invokes the realist language of exposés that we saw in Chapters 3 and 4, especially the claim that truth is stranger than fiction. These realist gestures seem quite self-­evident and even mandated by the slave narrative’s eschewal of fictionality. But Incidents also invites genre confusion, and as the opening reviews of Uncle Tom’s Cabin should remind us, genre and morality were tightly linked in these years. In her preface, she must address the fact that her narrative reads a lot like a novel, including its sentimental bildungsroman structure, clever use of dialogue, and Dickensian style of naming (Dr. and Mrs. Flint).24 Her narrative, as she anticipates, is open to accusations of fraud and fictionality, and the history of its reception, including the mistaken attribution of it to Lydia Maria Child, seemed to bear this out.25 But Jacobs’s final defense of “secrecy” bears equal consideration, especially in light of its

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relation to the claims to be presenting “strictly true” “facts.” By placing her consideration of other people’s privacy at the center of the decision to keep names secret, Jacobs proves herself to be the sympathetic subject, rather than an object of sympathy.26 She feels for others. In announcing such sympathies, she pursues “something akin” to narratological freedom. The preface’s insistence on facts (both revealed and hidden) frames what Jacobs knows will be the explosive revelation at the center of her narrative: that she sought, of her own accord, a relationship with a white man in order to stave off Dr. Flint’s threats of rape. Jacobs seemingly breaks with the decorum surrounding women’s ability to name sex publicly.27 Yet this admission—like the preface’s expression of sympathy for others’ privacy—grants Linda Brent, as the narrator, the authority to point out other people’s hypocrisies. Through Samuel Sawyer (called “Mr. Sands” in the memoir), Jacobs gives readers a peek not simply inside the sexual and moral hypocrisies of the plantation but into how those are carried directly to the halls of Congress. Having sent her daughter Ellen with Mr. Sands to Brooklyn, by way of Washington, DC, Linda pauses to consider this secret relation, exposed in her narrative but hidden by the polite culture of the white upper classes of the Capitol: If the secret memoirs of many members of Congress should be published, curious details would be unfolded. I once saw a letter from a member of Congress to a slave, who was the mother of six of his children. He wrote to request that she would send her children away from the great house before his return, as he expected to be accompanied by friends. The woman could not read, and was obliged to employ another to read the letter. The existence of the colored children did not trouble this gentleman, it was only the fear that friends might recognize in their features a resemblance to him.28 This is a stunning unfolding of the layers of congressional secrets: the surprise (especially for twenty-­first-­century readers) is not that a member of Congress has such children but that his plan for hiding them is to write a letter to an enslaved woman who cannot read. It is a letter that must, by necessity, be read by others. The distinction between the open secret of the plantation and the closed secret of the congressional hallway is reinforced by the details Jacobs insists on here: others read this letter; everyone knows about his children. This extraneous detail in the story also reminds readers of Brent’s own savvy use of the open nature of a “private” letter in the slave system, in her

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planting of fraudulent letters from the North delivered in such a way that Dr. Flint intercepts them and assumes they are true. But the final point in this passage—that the congressman fears visitors will be able to guess his secret when they actually see the children—returns to the position of this as an open secret which, like Poe’s purloined letter, hides in plain sight. It is no surprise that Jacobs uses the genre term “secret memoirs,” not “private memoirs,” for she and other Black abolitionists made clear that the sexual exploitation of enslaved women was an open secret in the South and a closed secret in the North, where the cult of true womanhood not only determined how white womanhood would be constructed but what was polite to say in public about sex. Naming the open secret, as Jacobs does in Incidents and Stowe obliquely does in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, risks the bad faith accusation that they are the ones introducing “dirty” and private topics to public discourse.

Infidelity’s Return Revelations of slave owners’ religious and sexual hypocrisies were absolutely vital to abolitionist discourse. Less often noted in our scholarship were the ways these accusations were also used to target abolitionists. In the 1850s, we see a flare-­up of charges of infidelity—not believing in God—that had previously reached a fever pitch back in the 1790s. The label of “practical atheism” was often hurled at abolitionists, and invocations of Paine, Voltaire, and Rousseau all became common in proslavery writing. Infidelity and atheism became shorthand for a standard way to express the hypocrisy of the abolitionists’ camp. And, as the previous chapters have shown, infidelity was not just an easy and ready-­made ad hominem attack on an opponent—though it was certainly this—but one that was made useful both by the very language of religious privacy and by its useful double entendre. One’s infidelity to God betrayed one’s infidelity in private and primarily sexual matters, and vice versa. With the upswing of antislavery outrage over the Fugitive Slave Act and the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin came an equally intense backlash from proslavery forces. The moral terms of this battle can be glimpsed in Abolitionism Unveiled! Hypocrisy Unmasked! And Knavery Scourged! (1850), which has the undeniably risible subtitle: Luminously Portraying the Formal Hocusses, Whining Philanthropists, Moral Coquets, Practical Atheists, and the Hollow-­Hearted Swindlers of Labor, ’yclept the “Northern Abolitionists.” This excited and angry tract follows a familiar argument that capitalism in the

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North was as bad as slavery in the South, if not worse. But the shape it takes is markedly personal: “The writer knows the general and private character of most of the prominent Northern Abolitionists; and he avows, that, as a rule, their philanthropy is assumption—their religion, Phariseeism—their justice, grovelling venality—their profession of motives is unqualified, unmingled, unredeemed hypocrisy. Does the reader doubt the fact? Ascertain, then, how these men make or made their wealth. Open a directory—read their addresses—enquire of those in their employ whether they do not experience the meaning of the term serf, in all its literality.”29 Here, the writer invites his readers to join in on what, in the age of the internet, is called doxxing: publishing the means for finding the private addresses of New York abolitionists as proof that the writer of Abolitionism Unveiled! is telling the truth—that these abolitionists are hypocrites. Of these specific charges—which the writer elaborates on in the pamphlet—two aspects stand out: first, that their philanthropy is an assumption, covering over their own exploitation of white workers; and second, that their Christianity is “Phariseeism,” that is, that they are religious hypocrites. Accusations of such moral hypocrisy on the part of white abolitionists were rife in the debates over slavery. Garrison, Douglass, Stowe, William Henry Seward, and many others were accused by their opponents of being secret infidels, with sordid private desires that could be gleaned from their public proclamations. Garrison was so often accused of being an infidel that he regularly responded to this accusation in his speeches and essays, and reprinted many more in the Liberator, as when he reprinted a squib from the Ohio Statesman in the May 11, 1860 issue. The original Ohio Statesman headline screamed out “Where Ultra Abolitionism Leads.” Not surprisingly, the Ohio Statesman thought it led straight to hell. Or, to be more specific, “sectional fanaticism” begins with a “deep interest” in the Christian religion, so deep that one must follow higher law and break the Fugitive Slave Act. But then, “gradually infidelity takes hold, and its growth finally absorbs all the members of these ‘anti-­slavery churches’ and communities, until it is not uncommon to hear men of age, ‘thrift and intelligence,’ rejoice that they have escaped from the false faith they once professed, as they term the Orthodox, and are now safely grounded in ‘morality and progressive reform,’ which means, of course, that they are now good stout infidels.”30 A manicule under the reprinted article points to the Liberator’s response to such a slippery-­ slope argument: “Thus, it seems, to be ‘safely grounded’ in ‘morality and progressive reform’ constitutes one an ‘infidel’!”

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Despite his pose of outraged shock, this accusation is really no surprise to Garrison. As he writes in a tract for the American Anti-­Slavery Society, aptly named The “Infidelity” of Abolitionism (1860), “Every great reformatory movement, in every age, has been subjected alike to popular violence and to religious opprobrium. The history of one is essentially that of every other. Its origin is ever in obscurity; its earliest supporters are destitute of resources, uninfluential in position, without reputation; it is denounced as fanatical, insane, destructive, treasonable, infidel.”31 Douglass likewise parried these accusations, and responded in kind. The appendix to his 1845 Narrative evinces how, even early in his activist career, he knew the grounds on which the attack would be waged. Claiming that his representations of Christianity in the narrative were specifically of slave-­owning Christianity, Douglass affirms, “I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-­whipping, cradle-­plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels.”32 In his “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” speech, Douglass again excoriates “slaveholding Christianity,” and declares, “For my part, I would say, I welcome infidelity! welcome atheism! welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by those Divines! They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny, and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke, put together, have done!”33 While Garrison, Douglass, and others contended with charges of infidelity, northern white ministers and white women constituted perhaps the most recurring images of religious hypocrisy in anti-­abolitionist texts. In Ellen; or, The Fanatic’s Daughter (1860), a “Parson Blake” plots an Aaron Burr–style conspiracy to annex the South. According to the narrator, he “professed to be a minister of the Gospel, but in reality, used religion as a mere cloak beneath which, for a time, his vices were effectually hid. The parson was a thoroughgoing abolitionist, not from any real sympathy he had for the African race—in truth, he cared as little for slave as slaveholder—but the abolition of slavery was the popular theme of the day in his locality, and popularity, in his estimation, was an important object.”34 Blake’s sham is on the level of both sympathy (he “cared as little for slave as slaveholder”) and authenticity (he seeks popular approval in his abolitionism; it is not an expression of his deepest beliefs). Rev. Brainard in Caroline Lee Hentz’s Planter’s Northern

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Bride (1854) is also a northern confidence man, using religious enthusiasm and antislavery principles to shield his main goal, theft. The narrator explains that Brainard is “destitute of principle, ready to lend himself to any party, provided his momentary interests were advanced, always anxious to enter on a new field of action, since it afforded a larger development of his Machiavellian powers.”35 When we see Brainard alone in his private study, he has the Bible open to—but quickly flipped away from—two passages often invoked by slavery’s defenders: “Woe unto you, Pharisees! for ye tithe mint, and rue, and all manner of herbs, and pass over judgment and the love of God: these ought ye to have done, and not leave the other undone” and “Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are as graves which appear not, and the men that walk over them are not aware of them.”36 Far from being a theological moment in the novel, however, these passages operate as a generalized “moral” law chastising the character’s hypocrisy. Joining hypocritical ministers, white women became a particularly potent symbol for all abolitionist hypocrisy. In Mr. Frank, The Underground Mail-­ Agent (1853), the simple and honest Mr. Frank—who, it turns out, is being duped by more wily and hypocritical abolitionists—visits Philadelphia’s abolitionist circles only to find their hypocrisies include wealthy living, useless philanthropy, and the extremely poor treatment of servants. The scene centers on Mrs. Burton, the wife of a prominent Philadelphia abolitionist: She wore a rich change-­able-­colored silk dress, very long in the skirt, very short in the arms, and so low in the neck that it left a very large portion of her bust exposed to view; presenting quite an attractive appearance to those whose ideas of the beautiful were regulated by the magnitude of the object. Her hair was adorned with numerous artificial flowers, and hung down upon her neck in massy ringlets. Her face was quite large, florid, coarse, and vulgar; and covered with a smile of low, smirking self-­importance. Her gait betrayed evident attempts at grace and elasticity; and, although it did not merge into an absolute leap, strut, or swagger, it seemed to be made up of a strange mixture of all three; and resembled the motion of a full-­rigged English frigate, under full sail, more than anything else of which we have at present any idea.37 The portrait of Mrs. Burton manages to bring together several stereotypes at once: she is both overdressed and showy, but her excessive clothing also fails

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to cover those parts of the body deemed private, with her bosom “exposed to view.” She is smirking and pretentious, but above all she is a poser, her “evident attempts at grace and elasticity” betray that she is no feminine ideal. But the narrator does not let this caricature simply suggest improper sexuality. In this scene, Mrs. Burton sits down very close to Mr. Frank and shamelessly flirts with him. As the narrator sums up, “Mr. Frank came to the conclusion— which many unfortunate husbands have long since learned, to their sorrow— that the customs of the Quaker City tolerate things not known in the country, or enjoined in the Ten Commandments.”38 In the depiction of Mrs. Burton, the many elements that have come to signify disordered privacy are here: hypocrisy and irreligion; clothing as a sign of sexual disorder; the hint that some religious sects loosen or do away entirely with “traditional marriage” in their quests for utopian community and equality. What makes privacy a secular sensibility is the invitation to aesthetic and moral judgment, the good feeling the reader gains by seeing these signs of Mrs. Burton’s immoral private life.

Stowe Puts Her Finger in the Pot As we saw in the previous chapter, the moral panic around abolition used as its alibi the need to protect white womanhood. White woman abolitionists (as the figure of Mrs. Burton suggests) therefore sparked a vitriol difficult to locate in responses to white male abolitionists like Garrison or Weld. The reaction to Stowe is exemplary of this. As Cindy Weinstein has shown, the South’s response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin—and antislavery activism more widely—was to assert their more correct sympathy with the enslaved, and that sympathy began with racial difference rather than shared humanity.39 These claims to better sympathy traveled alongside equally ardent assertions of sincerity, in terms of their feelings, and authenticity, in terms of their representations of the South. For instance, in her forty-­page review of Uncle Tom’s Cabin for the Southern Quarterly Review, the poet, essayist, and South Carolinian Louisa McCord hits all of these notes. She begins by suggesting that Stowe’s aims are not so chaste and moral as one would expect: In the midst of political turmoil, Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe has determined to put her finger in the pot, and has, it would seem, made quite a successful dip. . . . Ten thousand dollars (the amount, it is said, of the sales of her work) was, we presume, in the lady’s opinion, worth

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risking a little scalding for. We wish her joy of her ten thousand thus easily gained, but would be loath to take with it the foul imagination which could invent such scenes, and the malignant bitterness (we had almost said ferocity) which, under the veil of christian charity, could find the conscience to publish them.40 McCord attacks Stowe and her novel under specifically gendered terms. In McCord’s account, Stowe is an opportunist with a foul imagination, all hidden “under the veil of christian charity.” As the last section indicated, it is no surprise that McCord would paint Stowe as a religious hypocrite, but we also see here how McCord establishes her own moral position in contrast. She would be “loath” to take the money that would spread such libels and, what is more, abandon her femininity by revealing such a “foul imagination.” Later in the review, McCord canvasses all the “theories” that have historically led to bloodshed, starting with the French Revolution and quickly turning to American reform: “The Mormon theory has introduced regular and legally established polygamy into these United States. The woman’s rights theory is putting the ladies into their husband’s pantaloons; and Mrs. Stowe’s theory would lead them, Heaven knows where! All spirit of joking leaves us as we look shudderingly forward to her results. Amalgamation is evidently no bugbear to this lady.”41 Here, McCord dances an elaborate step. Naming both Mormon polygamy and women’s rights (Bloomers in “their husband’s pantaloons”), she suggests that Stowe’s theory would lead “Heaven knows where!” In other words, she brings into one’s mind the upturning of sexual and gendered hierarchies but omits what exactly Stowe’s novel would produce: “We look shudderingly forward to her results.” While she coyly continues to omit the feared results of Stowe’s influence, the suggestion of polygamy and cross-­dressing earlier suggests that Stowe is certainly pushing at the very boundaries of society itself. McCord finally states Stowe’s aim: “Amalgamation is evidently no bugbear to this lady.” All along she has been hinting that the result of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is amalgamation, but unlike, say, David Meredith Reese in 1834, she walks around the term quite a lot. McCord’s deep dive into Stowe’s libelous book catalogs all of the ways in which Uncle Tom’s Cabin gets facts wrong about the South. For her, as for many other reviewers, Stowe’s failures at realism revealed her religious hypocrisy and moral failings. Indeed, despite the Southern Literary Messenger’s characterization of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as coarse realism, it was a common charge

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that Stowe’s novel was not true to facts at all. Today scholars are more familiar with critiques from Black abolitionists like William G. Allen, who noted that “Uncle Tom was a good soul, thoroughly and perfectly pious. Indeed, if any man had too much piety, Uncle Tom was that man. I confess to more of ‘total depravity.’”42 Littell’s Living Age, for instance, reprinted two responses to Uncle Tom’s Cabin back-­to-­back in their July 10, 1852, issue. The first review, from Boston, mainly lauds the novel, especially its character portraits, but knocks it for being too “highly colored”: “the aggregation of so many rare horrors into two small volumes” has the effect, the review contends, to “grossly exaggerate the actual evils of negro slavery in this country. As a didactic work, therefore, it should be swallowed with a considerable dose of allowance.”43 The reviewer is thus largely in agreement with the second review with which it is paired, which complains that Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a “caricature of slavery” and that it “selects for description the most odious features of slavery” and portrays the “slaves of the story as more moral, intelligent, courageous, elegant and beautiful than their masters and mistresses; and where it concedes any of these qualities to the whites, it is to such only as are, even though slaveholders, opposed to slavery.”44 These reviews target Stowe’s realism in both aesthetic and moral terms. They charge her with improbable depictions that detract from her realism. And in not achieving her realism, they suggest, she fails to impart her morals. On their way to proving that the novel got slavery as an institution wrong—with the ultimate goal, as Weinstein argues, of “undermin[ing] altogether the differences between slavery and freedom”—Stowe’s southern critics were particularly preoccupied with her depiction of etiquette and manners, and with how she presented southern white gentlemen.45 Like many other defenders of the slave system against the popular representations in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, McCord latches onto the opening chapter, “A Man of Humanity,” in which Stowe develops a chapter-­long joke about which man is the “gentleman” and “man of humanity,” the genteel planter, Mr. Shelby, or the vulgar but rich slave trader, Mr. Haley. The point, of course, is that according to Stowe neither man is a gentleman, let alone a “man of humanity.” But, to say the least, the joke is lost on McCord. This chapter, instead, gets under her skin, and she spends a great amount of time picking it apart for its lack of realism, but that lack of realism alone is not really where she intends to sting. “Mrs. Stowe evidently does not know what ‘a gentleman’ is,” McCord begins, for she has “associated much, it would appear, with negroes, mulattoes and

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abolitionists; possibly, in her exalted dreams for the perfection of the race, she has forgotten the small punctilios of what, in the ordinary parlance of the world, is called decent society.”46 It is not simply that Mr. Shelby (and later, Marie St. Clare) uses New England regional slang in Kentucky or New Orleans; rather, it is that Stowe has left out the “small punctilios,” the etiquette that determines who can be invited where and how they speak to each other in those spaces. Stowe is no lady, McCord implies, or else she would know how to portray a gentleman. Critics of Uncle Tom’s Cabin located in Stowe’s supposed lack of realistic etiquette a means to attack her morality, and the way McCord and others went about this critique exposes how authenticity was, by the 1850s, a thoroughgoing language of morality and aesthetics. The two—the moral assessment of slaveowners and the realism of the novel—were in fact intimately tied together. Consider the New England minister Nehemiah Adams’s South-­ Side View of Slavery; or, Three Months at the South, in 1854 (1854), a travel memoir about heading south for his health. The objection he records from southerners (again about chapter 1 of the novel) concentrates on the importance of manners: But above all, to represent a southern gentleman, a man having ‘the appearance of a gentleman,’ ‘the arrangements of the house and the general air of the housekeeping indicating easy and even opulent circumstances,’ as suffering Haley to bid for such a woman as Eliza, with a view to her peculiar fitness for the New Orleans market, ‘slapping Mr. Shelby on the shoulder,’ and coaxing him to let him have her for this purpose, it may well be conceived by honorable and virtuous gentlemen, is felt to be an affront by every decent man at the south—a coarse, broad, disgusting caricature, which, as a libel on a community, they say, hardly has a parallel.47 While both Adams and McCord alight on the same reason to object to this scene—the inaccuracy, if not offensiveness of the depiction of Mr. Shelby— here, Adams is more direct than McCord about what constitutes the “libel”: Stowe’s depiction of Mr. Shelby allowing Haley to bid openly with him for Eliza for the express purpose of selling her on the New Orleans market. The nature of the “coarse, broad, disgusting caricature” is a breach of both realism and manners. Or it is a breach of realism because it is a breach of manners. It is not objectionable that this form of enslavement exists; rather, the

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complaint is that no one would discuss the topic in polite company, least of all a gentleman of Mr. Shelby’s standing. Needless to say, these and other critics of Stowe operate in bad faith: the open secret of the South, as Jacobs showed so effectively, was that sexual exploitation and violence were ubiquitous parts of the system. But to name it or depict it was to breach that open secret. That is, abolitionists made public an open secret. In doing so, they sought to show that private life in the South was not sexually moral, and therefore cannot have a claim to privacy in the first place. But the accusations reverberated back, which Jacobs fully anticipated in her careful posturing in the preface to Incidents, and this is where the bad faith occurs. In not openly admitting that this was a system of sexual assault and exploitation, Stowe’s critics could point to her novel as evidence of her lewdness. And, indeed, Stowe was excoriated by the southern press for depicting, however obliquely, the sexual violence of slavery. The Western Journal and Civilian echoed McCord, accusing Stowe of advocating amalgamation, that “she is willing to occupy the position of proposing to her countrywomen to submit themselves to the embraces of negroes, thus becoming the mothers of a degraded race of mulattoes.”48 George Frederick Holmes’s second review in the Southern Literary Messenger, this time of Stowe’s Key to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” opens with an extended screed about the novel: It may accord with the gross fancies and coarse nature of a Cincinnati school-­mistress to revel over the imagination or the reality of corruptions, with which she is much more conversant than the majority of Southern gentlemen, but the license of a ribald tongue must be excluded from the sanctity of the domestic heart. If Mrs. Stowe will chronicle or imagine the incidents of debauchery, let us hope that women—and especially Southern women, will not be found poring over her pages. The Gospels according to Fanny Wright, George Sand, the fashionable favour extended to the licentious novels of the French School, and the woman’s rights’ Conventions, which have rendered the late years infamous, have unsexed in great measure the female mind, and shattered the temple of feminine delicacy and moral graces; and the result is before us in these dirty insinuations of Mrs. Stowe.49 To follow this logic, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the proof that Stowe has a secret, dirty mind and that her “dirty insinuations,” which are sexual in nature, spring from

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infidelity, Jacobinism, and women’s rights. The plausible Christian sentimentality of Uncle Tom’s Cabin really hides a damning secret atheism at the heart of her project. Ultimately, Stowe is a “Cincinnati school-­mistress”—already a suspect, public woman working for her wages; with her penchant for writing about “incidents of debauchery,” Stowe is low in more ways than one. And because of this, her “ribald tongue” cannot be invited back into the private sphere, for the novel betrays the fact that Stowe has kept her dirty thoughts secret, and, as such, they are not fit for the moral role of the private. To Stowe’s southern reviewers, Uncle Tom’s Cabin evinced her disordered, degenerate secret self—that is, she and her novel together threatened to tear down the private sphere and that which it was meant to shore up, a moral society. For a more vivid example of this accusation, we might look at “A Dream Caused by the Perusal of Mrs. H. Beecher Stowe’s Popular Work Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” a lithograph by C. R. Milne (from Louisville, Kentucky), which includes a suggestive portrait of Stowe attacked by naked demons, one of which straddles her and drags her into a dark hole. On the one hand,

Figure 13. “A Dream Caused by the Perusal of Mrs. H. Beecher Stowe’s Popular Work Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” C. R. Milne, 1853. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, LC-­DIG-­pga-­02202.

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Stowe has promoted, according to these critics, amalgamation and has broken taboos about sex and public speech that reveal her own dirty mind. On the other hand, the response seems to be—as we saw with Thomas Paine and Herman Melville—to insist on pushing her depictions back under a veil. Yet, unlike with Paine and even Melville, the response to her revelations also demands a violent rebuttal, in which Stowe herself is imagined as in need of public correction.

Disinterested Benevolence If, as we saw in Chapter 4, white abolitionists were much too eager to declaim any interest in “practical amalgamation,” we should not be surprised that they also sought out figures who could stand for the opposite of the hypocritical ministers and white women of the anti-­abolitionist imagination. As Kansas started to break out into war, they found one in John Brown. Since the Fugitive Slave Act, many white abolitionists had increasingly found that peace measures would not answer the crisis at hand. From Theodore Parker to Henry C. Wright and Thomas Wentworth Higginson—let alone Emerson and Thoreau—many white male abolitionists left behind moral suasion methods, breaking with Garrison and those still advocating for peaceful dissent, and moved closer to the position of the more radical Black abolitionists like Douglass, Martin Delany, and James McCune Smith. White women like Stowe and Lydia Maria Child tended to continue their support of pacifism, though over the decade that position frayed as well. Following the 1856 battle at Ossawatomie in Kansas (which the Free Soilers lost), Brown became a national symbol of antislavery resistance, one that demonstrated that white abolitionism was not all moralizing sentimentality. Brown toured New England in 1857, a trip that included a visit to Concord where he gave lectures on Kansas and attempted to raise funds. The abolitionists with whom Brown circulated in these years continually recorded two reactions: one was how authentic Brown was; and second, that he was a return of the Puritans, a modern-­day Cromwellian soldier, or even Oliver Cromwell himself. Nearly every positive public comment on Brown, including those in retrospect, seems to represent him through a language of aesthetic authenticity. According to Frederick Douglass in an 1881 speech on John Brown at Storer College, Brown’s New Elba house was a metonym for the man: “In its plainness it was a truthful reflection of its inmates: no

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disguises, no illusions, no make-­believes here, but stern truth and solid purpose breathed in all its arrangements. I was not long in company with the master of this house before I discovered that he was indeed the master of it, and likely to become mine too, if I staid long with him.”50 And as he summed it up: “History has no better illustration of pure, disinterested benevolence.”51 These two points are of a piece. Just as in Sedgwick’s “Matty Gore,” the furnishing of one’s home was a key to one’s morality; Brown’s plain house reflected his moral uprightness. Douglass’s reference to “disinterest benevolence”—a term of late Edward­ ean Calvinism to which I will return—recalls Brown’s prominence in what Kenyon Gradert has described as the “abolitionist revival of Puritan radicalism,” which sought to “draw a millennial battle line through the middle of a complacent status quo.”52 So, for instance, Thoreau noted that while the modern Christian “shows the whites of his eyes on the Sabbath, and the blacks all the rest of the week,” Brown “was one of that class of whom we hear a great deal, but, for the most part, see nothing at all,—the Puritans. It would be in vain to kill him. He died lately in the time of Cromwell, but he reappeared here.”53 Or as Wendell Phillips put it, “You cannot expect to put a real Puritan Presbyterian, as John Brown is,—a regular Cromwellian dug up from two centuries,—in the midst of our New England civilization, that dares not say its soul is its own, nor proclaim that it is wrong to sell a man at auction, and not have him show himself as he is.”54 Mary Stearns, a niece of Lydia Maria Child and the wife of George Luther Stearns (a member of the Secret Six who funded the Harpers Ferry raid), described Brown as having “such an erect, military bearing, such fine courtesy of demeanor and grave earnestness, that he seemed to my instant thought some old Cromwellian hero suddenly dropped down before me.”55 These characterizations of Brown as a type of reincarnated Cromwellian soldier persisted even after his death. Thus, in his postwar descriptions of him, Franklin B. Sanborn—a member of the Secret Six and author of Memoirs of John Brown (1878)—writes that Brown was “a Puritan soldier, such as were common enough in Cromwell’s day, but have not been seen since.”56 And it should be said that these portrayals were not too far afield from Brown’s own self-­presentation; he explicitly patterned himself after Cromwell.57 The enduring mythology of Brown began in these years, as his contemporaries cast him as a modern-­day Puritan, and especially as a reborn member of Cromwell’s New Model Army. These representations fit into a

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larger pattern of what Christopher Hanlon has called “Atlantic sectionalism,” in which the North traced its cultural heritage through Saxon England and the Puritans, and the South identified with the Cavaliers of the English Civil War.58 For the northern white abolitionists especially, Brown was the return of Calvinism in the form of antislavery retribution, and the raid in 1859 proved to many the apotheosis of this second coming. Brown allowed abolitionists, as these examples attest, to partake in the “pleasures, pitfalls, and powers of a revolutionary holy war,” as Gradert puts it.59 He is morally out of place in their secular age, but, as such, he is a much-­needed antidote to that age’s complacency. Stowe’s novel about the end of the Calvinist era in New England, The Minister’s Wooing, tends to be read within nearly every context but this.60 Yet the novel was serialized in the Atlantic Monthly from December 1858 to December 1859, which means that Stowe published it straight through John Brown’s raid and trial, and her last installment was printed in the same month as his execution. To be sure, the composition of the novel predated the raid—Stowe began writing it following her son Henry’s death in 1857— but it neither predates invocations of Brown as a Cromwellian soldier nor the questions about hypocrisy and resistance that he raised for Stowe and her New England contemporaries.61 While her biographer Joan Hedrick highlights Stowe’s private grief, it is also clear that the ongoing investigation of sympathy that she conducted in her other two antislavery novels changed as violence broke out over the course of the 1850s.62 The Minister’s Wooing, set in the twilight of the Edwardean era in late eighteenth-­century Newport, confronts the attractions to and challenges of Calvinist theological prin­ciples in 1859. If Brown constituted for so many of Stowe’s peers the second coming of Cromwell, Stowe returned to the end of Calvinist culture’s dominance in New England to consider what its resurgence might mean for the antislavery movement. The marriage plot of The Minister’s Wooing concentrates on Mary Scudder, whose love interest, the unregenerate James Marvyn, is presumed to have died at sea. In her grief she agrees to marry Samuel Hopkins, the brilliant but absent-­minded Calvinist minister living with her and her mother (the minister is based very loosely on the historical Hopkins). Through his character, Stowe probes the doctrine of “disinterested benevolence,” in both Hopkins’s antislavery stance and his response to the return of James Marvyn. Disinterested benevolence, according to the historical Hopkins, was

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“the love in which God’s holiness consists.”63 The highest possible virtue, he maintained, was expressed by a willingness to set aside all individual private good for the salvation of others. In this, Hopkins’s fairly radical and controversial conclusion, holiness demanded the willingness to go to hell for the glory of God.64 We might say that disinterested benevolence was the inverse of hypocrisy: in acting in accord with this principle, one sets aside private desires or entanglements and acts for the salvation of all. But it is also more than this: in Hopkins’s estimation it demanded the complete subordination (perhaps even obliteration) of the private. In Stowe’s novel, when Hopkins releases Mary to marry James, he demonstrates the capacity for just such self-­sacrifice. A subplot of the novel mirrors these romantic and moral choices: Mary befriends the French Catholic Virginie de Frontignac, who is in love with Aaron Burr (depicted as a seductive libertine in the novel) but married to another man. Mary helps Virginie to sacrifice her private desire for Burr to fulfill her duty as a wife. The character to thoroughly inhabit the position of “disinterested benevolence” is Hopkins, both in his theology and his personal and political actions. Cast, like Brown so often was, as the last of a long line of Calvinists just as that tradition was about to be unseated by the evangelical revivals of the Second Great Awakening, Hopkins’s “pulpit talents,” the narrator explains, were “unattractive”: “His early training had been all logical, not in the least aesthetic; for, like the ministry of his country generally, he had been trained always to think more of what he should say than of how he should say it.”65 What’s more, as Ashley Reed points out, Stowe knew that she misrepresented the historical Hopkins as a “stuffed shirt” who had no ability to enact practical theology, someone who “cannot so much as darn a sock, much less manage a garden or farm.”66 In making these revisions, Stowe takes a step back from the celebration of Calvinist radicalism to consider its implications. One place she concentrates is in the demanding theology that seemed so attractive to the abolitionist imagination at the end of the 1850s: “The preaching of those times was animated by an unflinching consistency which never shrank from carrying an idea to its remotest logical verge” (195). The endpoint of this “unflinching consistency” was the demand that all believers in Christ sacrifice even their own salvation for others. As Reed explains, “in trying to imagine the perfectly unselfish person” Hopkins and his followers, in Stowe’s estimation, had “created a monstrously selfish God.”67 In a way, though, by making Hopkins impractical Stowe saves him from himself. His disinterested benevolence and impracticality make him

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novelistically endearing instead of monstrously unfeeling. By characterizing him thus, Stowe allows readers to think through the very real puzzle of hypocrisy without distancing themselves too easily from a character who is demanding such a high bar of their morality. We see these qualities at play when Hopkins visits his most prosperous parishioners to encourage them to end their involvement in the slave trade. He expects that theology will be enough to convince them to set aside their wealth. In neither case does this pan out. When he visits the Marvyns to encourage them to free their household slaves Candace and Cato, it is not so much his logic but Candace’s impassioned argument against enslavement using the secular language of the Revolutionary War that compels Mr. Marvyn to free her and her husband. When Hopkins visits Simeon Brown—the deacon of his church whose wealth comes directly from the slave trade—he is rebuffed entirely. Before this interview, Brown had been a most ardent supporter of Hopkins’s system of disinterested benevolence. But “benevolence, when Simeon Brown spoke of it, seemed the grimmest and unloveliest of Gorgons; for his mind seemed to resemble those fountains which petrify everything that falls into them. But the hardest-­shelled animals have a vital and sensitive part, though only so large as the point of a needle; and the Doctor’s innocent proposition to Simeon, to abandon his whole worldly estate for his principles, touched this spot” (95). That spot was his wealth. As Kate Scudder warns Hopkins before he sets out, “He may feel willing to give up his soul” but “I don’t think he’ll give up his ships” (87). When Hopkins simply asks him to take disinterested benevolence to its logical conclusion, to entirely disentangle his life from the slave trade, Brown recoils: “Doctor, you’re too fast. You are not a practical man, Doctor. You are good in your pulpit;—nobody better. Your theology is clear;—nobody can argue better. But come to practical matters, why, business has its laws, Doctor. Ministers are the most unfit men in the world to talk on such subjects; it’s departing from their sphere” (96). Ironically, Brown retreats to the position deists took in the 1790s: religion is well and good in its place, but, in taking up politics, ministers “depart from their sphere.” Morality, in other words, is only ever about something called “religion,” which is also only ever private and personal. In these depictions of Hopkins and the New England theological tradition, Stowe means not to thoroughly undermine either. As Stowe’s narrator explains, Hopkins’s ideality (in phrenological terms) was large, and the “only mistake made by the good man was that of supposing that the elaboration of theology was preaching the gospel. The gospel he was preaching constantly,

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by his pure, unworldly living” (55). Hopkins’s principle is key—he most thoroughly encompasses that “unflinching consistency which never shrank from carrying an idea to its remotest logical verge”—but his best effects are through his actions. He cannot seem to convince his parishioners to follow his theology to its lived conclusions, though. When Hopkins does finally preach his antislavery sermon, the effects are startling but short-­lived. “The sermon,” the narrator tells us, “rolled over the heads of the gay audience, deep and dark as a thunder-­cloud, which in a few moments changes a summer sky into heaviest gloom. Gradually an expression of intense interest and deep concern spread over the listeners; it was the magnetism of a strong mind, which held them for a time under the shadow of his own awful sense of God’s almighty justice” (144). Stowe portrays the strict logic of Hopkins’s theology as a force of nature. The urgency of quitting a sinful path before the judgment of God falls is likened to a storm, or animal magnetism, metaphors similar to her description of the effects of Dred’s prophetic voice in her previous novel. Yet, while Hopkins’s power spreads interest, even concern, the effects ultimately dissipate: “It was not till after the sermon, prayer, and benediction were all over, that the respectables of Newport began gradually to unstiffen themselves from the spell, and to look into each other’s eyes for comfort, and to reassure themselves that after all they were the first families, and going on the way the world had always gone, and that the Doctor, of course, was a radical and a fanatic” (144). Stowe depicts in this scene what Thoreau had described about the hypocrisy of “church going” in their secular age, that people were content to show “the whites of [their] eyes on the Sabbath, and the blacks all the rest of the week.” She adds to this charge the rhetorical way in which one can easily marginalize and contain the moral challenge of a Hopkins—or a Brown—by having the parishioners call Hopkins “a radical and a fanatic.” Doing so also allows her to draw a historical analogy between denunciations of radical Jacobins in the 1790s and the 1850s discourse about “fanatical” abolitionists. The Doctor is constantly puzzled by the inefficacy of his sound logic. When Katy Scudder warns Hopkins that Brown would rather lose his soul than his ships, he retorts, a little harshly and uncharacteristically, that then Brown would be “a hypocrite, a gross hypocrite” (87), a point the narrator mournfully revisits after Hopkins’s failed attempt to convince Brown to divest from the slave trade: “The ill-­success of the Doctor’s morning attempt at enforcing his theology in practice rather depressed his spirits,” the narrator sadly reports. “There was a noble innocence of nature in him which looked

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at hypocrisy with a puzzled and incredulous astonishment. How a man could do so and be so was to him a problem at which his thoughts vainly labored” (101). Hypocrisy, in Stowe’s universe, is recognizing the logic of disinterested benevolence, but remaining stubbornly resistant to it in practice. For Stowe, writing at the end of the 1850s, this question has as much to do with the widespread political question of slavery than any eighteenth-­century theological debate. How do citizens live with their hypocrisy, feeling slavery is wrong but not wanting to abolish it for fear of damaging their own bottom line, like Simeon Brown and the other Newport residents? That is, they cannot quite square this rising secular morality of authenticity (living their private convictions) with the equally pressing desires of capitalism. As Melville so famously put it, the “urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills.”68 And just as Plinlimmon maintained a facade of morality because he never challenged the status quo, Hopkins’s deacon Simeon Brown plans to go on “doing” religion and “seeming” religious without letting it interfere with his wealth. Being told one is a hypocrite is not enough incentive to change action, the novel suggests.

Feeling Right It is not just in its political plot that The Minister’s Wooing thinks through the struggle to live up to “disinterested benevolence.” It is central to the romantic plot as well. The final gesture of Hopkins’s disinterested benevolence has less to do with the antislavery theme than it does with the marriage plot. In sacrificing his own marital prospects and releasing Mary from her oath, Hopkins practices his holy gospel, rather than preaching its logic, a decision that prompts James Marvyn to announce, “Sir, this tells on my heart more than any sermon you ever preached. I shall never forget it. God bless you, Sir!” (320). James’s faith is established not by theological sternness but by the very living sacrifice that Hopkins makes. What Hopkins’s final sacrifice models is what Mary Scudder has long stood for in the novel: a living embodiment of what Ashley Reed has called Mary’s “doctrine of infinite kindness.”69 The women’s community in The Minister’s Wooing exemplifies this network of “infinite kindness,” and by releasing Mary from the engagement, Hopkins joins them as a practitioner rather than simply as the man they take care of.

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This is the culmination of the marriage plot. However, seven chapters precede it in which Mary faces an impossible, heartbreaking choice—end her engagement with Hopkins to be with her first and only love, James Marvyn, or keep her oath to the minister. She discusses the moral dilemma with Virginie, who is adamantly against Mary marrying Hopkins under any circumstances, whether or not James had returned from sea. Mary’s inclination is to stand by her duty, to sacrifice herself to the minister’s happiness and to her pledged oath. She explains to Virginie that, in her marriage with Hopkins, “I should hope that God would help me to feel right” (303). In this moment, Mary invokes Stowe’s famous recommendation at the end of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, to strive to “feel right.” But in The Minister’s Wooing, feeling right is not so simple. Virginie is blunt in her response: “I am very much afraid He will not, ma chère. I asked Him a great many times to help me, when I found how wrong it all was; and He did not” (303). The major development in Stowe’s ruminations on slavery and protest between 1852 and 1859 is encapsulated here. It is not easy—nor always the right decision—to strive to “feel right.” But because Hopkins releases her, Mary need not make a choice at all. The Minister’s Wooing sketches a heroine who struggles to “feel right” in relation to her engagement but who is spared the necessity of living out that disjunction. Mary Scudder remains in the novel a type and an ideal that others measure their own imperfections against, but it is an ideal never put to a complete test. These questions of fallibility, imperfection, and hypocrisy persist to the very last chapter of the novel. In it, Mary writes Virginie about Burr’s duel with Hamilton, and his subsequent loss of reputation. Virginie responds that Burr “is not so much more sinful than all the other men of his time. Have I not been in America? I know Jefferson; I know poor Hamilton,—peace be with the dead! Neither of them had a life that could bear the sort of trial to which Burr’s is subjected. When every secret fault, failing, and sin is dragged out, and held up without mercy, what man can stand?” (331). In Virginie’s lament at the end of The Minister’s Wooing, Stowe holds two irreconcilable points in tension with each other: Burr was not morally sound, nor should he be celebrated; yet to wait for “Infinite Purity” before acting in the world may also be a bad lesson to take from the example of the very compromised and hypocritical founders. And this is perhaps where Stowe’s novel and John Brown’s legacy intertwine. “When every secret fault, failing, and sin is dragged out, and held up without mercy, what man can stand?” After 1859, many northern

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abolitionists responded: John Brown. We could say Brown came to stand for the opposite public style of the sentimental white woman: he is the anti-­ hypocrite. If recent scholarship has tended to frame Stowe as emblematic of white abolitionist hypocrisy, it has also followed the abolitionist lead in establishing Brown’s hallowed position as the anti-­hypocrite and, as David Reynolds put it, nearly alone among white abolitionists in being “informed by a truly progressive vision of racial justice.”70 As Franny Nudelman has argued, Brown’s death “is one of the founding moments in the development of a Northern nationalism based on the affective power of self-­sacrifice.”71 Invocations of Brown, both then and now, occupy a peculiar relation to sentimental discourse. While he is the prophetic response to official jurisprudence, as suggested by Caleb Smith, he is also an example of a masculinity that can feel even as he punishes, according to Elizabeth Barnes.72 Brown’s capacity to feel and to love even as he dispenses violence, as Kevin Pelletier argues, was such an acute expression of sentimentalism’s apocalypticism (in which “threats of violent retribution precede and are meant to produce love”) that he inspired compassion and sentiment from northern abolitionists.73 As such, he earned sentiment by being the opposite of a sentimental hypocrite. He was no Stowe. Brown’s admirers repeatedly connected his transparency—his supposed lack of secret sins or hypocritical private actions—with his morals. In remarks delivered on November 18, 1859, directly following Brown’s trial, Ralph Waldo Emerson claimed that Brown was “so transparent that all men see him through.”74 As Emerson went on to explain, “I said John Brown was an idealist. He believed in his ideas to that extent, that he existed to put them all into action. He did not believe in moral suasion;—he believed in putting the thing through.”75 He “saw how deceptive the forms are” and saw distinctly “the fact behind the forms.”76 Perhaps what impressed Emerson so much about Brown, as he noted in “Courage,” was that Brown compelled even his enemies to respect his disinterest and transparency: “The true temper has genial influences. It makes a bond of union between enemies. Governor Wise of Virginia, in the record of his first interviews with his prisoner, appeared to great advantage. If Governor Wise is a superior man, or inasmuch as he is a superior man, he distinguishes John Brown. As they confer, they understand each other swiftly; each respects the other.”77 And it is true that Wise, though certainly eager to hang him, also had charitable words for Brown as a man. While naming him a “fanatic,” Wise also said he was a “man of clear head, of courage, fortitude, and simple ingenuousness.”78 Wise’s

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qualified admiration was repeated in any number of responses from others. It confirmed something authentic about Brown for northern abolitionists. A lot like Stowe’s Hopkins, Brown may have been an abolitionist fanatic, but his temper was true. To see how thoroughly gendered the accusations of hypocrisy were, we need only look closer at the distinction Wise drew between his estimation of Brown and that of a prominent white woman abolitionist, Lydia Maria Child. Wise and Child ended up in a heated public exchange over John Brown’s incarceration. The scandal originated with a private letter from Child to Wise requesting permission to visit and care for Brown in jail. Wise leaked the original correspondence to the press, provoking Child’s public response, which she published in the New York Tribune. These first two letters then roused Margaretta Mason, the wife of Senator James M. Mason of Virginia, to respond publicly to Child, and Child responded to her in kind. These letters (and Wise’s response to Child’s original appeal) were reprinted widely in both the North and the South, and they were published together in 1860 as The Correspondence Between Lydia Maria Child and Gov. Wise and Mrs. Mason, of Virginia by the American Anti-­Slavery Society. According to Carolyn Karcher, this 1860 publication reached “the almost unprecedented circulation of 300,000 copies.”79 What is fascinating in the publication history is how the debate within the letters about higher law and hypocrisy is echoed by the question of how private or public the correspondence was meant to be. And it swirled around the one man in the United States not to be confused with a sneaking hypocrite—John Brown, of whom Thoreau would say that he never yielded “to a whim or transient impulse, but carr[ied] out the purpose of a life.”80 Child opens her letter to Governor Wise by invoking those aspects of the secular sensibility I have been tracing in this book. While she disapproves of Brown’s violent tactics, she explains, “I and thousands of others feel a natural impulse of sympathy for the brave and suffering man. Perhaps God, who sees the inmost of our souls, perceives some such sentiment in your heart also.”81 Child speaks so thoroughly in the language of sentiment here that we risk overlooking her rhetoric, but the implications of her sentimental investment in private, authentic selfhood is precisely what will spark the angry exchange. She opens by suggesting there must be something “inmost” in Wise’s soul that would feel sympathy with Brown, a feeling surely not aligned with his stern public duty. This sentiment hearkens back to Stowe’s appeals to southern

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men in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. As Stowe describes Senator Bird’s change of heart, she pauses for one of her trademark addresses to the reader: “And you need not exult over him, good brother of the Southern States; for we have some inklings that many of you, under similar circumstances, would not do much better. We have reason to know, in Kentucky, as in Mississippi, are noble and generous hearts, to whom never was tale of suffering told in vain.”82 From the point of view of a writer like Stowe, as with Child, this disjunction between private belief and public stance is the opening to nudge the reader or citizen to antislavery action, that is, to a truer, more authentic relation between the inmost soul and the public person. From Governor Wise’s point of view, Child just called him a hypocrite. Which, to be fair, she did. Wise’s response focuses solely on his public position as governor, ready to “do [his] duty” in “protecting [Child’s] rights in our limits.” But his most potent line responds indirectly to Child’s allusion to his “inmost soul” and turns the accusation of hypocrisy back on her. Wise swears he would not “permit an insult” to any “woman in her walk of charity among us, though it be to one who whetted knives of butchery for our mothers, sisters, daughters and babes.”83 In other words, Wise swears he is no hypocrite—that he himself will chivalrously protect women, even if those women, like Child, themselves are hypocrites bent on murder and riot. But Child would have none of it. Her letter in response abandons any concern about Wise’s “inmost soul” and accuses him of an even deeper hypocrisy, one this time based on his public position: “Your constitutional obligation, for which you profess so much respect, has never proved any protection to citizens of the Free States, who happened to have a black, brown, or yellow complexion; nor to any white citizen whom you even suspected of entertaining opinions opposite to your own, on a question of vast importance to the temporal welfare and moral example of our common country.”84 Child begins her attack not by revealing a private hypocrisy but by pointing to the utter contradiction of Wise’s claims to defend the Constitution; as she points out, his defense of rights seems to stop when he meets with a black or brown citizen of the Free States, or when a white abolitionist disagrees with him on slavery. Well versed in the cult of domesticity, though, Child knew that she must also target his claim to protect women. She therefore turns to the still recent US-­Mexico War of 1846–1848 and asks, “Was it not by robbery, even of churches, that you proposed to load the mules of Mexico with gold for the United States? Was it not by the murder of unoffending Mexicans

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that you expected to advance those schemes of avarice and ambition? What humanity had you for Mexican ‘mothers and babes,’ whom you proposed to make childless and fatherless?”85 When Mason weighs in on this public feud between Child and Wise, she joins these mutual accusations of hypocrisy, opening her letter by asking, “Do you read your Bible, Mrs. Child? If you do, read there, ‘Woe unto you, hypocrites’”—biblical injunctions we saw in other proslavery texts—and she repeats Wise’s attack on Child’s plan to help a “man whose aim and intention was to incite the horrors of a servile war—to condemn women of your own race, ere death closed their eyes on their sufferings from violence and outrage, to see their husbands and fathers murdered, their children butchered, the ground strewed with the brains of their babes.”86 Mason leans into the affective tie of white womanhood, inviting Child to identify with her (the “women of your own race”) and not Brown. Mason then turns to a series of rhetorical questions intended to call out Child’s hypocrisy, heatedly asking Child whether she bothered helping those directly around her as white women do in the South, whether she would “stand by the bedside of an old negro, dying of a hopeless disease, to alleviate his sufferings as far as human aid could? Have you,” she continues, “ever watched the last, lingering illness of a consumptive, to soothe, as far as in you lay, the inevitable fate? Do you soften the pangs of maternity in those around you by all the care and comfort you can give?”87 Child recognizes that the game has shifted to her own personal morality and responds sharply in kind: “To the personal questions you ask me, I will reply in the name of all the women of New England. It would be extremely difficult to find any woman in our villages who does not sew for the poor, and watch the sick, whenever occasion requires. . . . I have never known an instance where the ‘pangs of maternity’ did not meet with requisite assistance; and here at the North, after we have helped the mothers, we do not sell the babies.”88 Through invocations of “whetting” knives to butcher women and children, Wise and Mason seek to expose the secret immorality of Child and other white abolitionists—their penchant for draping themselves in the clothing of Christian sympathy masks their violent, unrelenting immorality, their collective inability to read the Bible. It is no surprise that one’s perceived treatment of “women and children” symbolically stands in for one’s Christianity. They are, of course, synecdochal for the private sphere itself. This tight association between the two equally fueled the vicious rumors about Child that raced through the South—that she had abandoned a disabled daughter

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who was “being generously supported by a Mississippi slaveholder.”89 Likewise, it is no surprise that both Wise’s and Mason’s concerns are mainly for white women and children, an assumption that Child turns around on them by reminding them that “here at the North, after we have helped the mothers, we do not sell the babies.” The moral debate itself, though, cannot be won when one’s private authenticity—one’s “inmost soul”—has been called to account. As we saw back in 1800, accusations about private irreligion and hypocrisy are too easily turned around, and too easily lead to cordoning off moral judgment in a private sphere of family and marriage. As Wise’s qualified admiration of John Brown demonstrates, Brown stood for the opposite of Child’s and Stowe’s hypocrisy. Brown almost immediately served as a model for others in their quest to make themselves more “true,” more disinterested. For instance, consider how radical abolitionist James Redpath explains the origin of his Public Life of Capt. John Brown: “a publisher of New York asked me to write a Life of John Brown. He wanted it as a Republican campaign document. I declined. I would not help to light cigars from the fire above the altar. The publishers of this book made a nobler request; they believed in John Brown; they wished to do him justice; and they desired to assist his destitute family. This volume is the result of their request.”90 In the 1885 Life and Letters of John Brown, Liberator of Kansas, and Martyr of Virginia, the editor Franklin Sanborn recounts a story told by John Brown Jr. that takes his father’s reputation for modeling righteous behavior to another level. Keeping an account of junior’s sins, Brown demands a “settlement” in the tannery. After applying a “nicely-­prepared blue-­beech switch” to his son’s back, his “father stripped off his shirt, and, seating himself on a block, gave me the whip and bade me ‘lay it on’ to his bare back. I dared not refuse to obey, but at first I did not strike hard. ‘Harder!’ he said; ‘harder, harder!’ until he received the balance of the account.”91 An education that shores up masculinity could hardly have a better expression. But if we were to consider what the anecdote was probably meant to impart, we must return to Brown’s supposed war against hidden vices, his willingness to sacrifice himself for others’ secret sins, and, above all, his masculinity, which implies that he will take it “harder” and “harder” in his martyrdom. This version of Brown comes together in the 1865 lithograph “John Brown Exhibiting his Hangman!” in which we see Brown as the resurrected Christ figure, the martyr who has caught the sneaking hypocritical Jefferson Davis. Brown’s sustained appeal rests in a longer cultural history whereby the sentimental white woman was gathered under the sign of “hypocrisy.”

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Figure 14. “John Brown Exhibiting His Hangman!” 1865. Image courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

The Confederacy, in the guise of Jefferson Davis (captured, according to the apocryphal story popular in 1865, in his wife’s crinolines), is feminized while racial or gender equality gets sidelined or caricatured for an upright, white masculinity, represented in the only figure not being ridiculed in the image: Brown. Brown’s moral authenticity registers over and over as a hard masculinity, and that masculinity, in turn, suggests the opposite of the cowardly politician’s flight and the sentimental woman’s shallow tears.

CHAPTER 6

Secrecy

Ten years after she published The Minister’s Wooing, Harriet Beecher Stowe, still the most celebrated writer in America, wrote up a literary scandal, causing a turmoil of a reach and scope that even she, who had endured such a storm after the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, could not have anticipated. During her promotional tours around England in the 1850s, Stowe befriended Lady Anne Isabelle Noel Byron, widow of the most famous English Romantic poet who, though dead for thirty years, was still a best seller and a source of thrills, not only for the exuberance and daring of his verse but also for his notorious personal life. Byron and his wife had been estranged since 1816, and Lady Byron had kept quiet about that, though Byron had often alluded to her in autobiographical poems as a cold religious bigot. When Stowe met her, Lady Byron, believing her own death to be imminent, disclosed a great secret about her husband, and asked Stowe if she should tell the story for the good of the public. Lady Byron feared that a forthcoming inexpensive edition of his collected poems could trigger a new wave of Byronmania. Upon hearing this secret, Stowe’s first reaction was that she should not reveal it: “Considering the peculiar circumstances of the case,” she wrote, “I could wish that the sacred veil of silence, so bravely thrown over the past, should never be withdrawn during the time that you remain with us.”1 Eventually, however, she changed her mind. In 1869, nine years after Lady Byron’s death, a translation of My Recollections of Lord Byron by his mistress, Teresa, Countessa Guiccioli, was published and circulated on both sides of the Atlantic. The laudable reception it earned was enough to pique Stowe’s moral indignation; more galling still, however, was Guiccioli’s portrayal of the estrangement as entirely Lady Byron’s fault. Guiccioli furthered this insult by describing Lady Byron as “an only and a spoilt child, a slave to rule, to habits and ideas as unchanging and inflexible as the figures she loved to

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study.”2 Outraged at this caricature, Stowe resolved to publish the secret that Lady Byron had imparted to her. In September 1869, in both the Atlantic Monthly and Macmillan’s Magazine in Britain, “The True Story of Lady Byron’s Life” spilled the beans: that Lady Byron had left her husband because he had “a secret adulterous intrigue with a blood relation, so near in consanguinity that discovery must have been utter ruin and expulsion from civilized society.”3 Stowe was thus the first to confirm openly the old rumor that Lord Byron had had an affair with his half sister, Augusta Leigh, and that Lady Byron knew about it. Breaching the “sacred veil of silence,” Stowe gambled on the moral work of privacy—that a secret crime this appalling desacralized the private sphere. Outing it would expose the villain and exonerate the innocent, as it would in any sentimental novel. As she did back in 1852 in response to the accusations that she invented her facts in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, she followed up her article less than a year later with Lady Byron Vindicated (1870), a book-­length compilation of her sources, a narrative of the facts, and rebuttals against her many critics. If Stowe’s initial aim was to shield Lady Byron and stop young readers from falling for Lord Byron’s poetic seductions, she “miscalculated on both counts,” as Susan Ryan puts it.4 The “Byron whirlwind” (so dubbed by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.) was a transatlantic uproar that sparked an intense debate over literary value, authorship, and morality—terrain Stowe had already navigated in the 1850s.5 Yet the Lord Byron scandal played out differently than the controversy over Uncle Tom’s Cabin had. One striking difference was the speed and scale of the scandal’s impact. Sensationalist journalism and transatlantic cables made Stowe’s initial article a splash, and the luridness of the secret she told signaled a growing appetite for thrilling celebrity gossip. Added to this new environment of sensationalism, as Ryan argues, the responses to Stowe demonstrated that the ground of literary judgment was shifting. Stowe and her defenders rested on what they believed to be common sense—that a literary work could be evidence of an author’s morality, and the moral impact of a work was the proper way to evaluate it. In other words, she still assumed the tight relation of morality and aesthetics that we saw structuring the debate over her own works in Chapter 5. Yet ardent readers—not just Byron’s personal friends—argued instead for the worth of his poetry despite or outside of any moral as opposed to aesthetic judgment. Aesthetics could be uncoupled from an author’s life—including that author’s scandalous secrets—and even the intrinsic moral aims of the works themselves.6

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This chapter investigates a term that is central to scandals like the one Stowe kicked up around Byron but largely set aside through the rest of the book: secrecy. In the previous chapters, we have seen how privacy and secrecy, rather than privacy and publicity, became the true opposites in American secularism. I have called privacy a “secular sensibility” in that it attached moral and aesthetic judgments to the emerging secular forms of private life, symbolized most vividly in heteronormative, monogamous marriage—but more especially the performative aspects of those marriages. Ideas about belief, fashion, and embodiment came under the umbrella of this sensibility. Privacy, thus, exceeded forms of sexual or family life, or, more accurately, it attached public identity markers more firmly to expressions of private and sexual selfhood. The sensibility thus created the conditions for sexological discourse in the late nineteenth century and the emergence of sexual identity taxonomies in the twentieth, and it helped to make both seem natural and self-­evident. To maintain this sensibility, practices and beliefs deemed “immoral,” or simply just “radical” to the mainstream Protestant secular moral order, were reconstituted as secrets and, as secrets, they were always at risk of exposure by someone else in a quest to keep privacy morally pure. We might think of the endpoint of the opposition between privacy and secrecy as the twenty-­first-­century reality of living our private lives online through social media, and the consequent mandate that we not engage in any statements or actions that would affect us negatively were they to “go viral.” To understand that dynamic better, this chapter opens with two scandals: first, the Lord Byron “whirlwind”; and second, the Beecher-­Tilton scandal, in which Stowe’s brother, Henry Ward Beecher, was accused of and brought to trial for an alleged affair with his parishioner and friend, Elizabeth Tilton. The two central figures of these scandals could not be more different: Henry Ward Beecher was a paragon of sentimental religiosity; Byron was famous— and infamous—on both sides of the Atlantic as a poet and libertine. But both similarly provoked American readers to rethink their relations to famous men—and both involved Stowe. Nineteenth-­century sex scandals such as the ones that flared up around Byron and Beecher are iconic instances of Foucault’s thesis that, far from unspeakable, “sex” impelled a discursive explosion in the later nineteenth century. It was a discourse, though, characterized by its obliqueness. Even “scandalmongering journalists,” as William A. Cohen has argued, “must convey the sexual content of their stories without offending their readership.”7 Thus the process by which sex goes “public” is productive, in Cohen’s words,

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of “an elaborate discourse—richly ambiguous, subtly coded, prolix and polyvalent,” a code that “we now recognize and designate by the very term literary.”8 This literary quality was central to how both scandals in this chapter unfolded. Though exposure holds the promise of definitively determining guilt or innocence, in these scandals it only led the public into the thorny realm of interpretation. The ambiguity of the evidence against both Byron and Beecher highlights the main paradox of the secular sensibility of privacy: its attendant belief in exposure despite exposure’s rickety record of promoting a more moral society. And both scandals ultimately hinged on the question of interpretation: Are secrets and crimes unconsciously betrayed in writing, legible to every passing eyeball? Is the act of exposing those sordid secrets productive of moral or social reform? Although the precise facts of these scandals remain shrouded in doubt to this day, both events and their surrounding discourses demonstrate how the revelation of a secret promises a more exact truth on the very basis of its secrecy; yet, once revealed, it often offers the least conclusive evidence. The public’s fascination with both scandals also evinces how marriage operated (and arguably still operates) as the form through which the questions of morality, character, and public trust were adjudicated in secular society. But the scandals also reveal how private marriage proved an unstable locus for morality, especially in a world of proliferating publicity and celebrity, emblematically located for many commentators in the rise of yellow journalism and instantaneous photography. These scandals thus chart how the performative aspects of privacy had an unintended, even paradoxical consequence: the emergence of a discourse in which the very nature of the self is by definition hypocritical. What is secret begins to feel true and what is known seems false, a dichotomy that had already structured assumptions in the debates over slavery and anticipated psychoanalysis: the distinction between a real, authentic self that is secreted in private domestic spaces (or for Freud in the unconscious), and the public self, a conscious performance— and mask—of that authentic, hidden self. To get at the “real” of a person’s being, one must distrust the performance of the private self and look for the hidden secrets lurking elsewhere. Henry James’s novel of social reform, The Bostonians (1886), explores how secrecy and privacy operated as opposing terms by the end of the century, and how literary characters can be built—and judged—through that opposition.9 Most of the previous chapters investigated the sentimental-­realist aesthetic,

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in which the author offers surface details that point to deeper character revelations. James marks an important shift in this argument. While taste still plays a large role in revealing character, what is a betrayed symptom and what is a deep truth is unstable in his novels. The Bostonians offers James’s most stark recognition of the complexity of the postbellum notion of “privacy”: a sensibility at once exposed to contamination and bent toward exposing the self to others—one that proposes itself as inviolate while depending on exposure for its maintenance. James’s characterizations depend on this dialectic, but they also complicate it. His characters have blurred and easily contaminated interiors, none of which can be stabilized by even the most traditional of marriages. In turn, privacy’s dialectical opposite—the erotic thrill of secrecy—begins to define not what should be expelled from the private sphere but the very feeling or essence of the authentic self.

Mrs. Stowe’s Last Romance Until recently, literary scholars have treated Lady Byron Vindicated as an embarrassing episode in Stowe’s late career, evidence more of the limits of her personal sentimentalism than a crucial moment in literary history.10 Ann Douglas, for example, called Lady Byron Vindicated a “hysterical panegyric” and claimed that it betrayed Stowe’s adoption of “the self-­worship inculcated by sentimental feminine antinomianism which her extraordinary intelligence had prevented her from fully assuming all her insecure and chaotic life. She was beginning to boast rather than analyze.”11 In readings like Douglas’s, Lady Byron Vindicated became a symptom of Stowe’s own decline.12 This characterization of Stowe, though, tends to participate in the very terms through which the scandal itself unfolded. After all, the Stowe-­Byron scandal prompted questions that got at the very interpretive move that Douglas deploys: Does literary writing reveal an author’s hidden morality or personality, and is the moral work of revelation even effective? A prominent participant in the exposé culture of antebellum abolitionism, Lydia Maria Child weighed in on these very questions in her review of Stowe’s “True Story”: “It is a puzzling question whether the gross vices of society ought to be unveiled, as a means of discovering a cure; or whether they should be carefully covered, lest young minds should become dangerously familiar with them. There is much to be said on both sides of this argument. Looking at society as it exists under the covering-­up process, with such

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a thin crust of conventional propriety over foul and dark pitfalls, into which the ignorant and unwary are constantly falling, I sometimes feel as if no amount of disclosure could produce a worse state of things than now exists, where secrecy stimulates curiosity, and there is no wise instruction to satisfy it.”13 Despite Child’s portrayal of society as operating under “the covering-­up process,” the United States had long been entrenched in an exposé culture. In every decade of the nineteenth century, we see obsessions with exposing both secret vices and structural, public problems, often correlated together, and Child was an active participant in that culture. It is not a surprise, then, that Child comes down on the side of revelation. A society held together by propriety and taboos, following from her metaphor, is a dangerous place to navigate; one is liable, for lack of knowledge, to fall into “foul and dark” pits. As she puts it, “Secrecy stimulates curiosity.” This dialectic of secrecy and curiosity drove the print explosion around Stowe’s exposé. While the sprawling debate canvassed many aspects of Stowe’s charge against Byron—from the dates of her chronology to the trustworthiness of lawyers’ statements and the meaning of literary evidence—Stowe’s character itself came under sustained attack. Stowe’s defenders tended to fall back, like the London publishers of Lady Byron Vindicated, on her moral reputation. “An intense love of justice and hatred of oppression, with an utter disregard of her own interests, characterise Mrs. Stowe’s conduct and writings, as all who know her well will testify,” they averred in their prefatory note.14 Elizabeth Cady Stanton agreed. To her mind, the story was backed by her trust in and knowledge of Stowe’s character: she “is too cautious and conscientious to venture such publications without abundant proof to substantiate them,” and with respect to her motives for the revelation, “judging from her antecedents, we have reason to believe them worthy and pure.”15 As these defenses indicate, the debate about Byron’s affair was simultaneously about Stowe’s character and the quality of her writing, a surprise to no one (likely including Stowe herself). Many criticized Stowe for her indiscretion; she was, according to one such critic, “just the last person in the world to whom we could commit the custody of a confidential communication.”16 More reviewers objected to the style of her writing. Take the London Times’s review of “True Story,” which Stowe quotes at the beginning of part 2 of Lady Byron Vindicated. The reviewer objects to the article because Stowe has improperly mixed her voice with Lady Byron’s: “We are given the impression made on Mrs. Stowe’s mind by Lady Byron’s statements; but it would have been more satisfactory if the statement itself had been reproduced as bare as possible,

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and been left to make its own impression on the public.”17 This was a common refrain. Commentators claimed to find too much Stowe and not enough basic facts in the article, making a case for a narrative style, aesthetically aligned with reportage, in which a narrator’s or author’s distinctive voice should not be audible in the narration, a style that would be increasingly applied to the genre division between fiction and nonfiction. The London Times called for a narrator who would not explicitly point the reader to the deep moral meanings of surface details, arguably one of Stowe’s decided talents. Others shifted the blame to Lady Byron as either artful or delusional, allowing that Stowe may have accurately relayed Lady Byron’s communication but that, in the words of a contributor to the London Times, “We think it perfectly possible—and, indeed, probable—that Lady Byron was herself the victim of a delusion,—that she wrongly suspected her husband of the crime with which she charged him.”18 Or, in a different vein, Justin McCarthy (in an article titled “Mrs. Stowe’s Last Romance”) opined that Stowe “was evidently ready to believe anything. Her rapturous enthusiasm for Lady Byron rendered her childlike in her incapacity to doubt or criticise.”19 Whereas Stanton lodged her belief in a long-­standing knowledge of Stowe’s character, many others assumed the story to be false, and they therefore judged Stowe’s and Lady Byron’s characters accordingly. Neither woman, it seems, could be completely trusted here. Even when the Times and McCarthy find a way to excuse the origins of the story, they do so by assuming the women were naive or deluded. Building on critiques of her realism in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe’s defenders were often given to distancing themselves from Stowe as a writer. As a contributor to the Saturday Review claimed, the “intrinsic and internal evidence of this history itself ” compels their belief, but the article is really damning proof of something else: Stowe’s “loose, careless, inaccurate” writing and the “very bad taste in telling her story.”20 Judgmental asides about Stowe’s fictional style like this abounded during the scandal: she is an “American authoress, who is known to the public by a clever but uncandid romance”; “We all know that that lady is a mere sensationalist writer; that nothing from her pen is considered by the American public as historically reliable, and that she will at any time sacrifice truth, if by so doing she can succeed in attracting notoriety.”21 One response nearly echoed the style and tempo of George Washington Peck’s scathing review of Melville’s Pierre: “Startling in accusation, barren in proof, inaccurate in dates, infelicitous in style, and altogether ill-­advised in publication, her strange article will travel round the whole

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literary world, and everywhere evoke against its author the spontaneous disapprobation of her life-­long friends.”22 Not surprisingly, these attacks often laced racism into their evaluation: “Mrs. Beecher Stowe made her first success by white-­washing the black. She is now trying to revive an expiring popularity by blackening a white.”23 In all, as Susan Ryan sums up, “Stowe’s prose style in the ‘True Story’ was called uneven and sensational, serving for her critics as further evidence of her bankruptcy, both moral and artistic.”24 While Stowe’s character and writing came under attack, her use of literary evidence to establish Byron’s guilt was particularly scrutinized. Stowe’s “True Story” turned to Byron’s Manfred and Cain to prove that the story of incest was true: “Anybody who reads the tragedy of ‘Manfred’ with this story in his mind will see that it is true. The hero is represented as a gloomy misanthrope, dwelling with impenitent remorse on the memory of an incestuous passion which has been the destruction of his sister for this life and the life to come; but which, to the very last gasp, he despairingly refuses to repent of, even while he sees the fiends of darkness rising to take possession of his departing soul.”25 How do we know that Byron did it? Well, what other proof do you need than his own literature, perpetually obsessed with incest? Yet this seemingly obvious evidence proved entirely inconclusive when others began to weigh in. As a contributor to the London Times objected, “Mrs. Stowe says that no one can read Manfred without perceiving that her story is true, I confess that I draw an inference directly opposite.” For this reader, it was inconceivable “that a man with such a secret on his soul should have written Manfred at this time.”26 Stowe brought other evidence to the table, especially in her shift to Lady Byron Vindicated (where she omitted the literary evidence altogether), but it is worth lingering on the fact that in her original article she presented the literary text as a record of an author’s morality, and especially of sins that can and will be betrayed in their writing. “Incest,” according to Stowe, is hiding in plain sight, written legibly across both Manfred and Cain. But the Times contributor, among others, countered that if someone harbored such a secret, the very last place they would expose it would be in their literature. We might say that both Stowe and her detractors were working through the problematic nature of the Freudian unconscious and limning what would become psychoanalytic methods. Those who argued against her did so from a theory of total repression—that a secret this shocking demanded that a subject repress it entirely. Stowe’s argument is more subtle. She reads literature for the inadvertent revelation of secret repressions based on symptoms observed on the surface. As the Byron scandal shows, this style of analysis was in place well

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before Freud’s theories would cross the Atlantic. It is, indeed, the basis of the secular sensibility of privacy. There is a reason that Freud would become so popular in the United States.

A Bogus Sentimentality A year before he was fired from his editorial position at the Independent for his increasingly radical views on divorce and women’s rights, Theodore Tilton opened the magazine’s columns to a debate on the Stowe-­Byron scandal. Providing space for Stowe’s defenders like Stanton and Child, he also included her detractors, like Justin McCarthy’s “Mrs. Stowe’s Last Romance.” The struggle over evidence and interpretation in the Byron scandal, which readers of the Independent were invited to consider and participate in, was but a precursor to the scandal that would rock his own world when Victoria Woodhull—Spiritualist, free lover, the first woman to have a firm at the New York Stock Exchange, and the first woman to run for president—published in her newspaper, the Woodhull & Claflin Weekly, a rumor about Tilton, his wife Elizabeth, and Stowe’s brother, Henry Ward Beecher, that had been racing around the women’s rights and reform movement networks. In the public eye since the late 1840s, Henry Ward Beecher had become, to modify the title of Debby Applegate’s biography of him, “the most famous minister in America.” Beecher preached a style of evangelicalism that was equal parts a rejection of his father’s Calvinism and an embrace of sentimental and sympathetic morality (including antislavery sentiments). Translating sentimentalism, the central idiom of women’s domestic fiction, into a theological brand from his pulpit in Brooklyn’s Plymouth Church, Beecher “resituate[ed] the religious experience in heightened feelings and intimate sentiments, removing it from the realm of duty, doctrine, or convention,” as the foremost historian of the scandal, Richard Wightman Fox, characterized it. This form of religiosity was deeply invested in authenticity. Beecher ensured, to quote Fox again, “that a ‘modern’ culture would center its attention on the charged and evanescent ‘truths’ of each person’s private life.”27 Yet as Chapter 5 explored, sentimentality and authenticity always existed in a strained relationship with each other. Texts and writers that tried to provoke authentic sympathy easily fell into accusations of hypocrisy and inauthenticity. For those who doubted Beecher’s innocence, he became a national icon of hypocrisy, as his sister Harriet had been in the 1850s.

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The Tiltons were not simply Beecher’s parishioners at Plymouth Church. The three were close friends, dating back to when Beecher presided over the marriage of the couple in 1855. In 1870 Elizabeth Tilton confessed to her husband Theodore about the affair. From that moment, there ensued two years of intense struggle to keep the confession and the possible affair secret—despite the triad’s willingness to obliquely whisper the story to friends or write about it in letters to others in their reformist circles. Uppermost in Beecher’s mind was his public reputation as a famous minister, and he rushed to the Tilton household—in fact, to Elizabeth’s sickbed—to demand that she retract her confession. Theodore then demanded a retraction of the retraction. By the time of the trial, Elizabeth had again switched back to Beecher’s account, only to publish in 1878 that she did have an affair with Henry. As Fox recounts, the “cover-­up was doomed by the double games all of them were playing. Theodore kept spreading the very rumors they were ostensibly trying to contain; Elizabeth continued to disparage Theodore to family and friends; Henry went on communicating secretly with Elizabeth, and she with him. The latter two generated new secrets while Theodore heightened demand on the outside for exposing the whole festering pool of them.”28 As the rumor spread, it inevitably entangled more individuals than the Tiltons and Beecher. First, most of the Beecher-­Stowe family rallied to cover up the story and support Henry. But not all of the family: Beecher and Stowe’s half sister Isabella Hooker—an outspoken women’s rights activist— allied with Tilton and Victoria Woodhull.29 Carelessly, Henry and Theodore employed their friend Frank Moulton as a go-­between for letters to each other about the affair. Moulton was interviewed by Plymouth Church and went on to testify in the 1875 trial. Theodore also let the story slip to, among many other people, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who then related it to Susan B. Anthony. But Anthony had already heard a similar story from Elizabeth.30 Whether it was Stanton or Tilton who told her, Woodhull was the first to publish the full details of the rumor in the November 2, 1872, issue of the Woodhull & Claflin Weekly. In dire financial straits, in part due to attacks on her outspoken free love advocacy, she had written to Beecher to ask for assistance in exchange for her silence—a blackmail he refused. Whether Woodhull herself was sincerely exposing middle-­class hypocrisy or enacting a petty revenge on the Beecher family (following not just Beecher’s rebuff but Catharine Beecher’s public attacks on her and Stowe’s satiric caricature of her in My Wife and I [1871]), there was no keeping the scandal suppressed by the end of 1872. Rumors soon flew that Tilton and Woodhull had had

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Figure 15. “Testimony in the great Beecher-­ Tilton scandal case illustrated.” James  E. Cook, ca. 1875. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, LC-­DIG-­pga-­03156.

an affair, and that they were conspiring to drag Beecher down. The dizzying multiplicity of actors, rumors, charges, and denials made for good copy and was ripe for satire. Plymouth Church investigated and predictably dismissed the accusation against Beecher, so in 1875 Theodore Tilton brought Beecher to court for “criminal conversation”—a civil action for damages arising from adultery—in a trial of such national fascination that stories about it ran in newspapers from Chicago to New Orleans to San Francisco. The trial ended with a hung jury, Elizabeth Tilton was not asked to testify, and to this day scholars are not entirely sure of the facts of the affair—even as to whether or not it actually happened.31 According to Laura Korobkin, the trial itself was so absorbing for the reading public because it became “an increasingly undecidable interrogation of hypocrisy.”32 Hypocrisy, in fact, is exactly the note that Woodhull sounded

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in her exposé. Like Beecher, she valued authenticity above all else. As she put it, while she had suffered abuse for her public advocacy of free love, Woodhull discovered that “the most persistent and slanderous and foul-­mouthed accusations came from precisely those who, as I often happened to know, stood nearest to me in their convictions, and whose lives, privately, were a protest against the very repression which I denounce.”33 Woodhull does not condemn Beecher for his affairs but for his shocking hypocrisy, his loud denunciation of free love doctrines from the pulpit while engaging in secret dalliances with women parishioners and writing collaborators. Beecher is not the only hypocrite that Woodhull targets. She rhetorically rolls her eyes at Tilton’s public and private hand-­wringing about the affair: “I assumed at once, and got a sufficient admission, as I always do in such cases, that he was not exactly a vestal virgin himself.” She thus deems his anxiety over the affair “merely a bogus sentimentality, pumped in his imagination, because our sickly religious literature, and Sunday-­school morality, and pulpit pharaseeism had humbugged him all his life into the belief that he ought to feel and act in this harlequin and absurd way on such an occasion.”34 Everyone in the triad, it seemed, was caught up in a performance of virtue and propriety, and Woodhull declares that it is “my duty and my mission to carry the torch to light up and destroy the heap of rottenness, which, in the name of religion, marital sanctity, and social purity, now passes as the social system.”35 The social world is one of “compulsory hypocrisy and systematic falsehood which is thus enforced and inwrought into the very structure of society,” and her solution to this problem was to reveal the secret “free love” practices of prominent men (and it should be noted that Beecher was not the only man whose sordid private life was revealed in this issue of the paper).36 As Woodhull sees it, Beecher ought to own his private life publicly and support free love and marriage reform. If Lydia Maria Child wondered whether society would be better off without the “covering-­up process,” Woodhull had no doubts. While most legal histories trace the phrase “the right to privacy” to Samuel Warren and Louis D. Brandeis’s 1890 Harvard Law Review article, it can be found all over the Beecher-­Tilton scandal, most prominently wielded by Woodhull in her original article. As she concludes, “Believing in the right of privacy, and in the perfect right of Mr. *******, socially, morally and divinely, to have sought the embraces of Mrs. T*****, or of any other woman or women whom he loved and who loved him, and being a promulgator and a public champion of those very rights, I still invade the most secret and sacred affairs

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of his life, and drag them to the light, and expose him to the opprobrium and vilification of the public.”37 Woodhull affirms in this passage her support for the “right of privacy” and the right for everyone, in their private lives, to pursue their sexual choices. This position, though, seems also to be her warrant to “invade the most secret and sacred affairs” of Beecher’s life. Woodhull’s typographical choice enacts the contradiction of believing in both privacy and revelation, taking advantage of Lydia Maria Child’s dictum that “secrecy stimulates curiosity.” The cute use of asterisks draws the eye to that which was omitted. And New York and reformist readers of the Woodhull & Claflin Weekly were well aware of whom Woodhull was exposing, even without the name expressly printed, so much so that the exposé prompted Anthony Comstock to arrest her for it. But, in the end, there is not as much contradiction between supporting the right to privacy and the revelation of secrets, as we have seen. Secrets constitute the opposite of privacy, even for a radical like Woodhull. In the article, she champions the alignment of privacy with authenticity, in which the most important thing is to practice privately what you publicly declare. Under these conditions, the hypocritical Beecher, in Woodhull’s estimate, cannot be granted the right to privacy. Beecher would only earn a right to his privacy when he no longer could be charged with harboring a secret. But unlike Stowe, who revealed a secret to purify the private sphere in the name of morality, Woodhull exposed Beecher’s secret affair to root out the hypocrisy of that very moral order. Woodhull’s championing of just such a version of private life, like many free love proponents before her, placed her at legal odds with the emerging postbellum “national moral panic” to root out obscenity.38 Comstock was a one-­man crusade whipping up that panic, first on his own, and then as the leader of the New York City YMCA’s Committee on the Suppression of Vice. One of the ways he solidified that position was by targeting Woodhull, following her exposé of Beecher. On November 2, 1872, Comstock arrested Woodhull and her sister, Tennessee Claflin, for obscenity. His inability to get them prosecuted—the judge declared their newspaper not subject to the existing New York obscenity law—spurred Comstock to return to Washington, DC, to press for tougher federal laws.39 The 1873 federal vice laws (often referred to as the Comstock Laws) allowed him, installed in a new position as special agent in the United States Post Office, to pursue and suppress the print circulation of free love, birth control, and abortifacient information, along with erotic and pornographic materials. Obscenity law, like the 1878

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Supreme Court case Reynolds v. United States outlawing plural marriage, was not a remnant of the old order. Rather, they were the logical conclusions of the development of private life as the space where morality happens. While Woodhull cast herself and was cast by others like Comstock as a dangerous radical, it is here, as she delimits what forfeits one’s right to privacy, where she is utterly conventional. Hypocrisy is the greatest sin under the emerging secular sensibility of privacy this book has been charting. Authenticity—even and maybe especially if that authenticity led to punishment—was increasingly demanded. Indeed, both Comstock and Woodhull valued transparency and authenticity, only to different ends. Like Comstock, Woodhull thought that privacy should not be accorded to those who harbored secrets and lived hypocritically. As Victoria Olwell explains, “Free love’s new level of official ‘obscenity’ relied on a historical irony: the veneration of personal feeling that free lovers had helped to develop and had deployed against institutional marriage had reached a new threshold of institutional legitimation in new definitions of privacy.”40 Woodhull’s arguments for free love as the free expression of one’s private, authentic feelings over and against the combination of “religion, marital sanctity, and social purity,” which “now passes as the social system,” were as integral to the development of privacy as were her antagonists’ vice laws.

The Ragged Edge of Evidence Where Victoria Woodhull wanted to puncture the “bogus sentimentality” of “our sickly religious literature, and Sunday-­school morality,” the lawyers for both Tilton and Beecher wanted to shore up, ever more firmly, monogamous marriage as the center of social and moral life. In fact, both named these as the stakes of the trial. Samuel D. Morris, lawyer for Tilton, claimed in his opening statement that “this is a trial that involves, as I said, not the right to property or liberty, but it is a trial the consequences of which reach to the very foundations of society. The home, the marriage relation, with all that is dear in that relation, is upon trial in this case. Upon the result of your verdict to a very large extent, also, will depend the integrity of the Christian religion.”41 Not unlike Horace Greeley in his 1852 exchange with Stephen Pearl Andrews, Morris positions marriage as the ultimate ground on which rests “the very foundations of society,” and thus “the integrity of the Christian religion.”

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Beecher’s lawyer joined Tilton’s in seeing this trial as an attack on social foundations and Christianity itself, though General Benjamin Tracey, in his opening argument for Beecher, hinted at the sacrilegious nature of the claim that the “integrity of the Christian religion” was on trial. Rather, as he fulminated at length, it was Tilton who was the great threat to marriage and Christianity. He had fallen in with “gay, fascinating people, who considered themselves free from the conventional restraints of society,” and this first step led to his utter decline in morals: Some persons of cool heads can speculate on social, political or religious questions without losing their balance, but with Theodore Tilton, to calculate the depths of an abyss was to plunge headlong into it. A believer in the Christian faith and a member of an orthodox church, he speculated on the origin of matter and the attributes of God until he became a deist, denying the divinity of Christ and rejecting the Scriptures as a Divine revelation of God’s will to man. The husband of a gifted, pure, and loving wife—the father of an interesting family, having, as he described it, an ‘ideal home,’ he speculated on social problems, and was led by the malign influence under which he fell, to denounce the marriage relation as a remnant of effete civilization; a clog and hinderance to the development of the race. His remedy for the evils of marriage was easy divorce, leaving parties as free to dissolve the relation as they were to enter into it.42 Tracey’s accusation that Tilton harbored twinned infidelities would not seem out of place in a 1798 sermon by Timothy Dwight or in Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Redwood (1824). In a logic that was first widely circulated in response to Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason, questioning revealed religion led to deism and finally to free love and a debauched society. And if Tilton was cast as Paine, Beecher was transformed into another figure from the earlier nineteenth century: Arthur Dimmesdale from Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. Tilton’s lawyer introduced the 1850 novel as both a direct corollary to Beecher’s situation and a means to narrate his secret guilt. As he explains, “It does seem as if, with the prophetic eye of genius, Hawthorne has described the actual experience of Henry Ward Beecher,” who is, like Dimmesdale, “penitent and repentant toward God, but timid and defiant and lying toward men.”43 In the Byron scandal, Byron’s poems became

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contested evidence of his guilty secret. In the Beecher-­Tilton trial, The Scarlet Letter appeared as an analogy to help the judge and public discover in Beecher’s letters the evidence of a guilty mind and a secret affair.44 By invoking The Scarlet Letter, Tilton’s lawyer sought to pin down the meaning of inconclusive evidence. The Beecher-­Tilton scandal is a master class in Foucault’s thesis about the explosion of discourse around sex in the Victorian era, and in it we can see what Cohen describes as the literary qualities of scandal, most apparent in the scrutiny of Beecher’s letters and conversations during the trial. No letter came under more scrutiny than the one, written on February 5, 1872, that was popularly known as the “ragged edge letter,” from Henry to Frank Moulton, the go-­between for the Tiltons and Beecher. In it, Beecher lamented at length his despair and fears, and it was invoked by both sides and was much debated in the press. In an extravagant address to the jury, Tilton’s lawyer references two passages in particular: first, “If my destruction will place him all right, that shall not stand in the way. I am willing to step down and out. No one can offer more than that; that I do offer. Sacrifice me without hesitation if you can clearly see your way to his happiness and safety thereby”; and second, “Life would be pleasant if I could see that rebuilt which is shattered; but to live on the sharp and ragged edge of anxiety, remorse, fear, despair, and yet to put on all the appearances of serenity, and happiness, cannot be endured much longer.”45 Introducing the letter into evidence, Tilton’s lawyer, Morris, asks: “Would you require, gentlemen, any other evidence of the guilt of the defendant than he has furnished in the letter to which I have called your attention, taken in connection with the circumstances surrounding him at that time?” he asks. “All the sophistry and all the subtleties in the world cannot so gloss and color up the meaning of that letter as to take away the guilt there confessed—as to bury the meaning of those terrible words in that letter.”46 Tilton’s lawyer offers here what can only be described as a symptomatic reading disguised as surface reading. Ostensibly he suggests the reading is self-­evidently on the surface while inviting his audience to read between the lines. Beecher’s epistolary mode is flowery and intimate; what this letter is not, despite Morris’s best efforts, is a direct confession. To locate “adultery” in Beecher’s “ragged edge letter,” one must anticipate the practice of twentieth-­ century psychoanalysis by first identifying a symptom—the secret affair— and then pointing to its discursive absence as proof of deep psychological and spiritual conflict. But this is also a clue to the argument Morris pursues with it, well ahead of Freudian theories of the unconscious. Morris depends on the

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gesture of revelation: the very act of supplying the unnamed secret weights his interpretation with a feeling of truth. In his own testimony, Beecher attempted to explain the letter. He claimed that he was merely expressing concern for Plymouth Church, not his own reputation—not exactly compelling, even in 1875. What makes Morris’s interpretation of the “ragged edge letter” more convincing than Beecher’s defense is that it takes advantage of the secular morality of exposure. Morris’s interpretation of guilt sounds convincing because the referent is absent; Beecher’s attempt to name another referent sounds false because it is not a sufficient explanation for that absence, or indeed for that much overwrought anxiety in the first place. The “ragged edge letter” exemplifies the trial transcript as a whole. Three volumes clocking in at over seven hundred double-­column pages, it is a long-­ form testament to the messy interpretive possibilities that exposure creates. When Frank Moulton testified that Beecher “had prayed to God for help to discontinue their sexual relations,” we seem to be getting—finally—the explicit “real” affair hidden behind Beecher’s sophistries. Tilton’s lawyer therefore wanted the word “sexual” repeated endlessly: “Did he say that he had used that word in his prayer?” and “Did he say the word ‘sexual’ in that connection?” (This goes on for a whole column of the page).47 But naming the secret in this way does not actually resolve interpretation, due in large part—as Stowe found out when she named “incest”—because it is too bald. Indeed, Beecher’s lawyer circled back to this exchange to try to undermine it: “Why, it is most improbable, I submit. If Mr. Beecher had been confessing he never could have been guilty of such weakness, and displayed such love of nasty expressions as to be continually rolling these from his lips, as Moulton says he did.”48 If the missing term in the “ragged edge letter” is “sex,” here Moulton’s language makes that explicit. And when that language becomes explicit—when it seems to point exactly to what it aims to uncover—it is easily read as too obvious and therefore unlikely. Added to this, once the referent is named, the interpretation is not resolved so much as transformed into a question of character. Beecher—the famous minister—would never use such “nasty expressions”! Whether or not Beecher ever uttered the word “sexual” privately, the trial evidence of his letters and reports of his private conversations show us the secular sensibility of privacy consolidating into a logic about adjudicating morality via exposure. To elicit belief, exposure must, above all, feel revelatory. When the evidence or the meaning is too plain, too on the surface—whether that is crime, corruption, or sex—it can no longer be exposed and therefore either loses its illicitness or seems utterly improbable.

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For Privacy, for Him, for Love The Beecher-­Tilton scandal made for sensational headlines and created a powerful vortex capable of drawing in very unlikely people. One such person was Henry James Sr. As I covered in Chapter 2, James Sr. was dragged into a debate in 1852 over marriage in the pages of the New York Tribune. Seeking to defend his about-­face on Fourierism and free love, he concluded, along with Horace Greeley, that freedom did not extend to marital relations. James Sr. explained then that humans operated under a “threefold subjection” and our only freedom is that of the mind. In doing so, he articulated a version of privacy that anticipated the postwar era of moral panics, vice laws, and the 1878 Reynolds decision. But his renunciation of Fourierism and free love in the 1850s was not allowed to rest. As the controversy over Henry Ward Beecher stirred, James Sr. was drawn back into the debate. Harvey Y. Russell, a correspondent for the St. Paul Daily Press, reached out to him for his opinion on the Woodhull exposé and not only printed his answer but sent it along to Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, where it was reprinted with spicy commentary. In his letter to Russell, James Sr. dismissed Woodhull’s claim that Beecher was a “free lover,” writing that “he at all events is not a technical free-­lover, and his infirmity will be condoned by society therefore as a weakness of the will under great temptation, etc., etc. and as not indicating any hostility to marriage, or the social sentiment.”49 James Sr. distinguishes here belief in “free love” from private sin. While he concedes that Beecher’s beliefs seem not to be aligned with how he lives, he disagrees that Beecher secretly harbors these as beliefs and that Woodhull’s decision to expose him will end with Beecher throwing off his hypocrisy and coming out to the world as a free lover. While defending a “judicious enlargement of the law of divorce,” James Sr. goes on to condemn “technical or professional free-­love” as “the enemy of all society or fellowship among men,” and he repeats his argument from the 1850s that marriage is a form of subjection that offers perfection to men through their more spiritual wives.50 (He never quite articulates what wives get out of it.) James Sr. certainly did not expect to see his words on marriage recirculated in Woodhull’s controversial paper. Russell and Stephen Pearl Andrews both responded to James Sr.’s critique of free love—Andrews called it “balderdash”—but unlike in the previous print debate, James was afforded no chance to respond in kind. The editors of the two papers got the last laugh on James Sr.’s “crass and chronic stupidity.”51

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Whether or not Henry James’s chagrin at his father’s public ridicule so late in life provided the materials for The Bostonians, the novel certainly picks up on many of the elements of both the Stowe-­Byron and Beecher-­Tilton scandals: the connections to Romanticism, abolition, and other antebellum reform movements; the questions of free love and the new elevation of monogamous marriage as a way to make the private sphere sacred; and perhaps above all, how moral and aesthetic judgments come together under the term privacy.52 James explained that, in The Bostonians, he “wished to write a very American tale” that focused on “the situation of women, the decline of the sentiment of sex, the agitation on their behalf.”53 What makes a story “American”? According to James, “The relation of the two girls should be a study of one of those friendships between women which are so common in New England. The whole thing as local, as American, as possible, and as full of Boston.”54 On the one hand, as he suggests here, the American character of the story rests on the peculiar friendships of New England women, the lives they lead outside of monogamous, heterosexual marriage. However, he ends his comments on a different but also necessary element: “There must, indispensably, be a type of newspaper man—the man whose ideal is the energetic reporter. I should like to bafouer the vulgarity and hideousness of this—the impudent invasion of privacy—the extinction of all conception of privacy, etc.”55 The scandal-­mongering and privacy-­invading journalist (embodied by the character of Matthias Pardon in the novel) represents American modernity. But in introducing the newspaperman as a type, and then announcing his plans for that figure, James indulges in irony; he imagines openly and even violently ridiculing transgressions of privacy. (Bafouer, in its connotation and usage, tends to be stronger than “flout”; it suggests a forceful dismissal, and even, at its strongest, a metaphoric slap in the face.) Here, we have a clue that The Bostonians will attentively track changes in privacy but that it will not simply denounce or bemoan their loss. The novel will instead consider the attractions of public spectacle, the thrills of secrets that could be exposed, the interpretive work (including of one’s own self) that secrecy inspires, and ultimately the way privacy itself is not simply a domestic space but a feeling and orientation to the world. If James’s claim about the erosion of privacy in his notebooks is a national one, it is also a temporal one. His newspaperman represents the extinction of privacy, which implies that privacy was once respected. Basil Ransom is the voice through which James articulates a desire for a reconstituted private sphere, not unlike what both Tilton’s and Beecher’s lawyers were claiming

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were the stakes of the trial. Basil’s general view of privacy is stated very early in the novel: “Privacy for Basil Ransom consisted entirely in what he called ‘laying off.’”56 For Basil, though, “laying off ” is not his sole definition of privacy. He discovers he is in love with Verena Tarrant—the beautiful women’s rights activist at the center of the novel’s love triangle, who was brought up in a family of abolitionists, mesmerists, and frauds—when watching her speak at Mrs. Burrage’s music room in New York City. Dismissing her actual speech (“The idea that she was brilliant, that she counted as a factor only because the public mind was in a muddle, was not a humiliation but a delight to him”), he finds her supposed mediocrity reassuring, for “it was a proof that her apostleship was all nonsense, the most passing of fashions, the veriest of delusions, and that she was meant for something divinely different—for privacy, for him, for love” (209). In this, one of the most famous lines of the novel, the narrator presents “privacy” via a string of equivalents. Verena is meant for privacy, which James renders synonymous with being possessed by Ransom and being made for the sensibility of love. This version of privacy is “divine”—here we see the conflation of the religious sentiment with the domestic space—but more specifically it is “divinely different” from the reform world that Verena’s parents and the other reformers inhabit. In other words, as is abundantly clear in Basil’s characterization, “laying off ” and private possession of a woman are one and the same, and together they constitute the conservative push he hopes to enact in the world, saving society from the “most damnable feminisation” (260). Basil’s conservativism amounts to an attack on reform and especially women’s rights as a symbol of the “feminisation” he detests, expressed most often in his recoiling from disruptions to the gendered distinction between public and private. As he declares to Verena during their walk in Central Park, “The whole generation is womanised: the masculine tone is passing out of the world; it’s a feminine, a nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age, an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy and exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities” (260). Basil’s conservatism expresses both his nostalgia and his feelings of marginalization. As the political scientist Corey Robin has analyzed it, modern conservatism not only came into being as a radical reaction to the revolutions of the late eighteenth century that were often, in Britain and the United States, symbolized through Thomas Paine, but it imagines itself always to be embattled, “that the left has been in the driver’s seat since, depending on who’s counting, the French Revolution or the Reformation” and therefore conservatives “must declare war against the culture as it is.”57 As

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Victoria Olwell points out, The Bostonians fits this definition well. Its plot is a lament for something that was never there, a back-­formation that creates “a picture of the American national past as a time of secure boundaries between public and private, masculine and feminine spheres.”58 Yet it is not quite clear that the novel sees the past as one of stable order and hierarchy so much as Basil wishes to.59 Basil’s is a misreading of the history of privacy in the United States, one routed through the narrative of the Lost Cause—that is, the myth of southern resistance as noble even if always doomed to fail in the face of northern industrialism and abolitionist fanaticism.60 Expanded out, it is a declension narrative that describes the present as disorderly or declining, over and against a simpler, more virtuous past. Basil is thus a perfect embodiment of the type of conservative that Robin describes—battling the culture as it is while simultaneously re-­creating a past that never existed. It is not that James promotes Basil’s interpretation so much as he represents him as part of a long line of conservative responses to political and social revolutions. James does so by explicitly aligning Basil with the Lost Cause, but it is also a line reaching back to the proslavery advocates of the antebellum years and to Timothy Dwight and Jedidiah Morse, fighting the deist conspiracy in the early United States. And even further still: as an editor looking over Basil’s article notes, “his doctrines were about three hundred years behind the age” (148). Privacy, therefore, becomes both the sensibility Basil wants to bring into being as a sacred space for marriage and love but one that he claims is no innovation. Unlike Horace Greeley and Henry James Sr., then, Basil is not imagining monogamous marriage as modern and progressive; quite the reverse—his version of marriage is an imagined reconstitution set against the modern age. The odd thing about the reform characters against whom Basil defines himself is that they too have a complicated relation to a declension narrative lamenting the extinction of privacy. The narrator actively conflates them with an antebellum past (especially in their connection to abolitionism as a noble cause) but also, simultaneously, with a present age obsessed with the publicity and sensationalism exemplified by sex scandals and the newspapermen who report on them. Miss Birdseye, the aging abolitionist thought to be modeled on Elizabeth Peabody, and Mrs. Farrinder, a leading women’s rights advocate, typify reform as both faddish, as Jennifer Fleissner has described it, but also belated.61 They are both too behind the times and too much of the era simultaneously. Basil thought Miss Birdseye “looked as if she had spent her life on platforms, in audiences, in conventions, in phalansteries, in séances;

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in her faded face there was a kind of reflection of ugly lecture-­lamps; with its habit of an upward angle, it seemed turned toward a public speaker, with an effort of respiration in the thick air in which social reforms are usually discussed” (23). In Miss Birdseye’s face, Basil discovers an ugly and grubby publicity explicitly tied to the utopianism and reformism of the antebellum world. The narrator reinforces these associations. Miss Birdseye “had a sad, soft, pale face, which (and it was the effect of her whole head) looked as if it had been soaked, blurred, and made vague by exposure to some slow dissolvent” (22). This punning description likens Miss Birdseye to an exposed photograph; her lack of a private life—that is, her exposure to the public—fades and blurs the boundaries of her selfhood. If Miss Birdseye’s character is one that represents the reform publicity of the past, Mrs. Farrinder more fully inhabits the public world of reform in the postwar era: There was a lithographic smoothness about her, and a mixture of the American matron and the public character. There was something public in her eye, which was large, cold, and quiet; it had acquired a sort of exposed reticence from the habit of looking down from a lecture-­ desk, over a sea of heads, while its distinguished owner was eulogised by a leading citizen. Mrs. Farrinder, at almost any time, had the air of being introduced by a few remarks. She talked with great slowness and distinctness, and evidently a high sense of responsibility; she pronounced every syllable of every word and insisted on being explicit. If, in conversation with her, you attempted to take anything for granted, or to jump two or three steps at a time, she paused, looking at you with a cold patience, as if she knew that trick, and then went on at her own measured pace. She lectured on temperance and the rights of women; the ends she laboured for were to give the ballot to every woman in the country and to take the flowing bowl from every man. She was held to have a very fine manner, and to embody the domestic virtues and the graces of the drawing-­room; to be a shining proof, in short, that the forum, for ladies, is not necessarily hostile to the fireside. She had a husband, and his name was Amariah. (25–26) This long introduction to a character who plays very little role in the novel is perhaps a perfect guide to how much James complicates the shifting tides of both reform and privacy. While Miss Birdseye has been exposed, like a

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photograph, until she has become blurred and indistinct, Mrs. Farrinder is a success precisely to the degree that she has managed publicity with an eye to what is demanded of one’s public performance of private morality. There is “something public in her eye” and she speaks at all times as if she were on the lecture circuit, but she is also an embodiment of the “domestic virtues and the graces of the drawing-­room.” Her every note is meant to reassure that to give women the ballot would not be a threat to private life. And the description ends with a flat fact about that domesticity: “She had a husband, and his name was Amariah.” This short, declarative sentence at the end is pure Jamesian deadpan. Mrs. Farrinder has turned antebellum reformism into a kind of business, and even as she promotes herself as able to provide, in her own life, “a shining proof, in short, that the forum, for ladies, is not necessarily hostile to the fireside,” her husband is an afterthought, a punch line. These early, and decidedly catty descriptions of Miss Birdseye and Mrs. Farrinder seem, at first glance, to align with Basil’s conservative objections to reform circles and women’s rights. But even before James deepens Miss Birdseye’s character into one that, while still belated and idealistic, is sympathetic, it would be wrong to conflate too readily the narrator’s point of view with Basil’s. By bringing Basil, Miss Birdseye, and Mrs. Farrinder into alignment, readers can glimpse how James keenly understood privacy as a sensibility, and as a performance. If Basil’s is a performance of the Lost Cause, Mrs. Farrinder’s is of a perfectly ordered private life meant to counter just such attacks as Basil’s. But this does not mean that they are frauds. Rather, James’s characters are built in and through their relation to privacy and its affective and performative qualities, including its fantasies.

Verena’s Secret Self Olive, like Basil, is a character defined very much by her relation to privacy, and despite Olive’s distaste for the whole institution, marriage frames our introduction to her. Basil perceives her to be a “signal old maid.” As the narrator goes on to explain, “There are women who are unmarried by accident, and others who are unmarried by option; but Olive Chancellor was unmarried by every implication of her being” (16). James’s opening characterization does more than register what Peter Coviello calls Olive’s “protolesbianism”; it marks her, in Coviello’s words, as “in the grip of a constant, perplexing, buffeting sort of desire, for which there seems, at least until the advent of

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Verena, no available satisfaction, and precious little hope of one.”62 In Olive’s selfhood we see, with Coviello, a register of something “deeper”—a yearning, an unconscious. Crucially though, it is not a secret. Rather, it is a sensibility, one for which the discursive coordinates do not yet exist, and the narrator therefore falls back on the nineteenth-­century emblem of privacy—marriage. Being “unmarried by every implication of her being” registers the role that marriage played in defining the self by the end of the nineteenth century. It was not just a proof of morality and a warrant for public trust but a sensibility that must be finely attuned, like Mrs. Farrinder’s, to the presentation of the private self. That said, Olive’s character can neither be expressed by the sentimental-­ realist aesthetic of surface and depth nor through a marriage plot. Basil’s view of Olive’s home, her life as a Boston “old maid,” is one that immediately registers her inner life as complicated far beyond the narrowed terms of the secular sensibility of privacy. Basil reflects that he had “never seen an interior that was so much an interior” as Olive’s “queer corridor-­shaped drawing room” (14), and he “had never felt himself in the presence of so much organised privacy or of so many objects that spoke of habits and tastes” (14). Olive’s privacy is strenuous, organized, but above all it is expressed through redundancies (an interior that was so much an interior) and exaggerations (so much privacy; so many objects). Quite visibly, of course, the narrator’s description is exaggeratedly vaginal (an interior that is an interior; a corridor-­shaped room), an interpretation we can presume Basil does not fully perceive. And unlike Miss Birdseye and Mrs. Farrinder, Olive is not someone who exposes herself; her privacy is not a public effect. In the course of the novel, Verena comes to recognize that there is something extremely private—something to the “rear,” as the narrator puts it early in the novel—of Olive’s obvious morbid shyness: “Such moods” belonged to “Miss Chancellor’s very private life” (107). This inner life, named by James again with exaggerated language, is a “very private life.” It is not, however, a secret life. Verena’s character differs on all of these scores from Olive’s. Indeed, as the plot unfolds, Verena will become increasingly defined by secrecy. She is perhaps James’s most careful instantiation of the way secrecy and privacy are dialectical terms. James first approaches Verena’s inner world through his lavishly satiric characterizations of her parents. The blurred lines and avid publicness of the other reform characters are amplified to a parodic degree in Selah, a mesmeric healer and former lead-­pencil salesman, and Mrs. Tarrant, the daughter of a Boston abolitionist who had made the dubious decision

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to elope with him. (The class aspirations of Mrs. Tarrant—who loses status through her marriage, never to be regained—color all of her interactions with Olive Chancellor.) Selah came to the marriage out of utopian experiments like Modern Times or Oneida. As the narrator reports, Mrs. Tarrant knew that Selah had “been for a while a member of the celebrated Cayuga community, where there were no wives, or no husbands, or something of that sort (Mrs. Tarrant could never remember)” (56). And, as the narrator implies, these complex arrangements were not simply in the past. Mrs. Tarrant often reflected with bitterness on being dragged by Selah to Mrs. Ada T. P. Foat’s Spiritualist lectures, “and it was his wife’s belief that he had been ‘associated’ with her (that was Selah’s expression in referring to such episodes) at Cayuga. The poor woman, matrimonially, had a great deal to put up with; it took, at moments, all her belief in his genius to sustain her” (57). Mrs. Tarrant’s whole moral being has been formed by her marriage: “Her husband’s tastes rubbed off on her soft, moist moral surface, and the couple lived in an atmosphere of novelty, in which, occasionally, the accommodating wife encountered the fresh sensation of being in want of her dinner” (57). Here, we see the realist trope—which was as important to Brockden Brown’s and Sedgwick’s fiction as it was to James’s—that taste expresses morality. Yet James describes Selah’s tastes not as an influence on so much as a potential absorption by Mrs. Tarrant’s “soft, moist moral surface,” a perfect description of how secular sensibility can be imagined as a porous embodiment. As the narrator goes on to explain, “Selah Tarrant and his companion had strange adventures; she found herself completely enrolled in the great irregular army of nostrum-­mongers, domiciled in humanitary Bohemia. It absorbed her like a social swamp; she sank into it a little more every day, without measuring the inches of her descent. Now she stood there up to her chin; it may probably be said of her that she had touched bottom” (57). And then again, “Of course a woman who had had the bad taste to marry Selah Tarrant would not have been likely under any circumstances to possess a very straight judgment; but there is no doubt that this poor lady had grown dreadfully limp” (57–58). It is not that Mrs. Tarrant has been seduced and led astray (after all, it was her own “bad taste” to marry Selah in the first place) but that her whole being had become absorbed into and permeated by Selah’s questionable moral world, even to the point of accepting his obvious infidelities with an “almost cynical equanimity” (60). James’s metaphors call attention to a sensibility that has been thoroughly soaked in its environment. This is not influence, and it is not a surface. In Sedgwick’s “Matty Gore,” as we saw in Chapter 2,

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domestic taste reflected John Gore’s descent into atheism, which culminated in his out-­of-­wedlock relationship with a loose woman; when he converted back to Protestant belief, his domestic sphere was restored to its simple, humble (that is, Protestant) taste. In The Bostonians, though, conversions cannot bring order back to the surface because the surface itself has changed; it is limp, moist, swampy. While Selah’s participation in Cayuga and his relationship with Ada Foat (among others) recall an antebellum world of experimental domestic arrangements and spiritual quests, these forays do not imply that he is invested in any sort of “right to privacy.” Selah’s moral world (much like Woodhull’s) is keyed wholly and completely to publicity. As the narrator explains, “The vision of that publicity haunted his dreams, and he would gladly have sacrificed to it the innermost sanctities of home” (80). Indeed, even in private and at home, Selah “had never allowed that he wasn’t straight” (58). Whether in terms of his “medical” appointments with women or in the séances he and Mrs. Tarrant conducted (and fixed) together, “he produced, or would have liked to produce, the impression of looking above and beyond everything, of not caring for the immediate, of reckoning only with the long run. In reality he had one all-­absorbing solicitude—the desire to get paragraphs put into the newspapers” (80). Selah’s publicity is his morality. He is always performing the self, even in private. We might say he lacks a theory of privacy or that he represents the absence of it, but he is actually its most obvious culmination. Like Plinlimmon in Melville’s Pierre, Selah has no secret self and thus he is his most authentic self in public as well as in private. The Bostonians presents Selah’s avid publicness as a moral problem. Olive certainly observes this when she notes that “Tarrant was a moralist without moral sense” (86). Even more so, though, Selah’s morality is a psychological problem in the unfolding of Verena’s character. Olive’s insight about Selah, in fact, occurs as Verena narrates her childhood “with an extraordinary artless vividness” that was “tremendously fascinating to Miss Chancellor” (86). When, in their first meeting, Verena declares her preference for “free unions,” Olive “held her breath an instant; such an idea was so disagreeable to her.” “Verena talked of the marriage-­tie as she would have talked of the last novel,” James’s narrator explains, “and at certain times, listening to the answers she made to her questions, Olive Chancellor closed her eyes in the manner of a person waiting till giddiness passed” (66). It is important that Verena’s declaration for free unions is likened by the narrator to novel reading. As we saw in Chapter 2, the popularity of the marriage plot is, in fact, a lurking moral

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problem; while everywhere it seems to reinforce the moral objective of marriage, its proliferation is akin to rereading the same plot continually—that is, free unions become logical if we love reading novels too much. The morality of free love and marriage, in this scene and often throughout the novel, is cast as an aesthetic problem. Free unions are ultimately distasteful to Olive in a particular way: “though Olive had no views about the marriage-­tie except that she should hate it for herself—that particular reform she did not propose to consider—she didn’t like the ‘atmosphere’ of circles in which such institutions were called into question” (66). Like the words swampy and contamination, atmosphere does quite a lot of work in this sentence. Morality is not simply a form or an ordering of the private; it is the air one breathes. It can get inside of you. It is a sensibility caught up in questions of authenticity and aesthetics. These conversations with Verena about free love and her upbringing with Selah ultimately prompt Olive “to ask herself whether the girl was also destitute of the perception of right and wrong. No, she was only supremely innocent; she didn’t understand, she didn’t interpret nor see the  portée  of what she described; she had no idea whatever of judging her parents” (86). James shifts into free indirect discourse at the moment of moral judgment: “No, she was only supremely innocent; she didn’t understand” is Olive’s point of view. Olive seeks to imagine for Verena a selfhood that is cordoned off, uncorrupted. Ironically, this is so that she can include Verena in her own private life. The novel will go on to test and complicate the hope that Verena is perfectly “innocent” of her parents’ influence. While avoiding the swampy and limp metaphors attributed to Mrs. Tarrant’s moral composition, the narrator still structures Verena’s private self in a way that indicates her susceptibility to Selah’s paternal guidance, even at the very end of the novel as she struggles over the final choice between Olive and Basil: “No stranger situation can be imagined than that of these extraordinary young women at this juncture; it was so singular on Verena’s part, in particular, that I despair of presenting it to the reader with the air of reality. To understand it, one must bear in mind her peculiar frankness, natural and acquired, her habit of discussing questions, sentiments, moralities, her education, in the atmosphere of lecture-­rooms, of séances, her familiarity with  the vocabulary of emotion, the mysteries of ‘the spiritual life’” (296). While the sentences that follow this passage have garnered the most critical notice (that Verena’s “essence” consisted of “the extraordinary generosity with which she could expose herself, give herself away, turn herself inside

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out, for the satisfaction of a person who made demands of her”), that insight comes in relation to these prefatory remarks (296). As the narrator reminds the reader, to understand Verena’s character requires a reckoning with her upbringing. Despite Olive’s own assurances to herself that Verena was innocent of Selah’s influence, here the narrator draws on it to explain her tendency to exposure, her inclination to give herself away “for the satisfaction of a person who made demands of her.” In this passage, the narrator also draws attention to both the attempt and the inevitable failure of realistically conveying a character brought up in the way Verena has been (“I despair of presenting it to the reader with the air of reality”). If the sentimental-­realist aesthetic had assured readers of the relation of embodied or physical surface to psychological depth, James’s realism complicates both coordinates: Miss Birdseye and Mrs. Tarrant present blurred and limp surfaces; Olive has a “very private life”; and now Verena, brought up in these reform circles but harboring desires not anticipated by them. At the beginning of the novel, Verena’s character could be understood through the coordinates we saw organizing Selah’s and Mrs. Farrinder’s: there is public and private, and private is also very public. Yet secrecy is increasingly the word attached to Verena’s inner world as the novel proceeds. When Basil visits her in Cambridge, she suggests a tour of Harvard, and as she puts on her hat to go out, the narrator reports that she “had become nervous”: “She felt as a girl feels when she commits her first conscious indiscretion. She had done many things before which many people would have called indiscreet, but that quality had not even faintly belonged to them in her own mind; she had done them in perfect good faith and with a remarkable absence of palpitation” (182). James’s narrator parses an important distinction here that is central to Verena’s development as a character. Verena was brought up in the world of reform publicity represented by Selah, Miss Birdseye, and Mrs. Farrinder. Public life was normalized; here, though, is an indiscretion that somehow does not fit into that worldview. On the face of it, this is a public walk with Basil—not exactly “private.” But that is also the point: this is not private, it is secret. Indeed, it was “the only secret she had in the world—the only thing that was all her own” and “she was conscious at the same time that the moment her secret was threatened it became dearer to her” (224). Her secret produces a self-­awareness that had been lacking in Verena’s character in earlier chapters: “she seemed to herself strangely reckless” when she goes about proposing the Cambridge walk (182). This is the moment when the narrator ascribes to Verena the ability to watch herself, to assess

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her own motives, and to interpret her own character. If we are hard-­pressed to find exactly where and when Verena falls in love with Basil, we do see exactly how she becomes attached to him—through a shared secret. Selah’s fascination with publicity had colored Verena’s upbringing. She was implicitly taught to locate in secrecy a sort of erotic thrill, in part because it was new but also because it was the necessary inversion of that investment in publicity, his faith in exposure. Verena’s attachment to her secret is ultimately an attachment to a sense of herself in a world structured around the dialectic between secrecy and privacy. Verena’s character was “made for privacy,” that is, the emergent version of privacy as a self-­evident moral sensibility—the kind of authenticity that would be championed by a Victoria Woodhull or a Basil Ransom. What Basil has taken advantage of is the implicit assumption that if Verena secretly wants to marry him, she can no longer be a public part of the women’s rights movement, even for her last promised lecture in Boston. Put differently, the marriage to an outspoken conservative will come to symbolize Verena’s morality and her politics. As the narrator puts it, “She was to burn everything she had adored; she was to adore everything she had burned” (299). This is what the secular sensibility of moral authenticity demands. Yet this is not a “conversion” to new ideas; she is not embracing new propositional beliefs and abandoning old ones. She finds herself instead attached to a secret value that feels truer because of its secrecy, and her inner life has been restructured around that. This is not to say that Basil definitely “proves” that Verena was “made for privacy”—after all, the final words of the novel (that these would not be the last tears Verena would shed) are hardly equivocal—but that Verena is susceptible in the first place to Basil’s vision of privacy because she was brought up, paradoxical as it seems, to share it.

Inviolate Personality Samuel Warren and Louis D. Brandeis would champion that same version of privacy in 1890. In their Harvard Law Review article, Warren and Brandeis theorized a trend toward recognizing a right to privacy out of (but distinct from) the right to intellectual property and libel laws.63 Immediately heralded as adding a “chapter to the law,” the article’s legacy has been long and storied, cited in nearly every twentieth-­century case on privacy.64 Their breakthrough was to explicitly name a new right for the cultural belief emerging across the

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century that the true and authentic self is a private one. “Privacy in this light was not simply an aspect of individual liberty or property but a psychological, even spiritual matter,” as the historian Sarah E. Igo describes it.65 Their “right to privacy” is thus not a matter of “empirical distance,” to borrow the legal historian Robert C. Post’s formulation, so much as a “moral characterization.”66 Perhaps the most important cultural impact has been, as the political scientist Susan E. Gallagher argues, that “we have come to view public activities as mere performance, and to assume that the real truth can only be discovered if we look behind the scenes.”67 In Warren and Brandeis’s article, we can see the culmination of privacy as a secular morality, in need of a new right to protect it precisely because it is a sensibility. “The Right to Privacy” is built around a historical narrative, in which “the intensity and complexity of life, attendant upon advancing civilization” is characterized by a new sensitivity, which makes “solitude and privacy” ever “more essential to the individual.”68 Each citizen urgently needs “some retreat from the world” because that world has become ever more intrusive: “Modern enterprise and invention have, through invasions upon his privacy, subjected him to mental pain and distress, far greater than could be inflicted by mere bodily injury” (196). Just as Henry James singled out the journalist as the “indispensable” type of the era, Warren and Brandeis focus on the role of the prying newspaperman in spreading “idle gossip, which can only be procured by intrusion upon the domestic circle” (196).69 Ultimately, for Warren and Brandeis, this intrusion on domesticity is a moral issue: “Each crop of unseemly gossip, thus harvested, becomes the seed of more, and, in direct proportion to its circulation, results in a lowering of social standards and of morality. Even gossip apparently harmless, when widely and persistently circulated, is potent for evil. It both belittles and perverts” (196). While scholars have rightly concentrated on the emphasis on the press here, the dire effects they foresee are fully centered on morality and domesticity, and these two terms are inextricably interrelated with each other throughout the article. Warren and Brandeis trace a history of privacy in the article, and it is one that implicitly depends on the privatization of marriage and its conflation with morality. That history moves from property to intellectual property to a right to privacy. Yet, in pursuing the distinction between privacy and property rights, their first hypothetical is of a man who “records in a letter to his son, or in his diary, that he did not dine with his wife on a certain day” (201). While they suggest that it is the fact and not the diary that is protected, their example prompts different sorts of questions: Why is the husband not dining

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with his wife that night? And how does that fact come to evince a need to protect privacy? Searching for an example of a fact that could not be tied to some type of intellectual property, Warren and Brandeis suggest a secret sin. In other words, they are concerned in this article with understanding the relation of privacy with secrecy, hinted at very obliquely in this example. To find a reason to protect such secrets as the entry in the man’s diary, Warren and Brandeis must look beyond intellectual property, for the entry itself does not quite qualify as that. They seek to forge a different legal recognition, one that would recognize “the value of sensations” (193). In their overview of legal history, they move swiftly through assault, nuisance, and from there, they claim, the law extended this “regard for human emotions” to that which lay “beyond the body of the individual”: His reputation, the standing among his fellow-­men, was considered, and the law of slander and libel arose. Man’s family relations became a part of the legal conception of his life, and the alienation of a wife’s affections was held remediable. Occasionally the law halted,—as in its refusal to recognize the intrusion by seduction upon the honor of the family. But even here the demands of society were met. A mean fiction, the action per quod servitium amisit, was resorted to, and by allowing damages for injury to the parents’ feelings, an adequate remedy was ordinarily afforded. (194) This quick tour of legal history begins with the right not to be assaulted and ends with what they call a “mean fiction”: the use of civil lawsuits over the loss of the labor of a servant to sue men who have seduced daughters.70 As Warren and Brandeis point out, private reputation incorporated not just a man’s home and family but more specifically the sexual reputations of the women connected to him. Thus, it is not simply the protection of the home that is at stake in this new right to privacy but, as Warren and Brandeis insist, it is what the home metonymically stands for—a moral reputation, women, sexual chastity. (Or as James would put it, “for privacy, for him, for love”). Their right to privacy is thus built, in large part, by adapting this “mean fiction” to protect men’s emotions. Doing so, they claim, is a necessity of the modern age: “The intense intellectual and emotional life, and the heightening of sensations which came with the advance of civilization, made it clear to men that only a part of the pain, pleasure, and profit of life lay in physical things. Thoughts, emotions,

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and sensations demanded legal recognition, and the beautiful capacity for growth which characterizes the common law enables judges to afford the requisite protection, without the interposition of the legislature” (195). Modern society is one that values the “pain, pleasure, and profit” of that which is beyond “physical things.” Nowhere in their article do they name religious sentiments or spiritual needs, yet their historical sweep depends on modernity (civilization) being invested in that which lies beyond the merely immanent. (Or, again to invoke James’s perfect wording, we might hear echoed Verena’s “familiarity with the vocabulary of emotion, the mysteries of ‘the spiritual life.’”) What might have once been deemed “religion” transformed in Warren and Brandeis’s hands into “thoughts, emotions, and sensations,” and the assumption underlying the new tort was that those were located in an inner self and metaphorized in a home and marriage. Warren and Brandeis, in other words, arrived at privacy via the secularization of the spiritual, its conflation with the domestic sphere and, most importantly, a deep, authentic self. At the center of their theory of privacy is a selfhood to which they struggle to give a robust explanation. Variably named an “inviolate personality” or “one’s personality,” that which this new right would protect is at once confusingly singular (inviolate, possessable) and also spread out—into private utterances and papers, diaries and letters—and threatened by yellow journalism and gossip pages (205). The “secular sensibility” of privacy, as I have described it in this book, conveys just this paradox: exposable and exposed, it is also sacredness in a secular key. It is a sensibility that lodges the sacred in an authentic person—the personality—and calls attention to its vastness and its vulnerability.

EPILOGUE

The Ends of Privacy

Writing a book on privacy and secularism well into the twenty-­first century—after the rise and dominance of social media and the near-­complete erosion of reproductive rights—means grappling not just with the beginning of our discourse of privacy but with its end. From the need to purify religion in the 1790s to Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis’s “inviolate personality,” privacy became a sensibility in need of protection and cultivation over the course of the nineteenth century. Constitutional recognition for this sensibility was established in the 1965 case Griswold v. Connecticut, which granted married people the right to access birth control. Writing for the majority, Justice William O. Douglas founded the right to privacy in what he controversially called “penumbras” implied by the Bill of Rights: that the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Amendments protected a citizen’s privacy (via their rights to assembly, to the inviolability of their households, to due process and protection from self-­incrimination, and that citizens retain rights beyond those explicitly enumerated in the Constitution).1 We can imagine Douglas’s struggle to explain what is clearly implied in the Bill of Rights but never expressly named. If too fuzzy for today’s originalists and textualists, Douglas’s interpretation was historically insightful. In the nineteenth century, privacy was discursively everywhere, a central formation of American secularism that was composed of, to borrow Henry James’s wording, “the vocabulary of emotion” and “the mysteries of ‘the spiritual life.”2 But it was also oddly nowhere, hard to define and demarcate. Part of that indefiniteness was certainly due to the fact that it was an emerging concept. Part of it, though, is intrinsic to the concept itself. Privacy is an affect not an object. Affects, though, have material consequences. In the case of privacy, those consequences are felt in the tight dialectic between privacy and exposure. As

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this book has argued, secrecy and privacy are the true opposites of American secularism, and they have forged a biopolitical condition that has meant, historically, the exposure of some and the protection of others, demarcated along the lines of race, gender, sexuality, class, and religion. We thus find ourselves today in a very different relation to the private sphere and privacy— and the surveillance of it—than Warren and Brandeis could have predicted. While a culture of exposure led them to theorize the right to privacy at the end of the nineteenth century, they did not (and could not) resolve the role that exposure had played and continues to play in our construction of privacy. Today exposure operates, as Zahid R. Chaudhary has argued, as “a rationality, a biopolitical condition, a political strategy, a cultural-­epistemic priority, and a mood.”3 If anything has changed, it is how pervasive, yet surprisingly ineffective, exposure has become over the last twenty or so years, but particularly after the advent of social media. We live at the end of the era of exposure as an effective moral gesture, but strangely not the end of our faith in it. Social media—a catchall term for platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram—thrives on this faith in exposure. The genres of social media such as the meme, gif, Facebook update, or tweet may seem to be, at first glance, the opposite of the nineteenth-­century novel, the economical and witty miniature to those “large loose baggy monsters” (as Henry James once famously deemed the novel form).4 But the platforms through which these genres circulate share with nineteenth-­century fiction a belief that there is an authentic moral self that craves and needs public recognition, and a faith in exposure as a foundational premise of social and political life. As the media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan points out, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and other leaders of Silicon Valley share this collective faith, combining an “absolute belief in their sincerity and capabilities” with a “blind faith” in an ethos of transparency.5 And in many ways the wide circulation provided by these platforms has been surprisingly valuable. One of its most important effects has been the exposure of police violence against predominantly Black and Brown citizens and communities—violence that was never actually secret, only segregated— and the mobilization of popular resistance to it, most notably in the Black Lives Matter movement and, in 2020, the largest civil rights protests of a generation. Yet, despite and maybe especially in the case of BLM, the structure of social media did not cohere a public around these facts but amplified a fractured one, in which the facts themselves—so often caught on camera—were undermined by both coordinated and uncoordinated campaigns of doubt and dismissal.

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The daily lived experience of social media is of a longing for communion amid this fracture. Social media has had the dual effect of compelling a forfeiture of privacy to the interests of corporations while at the same time prompting and promoting displays of one’s “authentic” moral self. To put this differently, we occupy what Lauren Berlant has called the “intimate public sphere.” What Berlant so acutely identified is how the coalescence of contemporary publics occurs around shared feelings of intimacy and how the market both prompts and exploits those feelings. One glance at a Twitter feed today affirms just how saturated and structured our socializing is by “a world of strangers who would be emotionally literate in each other’s experience of power, intimacy, desire, and discontent, with all that entails.”6 Though it has been but one of the factors involved in the erosion of the public sphere— factors that also include the rise of the political power of white evangelical conservatives since the 1970s; the Reagan Revolution and the neoliberal economic consensus; and 9/11 and the War on Terror, with its terrible costs nationally and globally—social media has shaped how everyday Americans respond to these conditions and reshaped expectations about privacy since 2006, the year that Facebook became available to the public. Media scholars have pointed to two almost paradoxical aspects of social media that dominate its interface: the self-­selection that potentially cultivates silos of shared cultures and reinforced beliefs (think Facebook Groups), and an algorithm optimized for engagement that depends on the constant stirring up of outrage and other negative emotions.7 These platforms depend on the invitation to divulge one’s private life and to expose others’ hypocrisies to sell personal data for advertising revenue. In other words, technology platforms have an economic incentive to exploit the sensibility of privacy. Shoshana Zuboff has named this “surveillance capitalism.”8 In turn, the ubiquity of social media in Americans’ lives has made extraordinarily visible the persistence of a widespread faith in the efficacy of exposure, but it also daily provides the evidence that exposure no longer works in a structural sense. That which is exposed does not create or cohere a public so much as proliferate a series of publics that may not share assumptions or even, increasingly, facts. Charges of hypocrisy that proliferate in social media, likewise, simply do not work, or, more accurately, do not work equally across the political spectrum. After all, one must believe in a moral order in which hypocrisy is a sin to be successfully called out for it. The effects of social media on the lived experiences of privacy are often discussed separately from the erosion of reproductive rights. But the long

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history of the emergence of privacy in the nineteenth century to its articulation as a Constitutional right in the twentieth asks us to see them as deeply intertwined. While social media seems to be the endpoint of the authentic self as it is experienced under neoliberal capitalism, the moral claims that privacy uneasily contained—already at odds in the nineteenth century—are now competing openly with each other in our politics and courtrooms. This long unwinding can be seen most vividly in the backlash following Roe v. Wade (1973), a decision that was built on Griswold’s precedent. Griswold was arguably the culmination of the logic of nineteenth-­century privacy, especially as it became increasingly tied to marriage. From its emergence in the nineteenth century to its description as a “zone of privacy” in Griswold, marriage has both symbolized and can be said to enact the moral aims of secularism in (to quote the majority decision in Griswold) “a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred.”9 In describing marriage as a sacred form of privacy, Douglas reflects back the legal absorption of religion’s function by the private sphere and its institutionalization of traditional heterosexual marriage as its ultimate public signifier. Yet even as the Griswold decision seemed to legitimate and institutionalize this long history, Griswold and Roe provoked an intense backlash that increasingly drew on the claim to religious freedom—also a central feature of the rise of privacy in the nineteenth century, including in arguments for private marriage—to fight precisely these expansions of reproductive and sexual rights. Such claims are apparent in acts of legislation like the Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act (2015), and legal opinions such as the majority opinion in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. (2014) and the dissents by Justices Roberts, Thomas, and Alito in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015). These all invoked “religious freedom”—that is, the language underlying the privatization of religion—as a way to police the sexual and reproductive lives of others. Just as we might declare the culmination of privacy’s function to be the protection of the sacredness of marriage and the acknowledgment of a woman’s “inviolate personality,” we simultaneously see an upswing of claims that this triumph is an attack on religious liberty, which is itself central to and a legacy of the shift to modern privacy. In a speech to the Notre Dame Law School on October 11, 2019, William Barr—attorney general during the Trump Administration—narrated his version of this open conflict, not as a history of privacy but as a problem of secularization. In this speech, Barr argued explicitly that the framers of the Constitution drew on the “classical Christian tradition” and were, above all,

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concerned about “whether the citizens in such a free society could maintain the moral discipline and virtue necessary for the survival of free institutions.”10 Selectively ignoring the main thrust of James Madison’s concerns about religious establishments—which, as noted in Chapter 1, were deeply entwined with an anti-­Catholic fear of tyranny—Barr claims that, for Madison, religious liberty was mainly, perhaps even overwhelmingly a question of one’s “duty towards the Creator.” Misreading late eighteenth-­century deist language has been a common tactic of the Far Right; doing so in this speech allows Barr to develop a counternarrative of US history that he presents as an epic battle, culminating right now, between “modern secularists” and a moral people whose values “flow from a transcendent Supreme Being,” which he later narrows to a “Judeo-­Christian moral system.” He cites soaring illegitimacy, suicide, and depression rates, the “wreckage of the family,” and rising drug use as the “bitter results of the new secular age.” He calls for those who follow a Judeo-­Christian morality to fight back, in the courts and through elections. Judeo-­Christian is itself a post-­1945 term of secularism that purposefully erases its own theological specificity and historicity. In it, we see the contemporary update of what Tracy Fessenden identified as the role of Protestantism in structuring the unmarked ground of the nineteenth-­century secular. A claim to morality based in Judeo-­Christian heritage allows politicians like Barr to sound ecumenical and exclusive, pushing beyond the bounds of acceptance whole theologies (most pointedly, Islam) and all varieties of unbelief. Barr’s historical narrative itself is just simply the secularization thesis, but instead of celebrating the supposed banishing of religion from the public sphere, he laments it. Barr sees our present moment as one defined by a moral struggle between Christians, who follow a “micro-­morality” in which the goal is to “transform the world by focusing on our own personal morality and transformation,” and the “modern secularists,” who follow a “macro-­ morality,” which he asserts is an “inversion of Christian morality.” For these modern secularists, “one’s morality is not gauged by their private conduct, but rather on their commitment to political causes and collective action to address social problems.” Barr then claims that it is the secularists who “signal” their “finely-­tuned moral sensibilities by demonstrating for this cause or that.” At the risk of taking seriously either Barr’s history or his terms, let me focus on his attempt at a moral distinction. His two categories are, at bottom, basically synonymous, especially in the age of social media. On the one hand, those with a dedication to “micro-­morality” are largely concerned with personal morality, and in changing themselves they would inevitably change the

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world; on the other hand, those engaged in “macro-­morality” seem likewise concerned with private morality, seeking to “signal” their “finely-­tuned moral sensibilities” to try to transform the world. For both, sincerity and sensibility are the issue—and the conflict. His narrative betrays, unwittingly, an impasse created by secularism. Intrinsic to today’s debates over politics and culture— debates engaged for the most part in the online spaces of social media where negative emotions are coaxed and optimized—is a metadiscourse concentrated on sincere beliefs and sensibilities. This is not to say that Barr has provided an accurate account of political history or current politics in the United States. But he has inadvertently reflected two things: first, the way that nineteenth-­century privacy is unwinding into a potentially irresolvable tension between groups that can legitimately claim its mantle; and second, how this standoff, especially as it plays out on social media, reinforces the effects of the privatization of religion by, to quote Fessenden, “creat[ing] subjects” like Barr “who are redoubled in conviction (because conviction, after all, is what counts) and unanswerable to—categorically outside of—democratic norms.”11 Despite Barr’s attempt to distinguish secularists from believers, his argument is indebted to, and is, in fact, even structured by secularism’s management of religion and privacy. Under these circumstances, to call Barr a hypocrite, or to reveal his contradictions—as, admittedly, I am doing here—is largely beside the point. If Lauren Berlant and Tracy Fessenden have diagnosed our current mode of public engagement correctly—and I think they have—we are in a strange situation. We are in need of a new vision of privacy that resists both the intimate public spheres of social media and the overemphasis on sincerely held private belief that underlies Barr’s call to fight the “bitter results of the new secular age.” Privacy itself is a formation of the secular; that is, it has managed religious conviction, sexual morality, and the right to participate in the public sphere. A first step toward changing that tight nexus is to better understand how secularism has fused religion and privacy together, and to recognize, with Fessenden, that to push spiritual, religious, or other beliefs deemed irrational even further into the private sphere will not resolve this democratic problem. Doing so risks reinforcing Barr’s distinction between secularists and believers and unwittingly confirms that morality can only be defined by a narrow set of concerns about sexuality. An avenue toward a renewed privacy can be found, in part, in the very book with which my introduction began, The Scarlet Letter. While

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Hawthorne’s plot arc suggests that secrets will out—that readers will know what self-­torture Dimmesdale enacts in his closet or that Salem will finally discover that he is Pearl’s father—the narrative does not culminate with any such revelations. Hawthorne considers instead the moral import of exposure itself. After finishing his Election Day sermon, Dimmesdale climbs the scaffold that had been the site of the opening chapter’s shaming of Hester, inviting her and Pearl to join him. Dimmesdale obliquely calls out that “there stood one in the midst of you, at whose brand of sin and infamy ye have not shuddered!” and he ends his speech with a feint at revelation: “With a convulsive motion, he tore away the ministerial band from before his breast. It was revealed! But it were irreverent to describe that revelation.”12 This evasion can strike readers as exasperatingly coy on Hawthorne’s part. Just when the reader (and the townspeople) may finally learn definitively of Dimmesdale’s secret tortures, the narrator refuses precision. By suggesting that it would be “irreverent” to tell the reader what Dimmesdale exposed on the scaffold, the narrator seems to suggest that even here, at the moment of catharsis for this tragedy, some element of Dimmesdale’s private self must remain sacrosanct and unrevealed. For a chapter called “The Revelation of the Scarlet Letter,” this scene leaves a lot to be desired. At first blush, this moment of narrative veiling is wholly in keeping with the overall terms of privacy as a secular sensibility. The narrator insists that exposing Dimmesdale is an irreverent act; that is, it transgresses against something that has been coded as sacred. It is not Dimmesdale’s theological belief that would be traduced so much as his private self, what Warren and Brandeis would call his “inviolate personality.” Yet the narrator does not protect privacy so much as secrecy.13 Dimmesdale wins the narrator’s protection precisely at the moment when he proclaims his guilt. That his seventeenth-­ century Boston congregation remains mystified about this guilt arises from the very fact that he is perceived as a living embodiment of the Elect. But as an author, Hawthorne is not focused solely (or even partially) on a re-­creation of Puritan doctrine. That nineteenth-­century readers and those today never know what is on Dimmesdale’s chest is more telling. At this critical moment, Hawthorne refuses to satisfy the faith in exposure that is the hallmark of secular morality and the novel form. If we could say there is any moral in The Scarlet Letter (and Hawthorne famously rejected such overt didacticism), we might find it when the narrator reflects on Dimmesdale’s final act: “Among many morals which press

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upon us from the poor minister’s miserable experience, we put only this into a sentence:—‘Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!’”14 Hawthorne calls his readers to moral authenticity—“Be true!”—and urges them to “show freely to the world,” but then he immediately qualifies this sentiment. You need not expose your worst sins to the world, but the capacity for difference and discordance, secrets and even sin, he suggests, can serve as a basis of generosity that you extend to others. It is the very hypocrisies that we all balance, and the shame of those failures, Hawthorne seems to be saying, that can create public and civic bonds. With Hawthorne, we might think about what has been lost with the end of the right to privacy—and what can be gained. Privacy as it has developed in American secularism insists on the concepts of sincere belief and personal authenticity, and of hypocrisy as a consummate transgression. It also depends on exposure, a state of visibility that Michel Foucault identified as the disciplinary condition of modern society. That said, what is increasingly apparent in our age of surveillance capitalism is that privacy has value for mental, physical, and societal health. As an older version of privacy ends— both in terms of control over personal data and control over reproduction— we might consider what role privacy can and should play now. The answer may mean not rejecting privacy as apolitical quietism—after all, its current alternative seems to be constant exposure—but redefining and reshaping what privacy means for the twenty-­first century. A twenty-­first-­century renewal of privacy would not be off track were it to begin with what Hawthorne emphasizes, the right to dignity, equally applied to all. Pursuing dignity would mean redrawing the lines of what is recognized as private and affording citizens the ability to shield themselves from surveillance. Dignity would, for instance, mean shifting the argument for reproductive rights from privacy to equality before the law. It would also help confront some of the problems social media sites have created by affirming an individual’s right, for instance, to control over personal data. Such a right might be modeled on laws like the “right to be forgotten” in the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (2018). These measures would also be aimed at reinvigorating public discourse beyond outrage cycles produced to benefit “surveillance capitalists,” and at ending what these cycles fuel in the United States: a culture war in which white conservative evangelicalism sets itself as the sole owner and arbiter of the language of morality. What I am suggesting, inspired admittedly by the generally pessimistic Scarlet Letter, is

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the importance of conceiving of a more equitable and more private form of privacy than was built in the nineteenth century. We might insist that personal and private connections not be secretly mined for the wealth of a few, and we might assume neither that the private sphere is your sole moral warrant for democratic participation nor that privacy can only be provided when you have no more secrets to hide.

NOTES

Introduction 1.  Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (1998), 547–566: 547. 2.  Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (New York: Penguin Books, 2016), 133–134. 3.  As Talal Asad explains, secularism holds myths as powerful as any religion (including the power to name what is religious and what is not), but these myths are often presented as if they are a self-­evident, rational reality. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), chapter 1. José Casanova usefully distinguishes two types of “secularism”: one, the “state-­craft doctrine” of disestablishment; the other, ideological. This book considers the emergence of secularism via its impact on privacy, though Chapter 1 also attends to the first meaning in terms of disestablishment of state churches. See José Casanova, “The Secular, Secularizations, Secularisms,” in Rethinking Secularism, ed. Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 54–74: 66–73. The new interventions in theories of the secular from interdisciplinary scholars such as Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood, Tracy Fessenden, José Casanova, John Modern, Peter Coviello, and others have questioned this assumption. See Tracy Fessenden, Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 6. For a consideration of whether there are different “secularisms,” see Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, “Introduction: Times Like These,” in Secularisms, ed. Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 1–35; and Saba Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 10–11. 4.  I use the term postsecular with a little caution. In line with the thinking outlined by Peter Coviello and Jared Hickman, my aim is to “examine the historical past unburdened by a particular fantasy of the inevitable or necessary supersession of something called ‘religion.’” Peter Coviello and Jared Hickman, “Introduction: After the Postsecular,” American Literature 86, no. 4 (2015), 645–654: 646. To be postsecular, as Coviello and Hickman explain, is still to be somehow haunted, and at times even enthralled, by secularism. This tendency rests in what Tracy Fessenden locates as the very implication of the “post” in “postsecular”—the way that the term still instantiates secular, progressive time in its very utterance: “This liberating, pluralizing move implies redemption from a constraining past, in this case from the analytic and existential confines of secular categories that no longer serve as well as we would wish,” a move that also betrays a desire to be released “from the burdens of religion, that is, from the competencies, obligations, and complicities associated with a putative past tense of shared religious belief and practice.” There is nothing more evident of secularism’s power, Fessenden points out, than celebrating freedom from the supposed constraints of public, organized religion. Tracy Fessenden, “The Problem of the Postsecular,” American Literary History 26, no. 1 (2014), 154–167: 157.

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5. Emily Ogden provides a sweeping and convincing account of credulity, which she describes as “modern enchantment.” The aspiration of antebellum secularism, she argues, is to “confine, explain, and redeploy primitive religious power.” Emily Ogden, Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2018), 9, 5, and the introduction more generally. 6. Asad, Formations of the Secular, 14. 7.  For more on the relation between sentiment, sensibility, and judgment, see Hina Nazar, Enlightened Sentiments: Judgment and Autonomy in the Age of Sensibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), introduction and chapter 1. 8.  The right to privacy has never been evenly applied, and in the ways people’s privacy has been abridged in the twentieth century we see the persistence of what I am arguing here. The landmark privacy cases of the later twentieth century (Griswold v. Connecticut [1965], Roe v. Wade [1973], and Lawrence v. Texas [2003]) centered time and again on whether sexual conduct and reproductive decisions should be regulated by the state or be lodged under the umbrella of the privacy of “family” or “household.” The elision between “moral” and “private” and “family” that often operates even in such ostensibly liberating decisions as Justice Kennedy’s majority decision in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015 testifies to this persistence. This should come as no surprise. The legal scholar Danielle Citron argues that Warren and Brandeis’s project in “The Right to Privacy” concerned sexual privacy, and this concern was central to the new tort they argued for. See Danielle Keats Citron, “The Roots of Sexual Privacy: Warren and Brandeis and the Privacy of Intimate Life,” Columbia Journal of Law and the Arts 42, no. 3 (2019), 383–388. For more on this topic, see Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), particularly her theorization of the “intimate public sphere”; Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004); and Jeb Rubenfeld, “The Right of Privacy,” Harvard Law Review 102, no. 4 (1989), 737–807, written after Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), a decision that denied the right to privacy to anyone engaged in nonheteronormative sex in their homes (overturned by Lawrence v. Texas in 2003). Sexual and reproductive rights, though, are not the only violations of modern privacy in the name of state power. We also see this in drug testing for access to welfare, for instance, and in other ways in which white supremacy, income inequality, and state surveillance come together. 9.  This fusion persists to this day, as can be seen in debates over reproductive rights, marriage equality, and access to welfare and other public support. As Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini argue, the tight connection between a sexual morality rooted in Protestantism and secular legal claims of privacy produces “promises of ‘freedom’ and ‘privacy’—promises supposedly made to every American by virtue of being a citizen—[that] are actually held out as rewards, not rights, and only to those who belong to the right kind of family.” Jakobsen and Pellegrini, Love the Sin, 9. As both an expression and performance of one’s private morality and a state-­ regulated institution, marriage is a central force for producing what Peter Coviello has named the biopolitics of secularism. Peter Coviello, Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 40. 10.  Steven K. Green, The Second Disestablishment: Church and State in Nineteenth-­Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 12. 11.  For more on these broader legal disputes over common law, see Green, Second Disestablishment, chapters 5–7; for more on the debates over nonsectarian public schools, see chapters

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9–10, and Fessenden, Culture and Redemption, chapter 3. For a more polemical historical narrative about nineteenth-­century fights over church and state, see David Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Where Green sees an uneven process of disestablishing across the legal history of the nineteenth century, Sehat argues that there were a variety of “religious and moral regulations that formed a moral establishment that connected religion and the state” (5). 12.  See especially Gretchen Murphy, New England Women Writers, Secularity, and the Federalist Politics of Church and State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). 13.  While these accounts of religion’s place in American culture differ and even contest each other, collectively they evince how, in the United States, Americans in the nineteenth century practiced and exhorted a wide range of religions, and that this historical development was a part of any process of “secularization,” not its opposite. Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), chapter 8; Nathan O. Hatch, introduction to The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989); R. Laurence Moore, introduction to Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (1977; reis., New York: Noonday Press, 1998); Catherine L. Albanese, introduction to A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). 14.  Along with the historians named in the previous note, this acknowledgment has long been part of any discussion of religion and secularism in the modern world. José Casanova first gave this explanation in Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Secularization has always had its Western exception in the United States, as Casanova notes, but it also does not hold up as a thesis when placed in a global context. Casanova revisited his focus on Western Europe and ecclesiastical formations, which has held up so well in the post-­9/11 world. See José Casanova, “Public Religion Revisited,” in Religion: Beyond a Concept, ed. Hent de Vries (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 101–119. See also George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); and T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981) for two foundational studies of the growth of rejections of secular modernity (including but not limited to religious objections) at the turn of the twentieth century. 15.  This equation of privately achieved conviction with religion first solidified into a philosophical and theological agreement across even otherwise opposing factions of Protestantism in the eighteenth century. According to Robert J. Baird, these are the roots of what would become the “modern notion of religion,” in which “religion is at root a set of beliefs and practices—practices that are actions motivated by those beliefs.” Robert J. Baird, “Late Secularism,” in Secularisms, 162–177: 166, 165. 16.  This confusion has been at the center of work by secular studies scholars and scholars of religion. As Finbarr Curtis explains, the “usage of religious privacy does not protect individual choices, but empowers a private sphere that contains institutions (such as churches, schools, hospitals, or other corporate bodies) that seek regulatory power over human bodies.” Finbarr Curtis, The Production of American Religious Freedom (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 5. See also Joan Scott on the ways in which secularism advanced an ideological contradiction: claiming to be liberating women (especially in relation to Islam) but nonetheless depending on sexual difference and hierarchy in the West. Joan Scott, introduction to Sex and

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Secularism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018). For another forceful articulation of the way gender and freedom came to be associated with Western secularism, in opposition to Islam, see Saba Mahmood, introduction to Religious Difference in a Secular Age. 17.  See especially Peter Coviello’s argument for the queerness and radicalness of early Mormonism (bound up in racialization and biopolitical enforcements) in Coviello, Make Yourselves Gods, 4–14. 18.  Robert Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 18. In chapter 6 of the book, Orsi elaborates on how and why this definition of “good religion” developed in the discipline of religious studies and examines its impact on scholarship. 19.  Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (New York: W. W. Norton, 1954), 159. 20.  John Lardas Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 45. 21. Fessenden, Culture and Redemption, 68. For an analysis of the introduction of the Protestant Bible to antebellum public schoolrooms, and the conflicts that erupted around these curricular decisions, see Fessenden, chapter 3. 22.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-­Reliance,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Poems, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1996), 259–282: 262. 23.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Divinity School Address,” in Essays and Poems, 75–92: 88, 87. 24.  Quoted in Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 299. Information on this controversy from Richardson, 298–300. 25.  In American public life and discourse, private religion, so central to Jefferson’s argument for disestablishment, has all but become synonymous with religious freedom, while “on the other hand,” as Winnifred Fallers Sullivan has observed, “Public, coercive, communal, oral, and enacted religion . . . was seen to be ‘false’” and came to be “closely regulated by law.” Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 8. 26.  Lyman Beecher, Lectures on Scepticism (Cincinnati, OH: Corey and Webster, 1835), 43. In lectures given in 1831 and 1833, Beecher developed his history and theory of skepticism as a modern, global “epidemic” of the era, an era he traces historically to the explosion created by the French Revolution. 27. Beecher, Lectures on Scepticism, 18, 20. 28.  Theodore Parker, “A Discourse of the Transient and Permanent in Christianity,” in The Critical and Miscellaneous Writings of Theodore Parker, 2nd ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1856), 152–189: 156. 29.  Parker, “Transient and Permanent,” 156. 30.  As Michael Kaufmann explains, “The process of naming and relocating certain values” to the private sphere “effectively creates the category of ‘religion’ in order to neutralize its resistance to the progress of capitalism.” Michael W. Kaufmann, “The Religious, the Secular, and Literary Studies: Rethinking the Secularization Narrative in Histories of the Profession,” New Literary History 38, no. 4 (2007), 607–628: 612. 31. Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age, 9. 32. Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age, 9.

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33.  Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “private,” accessed June 1, 2021, https://​www​-­­oed​-­­com​ .proxy2​.library​.illinois​.edu​/view​/Entry​/151601​#eid28426184. 34.  The critical use of the term spheres arose from the era itself (often termed woman’s sphere), and, as Linda Kerber has argued, it shaped the metaphoric horizon of feminist historiography of the twentieth century (11). For historiographic work on separate spheres, see Linda K. Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,” Journal of American History 75, no. 1 (1988), 9–39; and Cathy Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher’s introduction to No More Separate Spheres! (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 7–26. For more on the ideology of domesticity, see Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-­Century America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), in which she argues that domesticity played an important role in the rise of liberal subjectivity during the market revolution of the nineteenth century. For more on domesticity and race, see Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-­American Woman Novelist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), which demonstrates how African American women, who were explicitly excluded from the ideology, navigated it in their writing. For the relation of separate spheres, domesticity, and literary history, see Lora Romero’s Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), in which she shows how the “domestic woman” has “overstabilized” what we mean by “ideology” and “opposition” by defining the literary space in opposition to politics (4). As this brief overview of the scholarship indicates, interest in domesticity and separate spheres flourished in the 1980s and 1990s. For more recent extensions of this work, see Brian Connolly, Domestic Intimacies: Incest and the Liberal Subject in Nineteenth-­Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), which considers how new legal and cultural articulations of incest helped shore up liberalism; and Cindy Weinstein, Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-­Century American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), in which she revises work on sympathy and sentimentality through theories of “family” and kinship in the nineteenth century. I address scholarship on the domestic novel and sentimentality—the genres and modes most often associated with domesticity and separate spheres ideology—in Chapter 2. 35.  Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 20. 36.  This study is indebted to groundbreaking scholarship in African American literary studies, especially work on the intersectional questions of race, marriage, and private life. For more on how race, gender, and marriage operated conjointly in the nineteenth century (issues I expand on in Chapter 4), see Tess Chakkalakal, Novel Bondage: Slavery, Marriage, and Freedom in Nineteenth-­Century America (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2011); Brigitte Fielder, Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-­Century America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020); Frances Smith Foster, ’Til Death and Distance Do Us Part: Love and Marriage in African America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Carla L. Peterson, “Doers of the Word”: African-­American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830– 1880) (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995). 37.  Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “privacy,” accessed June 1, 2021, https://​www​-­­oed​-­­com​ .proxy2​.library​.illinois​.edu​/view​/Entry​/151596​?redirectedFrom​=​privacy&. 38.  Emerson, “Self-­Reliance,” 262. 39.  Dana Luciano has shown how this sense of self as a private authenticity outwardly performed developed as “a mode of compensation for, and, to some extent, of resistance to, the

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perceived mechanization of society” (6). Dana Luciano, Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-­Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2007). Luciano’s example of mourning culture is one vector through which the feeling body became aligned with nature and the sacred and, through that alignment, seemed to call out for seclusion in the private sphere. Yet for that seclusion to be afforded, there must be some public accounting, some recognition of the feeling self, as evinced by the importance granted to the public markers of mourning. 40.  Stacey Margolis, The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-­Century American Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 3. The consensus in scholarship on privacy in the nineteenth century is that it is a “public effect,” as Margolis puts it, dependent on what Jeffrey Insko calls the “commensurability of, or transparency between expression and identity” (664). Jeffrey Insko, “The Logic of Left Alone: The Pioneers and the Conditions of U.S. Privacy,” American Literature 81, no. 4 (2009), 659–685. For more on the ironic visibility of privacy, see also Katharine Adams, Owning Up: Privacy, Property, and Belonging in U.S. Women’s Life Writing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). For more on the development of the right to privacy in law and culture, see Milette Shamir, Inexpressible Privacy: The Interior Life of Antebellum American Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). 41.  See Sarah Blackwood, introduction to The Portrait’s Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-­Century United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019); and Christopher Castiglia on the relocation of democratic impulses into the control of interior states in his introduction to Interior States: Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy in the Antebellum United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 42.  Matt. 23:23 (King James Version). I look at this admonition in proslavery discourse in Chapter 5 as well. 43. Jefferson, Notes, 159. 44.  For Arendt, the French Revolution marked a decisive shift toward a cultural preoccupation with hypocrisy and authenticity in the West. Though Arendt does exclude the American Revolution from the “never-­ending” hunt for hypocrisy, Shklar more rightly includes the United States as exemplary of these political problems. See Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 86–105; and Judith N. Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1984), chapter 2. The preoccupation with sincerity and authenticity rising in the revolutionary era is seen, as well, in the rise of Romanticism on both sides of the Atlantic. For a classic study of sincerity and authenticity in American literature, see Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972). For a study of hypocrisy and British culture in the long eighteenth century, see Jenny Davidson, Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness: Manners and Morals from Locke to Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 45.  Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, in The Autobiography and Other Writings, ed. Kenneth Silverman (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 3–191: 73, 102. 46.  Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-­Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 60; Fessenden, Culture and Redemption, 94–95. 47. Shklar, Ordinary Vices, 75. 48.  Sarah E. Igo, The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). 14. 49.  Milette Shamir, Inexpressible Privacy, 157–162.

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50.  Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 138. 51.  The theory that “romance” is the unique contribution of the American novel finds its most forceful expression in Richard Chase’s claim that “since the earliest days the American novel, in its most original and characteristic form, has worked out its destiny and defined itself by incorporating an element of romance.” Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1958), viii. Chase’s interpretation (like many of his generation of Americanist scholars) is far more complex than this short passage suggests, and accounting for the fecundity and capacities of American “romance” since Chase’s work has been a significant conversation in the field. For an overview of the literary history of American romance, and the debates about it, see Jennifer Fleissner, “After the New Americanists: The Progress of Romance and the Romance of Progress in American Literary Studies,” in A Companion to American Literary Studies, ed. Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011), 173–190; and Emily Ogden, “Romance,” in American Literature in Transition: The Long Nineteenth Century, 1820–1860, vol. 2, ed. Justine S. Murison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 147–163. 52.  Christine Holbro, Legal Realisms: The American Novel Under Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 7. Holbro draws on Gregg Camfield’s definition of “sentimental realism” as rooted in Common Sense philosophy’s response to idealism. Camfield has also argued that psychological mimesis was a project for the sentimentalists as well as the realists; they just deployed different approaches to achieve it (12). Gregg Camfield, Sentimental Twain: Samuel Clemens in the Maze of Moral Philosophy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), chapters 1 and 2. 53.  I specifically identify this as a formal problem—that is, about the novel form as it developed historically—to distance this part of my argument from debates around such terms as surface/depth and reparative reading/critique, much of which seems to be conducted almost entirely about the novel form without identifying that focus as such. For an analysis of this elision, see Tim Dean, “Genre Blindness in the New Descriptivism,” Modern Language Quarterly 81, no. 4 (2020), 527–552. For a more general analysis of the relation of form to critique (and postcritique), see Ellen Rooney, “Symptomatic Reading Is a Problem of Form,” in Critique and Postcritique, ed. Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 127–152. 54.  For a thoughtful investigation of the claim of “relatability” as resonating on “queerer registers,” beyond normativity and solipsism, see Brian Glavey, “Having a Coke with You Is Even More Fun Than Ideology Critique,” PMLA 134, no. 5 (2019), 996–1011. By bringing up relatability, I am purposefully thinking through the relation of character development to plausibility, and I want to uncouple that line of thought from a strictly defined realism. In this way, my approach is distinct from Rita Felski’s argument about identification, in where she tends to build her argument in contrast to what she calls the “genre of realism” and the psychological assumptions it brings, neither of which I think applies well to much nineteenth-­century American literature. See Rita Felski, Hooked: Art and Attachment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), chapter 3. 55.  Susan M. Ryan, The Moral Economies of American Authorship: Reputation, Scandal, and the Nineteenth-­Century Literary Marketplace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 5. 56.  Ashley Barnes, Love and Depth in the American Novel: From Stowe to James (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020), 3.

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57.  Dawn Coleman, “The Spiritual Authority of Literature in a Secular Age,” Christianity and Literature 67, no. 3 (2018), 519–520: 521. For two studies that develop the complexities of literature written in tight dialogue with theological disputes and in relation to denominational specificity, see Ashley Reed, Heaven’s Interpreters: Women Writers and Religious Agency in Nineteenth-­Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020); and Claudia Stokes, The Altar at Home: Sentimental Literature and Nineteenth-­Century American Religion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). 58.  Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, ed. Milton R. Stern (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 116–117. 59.  Heather Love, “Close but Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn,” New Literary History 41, no. 2 (2010), 371–391. 60.  Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Hope Leslie; or, Early Times in the Massachusetts, ed. Carolyn L. Karcher (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), 128–129. 61.  Henry James, The Bostonians, ed. Richard Lansdown (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 10–11.

Chapter 1 1.  Christopher Grasso, Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 15. 2.  Disestablishment was not one process but varied by state and could involve some or all of the issues I list here. For a good resource on each state’s particular course through disestablishment, see Carl H. Esbeck and Jonathan J. Den Hartog, eds., Disestablishment and Religious Dissent: Church-­State Relations in the New American States, 1776–1833 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2019). This list is drawn from Esbeck and Den Hartog, “Introduction: The Task, Methodology, and Findings,” in Disestablishment and Religious Dissent, 3–23: 6–7. 3.  Green notes that “overall, the letters and pamphlets that circulated during 1787–1789 expressed concerns about preserving rights of conscience and preventing government preferences for particular sects, a condition which many felt still existed in several of the states.” Steven K. Green, The Second Disestablishment: Church and State in Nineteenth-­Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 64. Green’s convincing argument throughout chapter 2 is that the First Amendment was drafted to support religious liberty not to protect state establishments. 4. Green, Second Disestablishment, 57. 5.  James Madison, “To the Honorable the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia. A Memorial and Remonstrance,” ca. June 20, 1785, Founders Online, National Archives, http://​founders​.archives​.gov​/documents​/Madison​/01​-­­08​-­­02​-­­0163. 6.  Madison, “Memorial and Remonstrance”; Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, in Paine: Collected Works, ed. Eric Foner (New York: Library of America, 1984), 665–830: 666. 7. Paine, Age of Reason, 667. 8.  “From the Danbury Baptist Association,” October 7, 1801, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, https://​jeffersonpapers​.princeton​.edu​/selected​-­­documents​/danbury​-­­baptist​-­­association. This association was preparing for what would turn out to be a long fight to disestablish the Congregational Church in Connecticut, which would not be disestablished until 1818. In response to this letter, Jefferson would assert that the First Amendment aimed to build a “wall of separation” between church and state, a phrase that would become a significant statement in religious freedom cases in the twentieth century.

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9. Elizabeth Fenton, Religious Liberties: Anti-­ Catholicism and Liberal Democracy in Nineteenth-­Century U.S. Literature and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 34. 10. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (New York: W. W. Norton, 1954), 159. 11. Paine, Age of Reason, 666. 12. Paine, Age of Reason, 667, 666. 13.  Lyman Beecher, The Design, Rights, and Duties of Local Churches (Andover: Flagg and Could, 1819), 18. 14.  Lyman Beecher, Lectures on Scepticism (Cincinnati, OH: Corey and Fairbank, 1835), 36. 15. Beecher, Scepticism, 37. 16.  Gretchen Murphy, New England Women Writers, Secularity, and the Federalist Politics of Church and State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 69–70. 17. Grasso, Skepticism and American Faith, 14. 18.  As Grasso points out, this fear was also directed at the Universalists, led in the United States by John Murray (husband of the author Judith Sargent Murray), who did not believe in divine punishment in the afterlife. The Universalists, he notes, had a route to eventual acceptance that the deists and skeptics lacked in that they were an organized religion that could be recognized as such. Grasso, Skepticism and American Faith, 27–33, 114. 19.  Amanda Porterfield, Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 5. 20. Grasso, Skepticism and American Faith, 32. 21.  Eric R. Schlereth, An Age of Infidels: The Politics of Religious Controversy in the Early United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 11. 22. Paine, Age of Reason, 665. 23. Schlereth, Age of Infidels, 49. 24. Craig Nelson, Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 267, 269. 25. Schlereth, Age of Infidels, 49. 26.  Lyman Beecher, Autobiography, Correspondence, Etc., ed. Charles Beecher (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1866), 1:43. 27.  Elihu Hubbard Smith, April 13, 1796, in The Diary of Elihu Hubbard Smith (1771–1798), ed. James E. Cronin (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1973), 156. See also Bryan Waterman, “The Bavarian Illuminati, the Early American Novel, and Histories of the Public Sphere,” William and Mary Quarterly 62, no. 1 (January 2005), 9–30: 21. 28.  Shirley Samuels, “Infidelity and Contagion: The Rhetoric of Revolution,” Early American Literature 22, no. 2 (Fall 1987), 183–191: 185. 29.  Richard Watson, An Apology for the Bible, in a Series of Letters, Addressed to Thomas Paine, 5th ed. (London: T. Evans, Cadell Davies, P. Elmsley et al., 1796), 11, 7–8. 30. Watson, Apology, 3. 31.  Uzal Ogden, Antidote to Deism: The Deist Unmasked; or an Ample Refutation of All the Objections of Thomas Paine, Against the Christian Religion (Newark, NJ: John Woods, 1795), 17. 32. Ogden, Antidote to Deism, 13. 33.  Shirley Samuels, Romances of the Republic: Women, the Family, and Violence in the Literature of the Early American Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 12–13. 34.  Elias Boudinot, The Age of Revelation; or, The Age of Reason Shewn to Be an Age of Infidelity (Philadelphia, PA: Asbury Dickens, 1801), xxi.

230

Notes to Pages 34–38

35.  Timothy Dwight, The Nature and Danger of Infidel Philosophy (New Haven, CT: George Bunce, 1798), 57. 36. Jedidiah Morse, A Sermon, Delivered at the New North Church in Boston (Boston: Samuel Hall, 1798), 19. Like Dwight, Boudinot, and some other prominent ministers in the Northeast, Morse thought that the Illuminati was behind both the French Revolution and the popularity of The Age of Reason. 37. Schlereth, Age of Infidels, 55. 38. Ogden, Antidote to Deism, 15. 39.  “From the British Review,” Select Reviews of Literature and Spirit of Foreign Magazines 6 (December 1811), 377–391: 384. 40. Grasso, Skepticism and American Faith, 100. 41.  Review of “An Answer to Mr. Paine’s Age of Reason,” American Monthly Review 3, no. 4 (December 1795), 301–304: 301; “Notice to Correspondents,” Monthly Register, Magazine, and Review of the United States 2 (January 1807), 128. 42.  [William Cobbett], “Paine’s Age of Reason,” Porcupine’s Political Censor, May 1796, 195–205: 198, 197. 43.  “From the British Review,” 390. 44.  “From the British Review,” 391. 45.  Recent scholarship on The Algerine Captive has debated the extent to which we can see the novel in general, and its more sober second half specifically, as cosmopolitan or conservative. My argument here aligns with the readings of the novel as ultimately conservative. On the side of reading the novel as more liberal and cosmopolitan, see Keri Holt, “‘All Parts of the Union I Considered My Home’: The Federal Imagination of The Algerine Captive,” Early American Literature 46, no. 3 (2011), 481–515; and Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, “The Problem of Population and the Form of the American Novel,” American Literary History 20, no. 4 (Winter 2008), 667–685. In a less overtly optimistic way, Edward Larkin argues for conceptualizing the early United States as an empire, a refocusing that allows us to see the “diversity of cultures present in the states.” Edward Larkin, “Nation and Empire in the Early US,” American Literary History 22, no. 3 (Fall 2010), 501–526: 520. In his recent dissenting reevaluation, Ed White contends that Tyler typifies the logic of conservatism as it will emerge in the nineteenth century, in which irony allows for the appreciation and exploitation of the “constitutive gap between the conventional reality of the plebs and the cultural superiority, even transcendence of the professional class.” Ed White, “Divided We Stand: Emergent Conservatism in Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive,” Studies in American Fiction 37, no. 1 (2010), 5–27: 21. Likewise, Elizabeth Fenton argues that The Algerine Captive turns a skeptical eye on deliberative democracy. Eliza­ beth Fenton, “Indeliberate Democracy: The Politics of Religious Conversion in Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive,” Early American Literature 51, no. 1 (2016), 71–100. 46.  Jordan Alexander Stein, When Novels Were Books (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 10, and chapter 2 more extensively. 47.  Royall Tyler, The Algerine Captive; or, The Life and Adventures of Doctor Updike Underhill: Six Years a Prisoner Among the Algerines, ed. Caleb Crain (New York: Modern Library, 2002), 87. Subsequent citations to this edition of The Algerine Captive will be given parenthetically in the text. 48.  According to Edward Larkin, Paine’s reputation first slides in the United States after his open letter to George Washington. While I concentrate more on the outrage over The Age of Reason, in it I see a similar pattern to what Larkin traces, that Paine’s position as professional

Notes to Pages 39–44

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and adept author is part of what made him so suspect. See Edward Larkin, Thomas Paine and the Literature of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), chapter 2. 49.  Fenton, “Indeliberate Democracy,” 90. 50.  For more on the rise of “world religions” and “comparative religions,” see Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); and Toni Wall Jaudon, “The Compiler’s Art: Hannah Adams, the Dictionary of All Religions, and the Religious World,” American Literary History 26, no. 1 (Spring 2014), 28–41. 51.  Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, introduction to The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). 52.  White, “Divided We Stand,” 26. 53.  White, “Divided We Stand,” 26. 54. Paine, Age of Reason, 667, 666. 55.  Charles Brockden Brown, Ormond; or, The Secret Witness, ed. Mary Chapman (Ontario: Broadview Press, 1999), 40. Subsequent citations to this edition of Ormond will be given parenthetically in the text. 56.  The relationships between Constantia Dudley and Sophia Westwyn, and Constantia and Martinette, express, to borrow Julia A. Stern’s words, “female homoerotic longing” in an age when the democratic promise of the revolution was palpably waning. Julie A. Stern, “The State of ‘Women’ in Ormond; or, Patricide in the New Nation,” in Revising Charles Brockden Brown: Culture, Politics, and Sexuality in the Early Republic, ed. Philip Barnard, Mark L. Kamrath, and Stephen Shapiro (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004), 182–215: 185. 57.  Hana Layson, “Rape and Revolution: Feminism, Antijacobinism, and the Politics of Injured Innocence in Brockden Brown’s Ormond,” Early American Studies 2, no. 1 (Spring 2004), 160–191: 160. 58.  Mary Chapman, introduction to Ormond; or, The Secret Witness, by Charles Brockden Brown, ed. Mary Chapman (Ontario: Broadview Press, 1999), 9–31: 29. 59. As Michael J. Drexler and Ed White argue, Ormond continually offers narrative moments in which characters unconsciously reflect representations and fantasies of themselves, and the stylistic mode that Brown uses to explore this is early free indirect discourse. In their words, “republican fantasy imagines a relationship of moral self-­supervision and self-­ enjoyment. Pleasure emerges from the fantasy of depriving oneself of pleasure through imposition of moral restrictions.” Michael J. Drexler and Ed White, “Secret Witness; or, the Fantasy Structure of Republicanism,” Early American Literature 44, no. 2 (2009), 333–363: 349. 60.  Clifford Siskin writes that through the embedding of systems in fiction, radical authors like William Godwin escaped “the very real dangers of political reaction.” Clifford Siskin, “Novels and Systems,” Novel 34, no. 2 (Spring 2001), 202–215: 206. Critics have long noted Brown’s use of Godwinian politics in his novels. Ormond seems to embody them, from his rejection of marriage to, as quoted above, how he “carefully distinguished between men in the abstract, and men as they are,” a reference to novels Siskin highlights as systems: Godwin’s Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) and, more directly, Robert Bage’s twinned novels, Man as He Is (1792) and Hermsprong; or, Man as He Is Not (1796), the latter of which the Friendly Club read in 1796 while Brown was in New York City (Smith, Diary, 243). Smith describes the book thus: “I purpose [sic] to read this new book—whose author seems to be reading in the profane steps of ‘Caleb Williams’” (243). For scholarship on William Godwin and Charles Brockden Brown together, see Dorothy J. Hale, “Profits of Altruism: Caleb Williams and

232

Notes to Pages 46–54

Arthur Mervyn,” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 22, no. 1 (Autumn 1988), 47–69; Robert S. Levine, Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), chapter 1; and Bridget M. Marshall, The Transatlantic Gothic Novel and the Law, 1790–1860 (Surrey: Ashgate, 2011), chapter 3. 61.  William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1793), 1:239. Thank you to Elizabeth Massa Hoiem for suggesting Godwin’s theories on sincerity to me. 62. Godwin, Political Justice, 246. 63.  Julia A. Stern, The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 155. 64. That the election ultimately came down to a choice between two Democratic-­ Republicans evinced the decisive political shift away from the Federalists, what Jefferson himself later (with self-­congratulation) referred to as the “Revolution of 1800.” Whether or not 1800 truly earned the title of “revolution” has been a historiographical debate for years, but from the point of view of its role in the course of disestablishment and what that process meant for the nation’s political and religious institutions, there is no doubt that 1800 marked an important year, though perhaps not one with the radical promise that “revolution” implies. Cf. James Horn, Jan Ellen Lewis, and Peter S. Onuf, eds., The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002). Particularly useful for this overview is the editors’ introduction. 65.  For more on the Illuminati conspiracy, see Levine, Conspiracy and Romance, chapter 1; Bryan Waterman, “Bavarian Illuminati”; and Murphy, New England Women Writers, 65–69. 66. Jefferson, Notes, 159. 67.  [William Linn], Serious Considerations on the Election of a President (New York: John Furman, 1800), 19. 68. Jefferson, Notes, 143. 69.  In this section, I tend to quote mostly from Linn’s Serious Considerations. His is the argument most often disputed by Jefferson’s defenders, and his sets the structure for the other arguments against Jefferson (some of which simply quote whole passages from him). Linn’s choice from Notes is reproduced in other, less prominent, attacks. 70. [Linn], Serious Considerations, 12, emphasis in original. 71. [Linn], Serious Considerations, 13, emphasis in original. 72.  [Tunis Wortman], A Solemn Address, to Christians and Patriots (New York: David Denniston, 1800), 7. 73.  Grotius [DeWitt Clinton], A Vindication of Thomas Jefferson (New York: David Denniston, 1800), 4. 74. Jefferson, Notes, 163. 75. [Wortman], Solemn Address, 22. 76.  I draw the term “hothouse” from Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), chapter 8.

Chapter 2 1. Frances Milton Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (London: Whittaker, Treacher, 1832), 76. 2. Trollope, Domestic Manners, 80. 3. Trollope, Domestic Manners, 80.

Notes to Pages 54–58

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4. Trollope, Domestic Manners, 77. 5. Trollope, Domestic Manners, 79–80. 6. Trollope, Domestic Manners, 80. 7.  Edgar Allan Poe, “The Literati of New York City,” in Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1118–1222: 1200. For more on Sedgwick’s career, see Melissa Homestead, American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822–1869 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), chapter 2; and Melissa Homestead, “Behind the Veil? Catharine Sedgwick and Anonymous Publication,” in Catharine Maria Sedgwick: Critical Perspectives, ed. Lucinda L. Damon-­Bach and Victoria Clements (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003), 19–35; Catharine Maria Sedgwick: Critical Perspectives also appends a useful bibliography of all of Sedgwick’s publications, 295–313; and Sarah Robbins, “Periodizing Authorship, Characterizing Genre: Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Benevolent Literacy Narratives,” American Literature 76, no. 1 (March 2004), 1–29. By the early twentieth century, Sedgwick’s didactic fiction led to the critical reduction of her stature to that of an author of children’s literature, as James Machor shows, uncanonized until the feminist recovery projects of the late twentieth century. Machor’s argument highlights the increasingly tight correlation between “moral” literature and children’s literature over the course of the nineteenth century, so that by the modernist era (as Jane Tompkins also argued in Sensational Designs) moral didacticism itself betrayed aesthetic childishness. See James L. Machor, Reading Fiction in Antebellum America: Informed Response and Reception Histories, 1820–1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), chapter 5. 8.  For more on Sedgwick’s conversion, see Gretchen Murphy, New England Women Writers, Secularity, and the Federalist Politics of Church and State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 119–121; and Ashley Reed, Heaven’s Interpreters: Women Writers and Religious Agency in Nineteenth-­Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020), 29–31. As Reed cautions, though, it would be reductive to assume that Sedgwick only “wrote Unitarianly” (5). 9. Murphy, New England Women Writers, 121. 10. Murphy, New England Women Writers, 129. 11.  Gregg Camfield, Sentimental Twain: Samuel Clemens in the Maze of Moral Philosophy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 12. 12. Nina Baym made this point about women’s fiction, that it makes “suitors in these ­novels . . . less important than fathers, guardians, and brothers. Since the point of the fiction is the development of feminine self-­sufficiency, the traditional rescuing function of the lover is denied to him.” Nina Baym, Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and About Women in America, 1820–1870 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 40. 13.  Holly Jackson, American Radicals: How Nineteenth-­Century Protest Shaped the Nation (New York: Crown, 2019), 6. 14.  Frances Wright, Course of Popular Lectures, 4th ed. (New York: published at the Office of the Free Enquirer, 1831), 74. 15.  Celia Morris, Fanny Wright: Rebel in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 191. 16.  Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2003), 23. 17. Morris, Fanny Wright, 137. 18. Trollope, Domestic Manners, 44. 19. Jackson, American Radicals, 31. For a fuller account of Wright’s life, see Jackson, “A Tremendous no,” chapter 1, and “One Bold Lady-­Man,” chapter 2, in American Radicals, 3–47; and Morris, Fanny Wright.

234

Notes to Pages 59–63

20.  “Frances Wright’s Establishment,” Genius of Universal Emancipation 1, no. 4 (July 28, 1827), 30. 21. Jackson, American Radicals, 32. 22.  Mentor, “Frances Wright’s Establishment,” Genius of Universal Emancipation 1, no. 7 (August 18, 1827), 54. 23.  Frances Wright, “Communications: Nashoba,” New Harmony Gazette 3, no. 17 (February 6, 1828), 132–133: 132. 24.  Wright, “Communications,” 132. See also Jackson, American Radicals, 33–35, for more on Wright’s response to the Richardson report. 25.  After denouncing the institution of marriage as perpetuating inequality, Wright turns to the object at hand: slavery and racial prejudice. While dismissing slavery as doomed to decline, she worries more acutely about racial prejudice. The solution is more intercourse, in all senses of the word, between the races: “The physical amalgamation of the two colors . . . must surely be viewed as a good equally desirable for both,” which is why Nashoba was dedicated to “rais[ing] the man of color to the level of the white.” Wright, “Communications,” 133. 26. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 11. 27.  N. N., “Miss Frances Wright,” The Souvenir 2, no. 32 (February 4, 1829), 251–252: 251. 28.  For more on the fears that deism would undermine the effect of oath taking, see Eric R. Schlereth, An Age of Infidels: The Politics of Religious Controversy in the Early United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), chapter 1. 29.  James H. Lanman, “Social Disorganization,” American Monthly Magazine 8 (December 1836), 577–590: 578. 30.  “Miss Frances Wright,” Ariel 2, no. 22 (February 21, 1829), 172. 31.  This shift to describing and enforcing marriage as a contract between private parties is of a piece with the larger historical turn toward liberalism, with its emphasis on contract. For more on the larger context of contract, including its relation to emancipation, see Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 32.  Hendrik A. Hartog, “Marital Exits and Marital Expectations in Nineteenth Century America,” Georgetown Law Review 80, no. 1 (October 1991), 95–129: 96. 33.  Hartog, “Marital Exits and Marital Expectations,” 128–129; Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 38. 34. Cott, Public Vows, 52. 35.  “Marriage of Lucy Stone Under Protest,” Liberator, May 4, 1855, 71. 36.  For more on “anti-­marriage theory” and the utopian communities inspired by it, see Patricia Cline Cohen, “The ‘Anti-­Marriage Theory’ of Thomas and Mary Gove Nichols: A Radical Critique of Monogamy in the 1850s,” Journal of the Early Republic 34, no. 1 (Spring 2014), 1–20; Louis J. Kern, An Ordered Love: Sex Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Utopias: the Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneida Community (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981); and Jason Vickers, “‘That Deep Kind of Discipline of Spirit’: Freedom, Power, Family, Marriage, and Sexuality in the Story of John Humphrey Noyes and the Oneida Community,” American Nineteenth Century History 14, no. 1 (2013), 1–26. 37.  Stephen Pearl Andrews, “Mr. Andrews’ Reply to Mr. James,” in Love, Marriage, and Divorce, and the Sovereignty of the Individual: A Discussion, ed. Stephen Pearl Andrews (New York: Stringer and Townsend, 1853), 71–81: 76.

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38.  T. L. Nichols and Mrs. Mary S. Gove Nichols, Marriage: Its History, Character, and Results; Its Sanctities, and Its Profanities; Its Science and Its Facts (New York: T. L. Nichols, 1854), 19. For more on the Nicholses’ biographies and their careers in the free love and health reform movements, see Cohen, “‘Anti-­Marriage Theory’ of Thomas and Mary Gove Nichols.” 39.  Nichols and Nichols, Marriage, 12. 40.  Nichols and Nichols, Marriage, 14. 41.  Over the next few years, the Nicholses would shed these radical positions and convert to Catholicism (following a séance in which the spirit of Saint Ignatius of Loyola appeared to them). They moved to London in 1857 and when republishing their earlier radical books, they removed much of the free love arguments in them. See Cohen, “‘Anti-­Marriage Theory’ of Thomas and Mary Gove Nichols,” 17–19; and Jackson, American Radicals, 141. 42.  Horace Greeley, “Mr. Greeley’s Reply to the Foregoing,” in Love, Marriage, and Divorce, and the Sovereignty of the Individual, 48–54: 52. 43.  Greeley, “Mr. Greeley’s Reply,” 51. 44.  Miss Catharine E. Sedgwick [Catharine Maria Sedgwick], “Matty Gore,” in The Religious Souvenir, for 1845, ed. L. H. Sigourney (Hartford, CT: S. Andrus and Son, 1845), 50–90: 51. The Religious Souvenir lists the author as “Miss Catharine E. Sedgwick,” but this tale is confirmed to be by Catharine Maria Sedgwick. 45.  Sedgwick, “Matty Gore,” 57. 46.  Sedgwick, “Matty Gore,” 60–61. 47.  Sedgwick, “Matty Gore,” 68–69. 48.  Sedgwick, “Matty Gore,” 83–84. 49.  Sedgwick, “Matty Gore,” 90. 50.  Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), xxii, xxv. 51.  Ashley Barnes, Love and Depth in the American Novel: From Stowe to James (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020), 3, and the introduction more generally. 52.  Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Redwood; A Tale (London: John Miller, 1824), 1:121. Subsequent citations to this edition of Redwood will be given parenthetically in the text. 53.  Elizabeth A. De Wolfe, Shaking the Faith: Women, Family, and Mary Marshall Dyer’s Anti-­Shaker Campaign, 1815–1867 (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 3. 54. Charles Dickens, American Notes, ed. Patricia Ingham (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 236. 55.  Elizabeth Freeman argues convincingly that the relentless figuring of Shakerism as monotonous and repetitive was part of a larger racialization of the Shakers. See Elizabeth Freeman, Beside You in Time: Sense Methods and Queer Sociabilities in the American 19th Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 42–51. 56.  De Wolfe, Shaking the Faith, 10. 57.  Robert Baird, Religion in America (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1856), 568, 569. For the most part, the “Religion” referred to in Baird’s title is evangelic Protestantism. 58. Baird, Religion in America, 570. 59.  Miss C. M. Sedgwick, “Magnetism Among the Shakers,” Sartain’s Union Magazine of Literature and Art 4, no. 5 (May 1849), 337–338: 337. 60. Murphy, New England Women Writers, 142. 61.  Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-­Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 19.

236

Notes to Pages 78–85

62. Gordon, Mormon Question, 21; for a keen interpretation of the historicity embedded in The Book of Mormon, see Elizabeth Fenton, “Open Canons: Sacred History and American History in The Book of Mormon,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-­Century Americanists 1, no. 2 (Fall 2013), 339–361. 63. Gordon, Mormon Question, 21. 64.  Peter Coviello, Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-­Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 117–118. Coviello expands on what he calls the fissures and possibilities in Smith’s original revelation that could even expand to include women, in Smith’s investment in the “erotics of plural marriage: the central place not only of the body but of its startling, self-­surprising capacities.” These possibilities are eventually brought into alignment with gender hierarchy, especially through Brigham Young’s reinterpretation of the prophecy. Peter Coviello, Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 85, and chapters 2 and 3 more generally. 65. Coviello, Tomorrow’s Parties, 107. 66.  Joseph Smith, “Doctrine and Covenant 132.7,” accessed April 27, 2019, https://​www​.lds​ .org​/scriptures​/dc​-­­testament​/dc​/132​?lang​=​eng. 67.  Joseph Smith, “Doctrine and Covenant 132.15.” 68.  Joseph Smith, “Doctrine and Covenant 132.16.” 69. Coviello, Tomorrow’s Parties, 126. 70.  Nancy Bentley, “Marriage as Treason: Polygamy, Nation, and the Novel,” in The Futures of American Studies, ed. Donald Pease and Robyn Wiegman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 341–370: 347, 342. 71.  Bentley, “Marriage as Treason,” 343. 72.  Metta Victoria Fuller Victor, Mormon Wives: A Narrative of Facts Stranger Than Fiction (New York: Derby and Jackson, 1856), 29–30. 73.  [Maria Ward], Female Life Among the Mormons: A Narrative of Many Years’ Personal Experience (New York: J. C. Derby, 1855), 12. 74.  Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, chapter 8, on Walt Whitman’s Franklin Evans; Bruce Burgett, “On the Mormon Question: Race, Sex, and Polygamy in the 1850s and the 1990s,” American Quarterly 57, no. 1 (March 2005), 75–102: 91. 75. Victor, Mormon Wives, 299–300. 76. Victor, Mormon Wives, 177. 77. Victor, Mormon Wives, 178–179. 78.  Burgett, “On the Mormon Question,” 93. On the racialization of Mormons, see also Peter Coviello, Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), chapters 4 and 5. 79. Victor, Mormon Wives, 139, 140. 80. Victor, Mormon Wives, 313–314. 81. Victor, Mormon Wives, 313–314. For more on the trope of the material and embodied relations of mothers and daughters in domestic novels, see Gillian Silverman, Bodies and Books: Reading and the Fantasy of Communion in Nineteenth-­Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), chapter 2. 82.  Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835–1870 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017), 280–283. 83. [Ward], Female Life, 39.

Notes to Pages 85–90

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84. [Ward], Female Life, 39–40. 85. Baird, Religion in America, 574. 86.  [Francis Lieber], “The Mormons. Shall Utah Be Admitted into the Union?,” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of American Literature 5, no. 27 (March 1855), 225–236: 234, emphasis mine. 87.  Theodore Parker, “A Discourse of the Transient and Permanent in Christianity,” in The Critical and Miscellaneous Writings of Theodore Parker, 2nd ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1856), 152–189: 156.

Chapter 3 1.  Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855), in Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1982), 1–145: 27. 2.  Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-­Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 60. 3.  Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “private,” https://​www​-­­oed​-­­com​.proxy2​.library​.illinois​ .edu​/view​/Entry​/151601​?rskey​=​Gmd8qu​&​result​=​1​&​isAdvanced​=​false​#eid. 4.  For more on Typee’s reception among evangelical readers, see John Lardas Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011), 55–61; Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 89–90. 5.  Susan M. Ryan, The Moral Economies of American Authorship: Reputation, Scandal, and the Nineteenth-­Century Literary Marketplace (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 17. Ashley Barnes likewise argues that “instead of unveiling” its author’s “real” self, Pierre thwarts attempts at plumbing depth and critiques “the pretensions of romantic authorship.” Ashley Barnes, Love and Depth in the American Novel: From Stowe to James (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2020), 89. 6.  By engaging Pierre through style, this chapter joins several recent insightful readings of the novel that emphasize style and form over plot (after all, who reads Pierre for its plot?). See Elizabeth Duquette, “Pierre’s Nominal Conversions,” in Melville and Aesthetics, ed. Samuel Otter and Geoffrey Sanborn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 117–135; Christopher Freeburg, Melville and the Idea of Blackness: Race and Imperialism in Nineteenth-­Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), chapter 2; Paul Hurh, “The Sound of Incest: Sympathetic Resonance in Melville’s Pierre,” Novel 44, no. 2 (2011), 249–267; Gillian Silverman, Bodies and Books: Reading and the Fantasy of Communion in Nineteenth-­Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), chapter 3; Michael D. Snediker, “Pierre and the Non-­Transparencies of Figuration,” ELH 77, no. 1 (Spring 2010), 217–235; Cindy Weinstein, Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-­Century American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), chapter 6. 7.  [Evert Duyckinck], “Pierre, or The Ambiguities,” Literary World 21 (August 1852), 118– 120: 119. 8.  [John R. Thompson], “Notices of New Works: Pierre; or The Ambiguities,” Southern Literary Messenger 18, no. 9 (September 1852), 574–575: 574. 9.  “Unsigned Review, New York Herald,” in Melville: The Critical Heritage, ed. Watson G. Branch (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), 308–312: 310. 10.  [George Washington Peck], “Pierre, or The Ambiguities,” American Whig Review 16, no. 5 (1852), 446–454: 446; Hurh, “Sound of Incest,” 249. 11.  [Peck], “Pierre, or The Ambiguities,” 446.

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12.  For more on the changing estimation of ballet’s morality in the antebellum United States, see Christopher Martin, “Naked Females and Splay-­Footed Sprawlers: Ballerinas on the Stage in Jacksonian America,” Theatre Survey 51, no. 1 (May 2010), 95–114. 13.  Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods (New York: Library of America, 1991), 20. 14.  In Chapter 2, I cited Mary Gove as Mary Gove Nichols to discuss her coauthored book on marriage (with her husband Thomas Low Nichols). This chapter looks at a publication under the name Mary Gove from before her marriage. I refer to her here as Gove. 15.  Patricia A. Cunningham, Reforming Women’s Fashion, 1850–1920: Politics, Health, and Art (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2003), 20. 16.  For a decade-­by-­decade account of the changes in women’s fashion from 1830 to 1880, see Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women. 17.  I draw this summary from Cunningham, Reforming Women’s Fashion, 20–22. 18. Amy Kesselman, “The ‘Freedom Suit’: Feminism and Dress Reform in the United States, 1848–1875,” Gender and Society 5, no. 4 (December 1991), 495–510: 498. 19. Mary S. Gove, Lectures to Ladies on Anatomy and Physiology (Boston: Saxton and Peirce, 1842), 103. 20.  This illustration anticipates the advent of the X-­ray in the late nineteenth century, which Sarah Blackwood argues had the effect of “visually erasing the body whose secrets it was meant to reveal.” Sarah Blackwood, The Portrait’s Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-­ Century United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 138. 21.  M., “Bloomerism in London,” Lily, November 1, 1851, 82–83. 22.  Kesselman, “‘Freedom Suit,’” 500. As Kesselman explains, the attempt to make women’s movements through public space freer backfired as the women who dressed in the new fashion were surrounded by hecklers and crowds at every turn, and women’s rights reformers, in the end, abandoned the new look in order to keep people’s attention on their political claims. 23. For instance, the June 28, 1851, issue claims thirty-­two “young ladies” dressed in Bloomers walked by the office. “Bloomers,” Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-­Room Companion 1, no. 9 (June 1851), 141. 24. Beecher reportedly recommended Bloomers for women’s freedom of movement during country walks. “Hear Henry Ward Beecher on Bloomerism,” Liberator 23, no. 39 (September 30, 1853), 156. Holmes voiced a common complaint that the long and numerous skirts women put on got dirty in the streets, but he does not “like the Bloomers any too well.” Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., “The Professor at the Breakfast Table,” Atlantic Monthly 4, no. 21 (July 1859), 119–128: 120. 25.  Fanny Fern, Ruth Hall, in Ruth Hall and Other Writings, ed. Joyce W. Warren (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 1–211: 204. 26. Fern, Ruth Hall, 207. 27. Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, xv. 28. Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, xv. 29.  For more on city mystery novels and their relation to the wider print culture, see Jordan Alexander Stein, “Sexuality in Print,” in American Literature in Transition: The Long Nineteenth Century, 1820–1860, vol. 2, ed. Justine S. Murison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 235–252. 30.  George Lippard, Quaker City: or, The Monks of Monk Hall, ed. David S. Reynolds (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 154.

Notes to Pages 100–107

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31.  George Thompson, City Crimes; or, Life in New York and Boston (Boston, 1849; Project Gutenberg, 2009), http://​www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/27732​/27732​-­­h​/27732​-­­h​.htm. Subsequent citations to this edition of City Crimes will be given parenthetically in the text. 32.  Richard A. Posner, “The Right of Privacy,” Georgia Law Review 12, no. 3 (Spring 1978), 393–422: 403. 33.  I am not the first critic to notice Melville’s attention to clothing in Typee, or more generally. Sean Goudie has argued that the bodies and dress of the royal couple at the beginning of Typee converge into “a metaphor for the desire of Western imperialism to clothe the world in imperial fabric,” a metaphor resisted by the queen as she lifts her skirts and exposes her tattoos. Sean X. Goudie, “Fabricating Ideology: Clothing, Culture, and Colonialism in Melville’s Typee,” Criticism 40, no. 2 (Spring 1998), 217–235: 225. Nicola Nixon argues that, in “Benito Cereno,” “Delano’s absorption in the apparently complex markers of class superiority that the dandiacal Cereno exhibits is itself a clue not to deeply repressed content but to a propensity to ignore the seemingly plain and transparent.” Nicola Nixon, “Men and Coats; or, The Politics of the Dandiacal Body in Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno,’” PMLA 114, no. 3 (May 1999), 359–372: 361. Both Goudie and Nixon, drawing on Roland Barthes, concentrate on metaphors of clothing; while Goudie reads the clothes as an index of Melville’s critique of ideology, Nixon’s argument suggests something more akin to recent critiques of “symptomatic reading”—Delano is looking for depth when the answer is on the surface. 34.  Herman Melville, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, ed. John Bryant (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 196. Subsequent citations to this edition of Typee will be given parenthetically in the text. 35. Sally Engle Merry, Colonizing Hawaiʻi: The Cultural Power of Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 230. 36.  I draw this broad overview of the history from Merry, Colonizing Hawaiʻi, and Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwoʻole Osorio, Dismembering Lāhui: A History of the Hawaiian Nation to 1887 (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2002). 37.  [Ephraim Eveleth], History of the Sandwich Islands (Philadelphia, PA: American Sunday School Union, 1831), 86. 38.  Hiram Bingham, Bartimeus, of the Sandwich Islands (New York: American Tract Society, ca. 1854–1858), 29. The American Antiquarian Society does not offer a definitive date for the publication but narrows it to 1854–1858. I am exceedingly grateful to Elizabeth Pooloa at the Hawaiian Mission Houses Historic Site and Archives for her help in locating these images and digitizing them. 39.  Maria Theresa Sartwell Loomis to Mr. William Williams, May 14, 1820, in Loomis, Elisha: Missionary Letters (Honolulu: Hawaiian Mission House Archives). 40. Julia Brooks Spaulding to U.S. Family, Lahaina, October 26, 1832, in Spaulding, Ephraim: Missionary Letters (Honolulu: Hawaiian Mission House Archives). 41.  Crucially, the queen lifts her skirts to display her elaborate tattooing, which Samuel Otter has shown to be the real site of terror for Tommo, rather than, as Geoffrey Sanborn has argued, cannibalism. See Samuel Otter, Melville’s Anatomies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), chapter 1; and Geoffrey Sanborn, The Sign of the Cannibal: Melville and the Making of a Postcolonial Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), chapter 2. 42.  Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 7, 56, 58, 190, and 193. Subsequent citations to this edition of Pierre will be given parenthetically in the text.

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Notes to Pages 108–119

43.  Elizabeth Hewitt likens Plinlimmon’s philosophy to Emerson’s and describes how Melville rejects the logic of correspondence in it and then more widely in Pierre. Elizabeth Hewitt, Correspondence and American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 86–88. 44. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (New York: W. W. Norton, 1954), 159. 45.  Henry David Thoreau, “Slavery in Massachusetts,” in Walden and Other Writings of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern Library, 1992), 697–714: 708–709. 46.  Christopher Castiglia, Interior States: Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy in the Antebellum United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 276–277. 47. Weinstein, Family, Kinship, and Sympathy, 163, 165. 48.  Herman Melville, “Bartleby,” in Billy Budd and Other Stories, ed. Frederick Busch (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 3–46: 4. Subsequent citations for “Bartleby” will be given parenthetically in the text. 49.  Milette Shamir, Inexpressible Privacy: The Interior Life of Antebellum American Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 11. 50.  Maurice S. Lee, “Skepticism in The Confidence-­Man,” in The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert S. Levine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 113–126: 118. 51.  Rachel Cole, “At the Limits of Identity: Realism and American Personhood in Melville’s Confidence-­Man,” Novel 39, no. 3 (Summer 2006), 384–401: 385. 52.  Herman Melville, The Confidence-­Man; His Masquerade, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 21. Subsequent citations to this edition of The Confidence-­Man will be given parenthetically in the text.

Chapter 4 1.  For more on Peter Williams, see Carla L. Peterson, Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-­Century New York City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 69–71, 99–102. As Peterson points out, Williams’s church and home were attacked for his leadership role, and he was then blamed, rather than the white mob, by Bishop Onderdonk for the violence of the riots. For more on the riots in New York City, see Peterson, Black Gotham; and Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 556–560; for more on the riots in Philadelphia, see Andrew Heath, In Union There Is Strength: Philadelphia in the Age of Urban Consolidation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 44–45, 65–66; Julie Winch, “Self-­Help and Self-­Determination: Black Philadelphians and the Dimensions of Freedom,” in Antislavery and Abolition in Philadelphia: Emancipation and the Long Struggle for Racial Justice in the City of Brotherly Love, ed. Richard S. Newman and James Mueller (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011), 66–89. 2. Clarkson, “American Anti-­Slavery Society,” New-­York Spectator 37, no. 46 (May 26, 1834), 3. 3.  “It Is Not True,” Emancipator, and Journal of Public Morals 2, no. 33 (August 19, 1834), 1. 4.  Tavia Nyong’o, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 72. 5.  Together the abolitionist rhetorical arsenal, and the print forms in which they appeared, did not simply anticipate but shaped later nineteenth-­century forms of realism. According to Augusta Rohrbach, these techniques included “the use of authenticating details, money as a

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signifier of personal suffering, as well as the use of dialect and a frank treatment of the body.” Augusta Rohrbach, Truth Stranger Than Fiction: Race, Realism and the U.S. Literary Marketplace (New York: Palgrave, 2002), xiv. 6.  This brief biography of the Webbs and the original publication of The Garies and Their Friends is drawn from Eric Gardner, “‘A Gentleman of Superior Cultivation and Refinement’: Recovering the Biography of Frank J. Webb,” African American Review 35, no. 2 (2001), 297–308. See Gardner’s article for the rest of Webb’s biography that I do not cover in the chapter. 7.  Robert Reid-­Pharr, Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 80. Reid-­Pharr’s reading does not expand on this insight, turning instead to the novel’s preoccupation with creating defensive boundaries between the Black community and others and showing the limitations of northern philanthropy. 8.  Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 8; Carla L. Peterson, “Doers of the Word”: African-­American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830–1880) (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 20. 9.  Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 21. Mann’s term sousveillance emphasizes the reciprocal nature of sight and watching, that those surveilled also watch back. See Steve Mann, “Surveillance (oversight), Sousveillance (undersight), and Metaveillance (seeing sight itself),” in 2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops, June 2016, 1408–1417; for a careful argument showing what “sousveillance” and “dark sousveillance” offer to the Foucauldian paradigm and for antebellum literary study, see Kelly Ross, “Watching from Below: Racialized Surveillance and Vulnerable Sousveillance,” PMLA 135 no. 2 (2020), 299–314: 299–303. 10. Peterson, “Doers of the Word,” 12. 11.  Frank J. Webb, The Garies and Their Friends, ed. William Huntting Howell and Megan Walsh (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2016), 44–45. Subsequent citations to this edition of The Garies will be given parenthetically in the text. 12.  Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 1–2. Berlant’s definition is an apt description of Emily’s hopes about the North: “A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” (1). 13. Tess Chakkalakal, Novel Bondage: Slavery, Marriage, and Freedom in Nineteenth-­ Century America (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 51. For more on how 1850s African American novels thematized commodity capitalism, and in particular on The Garies and the practice of an “economics of marginality” in Philadelphia, see Carla L. Peterson, “Capitalism, Black (Under)development, and the Production of the African-­American Novel in the 1850s,” American Literary History 4, no. 4 (Winter 1992), 559–583: 577–579. For more on how the law around private property and inheritance operates in terms of race and region in Webb’s novel, see Jeffory A. Clymer, Family Money: Property, Race, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 19–35. 14.  Ann duCille, The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 17. 15.  Much of this brief history is drawn from Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), chapters 7 and 8; for more on the influence of Black abolitionists on Garrison specifically, 220. 16.  For more on the issue of legal marriage and the marriage plot across the nineteenth century in African American literature, see duCille, Coupling Convention; see also Nancy

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Bentley, “The Strange Career of Love and Slavery: Chesnutt, Engels, Masoch,” American Literary History 17, no. 3 (Autumn 2005), 460–485. 17. Nyong’o, Amalgamation Waltz, 74. 18.  Elise Lemire, “Miscegenation”: Making Race in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 67. 19. Lemire, “Miscegenation,” 65–66. For more on the distinction between “speculative theology” and “practical theology” as it developed historically and impacted antebellum literature, see Ashley Reed, Heaven’s Interpreters: Women Writers and Religious Agency in Nineteenth-­ Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020), 121. 20. Lemire, “Miscegenation,” 71. 21.  David Meredith Reese, A Brief Review of the First Annual Report of the American Anti-­ Slavery Society (New York: Howe and Bates, 1834), 38. 22.  Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “promiscuous,” http://​www​.oed​.com​.proxy2​.library​ .illinois​.edu​/view​/Entry​/152429​?redirectedFrom​=​promiscuous​#eid. 23. Reese, Brief Review, 16. 24.  Joan Wallach Scott, Sex and Secularism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 4. 25. Reese, Brief Review, 16. 26.  Oliver Bolokitten [Jerome B. Holgate], A Sojourn in the City of Amalgamation, in the Year of Our Lord, 19— (New York: by the Author, 1835), 17, 21–22. 27.  Jeannine Maria DeLombard, Slavery on Trial: Law, Abolitionism, and Print Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 1. 28.  For a list—itself not reliably complete—of antislavery publications to 1863, see Proceedings of the American Anti-­Slavery Society, at Its Third Decade (New York: American Anti-­ Slavery Society, 1864), 157–175. My thanks to Cora Anthony for finding this list. In a poignant moment in these proceedings, Frederick Douglass, addressing the society, opens by noting how, at the beginning of his involvement in the society, “I thought it was only necessary for the slaves, or their friends, to lift up the hatchway of slavery’s infernal hold, to uncover the bloody scenes of American thralldom, and give the nation a peep into its horrors, its deeds of deep damnation, to arouse them to almost phrensied opposition to this foul curse. But I was mistaken” (110–111). 29.  Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 438. 30.  Other major topics often “exposed” in the antebellum years: Mormonism and free love, which I discuss in Chapter 2; anti-­Jesuit and anti-­Catholic conspiracy; Spiritualism; and the Know Nothing Party. 31.  W[illiam] W[ilcocks] Sleigh, Abolitionism Exposed! Proving That the Principles of Abolitionism Are Injurious to the Slaves Themselves, Destructive to This Nation, and Contrary to the Express Commands of God (Philadelphia, PA: D. Schneck, 1838), 5. 32. Sleigh, Abolitionism Exposed!, 10. 33. Constitutionalist, Bigotry Exposed: or, A Calm Discussion of the Abolition Question (New York: printed for the author, 1835), 3. 34. Constitutionalist, Bigotry Exposed, 14–15. 35. Constitutionalist, Bigotry Exposed, 15, 16. 36.  For more on how antisentimentalism, which emerged at the same time as sentimentalism, is structured by this dichotomy between fact and feeling, see June Howard, “What Is

Notes to Pages 132–139

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Sentimentality?,” American Literary History 11, no. 1 (Spring 1999), 63–81. For a study of how this discourse has structured definitions of realism, see Jane F. Thrailkill, introduction to Affecting Fictions: Mind, Body, and Emotion in American Literary Realism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 37.  Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” in The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, vol. 2, 1847–54, ed. John W. Blassingame et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 359–388: 371. 38.  Theodore Weld, American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (New York: American Anti-­Slavery Society, 1839), 7. 39. Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 187. 40.  Peter Coviello, Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 11. 41.  This brief biography of Ruggles comes from Sinha, Slave’s Cause, 384–386; and Graham Russell Gao Hodges, David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), chapters 4 and 5. 42. Hodges, David Ruggles, 72. 43.  David Ruggles, The “Extinguisher” Extinguished! or, David M. Reese, M.D., “Used Up,” (New York: D. Ruggles, 1834), 16–17. 44. Ruggles, “Extinguisher” Extinguished!, 17. 45. Ruggles, “Extinguisher” Extinguished!, 44. 46.  I make a distinction in this chapter between the literary or stage dandy and the sporting culture of the era, though they are sometimes conflated with each other and are certainly related. While they both share an attachment to being fashionably dressed, sporting culture also represented a “hypermasculine urban milieu responsible for fomenting libertinism, prostitution, and misogyny” (Cohen, They Will Have Their Game, 4). In the era, these were not the most prominent qualities of the dandy as he emerged on the stage and in popular literature, though we can see how the dandy was related to this urban setting, particularly in the attachment to bachelorhood. For more on sporting culture, see Kenneth Cohen, They Will Have Their Game: Sporting Culture and the Making of the Early American Republic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017); and Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992). For a representation of the white dandy in popular fiction, see Robert Montgomery Bird’s character, I. Dulmer Dawkins, in Sheppard Lee. Robert Montgomery Bird, Sheppard Lee: Written by Himself, ed. Christopher Looby (New York: New York Review of Books, 2008). 47.  Asa Greene, A Glance at New York (New York: A. Greene, 1837), 83. 48.  Monica L. Miller, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 104. 49.  Carla L. Peterson, “Mapping Taste: Urban Modernities from the Tatler and Spectator to Frederick Douglass’ Paper,” American Literary History 32, no. 4 (2020), 691–722: 704. 50.  Anna Mae Duane, “Remaking Black Motherhood in Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends,” African American Review 38, no. 2 (2004), 201–212: 207. For more on Caddy, see also Samuel Otter, Philadelphia Stories: America’s Literature of Race and Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 241. 51.  For more on this scene of Stevens’s transformation and an expanded reading of the Irish community in the novel, see Robert Nowatzki, “Blurring the Color Line: Black Freedom, Passing, Abolitionism, and Irish Ethnicity in Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends,” Studies

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Notes to Pages 141–152

in American Fiction 33, no. 1 (Spring 2005), 29–58. For more on Clay, see Lemire, “Miscegenation,” and Otter, Philadelphia Stories, chapter 2. 52. Chakkalakal, Novel Bondage, 53–54. 53.  Reid-­Pharr, Conjugal Union, 70. Reid-­Pharr pursues a reading of this interracialism as a messy “southernism” that Webb rejects in favor of Black family and community, and “the production of a specifically Black American literature” (70–71).

Chapter 5 1.  [George Frederick Holmes], “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Southern Literary Messenger 18, no. 12 (December 1852), 721–731: 727, 729. 2.  [Holmes], “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” 731. 3.  See Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); and Molly Oshatz, Slavery and Sin: The Fight Against Slavery and the Rise of Liberal Protestantism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 4.  [Holmes], “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” 721. 5.  Susan M. Ryan, The Moral Economies of American Authorship: Reputation, Scandal, and the Nineteenth-­Century Literary Marketplace (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 117. In this chapter, Ryan uses the reception of Uncle Tom’s Cabin to show how morality and aesthetics were “complementary—even mutually constituting—elements” and the wide range of responses to the novel underscores the argument it sparked about how to value her work under those very terms. 6.  Gretchen Murphy, “States of Innocence: Harriet Beecher Stowe, London Needlewomen, and the New England Novel,” Legacy 34, no. 2 (2017), 278–300: 294. 7.  Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (1977; reis., New York: Noonday Press, 1998), 6; James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948–1985 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 27–33: 28. 8.  Lauren Berlant, “Poor Eliza,” American Literature 70, no. 3 (September 1998), 635– 668: 636. 9.  Cindy Weinstein, Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-­Century American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 6–7. 10. For a careful reconsideration of authenticity and sentimentalism, see Marianne Noble, Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-­Century American Literature: Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, Dickinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), introduction. 11.  Matthew 7:12 (King James Bible). 12.  Matthew 22:39 (King James Bible). 13.  June Howard, “What Is Sentimentality?,” American Literary History 11, no. 1 (Spring 1999), 63–81: 72. 14.  Glenn Hendler, Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-­Century American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 2. 15.  Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000), 3–4. 16. Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 55. 17.  Howard, “What Is Sentimentality?,” 74. 18.  This is also why, as Jennifer Greeson has argued, the city mystery genre and the slave narrative were “intimately connected” to each other. Jennifer Rae Greeson, “The ‘Mysteries and

Notes to Pages 152–156

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Miseries’ of North Carolina: New York City, Urban Gothic Fiction, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” American Literature 73, no. 2 (June 2001), 277–309: 278. 19.  David Ruggles, The Abrogation of the Seventh Commandment, by the American Churches (New York: David Ruggles, 1835), 4. 20. Ruggles, Abrogation, 7, 14. 21. Ruggles, Abrogation, 14; Exodus 20:14 (King James Bible). 22.  Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Nell Irvin Painter (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 3. 23.  Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-­Making in Nineteenth-­ Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 107. See also Lindon Barrett, “African-­American Slave Narratives: Literacy, the Body, Authority,” American Literary History 7, no. 3 (Autumn 1995), 415–442. 24.  For a fuller interpretation of the fictionality of Incidents, see Carla L. Peterson, “Doers of the Word”: African-­American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830–1880) (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), chapter 6. Peterson’s argument is in response to previous scholarship that asserted that the slave narrative was entirely constrained by white conventions, such that, in John Sekora’s words, “the overarching shape of that story is mandated by persons other than the subject. Not Black recollection, but white interrogation brings order to the narration.” John Sekora, “Black Message/White Envelope: Genre, Authenticity, and Authority in the Antebellum Slave Narrative,” Callaloo, no. 32 (Summer 1987), 482–515: 509. Greeson also writes about the fictional aspects of Incidents (see Greeson, “‘Mysteries and Miseries’”). For more on Jacobs and aesthetics, see Theo Davis, “Harriet Jacobs’s ‘Excrescences’: Aesthetics and Politics in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” Theory and Event 13, no. 4 (2010), muse​.jhu​.edu​ /article​/407143. 25.  Jean Fagan Yellin’s biographical research uncovered Harriet Jacobs’s authorship and corrected the long-­standing mistake of categorizing Incidents as fiction and attributing it to Lydia Maria Child with research she published in her Harvard University Press edition of Incidents in 1987. For more on Jacobs’s life, see Jean Fagan Yellin, Harriet Jacobs: A Life (New York: Basic Books, 2004). 26.  For a longer reading of secrecy and exposure in Incidents, see Michelle Burnham, “Loopholes of Resistance: Harriet Jacobs’ Slave Narrative and the Critique of Agency in Foucault,” Arizona Quarterly 49, no. 2 (Summer 1993), 53–73. 27.  While not directly focusing on the queer aspects of Incidents, my reading owes a great deal to Aliyyah I. Abdur-­Rahman’s argument about how “authors of slave narratives acknowledged the notion that sexual criminality was a racial characteristic but subverted this notion by exposing the sexual perversity not of enslaved black people but of white slave-­ owners.” Aliyyah I. Abdur-­Rahman, “‘The Strangest Freaks of Despotism’: Queer Sexuality in Antebellum African American Slave Narratives,” African American Review 40, no. 2 (January 2006), 223–237: 225. 28. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 158–159. 29. [H. F. James], Abolitionism Unveiled! Hypocrisy Unmasked! And Knavery Scourged! Luminously Portraying the Formal Hocusses, Whining Philanthropists, Moral Coquets, Practical Atheists, and the Hollow-­Hearted Swindlers of Labor, ’yclept the “Northern Abolitionists” (New York: T. V. Paterson, 1850), 2. 30.  “From the Columbus (Ohio) Statesman. Where Ultra Abolitionism Leads,” Liberator, May 11, 1860, 1.

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31.  William Lloyd Garrison, The “Infidelity” of Abolitionism (New York: American Anti-­ Slavery Society, 1860), 3. 32.  Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, ed. Ira Dworkin (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), 109. 33.  Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” in The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, vol. 2, 1847–54, ed. John W. Blassingame et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 359–388: 377–378. 34.  V. G. Cowdin, Ellen; or, The Fanatic’s Daughter (Mobile, AL: S. H. Goetzel, 1860), 5. 35.  Caroline Lee Hentz, The Planter’s Northern Bride (Philadelphia, PA: T. B. Peterson and Brothers, 1854), 460. 36. Hentz, Planter’s Northern Bride, 458. Hentz cites from Luke 11:42 and 11:44. 37. Vidi, Mr. Frank, The Underground Mail-­Agent (Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, Grambo, 1853), 60–61. 38. Vidi, Mr. Frank, 61. 39. Weinstein, Family, Kinship, and Sympathy, 66–69. 40.  L[ouisa] S. M[cCord], “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Southern Quarterly Review 7, no. 13 (1853), 81–120: 81–82. 41.  M[cCord], “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” 90. 42.  William G. Allen, “Frederick Douglass: Dear Sir:—,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, May 20, 1852, http://​utc​.iath​.virginia​.edu​/reviews​/rere03at​.html. For more on Black activists’ responses to Stowe’s novel, and in particular the debate on it between Martin Delany and Frederick Douglass, see Robert S. Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), chapter 2. 43.  “From the Morning Post, Boston,” Littell’s Living Age, July 10, 1852, 61–62: 61. 44.  “From the Southern Press,” Littell’s Living Age, July 10, 1852, 62–63: 62. 45. Weinstein, Family, Kinship, and Sympathy, 69. Weinstein also concentrates on the way Caroline Lee Hentz invokes “facts” to support her novel’s claim to be the truer portrait (77–79). For more on Stowe’s reception, in and out of the South, see also Barbara Hochman, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the Reading Revolution: Race, Literacy, Childhood, and Fiction, 1851–1911 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011). Hochman notes how southerners in the post–Reconstruction era embraced the novel they once reviled, as it was recast as a plantation romance and stripped of its evangelicalism and abolitionism (3). For more on the novel’s long reception history, see also Hugh McIntosh, Guilty Pleasures: Popular Novels and American Audiences in the Long Nineteenth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018), chapters 1 and 5; and Faye Halpern, “Searching for Sentimentality in Henry James’s The Bostonians,” Henry James Review 39, no. 1 (Winter 2018), 62–80: 64. 46.  M[cCord], “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” 92–93. 47.  Nehemiah Adams, A South-­Side View of Slavery; or, Three Months at the South, in 1854 (Boston: T. R. Marvin and B. B. Mussey, 1854), 159. 48.  X. Y. Z., “Literary Department. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly, by Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe,” Western Journal and Civilian 9, no. 2 (November 1852), 133–139: 139. 49.  [George Frederick Holmes], “A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Southern Literary Messenger 19, no. 6 (June 1853), 321–330: 322–323. 50.  Frederick Douglass, John Brown (Dover, NH: Morning Star Job Printing House, 1881), 22. 51. Douglass, John Brown, 17.

Notes to Pages 166–167

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52.  Kenyon Gradert, Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 4, 7. 53.  Henry David Thoreau, “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” in Walden and Other Writings, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern Library, 1992), 717–743: 719. 54.  Wendell Phillips, Speeches, Lectures, and Letters (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1884), 276. 55.  Quoted in David S. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist (New York: Vintage Books, 2005), 210. 56.  Franklin B. Sanborn, Memoirs of John Brown (Concord, MA: n.p., 1878), 45. 57. Reynolds, John Brown, 164. 58.  Christopher Hanlon, America’s England: Antebellum Literature and Atlantic Sectionalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 22, and chapter 1 more generally. 59. Gradert, Puritan Spirits, 7. 60. Although it is often counted as her third antislavery novel, The Minister’s Wooing has not received nearly the critical attention of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or even Dred. The current scholarship mainly focuses on the novel’s representation of religion and the secular, especially in Stowe’s critiques of Calvinism and her use of Catholicism. See Jenny Franchot, “Unseemly Commemoration: Religion, Fragments, and the Icon,” American Literary History 9, no. 3 (Autumn 1997), 502–521; Kimberly VanEsveld Adams, “Family Influences on ‘The Minister’s Wooing’ and ‘Oldtown Folks’: Henry Ward Beecher and Calvin Stowe,” Religion and Literature 38, no. 4 (Winter 2006), 27–61; Neil Meyer, “‘One Language in Prayer’: Evangelicalism, Anti-­ Catholicism, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Minister’s Wooing,” New England Quarterly 85, no. 3 (September 2012), 468–490; Claudia Stokes, The Altar at Home: Sentimental Literature and Nineteenth-­Century American Religion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), chapter 3, which addresses how the novel (and Stowe’s later fiction more generally), develops millennialism through her depictions of domesticity; and Ashley Reed, Heaven’s Interpreters: Women Writers and Religious Agency in Nineteenth-­Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020), chapter 4, which reads The Minister’s Wooing alongside Agnes of Sorrento as responding to the fragmentations of modern life through her heroines and to present Stowe as a “creative producer of theology rather than as someone who waters down complex Calvinist doctrine for a lazy reading public” (120). Another major critical focus (not unrelated to the representation of evangelicalism and Catholicism) is on women’s labor, community, and embodiment. See Murphy, “States of Innocence”; Dorothy Z. Baker, “French Women, Italian Art, and Other ‘Advocates of the Body’ in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Minister’s Wooing,” New England Quarterly 83, no. 1 (March 2010), 47–72; and Susan K. Harris, “The Female Imaginary in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Minister’s Wooing,” New England Quarterly 66, no. 2 (June 1993), 179–198. Finally, scholars continue to reconsider Stowe’s evolving understanding of sympathy and how that is represented in domestic fiction and/or sentimentality. Marianne Noble has recently called attention to how Stowe’s understanding of sympathy evolved beyond her first novel. See Noble, Rethinking Sympathy, chapter 4. See also Faye Halpern, Sentimental Readers: The Rise, Fall, and Revival of a Disparaged Rhetoric (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2013), chapter 2, on how Stowe equates unlearning in the formal art of rhetoric with authentic, and thus convincing, eloquence in the novel. 61.  Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 279. 62. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 272–279.

248

Notes to Pages 168–174

63.  Samuel Hopkins, An Inquiry into the Nature of True Holiness (Newport, RI: William Durell, 1791), 125. 64.  For more on Hopkins’s theology of disinterested benevolence, see Reed, Heaven’s Interpreters, 123–124; see also E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 139–141. 65.  Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Minister’s Wooing, ed. Susan K. Harris (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 53. Subsequent citations to this edition of The Minister’s Wooing will be given parenthetically in the text. 66. Reed, Heaven’s Interpreters, 122. 67. Reed, Heaven’s Interpreters, 125. 68.  Herman Melville, Moby-­Dick, or The Whale, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 6. 69. Reed, Heaven’s Interpreters, 126. 70. Reynolds, John Brown, 114. 71.  Franny Nudelman, John Brown’s Body: Slavery, Violence, and the Culture of War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 16. 72.  Caleb Smith, The Oracle and the Curse: A Poetics of Justice from the Revolution to the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 3–4; Elizabeth Barnes, Love’s Whipping Boy: Violence and Sentimentality in the American Imagination (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 88–89. 73.  Kevin Pelletier, Apocalyptic Sentimentalism: Love and Fear in U.S. Antebellum Literature (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015), 155. 74.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Speech at a Meeting to Aid John Brown’s Family,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, ed. Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 117–120: 118. 75.  Emerson, “Speech,” 119. 76.  Emerson, “Speech,” 119. For a particularly insightful reading of this passage from Emerson in relation to the long-­standing use of legal forms and metaphors in abolitionist writing, see Jeannine Marie DeLombard, Slavery on Trial: Law, Abolitionism, and Print Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 212–213, and more generally in her book’s conclusion, on John Brown’s trial. 77.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Courage,” in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1886), 7:251–280: 271. 78.  Wise quoted in Charles Joyner, “‘Guilty of Holiest Crime’: The Passion of John Brown,” in His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid, ed. Paul Finkelman (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995), 308, 307. For more on Wise’s political calculations on the trial and execution of Brown and his coconspirators, see Robert E. McGlone, “John Brown, Henry Wise, and the Politics of Insanity,” in His Soul Goes Marching On, 213–252. 79.  Carolyn L. Karcher, The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 423. 80.  Thoreau, “Plea for Captain John Brown,” 720–721. 81.  Lydia Maria Child, Maria Mason, and Henry A. Wise, Correspondence Between Lydia Maria Child, and Gov. Wise and Mrs. Mason, of Virginia (New York: American Anti-­Slavery Society, 1860), 3.

Notes to Pages 175–182

249

82. Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 94–95. 83.  Child, Mason, and Wise, Correspondence, 5. 84.  Child, Mason, and Wise, Correspondence, 6. 85.  Child, Mason, and Wise, Correspondence, 8. 86.  Child, Mason, and Wise, Correspondence, 16. 87.  Child, Mason, and Wise, Correspondence, 16–17. 88.  Child, Mason, and Wise, Correspondence, 26, emphasis in the original. 89. Karcher, First Woman in the Republic, 423. 90.  James Redpath, The Public Life of Capt. John Brown (Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1860), 8. 91.  F. B. Sanborn, The Life and Letters of John Brown, Liberator of Kansas, and Martyr of Virginia (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1885), 92.

Chapter 6 1.  Harriet Beecher Stowe, Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe, ed. Annie Fields (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1897), 321. 2.  Teresa Guiccioli, My Recollections of Lord Byron and Those of Eye-­Witnesses of His Life, trans. Hubert E. H. Jerningham (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1869), 516. 3.  Harriet Beecher Stowe, “The True Story of Lady Byron’s Life,” Atlantic Monthly, September 1869, 295–313: 302. 4.  Susan M. Ryan, The Moral Economies of American Authorship: Reputation, Scandal, and the Nineteenth-­Century Literary Marketplace (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 137. 5.  Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., quoted in Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe, 321. 6. Ryan, Moral Economies of American Authorship, chapter 5, which thoroughly canvasses the Lord Byron scandal. My chapter owes a great debt to the smart, if too few, scholarly readings of Stowe’s “The True Story of Lady Byron’s Life” and Lady Byron Vindicated. Ryan’s and Jennifer Cognard-­Black’s research trace the issues of authorship, genre, and morality and help scholars position this scandal not just in the history of Stowe’s own development as a writer but in the changing landscape of professional writing and its reception. See Jennifer Cognard-­Black, “The Wild and Distracted Call for Proof: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Lady Byron Vindicated and the Rise of Professional Realism,” American Literary Realism 36, no. 2 (Winter 2004), 93–119. See also T. Austin Graham, “The Slaveries of Sex, Race, and Mind: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Lady Byron Vindicated,” New Literary History 41, no. 1 (Winter 2010), 173–190, which unpacks some of the complexities of Stowe’s feminism and her use of the term “sexual slavery”; Michelle Hawley, “Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lord Byron: A Case of Celebrity Justice in the Victorian Public Sphere,” Journal of Victorian Culture 10, no. 2 (2005), 229–256, which considers the scandal in light of changing notions of citizenship and what she calls “literary citizenship,” especially for American women writers after the war; and Susan McPherson, “Opening the Open Secret: The Stowe-­Byron Controversy,” Victorian Review 27, no. 1 (2001), 86–101, which connects the naming of incest with Byron’s other unnamed sexual experiences with other men. 7.  William A. Cohen, Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 4. 8. Cohen, Sex Scandal, 3. 9.  Privacy has been a keyword for James studies, especially in relation to his three novels that most thematize this issue: The Bostonians, The Reverberator, and The Aspern Papers. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to canvass all of that scholarship, but I want to highlight a

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Notes to Pages 183–185

few that are emblematic and were influential for my thinking on The Bostonians. See Victoria Olwell, The Genius of Democracy: Fictions of Gender and Citizenship in the United States, 1860–1945 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), chapter 2, which argues that James’s novel does not so much lament the decline of privacy in the new postwar modernity but invents the lament of its decline; Brook Thomas, “The Construction of Privacy in and Around The Bostonians,” 64, no. 4 (1992), 719–747, which offers a helpful overview of the different legal issues around “privacy” (constitutional v. tort privacy laws); Joyce A. Rowe, “‘Murder, What a Lovely Voice!’: Sex, Speech, and the Public/Private Problem in The Bostonians,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 40, no. 2 (1998), 158–183, usefully lays out how James’s focus on the women’s rights movement is a partial displacement of his real subject, the loss of a “consensual social space” distinct from public activity and private feeling; Chris Walsh, “Stardom Is Born: The Religion and Economy of Publicity in Henry James’ The Bostonians,” American Literary Realism 29, no. 3 (1997), 15–25, which suggests that James sees in the new culture of publicity and celebrity a “religion” for the modern era; Ian F. A. Bell, “The Personal, the Private, and the Public in The Bostonians,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 32, no. 2 (1990), 240–256, which considers James’s acute critique of how modernity has shifted from publics to publicity, and how the personal and the private have been transformed into “a cluster of attributes, effects, and performances” (241), or, in more contemporary language, into self-­branding. 10.  As T. Austin Graham points out, until recently “the conversation about Stowe and the sensation she caused has gone on as it always has, with commentators on both sides of the Atlantic sharing a certain disbelief at her audacity and a need to make sense of it.” Graham, “Slaveries of Sex, Race, and Mind,” 174–175. 11.  Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (1977; reis., New York: Noonday Press, 1998), 246. 12. This tendency to position Lady Byron Vindicated in such a way occludes how the scandal’s eruption came at an important inflexion point in the history of literary genre and its valuation across the nineteenth century, as several reevaluations of the episode have shown. Stowe’s exposé casts light on the shifting assessments and expectations of fictional realism, as Jennifer Cognard-­Black argues. While this era was not the first to fight over the factual nature of fiction—Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s reception by southern critics is an earlier case in point— Cognard-­Black highlights how the uproar about Stowe’s Byron exposé “reveal[ed] the gendered hypocrisies necessary to professional realism.” Professional realist writers, she explains, sought to “counter the fictionality induced unreality of quotidian life”—exemplified by the sensationalism of newspaper writing—“by producing a fiction more real than reality—a narrative more factual than fact.” Cognard-­Black, “Wild and Distracted Call for Proof,” 108, 98. If, on the one hand, the Stowe-­Byron scandal was about realism, on the other, it was also about the moral valuation of literature, as Susan Ryan shows. The two are united, as this book has been arguing. The secular sensibility of privacy positions exposure as both a realist trope and a moral stance. 13.  Lydia Maria Child, “The Byron Controversy,” Independent, October 14, 1869, 1. 14.  “Publishers’ Note,” in Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lady Byron Vindicated: A History of the Byron Controversy (London: Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, 1870), vi. 15.  Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “The Moral of the Byron Case,” Independent, September 9, 1869, 1. 16.  “Mrs. Beecher Stowe and Lady Byron,” Littell’s Living Age, October 9, 1869, 110–112: 110. This is a reprint from the Spectator. 17. Stowe, Lady Byron Vindicated, 132.

Notes to Pages 185–190

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18.  “From the Times, Sept. 3rd,” in The Stowe-­Byron Controversy: A Complete Résumé of Public Opinion, [ed. Eneas Sweetland Dallas] (London: Thomas Cooper), 36. 19.  Justin McCarthy, “Mrs. Stowe’s Last Romance,” Independent, August 26, 1869, 1. 20. “The Saturday Review of September 4th Thus Deals with the Question,” in Stowe-­Byron Controversy, 38. 21.  “From the Standard, Sept. 4th,” in Stowe-­Byron Controversy, 56; A Member of Congress, “From the Times, Sept. 6th,” in Stowe-­Byron Controversy, 86. 22.  “The Byron Revelations,” Independent, August 26, 1869, 4. 23.  From a Fun article reprinted as “The Byron Scandal,” Flag of Our Union, October 16, 1869, 664. 24. Ryan, Moral Economies of American Authorship, 139. 25.  Stowe, “True Story of Lady Byron’s Life,” 308. 26.  C. G. P., “To the Editor of the Times,” Times, September 2, 1869, 4. 27.  Richard Wightman Fox, Trials of Intimacy: Love and Loss in the Beecher-­Tilton Scandal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 37. 28. Fox, Trials of Intimacy, 134. My summary of the scandal draws on Fox’s detailed history, as well as Laura Hanft Korobkin, Criminal Conversations: Sentimentality and Nineteenth-­ Century Legal Stories of Adultery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), chapters 3 and 4; and Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (New York: Three Leaves Press, 2006), chapter 12. 29.  For more on Hooker’s role in the scandal, see Fox, Trials of Intimacy, 79–80. Hooker’s continued support of Woodhull was part of the story of the larger women’s rights movement (and its divisions and fights) in these years, which tied together Hooker, Tilton, Woodhull, Stanton, and Anthony. The splintering of the women’s rights movement, especially during and after the passing of the Reconstruction Amendments, is a complicated history. The divisions ran along racial lines—with Stanton and Anthony breaking with the main movement over the support of Black men’s suffrage before women’s suffrage—and also along state and regional lines. These divisions affected the Beecher-­Tilton scandal, especially as Woodhull was a divisive figure for the movement. For a fine-­grained history of these divisions, and the mythologization of Seneca Falls out of them, see Lisa Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), chapters 1–2. 30.  The two stories they hear do not completely match, and the whole episode that involves Anthony is complicated by her participation in an angry fight at the Tilton house, a story of which we get in two different versions from Anthony and Elizabeth Tilton. See Fox, Trials of Intimacy, 163–167. 31.  For a full historical accounting of the trial and its aftermath, see Fox, Trials of Intimacy, chapters 4 and 5. 32. Korobkin, Criminal Conversations, 61. 33.  The Beecher-­Tilton Scandal: A Complete History of the Case (New York: F. A. Bancker, 1874), 5. 34.  Beecher-­Tilton Scandal, 21, emphasis in original. 35.  Beecher-­Tilton Scandal, 18. 36.  Beecher-­Tilton Scandal, 30, emphasis in original. The other exposé (presumed to be written by Tennessee Claflin) is more shocking in its actual content—about Luther Challis, a prominent New York stockbroker, and his “seduction” and/or rape of two adolescent girls—but,

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Notes to Pages 191–198

as it was not about a famous minister, it did not become a source of national outrage and controversy, nor was it the cause of Comstock’s crusade against Woodhull. See “Mr. L. C. Challis,” Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, November 2, 1872, 14. For more on the blurred legal line between rape and seduction in the nineteenth century, see Pamela Haag, Consent: Sexual Rights and the Transformation of American Liberalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). 37.  Beecher-­Tilton Scandal, 28. 38. See Molly McGarry, “Spectral Sexualities: Nineteenth-­Century Spiritualism, Moral Panics, and the Making of U.S. Obscenity Law,” Journal of Women’s History 12, no. 2 (2000), 8–29: 21. 39.  For a thorough historical explanation of Comstock and the passing and enforcement of the federal obscenity law, see Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-­Century America (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), chapter 16. 40. Olwell, Genius of Democracy, 83. 41.  Theodore Tilton vs. Henry Ward Beecher (New York: McDivitt, Campbell, Law Publishers, 1875), 1:19–20. 42.  Theodore Tilton vs. Henry Ward Beecher, 2:8. 43.  Theodore Tilton vs. Henry Ward Beecher, 3:935. 44.  As Laura Korobkin has ably shown, novels (most prominently Griffith Gaunt and The Scarlet Letter as well as those written by the two men, Tempest-­Tossed and Norwood) mediated and shaped the interpretation of the events of the alleged affair. See Korobkin, Criminal Conversations, chapter 4. 45.  Quoted in Fox, Trials of Intimacy, appendix, 351. Moulton published all the letters between Beecher and himself in 1874. 46.  Theodore Tilton vs. Henry Ward Beecher, 1:38–39. 47.  Theodore Tilton vs. Henry Ward Beecher, 1:215. 48.  Theodore Tilton vs. Henry Ward Beecher, 2:54. 49.  [Henry James Sr., Harvey Y. Russell, and Stephen Pearl Andrews], “Morality vs. Brute Instinct. Correspondence and Comments,” Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, April 18, 1874, 5–6: 5. 50.  [Henry James Sr., Harvey Y. Russell, and Stephen Pearl Andrews], “Morality vs. Brute Instinct,” 5. 51.  [Henry James Sr., Harvey Y. Russell, and Stephen Pearl Andrews], “Morality vs. Brute Instinct,” 6. 52.  For Alfred Habegger, James’s father’s unnecessary entanglement in the Beecher scandal (and at the hands of Andrews, the free love associate of Victoria Woodhull, no less) influenced his tales: James “would repeatedly associate social reform with the violation of family life by journalistic radicals, such as Andrews or Russell.” Alfred Habegger, “The Bostonians and Henry James Sr.’s Crusade Against Feminism and Free Love,” Women’s Studies 15 (1988), 323–342: 332. 53.  Henry James, The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 20, emphasis in original. 54. James, Notebooks, 19, emphasis in original. 55. James, Notebooks, 19, emphasis in original. 56. Henry James, The Bostonians, ed. Richard Lansdown (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 16. Subsequent citations to this edition of The Bostonians will be given parenthetically in the text.

Notes to Pages 198–208

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57.  Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 25. 58. Olwell, Genius of Democracy, 76. 59.  There is a lively scholarly debate about the extent to which James’s narrator (and his own views) align perfectly with Basil’s. Habegger and Olwell both see alignment of narrator and Basil whereas Coviello, Duquette, and Funchion see more of a gap. I follow the latter school of thought in seeing a distinction between Basil’s version of privacy and the novel’s. See Peter Coviello, Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-­Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2013), chapter 6; Elizabeth Duquette, Loyal Subjects: Bonds of Nation, Race, and Allegiance in Nineteenth-­Century America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), chapter 3; and John Funchion, “Critical Oversights: The Aesthetics and Politics of Reading The Bostonians,” Henry James Review 34, no. 3 (2013), 279–284. 60.  For an incisive reading of The Bostonians in light of the Civil War and its memory, see Duquette, Loyal Subjects, chapter 3. 61.  Jennifer L. Fleissner, Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 124. 62. Coviello, Tomorrow’s Parties, 177. 63.  Milette Shamir, Inexpressible Privacy: The Interior Life of Antebellum American Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), chapter 4. 64.  Dean Roscoe Pound of Harvard Law School, quoted in Sarah Igo, The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 35. As Dorothy J. Glancy has shown, though, the claim to originality is certainly overstated, for Warren and Brandeis offered instead an “ingenious evocation of a broad historical sweep in which such legal recognition and enforcement appear as natural and inevitable developments.” Dorothy J. Glancy “The Invention of the Right to Privacy,” Arizona Law Review 21, no. 1 (1979), 1–39: 3. 65. Igo, Known Citizen, 38. 66.  Robert C. Post, “Rereading Warren and Brandeis: Privacy, Property, and Appropriation,” Case Western Reserve Law Review 41 (1991), 647–680: 651. David Rosen and Aaron Santesso argue that this spiritual quality of their argument has prompted a “professional revulsion toward the almost literary opacity, not to mention the spiritual conviction, at the heart of the Harvard essay.” David Rosen and Aaron Santesso, “Inviolate Personality and the Literary Roots of the Right to Privacy,” Law and Literature 23, no. 1 (2011), 1–25: 6. 67.  Susan E. Gallagher, “Privacy and Conformity: Rethinking ‘The Right Most Valued by Civilized Men,’” Touro Law Review 33, no. 1 (2017), 159–175: 174–175, emphasis in original. 68.  Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis, “The Right to Privacy,” Harvard Law Review 4, no. 5 (1890), 193–220: 196. Subsequent citations for “The Right to Privacy” will be given parenthetically in the text. 69.  Warren and Brandeis’s argument has been read alongside the invention of instantaneous photography, and the lawsuits over ownership of one’s image spurred by that new technology. See Igo, Known Citizen, 17; for an in-­depth account of the historical context for “The Right to Privacy,” see Glancy, “Invention of the Right to Privacy”; for the emergence of privacy law (and worries about instantaneous photography that provoked some of the first cases on privacy) as a specifically racialized and gendered discourse, see Eden Osucha, “The Whiteness of Privacy: Race, Media, Law,” Camera Obscura 24, no. 1 (2009), 67–107; and Monica Huerta, “What’s Mine: Involuntary Expressions, Modern Personality, and the Right to Privacy,” J19: The

254

Notes to Pages 209–213

Journal of Nineteenth-­Century Americanists 4, no. 2 (2016), 359–389, which demonstrates that Warren and Brandeis’s article attaches privacy to involuntary expressions caught on camera, which she argues is the most apt articulation of the modern notion of “personality.” 70.  For more on the role of seduction in legal history, see Haag, Consent, chapter 1.

Epilogue 1.  Majority opinion, Justice William O. Douglas, Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), https://​ www​.law​.cornell​.edu​/supremecourt​/text​/381​/479. The “penumbra” reading has been controversial since this case, even as this decision has been used as a precedent for others, most notably in Roe v. Wade. 2.  Henry James, The Bostonians, ed. Richard Lansdown (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 296. 3.  Zahid R. Chaudhary, “The Politics of Exposure: Truth After Post-­Facts,” ELH 87, no. 2 (2020), 301–324: 319. 4.  Henry James, “Preface to The Tragic Muse,” in Henry James: Literary Criticism, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Library of America, 1984), 2:1103–1119: 1107. 5.  Siva Vaidhyanathan, Anti-­Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 5. This claim to sincerity is bolstered by a belief in data neutrality, which obscures the racist and sexist assumptions built into algorithmic codes for search and social media by software engineers. For more on the racism and sexism embedded in search functions, see Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: New York University Press, 2018). The emphasis on sincerity has also given rise to its opposite, online trolling, whose aim is the disruption of sincere debate. For a deep study of the online trolling culture and its influence on mainstream American culture, see Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015). 6. Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 5. For more on how these online platforms affect academic discourse in the field of literary studies, see the PMLA forum “Cultures of Argument,” ed. Pardis Dabashi, PMLA 135, no. 5 (2020). See in particular Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s “Generous Argument,” 956–962; and Erin A. Spampinato’s “‘Never Punch Down’; or, How We Disagree (Online) Now,” 963–969. 7.  The Facebook Papers in 2021 disclosed how Facebook programmed their algorithm to assign more points to negative user interactions (like “sad” or “angry” emojis), which had the effect of pushing more of the content that inspired those responses to users. See Jeremy B. Merrill and Will Oremus, “Five Points for Anger, One for a ‘Like’; How Facebook’s Formula Fostered Rage and Misinformation,” Washington Post, October 26, 2021, https://​www​.washingtonpost​ .com​/technology​/2021​/10​/26​/facebook​-­­angry​-­­emoji​-­­algorithm/. 8.  See Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2019), for a description of the ways that Google and Facebook have been optimized to extract personal data and sell it on “a new kind of marketplace for behavioral predictions.” Zuboff names the end result of these markets surveillance capitalism, which she defines as the unilateral claim to “human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data” (8). As she explains, data is not simply collected but produced through surveillance capitalists’ interventions, as they “nudge, coax, tune, and herd behavior toward profitable outcomes” (8).

Notes to Pages 214–218

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9.  Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965), https://​www​.law​.cornell​.edu​/supremecourt​ /text​/381​/479​#writing​-­­USSC​_CR​_0381​_0479​_ZO. 10.  William Barr, “Remarks to the Law School and the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame,” October 11, 2019, https://​www​.justice​.gov​/opa​/speech​ /attorney​-­­general​-­­william​-­­p​-­­barr​-­­delivers​-­­remarks​-­­law​-­­school​-­­and​-­­de​-­­nicola​-­­center​-­­ethics. 11.  Tracy Fessenden, “‘The Secular’ as Opposed to What?,” New Literary History 38, no. 4 (2007), 631–636: 634. 12.  Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (New York: Penguin Books, 2016), 235, 236. 13.  This use of partial revelation and attention to secrecy runs through all of Hawthorne’s fiction, as Gordon Hutner has elucidated. As he puts it, “It remains an open question whether the secrets told finish the proceedings appropriately” or “if they conclude the plot at all.” Gordon Hutner, Secrets and Sympathy: Forms of Disclosure in Hawthorne’s Novels (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 5. 14. Hawthorne, Scarlet Letter, 242.

INDEX

abolitionism, 40–41, 117–35, 148–59, 161, 165–75, 199; anti-­abolitionism, 118, 125–32, 148, 155–65 Adams, Nehemiah, 162–63 adultery, 152, 189–94. See also marriage affect, 3–4, 9, 24, 76, 133, 211–12 “Ain’t you a pretty pair of bloods,” 97 (fig.) Akin, James, 23–24, 48; “The Philosophic Cock,” 24 (fig.) Allen, William G., 161 American Anti-­Slavery Society, 118, 123, 125, 130–31, 133, 157, 174. See also abolitionism Andrews, Stephen Pearl, 56, 62–65, 84–85, 192, 196; and Modern Times, 62, 84, 203 Arendt, Hannah, 12, 226n44 Armstrong, Clarissa Chapman, 102–4; “Bartimea Pua‘aiki: Blind Preacher of Maui,” 103 (fig.); “Titihuta: Native Marquesan,” 103 (fig.) Asad, Talal, 3, 221n3 atheism, 23, 31, 61, 67–68, 69, 77, 155, 164. See also religion: religious infidelity Baird, Robert, 72, 86 Baldwin, James, 150 Barnes, Ashley, 17, 69 Barr, William, 214–16 Beecher, Henry Ward, 181–97 Beecher, Lyman, 8, 29–30, 32, 42 Beecher-­Tilton Scandal, 181–97 Bentley, Nancy, 78–80 Berlant, Lauren, 1, 123, 150, 213, 216 Bloomer, Amelia, 93, 94, 98; “Amelia Bloomer, Originator of the New Dress,” 98 (fig.). See also dress reform “Bloomerism—An American Custom,” 91 (fig.) Boudinot, Elias, 34, 36 Brooks, Daphne, 121, 140

Brown, Charles Brockden, 12, 25, 42, 53, 203; Jane Talbot, 53; Ormond, 25–26, 42–53; Wieland, 47, 48 Brown, John, 148, 165–67, 172–78; and raid on Harpers Ferry, 149, 166–67 Brown, William Wells, 130, 148, 152–53 Browne, Simone, 121, 135 Burgett, Bruce, 78, 81–83 Burr, Aaron, 48, 157. See also Stowe, Harriet Beecher: The Minister’s Wooing Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, 1, 214 Byron, Lady Anne Isabelle Noel, 179–80, 184–85. See also Stowe-­Byron Scandal Byron, Lord George Gordon, 179–82, 184, 186, 193. See also Stowe-­Byron Scandal Calvinism, 3–5, 125, 166–68 Camfield, Gregg, 57 capitalism, 10, 15, 56, 155, 171, 214 Casanova, José, 221n3, 223n4 Castiglia, Christopher, 111 Catholicism, 28–30, 59, 68–69, 77 Chakkalakal, Tess, 124, 141 Chapman, Mary, 43 Chaudhary, Zahid R., 212 Child, Lydia Maria, 125, 153, 165, 174–77, 183–84, 191 Clay, Edward, 126–27, 135, 136, 139; “Practical Amalgamation. (The Wedding),” 127 (fig.) Clinton, DeWitt, 51–52 Cobbett, William, 35 Cohen, William A., 181–82, 194 Cole, Rachel, 113 Coleman, Dawn, 17 Comstock, Anthony, 191–92 conspiracy theory, 47–48, 117–23, 131–32, 143–46; about abolitionists, 21–22, 117–21, 129–35, 143; about deists, 47, 199; about the Illuminati, 44, 48

258

Index

“Convenient Fashion,” 93 (fig.) Cott, Nancy, 61–62 Coviello, Peter, 78–79, 80, 85, 133, 201–2 Cromwell, Oliver, 165–67 Cunningham, Patricia A., 92 Curtis, Finbarr, 223n16 Davis, Jefferson, 177–78 De Wolfe, Elizabeth A., 70 deism, 23–26, 31–36, 48–50, 169, 193, 215 DeLombard, Jeannine, 130 Democratic-­Republicans, 31–32, 48–52. See also Election of 1800 Dickens, Charles, 16, 70–71, 73, 142 Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock, 10, 39 disestablishment, 1, 3–9, 21, 26–36, 49, 64, 72, 85 disinterested benevolence, 148–49, 165–71 domesticity, 62, 66–67, 70–72, 110–12, 120, 141–143, 200–201, 204; separate spheres ideology, 4, 10–11, 22, 58, 92, 101–12, 199, 225n34. See also novel: domestic Douglas, Ann, 150, 183 Douglass, Frederick, 132–35, 148, 153, 157, 165–66; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 148, 153; Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 136; “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” 132, 157 “Dream Caused by the Perusal of Mrs. H. Beecher Stowe’s Popular Work Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” 164 (fig.) dress reform, 91–95, 160 duCille, Ann, 124 Duyckinck, Evert, 90 Dwight, Timothy, 34–36, 193, 199 Election of 1800, 48–53 Ellen; or, The Fanatic’s Daughter, 157 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 7, 165; “Courage,” 173; “The Divinity School Address,” 8; “Self-­Reliance,” 11, 108; “Speech at a Meeting to Aid John Brown’s Family,” 173 exposé, 99, 119, 129–32, 183–87, 188–92 fashion, 20–21, 36–38, 54, 70, 88–106, 108, 113–16, 133–40, 158–59; and dandyism, 118, 126, 136–39. See also dress reform Federalists, 24, 31–36, 48–52. See also Election of 1800 Fenton, Elizabeth, 28, 39, 69

Fern, Fanny, 100; Ruth Hall, 96–97, 116 Female Life Among the Mormons, 80–82, 85 Fessenden, Tracy, 7, 14, 68–69, 215–16, 221n4 First Amendment, 5–7, 26, 49, 85, 211 Foucault, Michel, 118, 181, 194, 218 Fourierism, 83, 196 Fox, Richard Wightman, 187–88 Franchot, Jenny, 68–69 Franklin, Benjamin, 12–13 free love, 56–66, 83–87, 124, 188–92, 196, 204–5 freedom of religion, 1, 27–30, 41–42, 62–64, 86, 214–15 Freeman, Elizabeth, 235n55 French Revolution, 8, 23–24, 31–38, 41, 48. See also Jacobinism Freud, Sigmund, 182, 186–87, 194 Gallagher, Susan E., 208 Gardner, Eric, 119–20 Garrison, William Lloyd, 118, 125–26, 156–57, 165; The “Infidelity” of Abolitionism, 157; Liberator, 125. See also American Anti-­ Slavery Society Godey’s Lady’s Book, 93–94; “Godey’s Unrivalled Colored Fashions,” 94 (fig.) Godwin, William, 35, 46, 58; Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 12, 46 Gordon, Sarah Barringer, 78 Gradert, Kenyon, 166–67 Grasso, Christopher, 24, 30–31, 35 Greeley, Horace, 63–64, 65, 80, 192, 196 Green, Steven K., 5, 26 Greene, Asa, 136 Griswold v. Connecticut, 11, 211–14 Halttunen, Karen, 13, 88, 98–99 Hanlon, Christopher, 167 Hartog, Hendrik A., 61 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 14, 18–21, 218; The House of the Seven Gables, 18–19; The Scarlet Letter, 2–4, 11–12, 16, 193–94, 216–18 health reform, 92–94 Hedrick, Joan, 167 Hemings, Sally, 23 Hendler, Glenn, 151 Hentz, Caroline Lee, 71; The Planter’s Northern Bride, 157–58 Hodges, Graham, 133 Holbro, Christine, 16

Index Holgate, Jerome B., 129, 145 Holmes, George Frederick, 147, 163. See also Southern Literary Messenger Holmes, Oliver Wendell Sr., 95, 180 Hopkins, Samuel, 167–68. See also Stowe, Harriet Beecher; The Minister’s Wooing Howard, June, 151 Hurh, Paul, 90 hypocrisy, 11–14, 28–29, 46, 72–73, 88–89, 98–116, 120–46, 147–77, 187–92, 213–18 Igo, Sarah E., 14, 208 intellectual property, 207–9 Jackson, Holly, 59 Jacobinism, 23–24, 34, 37, 44, 57, 164, 170 Jacobs, Harriet, 163; Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 148, 153–55, 163 Jakobsen, Janet R. and Ann Pellegrini, 222n9 James, Henry, 152, 197, 201, 203, 208, 211, 212; The Bostonians, 20, 182–83, 196–207 James, Henry Sr., 63, 80, 196 Jefferson, Thomas, 7, 23, 25, 29, 39, 45, 48–54, 108, 152; and the Danbury Baptist Association, 28, 49; Notes on the State of Virginia, 7, 12, 28, 49–52 “John Brown Exhibiting His Hangman!” 178 (fig.) Kaufmann, Michael, 224n30 Kesselman, Amy, 93 Korobkin, Laura, 189 Layson, Hana, 43 Lee, Maurice S., 113 Leiber, Francis, 86–87 Lemire, Elise, 125–26 Liholiho (Kamehameha II), 102 Linn, William, 49–53 Lippard, George, 100, 119; The Quaker City, 99–100; The Killers, 117 Locke, John, 39, 44 Loomis, Maria Thomas, 104 Luciano, Dana, 225n39 Madison, James, 27–29, 215 Mahmood, Saba, 9, 21 Margolis, Stacey, 11 marriage, 4, 9, 29, 44, 55–56, 63–87, 124, 159, 181–83; antimarriage theory, 45, 62–67;

259

coverture, 59–62; divorce, 61–62, 64–65, 187, 193, 196; history of, 63–64, 78–80, 208, 214; interracial, 124–31; plural, 6, 78–87, 160 Mason, Margaretta, 174–77 McCarthy, Justin, 185, 187 McCord, Louisa, 159–63 Melville, Herman, 21, 89–91, 101, 105–6, 113–16, 119, 165; “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” 89, 111–13; The Confidence-­Man, 89, 111, 113–16; Moby-­Dick, 13, 108, 135, 171; Pierre, 16, 89–90, 106–13, 116, 140, 185; Typee, 89–90, 101, 104–6, 111, 116 memoir, 15, 25, 154–55 mesmerism, 81, 202, 204 Miller, Monica, 136 “Miss Crinoline,” 96 (fig.) Modern, John Lardas, 7 moral panic, 159, 191–92 moral suasion, 165, 173 Mormon Wives, 80–85 Mormonism, 57, 62, 71, 78–87, 117, 160. See also marriage: plural Morris, Celia, 58 Morse, Jedidiah, 35, 36, 199 Mr. Frank, The Underground Mail-­Agent, 158–59 Murphy, Gretchen, 30, 56–57, 75, 150 Nichols, Mary Gove, 62–65, 92; Lectures to Ladies on Anatomy and Physiology, 95 (fig.). See also marriage: antimarriage theory Nichols, Thomas Low, 62–65. See also marriage: antimarriage theory Norton, Andrews, 8 novel, form of, 2–3, 4, 15–21, 118, 149, 212–17; antipolygamy, 57, 80–86; city mystery, 99–100, 116–19; didactic, 56–57; marriage plot in, 42, 47, 53, 56–57, 70–82, 167, 172, 202–4; psychological realism in, 12, 17–21; realist, 21, 202–6; romance, 16, 21, 149, 227n51; sentimental, 16–17, 57, 76–80, 85, 88, 114–16, 131–32, 148–53, 173–92; sentimental-­realist ­aesthetic of, 16–19, 57, 82, 88, 113–20, 135, 146, 182, 206 Nudelman, Franny, 173 nudity, 88, 100–105 Nyong’o, Tavia, 118, 125

260

Index

Obergefell v. Hodges, 1, 214 obscenity, 191–92 Ogden, Emily, 222n5 Ogden, Uzal, 33–36 Olwell, Victoria, 192, 199 Oneida community, 62, 203 Orsi, Robert, 6–7, 57 Owen, Robert Dale, Jr., 58, 131

Reynolds v. United States, 6, 192, 196 “Right to Privacy, The” (Warren and Brandeis), 21–22, 190, 207–12, 217 Robin, Corey, 198–99 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 12, 23, 32 Ruggles, David, 125, 133, 152; “Extinguisher” Extinguished! 133–35 Ryan, Susan, 17, 89, 149, 180, 186

Paine, Thomas, 41–42, 52, 58, 60, 165, 198; The Age of Reason, 25, 27–39, 45, 193 Parker, Theodore, 8, 9, 87 Pateman, Carole, 60 Peck, George Washington, 90–91, 97, 101, 106, 109, 185 Pelletier, Kevin, 173 Peterson, Carla L., 120–21, 136–37, 141 Poe, Edgar Allan, 143, 155; “Literati of New York City,” 56 polygamy. See marriage: plural Porterfield, Amanda, 31 Posner, Richard, 100 Post, Robert C., 208 practical amalgamation, 125–36, 148 privacy: definition of, 9–11; right to, 1, 15, 190–91, 204–9, 211–12, 218, 222n8. See also “Right to Privacy, The” (Warren and Brandeis) private sphere, 3–6, 9–10, 61, 197. See also domesticity: separate spheres ideology Protestantism, 6–17, 27, 42, 54–60, 68–87, 204, 215; evangelical Protestantism, 5, 7–8, 29, 54–55, 89, 101–4, 168, 187, 213, 218; Protestant missionaries 89, 101–6 public sphere, 10, 60, 213–16. See also domesticity: separate spheres ideology

Samuels, Shirley, 33, 34 Sanborn, Franklin B., 166, 177 Schlereth, Eric R., 31, 32, 60 scientific racism, 50–51, 129, 145 Scott, Joan, 128 Second Great Awakening, 5–8, 168. See also religion: revivals secular, 3, 54, 68–69, 131, 215–16 secular sensibility, 3–4, 10–11, 24–25, 87, 108, 112, 116, 118, 146, 152, 159, 181, 195, 203, 207, 210 secularism, 3–21, 115, 125–28, 211–18, 221n3 secularity, 3–5, 57, 79, 129; history of, 9, 65, 80 secularization thesis, 3, 26–27, 63, 210, 214–15 Sedgwick, Catharine Maria, 13–14, 20–21, 56–57, 78, 84, 105, 116, 119, 203; Hope Leslie, 56; “Matty Gore,” 65–69, 115, 203–4; A New England Tale, 57; Redwood, 56, 57, 69–77, 80–82, 85, 89, 109, 141, 193 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 15 sentimentalism, 13, 132, 146–48, 150–51, 173, 187, 190–92; antisentimentalism, 13, 131, 151–52. See also novel: sentimental sex: act of, 127–29, 154–55, 181, 195; chastity, 28–30, 53, 209; incest, 90, 186, 195; interracial, 52, 118, 125–29; sexological discourse 127, 181; sexual violence, 23, 43, 129, 148, 154. See also marriage Shakers, 68–78, 86–87, 111 “Shakers, Their Mode of Worship,” 71 (fig.) Shamir, Milette, 15, 111 Shklar, Judith, 12–14 Siskin, Clifford, 44 skepticism, 30–31, 66, 146. See also religion slavery, 34, 39, 51–59, 131–34, 146, 161, 171; Fugitive Slave Act, 155–56; Lost Cause narrative, 199–201; slave trade, 40–41, 169–70. See also abolitionism slave narrative, 119–31, 153 Sleigh, William Wilcocks, 130–31

Redpath, James, 177 Reed, Ashley, 56, 168, 171 Reese, David Meredith, 126–129, 131, 133–35, 145, 160 Reid-­Pharr, Robert, 120, 146 religion: religious infidelity, 23–26, 30–36, 38–39, 50–52, 55–56, 65–68, 76–77, 84, 155–57, 177; private belief as, 5–9, 27–29, 52–53, 216; privatization of, 3–21, 27–36, 52–57, 72, 214–16; revealed, 34–36, 50, 60; revivals, 54–55; unbelief, 8, 30, 42, 68, 75, 215 reproductive rights, 1, 211–13

Index Smith, Adam, 151 Smith, Elihu Hubbard, 32 Smith, Joseph, 78–80, 85; D&C 132, 79–80, 85. See also Mormonism social media, 181, 211–18 Southern Literary Messenger, 147, 149–50, 160 Spaulding, Julia, 104 spiritual autobiography, 37, 42 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 93, 187, 188; “The Moral of the Byron Case,” 184–85 Stein, Jordan Alexander, 37 Stern, Julia, 47 Stone, Lucy, 62 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 13, 16, 84, 116, 119–20, 130, 132–33, 148–78, 181–91, 195; The Christian Slave, 119–20; Dred, 149; A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 163; Lady Byron Vindicated, 180–86; The Minister’s Wooing, 149, 167–72; My Wife and I, 188; “The True Story of Lady Byron’s Life,” 180, 183–86; Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 119, 130–33, 145, 147, 149–51, 153, 155, 159–64, 172–75, 180, 185 Stowe-­Byron Scandal, 183–87, 197 Sullivan, Winnifred Fallers, 224n25 surveillance, 135, 212, 218–22; surveillance capitalism, 213–18 sympathy, 151–59, 176, 187. See also sentimentalism Tappan, Arthur and Lewis, 118, 128; Emancipator, 118, 133. See also American Anti-­ Slavery Society Taylor, Charles, 5, 57, 74 “Testimony in the great Beecher-­Tilton scandal case illustrated,” 189 (fig.) Teresa, Countessa Guiccioli, 179–80 Thompson, George, 100, 119; City Crimes; or Life in New York and Boston, 99–102 Thoreau, Henry David, 12, 79, 149, 165, 170; “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” 166, 174; “Slavery in Massachusetts,” 108; Walden, 92

261

Tilton, Elizabeth Monroe Richards, 181, 187–94. See also Beecher-­Tilton Scandal Tilton, Theodore, 187–94. See also Beecher-­ Tilton Scandal Trollope, Frances, 54–55, 58, 72 Tyler, Royall, 12; The Algerine Captive, 25, 37–42 Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, 85 Vaidhyanathan, Siva, 212 Walker, David, 51, 125 Warner, Michael, 1, 58, 81–82 Watson, Richard, 33–34 Watt, Ian, 15 Webb, Frank J., 117; The Garies and Their Friends, 119–24, 137–46, 148 Weinstein, Cindy, 111, 150, 159, 161 Weld, Theodore, 133, 159; American Slavery as It Is, 130, 132 White, Ed, 41 whiteness, 80, 121, 133–35; white womanhood, 56, 80, 88, 118, 122, 126, 136, 141, 146–48, 155, 157–59, 173, 176–77 Whitman, Walt, 13, 79, 101; Leaves of Grass, 88 Williams, Peter, 117–18 Wise, Henry A., 173–76 women’s rights, 59–61, 91–95, 114, 160–64, 187–92, 198–207 Woodhull, Victoria, 187–92, 196, 204, 207. See also Beecher-­Tilton Scandal Wortman, Tunis, 51–52 Wright, Frances, 54, 56, 58–62, 65–66, 68, 80, 83–85, 131, 163; and Nashoba, 58–59 Young, Brigham, 78, 82, 84. See also Mormonism Zuboff, Shoshana, 213

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

One cannot help feeling a bit self-­conscious when writing the acknowledgments for a book about privacy. An acknowledgments page promises to raise the curtain on a book’s conception and completion, to provide a peek behind the scenes for readers. The pleasure for the writer is in publicly thanking the people who helped her navigate, in Edgar Allan Poe’s memorable words, the “vacillating crudities of thought,” the “innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view,” and the “fully matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable.” This book took a decade to write, and there were many crudities of thought and innumerable glimpses of ideas to discard before it was finished. But I did not do that alone. Writing is a collaborative process, and the people and institutions I’m happy to thank here helped me finish this book before another decade had passed. I am fortunate to know so many generous friends and colleagues, both at the University of Illinois and beyond, who read and, at times, reread a manuscript that was basically about two abstractions (privacy and secularism!). I am so grateful to Dawn Coleman, John Evelev, Chris Freeburg, Jeff Insko, Bruce Michelson, Gretchen Murphy, Ashley Reed, Michelle Sizemore, Derrick Spires, Jordan Alexander Stein, and Arielle Zibrak. Their timely, attentive, and incisive advice at crucial stages helped me not just understand what I was trying to say but figure out how to write it for others. I must especially acknowledge and thank Betsy Duquette, whose editorial advice and good cheer have both been indispensable to me over the years. Above all, I owe a debt of gratitude to my dear friends in the GLOW writing group. Lilya Kaganovsky, Brett Kaplan, and Anke Pinkert read messy drafts of every chapter and helped me see what I often could not—how to shape this into a coherent book. The book quite literally would not be in the world today without their feedback and encouragement. The project and my thinking have been enlivened by conversations with so many wonderful scholars at conferences and, in the era of COVID, on Zoom. Many thanks especially to Nancy Bentley, Chris Castiglia, Tess Chakkalakal,

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Acknowledgments

Peter Coviello, Colin Dayan, Jonathan Elmer, Tracy Fessenden, Beth Freeman, Josh Greenberg, Amy Huang, Rodrigo Lazo, Bob Levine, Chris Looby, Dana Luciano, Cody Marrs, Matt Rebhorn, Joe Rezek, Jared Richman, Kyle Roberts, Kelly Ross, and Will Slauter. A warm thank-­you to the regular members of the Civil War Caucus at the Midwest Modern Language Association, organized by the incomparable Kathleen Diffley. Their thoughtful and generous engagement with early versions of the chapters of this book helped make the book what it is. Several caucus members have already been named as readers of chapter drafts, a testament to Kathleen’s ability to bring together a truly collegial and generous group of scholars. My thanks to her and to the regular members of the group: Faith Barrett, Martin Buinicki, Jill Cadell, Tim Donahue, Ben Fagan, Emily Field, Brigitte Fielder, Sam Graber, Chris Hanlon, Chris Hedlin, Andrew Kopec, Greg Laski, Elizabeth Renker, Eliza Richards, Jane Schultz, Michael Stancliff, Julia Stern, Tim Sweet, Kristen Treen, and Elizabeth Young. Finally, I am beyond grateful to Sari Altschuler and Erica Fretwell for always lending an ear to gripes big and small, professional or otherwise, and helping me to navigate them—or just laugh about them. I am equally lucky to be surrounded by supportive friends and colleagues at the University of Illinois. I do not know how I could have finished this project while balancing the crush of work that falls to associate professors, especially women, if it were not for so many wonderful people. Not all of these colleagues are still at Illinois, but they remain, at least for me, part of the Illinois community. Thank you Rob Barrett, Manisha Basu, Dale Bauer, Antoinette Burton, Eric Calderwood, Nancy Castro, Lucinda Cole, Eleanor Courtemanche, Tim Dean, Jon Ebel, Stephanie Foote, Andy Gaedtke, Catharine Gray, Jenny Greenhill, Jim Hansen, Stephanie Hilger, Rana Hogarth, Gordon Hutner, Dana Kinzy, Vicki Mahaffey, Bob Markley, Hina Nazar, Bob Parker, Curtis Perry, Ricky Rodriguez, Kristin Romberg, Michael Rothberg, Rob Rushing, Lindsay Rose Russell, Ramón Soto-­Crespo, Nafissa Thompson-­ Spires, Ted Underwood, and Yasemin Yildiz. Let me especially thank four close friends. Near daily chats with Andrea Stevens and Maggie Flinn were and continue to be a lifeline. And Renée Trilling and Jamie Jones, whose camaraderie, especially during the worst months of the COVID pandemic, got me through. This project benefited from timely support from a number of institutions. A Senior Research Fellowship from the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois funded preliminary research on Chapter 3. A Faculty Fellowship and a New Horizons Faculty Fellowship from the

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Humanities Research Institute (formerly the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities) nicely bookended the research for this project. The first fellowship in 2012 catapulted me into the project and the second funded necessary trips to archives in Philadelphia and Boston. I received a Midwest Modern Language Association Fellowship from the Newberry Library in 2014–2015 that allowed me to spend copious amounts of time in their archives, and an AAS–Northeastern Modern Language Association Fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society funded a transformative (and snowy!) month in Worcester in February 2015. My thanks to the librarians at the American Antiquarian Society, the Hawaiian Mission Houses Historic Site and Archives, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Newberry Library, and the University of Illinois Library for their help in locating materials for this project. The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois named me a Conrad Humanities Scholar and that funding has supported the writing of this book in its final stages. These fellowships and other research support from Illinois made it possible for me, over the course of the past ten years, to hire several extraordinary research assistants, including Cora Anthony, Leah Becker, Liz Hoiem (now my colleague at Illinois), Alexis Kapczynski, Alexis Schmidt, and Jessica Whitfield. Bob Lockhart and Max Cavitch have supported this project nearly from its inception, and I am truly grateful for their wisdom and encouragement. Max has long been one of my intellectual mentors, and it was a joy to work with him on this project. Bob is an ideal editor, one who guides authors as writers. The final version of this book owes much to his careful editorial eye. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the anonymous readers of the manuscript whose generous feedback gave me a road map for finishing the project. Portions of Chapter 3 and the epilogue were originally published in American Literature, and they are republished here by permission of the copyright holder, Duke University Press. An early version of the ideas in the epilogue appeared in “Uneasy A” in Avidly, and I am grateful for Sarah Mesle’s and Sarah Blackwood’s advice and encouragement with that essay. Acknowledgments usually end with the most private aspects of our lives, rewarding the reader who gets this far. Mine are no different. Alexine Fleck has been there for me for over twenty years. She is always ready to lift my spirits, listen to my problems, and keep me connected to what matters in life. I couldn’t ask for a better friend. This book would not have been possible without the love and support of my family. Thanks to my brother and sister,

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Jason and Andrea, and to my parents, Lynn and Richard. My father died in 2017 while I was writing this book, and I dedicate it to him and my mother. Their friendship and love—for each other and for us—are the most fundamental influences on my life. While writing this book I met John Levi Barnard. Every day, he shows me what it means to live a life of generosity, thoughtfulness, patience, and ethical commitment. In The House of the Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne writes that “our first youth is of no value” for “we are never conscious of it, until after it is gone. But sometimes—always, I suspect, unless one is exceedingly unfortunate—there comes a sense of second youth, gushing out of the heart’s joy at being in love.” Thank you, John, for giving me that second youth.