Letter and the Spirit of Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Justice, Politics, Theology 9780773572317

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 The Justice of Sentencing, or How (Not) to Speak
2 "A" Confession: How to Avoid Speaking the Name of the Father
3 Constituting Justice: Unionist-Republican and Confederate-Democratic Narratives
4 The Feminine, the Judaic, the Pauline, and the Political: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Ethical Critique of Justice
5 Exodus Politics and the Redemption of Difference
6 Rendering Justice in The Grandissimes: Advocacy and Others' Voices
Conclusion: Confederate Democracy and the Non-In-Different Constitution
Notes
Works Cited
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
R
S
T
U
V
W

Citation preview

The Letter and the Spirit of Nineteenth-Century American Literature

This page intentionally left blank

The Letter and the Spirit of Nineteenth-Century American Literature Justice, Politics, and Theology THOMAS LOEBEL

McGill-Queen's University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

© McGill-Queen's University Press zoo 5 ISBN 0-7735-2803-2.

Legal deposit first quarter 2005 Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Loebel, Thomas, 1965The letter and the spirit of nineteenth-century American literature: justice, politics, and theology / Thomas Loebel. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7735-2803-2 i. American literature - i9th century - History and criticism. 2. Justice in literature. I. Title. PS2OI.L63 2005

8io.9'3554

02004-902824-3

This book was typeset by Dynagram Inc. in 10/12 Sabon.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction 3 1 The Justice of Sentencing, or How (Not) to Speak

26

2 "A" Confession: How to Avoid Speaking the Name of the Father 62. 3 Constituting Justice: Unionist-Republican and Confederate-Democratic Narratives 99 4 The Feminine, the Judaic, the Pauline, and the Political: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Ethical Critique of Justice 127 5 Exodus Politics and the Redemption of Difference 6 Rendering Justice in The Grandissimes: Advocacy and Others' Voices 217 Conclusion: Confederate Democracy and the Non-In-Different Constitution 24 5 Notes 257 Works Cited Index

289

273

172

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the "sustenance" of Eleanor and Peter Loebel. Thank you for love; thank you for dinner. To Michael Anthony, who transformed my years immeasurably; to the intellectual community at SUNY Buffalo, who were beyond compare, heartfelt thanks. I owe a debt of intellectual and personal gratitude to UB faculty members Neil Schmitz, Carol Jacobs, Kenneth Dauber, Susan Eilenberg, and Jill Robbins; and graduate students Ben Friedlander and Carla Billitteri, Gina Camodeca, Natalie Grinnell, and Patricia Wahl. Similarly, thanks go to those at York University, particularly Kim Michasiw, Ian Balfour, Maurice Elliott, and the staff of the undergraduate and graduate English offices. Janet Melo-Thaiss, Ronald Paul, and Alia Somani brought perspicacity and speed to the work of research assistance. Without their help, I would never have met my ever-extending deadlines. Special thanks go also to Jennifer Henderson, Craig Gordon, Lauren Gillingham, and Julie Murray for being interlocutors who helped me to shape my ideas. Early on in my studies, Deborah Esch transformed the way this political philosophy cum music education grad approached literature. Her influence made a significant mark. While I was at the University of Calgary, Eric Savoy's exemplary combination of humour and intellectual rigour kept me focused. Tim Dean kept me sane, wherever. I am most appreciative of the editors at McGill-Queen's University Press, specifically Philip Cercone and Joan McGilvray, as well as the external readers of the original manuscript. Thanks also go to Elizabeth Hulse for her rigorous copy-editing. The Social Sciences and

viii Acknowledgments

Humanities Research Council of Canada provided the assistance of a doctoral fellowship during graduate school, which enabled a portion of this book to emerge. The Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, administered by the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, provided assistance to McGill-Queen's University Press, for which I am grateful. The staff at the archives of the Harriet Beecher Stowe House and in the Manuscripts Department of the Special Collections Division, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University, spent many an hour dragging up boxes from storage, while helping me to refine my searches. Many thanks. Part of chapter z is adapted from an earlier study, " 'A' Confession: How to Avoid Speaking the Name of the Father," which focused solely, however, on The Scarlet Letter; it is reprinted from the Arizona Quarterly 69.1 (zoo3) by permission of the Regents of the University of Arizona. A portion of chapter 3 appeared in article form as "Jefferson Davis on the Plains of Abraham," originally published in CR: The New Centennial Review i.z (zooi), issued by Michigan State University Press.

The Letter and the Spirit of Nineteenth-Century American Literature

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction

This study began as an exploration of the interrelations between law and literature in nineteenth-century America, in the sense of analyzing how literary themes engaged and otherwise criticized controversial laws concerning race and rights throughout that century. It started in dialogue with Brook Thomas's Cross-Examinations of Law and Literature, offering a different reading of the ultimate effect of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. While that effect was certainly political, and while one could track, as Thomas does with care, how the text reads case law on the issue of slavery, I became more interested in the larger theory of justice that her writing ultimately presents. However, I began to question just what exactly that theory was writing itself into as an intervention. Besides southern constitutional justifications of slavery, Stowe seemed as much to be arguing with northern senses of justice that abided these southern constitutional claims, even while they wrung their proverbial hands. For her, any kind of justice that admits slavery is not just influenced by national politics; it is an entire product of politics; whereas true justice for Stowe is first and foremost derived from ethics as a theological imperative. Justice must order politics, and not the other way around. Certainly, it is apparent that sentimentalism in her style of writing was meant to influence hearts and minds to change their politics, but this influence sought a conversion to justice as she conceived it. Her theology, it is clear, influenced her politics and certainly her literary themes, but its relation to her style went beyond rhetorical shaping of language to something more fundamental about the nature and task of language

4 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

as such. Sentimentalism in her themes and rhetoric is the style of the vehicle; theology is the powerful engine, and political transformation the destination. This combination of justice, politics, and theology in Stowe's writing took me on an important, if somewhat difficult, journey. The more traditional structure of a literary critical study, which would properly historicize its readings and really inform its audience about the period, limited the approach and the probable results of what required analysis, namely, a rethinking of language from a theological perspective and the effects of its indwelling in the literary. Those effects were linguistic and stylistic, but also immediately political and philosophical. While all of these elements might fall into distinct categories by definition, the particular focus on language revealed that they were discursively interwoven. Analyzing the weave itself, however, produced two problems of their own: how to balance the movement into and then out of literary analysis and criticism in order to relate and develop the various components which the literary language itself engages, and how to keep a handle on the nature of argument by accumulation that seems inevitably to result. The former produces chapters that set various plates spinning at the same time - close reading, political excursus, philosophical meditation, entirely non-traditional linguistic theorization - whose simultaneity print does not facilitate best. The latter creates accumulation that is tropological as well as discursive and argumentative. The chapters develop aspects of the overall idea, which takes shape, and only in the sense of outline, in the conclusion. In some sense, the book is only a prolegomenon to a theory of justice proper. This is not to dismiss the literary analyses found here and what they say to the period and field of nineteenth-century American literature; rather, it highlights that what this book provides is the sometimes complicated working through of language, theology, and politics (and ethics, alterity, and representation) that enabled me to draw the outline. What follows, by way of introduction, provides background for the accumulative argument and establishes its terms. LANGUAGE AS THEO-LOGOS

A theological approach to language seeks to annunciate ethics into language, manifesting it as justice. "Manifestation," I suggest, is a term in difference to "representation." If representation promotes communicative content, and thus constructs themes and employs pre-existent discourses and styles, then manifestation is akin to the poetic and sometimes performative effect of language that functions otherwise than or beyond representative communication. A theological concep-

5

Introduction

tion of language argues for ethics as the fundamental constitution of language as such. The Word is created as the relation to the inassimilable Other. Wholly constitutive of human language, Word persecutes the attempts of human language to represent in-justice to the others of this world. The trace of this ethical persecution can be recognized in the transformative and sometimes traumatizing effects on human language of annunciation and revelation. As a break into identity and time, revelation annunciates the priority of the Other for Being by opening the word, affecting language, exceeding its possibilities of signification for meaning in any one-to-one relation. This affect - an affect given to language by the Other - troubles knowledge, whose relation to linguistic representation becomes essentially arbitrary but constructively poetic. By "poetic," and an ensuing poetics of approaching language and reading, I follow Paul Ricoeur in asserting that poetics "is not a literary genre, but rather the totality of these genres inasmuch as they exercise a referential function that differs from the descriptive referential function of ordinary language" (9). I push the question further to say that the referential function designated by a poetics differs from how we conceive of language as such, for meaning is not in the word or in the relation between signifier and signified but, rather, in the passing through of that relation. A poetics as reading seeks to perform the passage - tweaking Ricoeur slightly - "of belonging-to amid the ruins of descriptive discourse" (9). "It is revelatory because the poetic function incarnates a concept of truth that escapes the definition by correspondence as well as the criteria of falsification and verification. Here truth no longer means verification, but manifestation; that is, letting what shows itself be" (10), and its "being" will exceed any determination of its identity in language or that which facilitates its manifestation for people. If literary language is approached as a medium of communication and representation, what sorts of performative transformations happen to it when a different kind of signification annunciates itself to language, manifesting justice beyond representing what it could, might, and should be? I draw on the work of Emmanuel Levinas in this regard, but rethink it in predominantly Christian theological as well as literary terms. Annunciation is the mark of a certain " 'order' in which signifyingness remains an irremissible disturbance" (Levinas, Basic 60), which is not susceptible to capture by representation, but whose trace alters every kind of sense of representation and every sense that any specific representation could provide. Annunciation into language questions consciousness as such, prior to any eventual conscious question, which then has to make sense of the language (Levinas, Basic 54). The "content" of annunciation into language, which is not a thematic

6 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

content but is, rather, prior to it, is, I suggest, Love, which motivates the shaping of language as justice. I mean Love, not as any kind of already packaged thematic content of endearment or affection, but as a condition that generates the desire to represent, to thematize, to arrange language for the other. Love is an activity, the bringing of the right language, language as justice. In these terms, themes of justice in Harriet Beecher Stowe's work, for instance, are politically, historically, and legally engaged, to be sure. What they strive for is to be just as thematic representations. But as linguistic formulations, they also strive to feel right, where the heart is opened in the word opened as justice. "Sentiment" is a word used to name something produced in persons as a result of language. "Sentimentalism" is a literary style and rhetorical construction of language gauged for such an outcome. However, both these terms trace the prior affective condition signified into language that is just and that enables their production. Annunciation opens language as justice within and as that which just representation can perform the relation to the other. As Levinas has detailed, justice is an inter-position that comes to be because of a metaphysical relation between the one and the other in the constitution of Being. Prior to the ontological categorization of the other - prior, that is, to recognizing anyone as different from the self is the face of radical alterity which calls out. In the moment of the turn to face the call, the figure of the other is cognized as a face. Cognition comes to be as Being; Being originates in the figuration of the face, which is a figure to be recognized as human. Simultaneously, cognition of and as a figure (face) signifies. Yet with this visual dimension in cognition, the figure is immediately linguistic, to which the term "call" hearkens. Thus, according to Levinas, ethics is metaphysics, establishing the necessity of the intersubjective relation and the necessity of responsibility for the other as that which constitutes ontology and any kind of fundamental ontology of Being. In the call, the other is cognized as other and immediately re-cognized as an other for someone else. Suddenly, ethics as responsibility for the other becomes the call for justice, for recognition, for representation, for measuring between, for mediation, which is simultaneously the call for language. Justice is language, within which cognition and measurement function. The concept of recognition of the other as an other of responsibility for the self demands representation (justice as language) to call for materially substantive justice in the state. Literary authors' facility with producing sentiment and affect from language can be tremendously important and influential in supplementing how justice is conceived of and performed in law and politics. The legal system, and jurisprudence more generally, works within a closed

7 Introduction discourse to produce the principles that allow for justice to be pronounced. The problem, however, as Jean-Francois Lyotard's work on the differend details, is that the system cannot technically and philosophically "hear" claims of injustice not constructed in law's discourse. If there are no terms in the discourse for translating the injustice, then within the system it is not one, which is perhaps the greatest injustice of all. Other domains which are open to multiple discourses and which hone the art of rhetoric as trope and persuasion - here literature and politics - not only have a greater chance at thematizing diverse injustices, but they can also bring intersubjective identification to the fore as mediation. To the differend produced by law and politics, literary themes of injustice generate affect - sympathy, worry, a self-reflection in relation to the other, for instance - which holds out the possibility of bridging the gap. The differend may well be "real" as an effect of how legal and political discourses approach justice, but at risk of sounding like a modern-day little Eva in Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin., affect may bridge it if we wish it to. The problem of the differend in the law is the problem of legal discourse, by which I mean two things: if Love annunciates language into existence as justice, then language is prima facie the mediation of differences. The sign of this structure is the emotional response. As "felt" and "sensed," and thus wedded to thought in their perception and recognition, the relation of emotion to language is figural and is used to bridge orders of physicality to sensibility, body to mind. Thus literature's ability to embody injustice and to call, not for bloodless recognition, but for emotional identification holds out the possibility of changing how one hears the claims and sees the bridge. Emotional identification motivates cognitive movement across the gap. It makes a bridge by giving. As mediation, advocacy, and manifestation, literature provides a productively critical venue for thinking about whether there is or can be justice in representation. My analysis investigates the figures used by authors to represent others, to state plaintiff claims, to work with and against the language of the law, and to express in literary language, claims that legal language appears ill fitted to pronounce. In American democratic pluralism, where justice turns so much on questions of right representation, literature opens up new ways - and new problems - of theorizing justice and representation and the justice of representation. THE POLITICS OF JUSTICE AND THE CHARACTER OF AMERICA

As Stowe was attempting to write into the politics of justice, the exploration of political discourses enables another approach to this issue of

8 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

the language of justice. Here, too, representation and reading emerge as problematic, if compelling, categories. In America the political and legal construction of justice is tied to the nature of federalism. Consider that the Constitution's first two goals are to "form a more perfect Union" and to "establish Justice," as stated in the Preamble. As a political and legal document, the Constitution represents how justice is not only a construction of legal theory but also a product of political theory. Determining the kind of federalism that the governmental structure and series of rights laid out by the Constitution bring into being is simultaneously to determine its principles of justice. This is to say that while the Constitution forms a more perfect union, one still has to figure out what that form, and therefore the Union, actually is. Once this is determined, the principles of justice it necessitates becomes clear. The problem is that such a clear determination was never made and, I argue, can never be made from the language of the Constitution. Great national issues, such as slavery, have forced Americans to recognize the problem. Abraham Lincoln was certainly one to do so. He understood the discursive gap at the document's centre, but he sutured it with his multithreaded rhetoric of union. One thread is temporal: union is perpetual, thus indissoluble. Another is numerological: union produces something that is more than the sum of its parts; it is "more perfect." Another is theo-logical: political union is akin to union with God; constitution of union by the people establishes the tribunal in which the justice of the Almighty Ruler is realized. Lincoln's unionist logic is centripetal in force, in that it draws in and locks differences (persons, citizens, and states) together and as the forging of a republican nation. The Constitution is therefore not contract but creation. However, while the people create the nation in language, the nation then reconstitutes the people as citizens, certainly, but with a character that is now newly American. Differences will exist in the nation, to be sure, but they will be united together under a singly constituted national character. To figure constitution as a type of creation that then fashions citizens as its own adorn is to amplify the theological resonance of political union. There is "near religious veneration" of the Constitution, as Gregg D. Crane puts it (i), and reading the text for all that it creates - justice, nation, citizen - demands a hermeneutics. So much depends upon the document, whose aim Christopher Looby yokes together as the "process of national-creation-through-signification" (2). During the period leading up to the Civil War, debates on the Constitution produced different ways of conceiving the character of America and justice simultaneously. I explore what I call unionist-republican and confederate-democratic approaches, which offer competing logics as to the nature of "the People,"

9 Introduction federalism, and the principles of democracy. Unionist-republicanism and confederate-democracy do not in any way fall in line with simplified divisions between the Republican and Democratic parties or between conservatism and liberalism. Rather, they seek to designate different logics or ways of reading and thinking about the Constitution, the nature of the country it means to constitute, and the meaning of justice for its peoples. While American jurisprudence since the Reconstruction has ebbed and flowed between more or less conservative and liberal decisions, it has not, I would argue, diversified the fundamental unionist logic governing its reading of the Constitution. This is to say that the courts are rather certain, within the confines of a set definition of America and American justice in the Constitution, that the country is, for instance, a national republic and not a confederacy; that whatever the interest and posterity and even, to some extent, the significance of justices' dissenting opinions, the majority rules, as does the winner's history. I bring confederate-democratic theory to bear on unionist-republicanism to explore its different logic and hermeneutics of constitution. These two approaches to the character of American democracy and justice open up, as well as close down, different possibilities for thinking about such key concepts as equality, sociality, and representation. Were it that all differences could be brought together and represented equally in their discourses and practices, then pluralism and unionism perhaps could be held together; however, unionist logic is deeply committed to the fundamental right of the majority and the acquiescence of minorities to central majority decisions. In a philosophical way of conceiving it, the other has no priority in a political construction of society, but is rendered subordinate to majoritarian sameness. With a plurality of persons, a majority of like interests decides what is just for the minority others, who must then cater to and work within these terms. I call unionism a centripetal force because its investment in perpetuity and the national status of the republic puts real pressure on minority difference - such pressure that it is unlikely that minorities (racial or simply interest-based communities) will ever achieve the practical political results they wish on their own terms. Union, in this way of seeing it, is a political mechanism that manufactures its own character content, into which all Americans must acculturate themselves if they are to be Americans. While primarily a political theory, unionism has developed in its praxis a social philosophy; for if the nation is to have a character as if it were a person, then if persons in the United States are to be the nation's citizens, they need to pledge allegiance to that character. To be a citizen is to accept that one is a participant in the character of the nation and must not just emulate but identify with and further its ideals. In uniting "states," unionism

io The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

does not just bind political entities together in perpetuity; it brings together persons for cultural cohesion through national identification. And national identification is ultimately policed by law and perhaps more powerfully by interpellation, even if it is promoted as "voluntary" self-assimilation. Citizens of different states, persons of different races and ethnicities and classes, all become Americans. They are a fundamental part of the "united states" which make America and which America remakes in turn. Bringing out this unionist structure of "America," however, is the very thing that makes one question just how to read the "United States of America." The unionist reading has undeniable explanatory utility, most recognizable, perhaps, because Americans have lived under its totalizing power since 1865, The unionist reading is promoted by a selective and ultimately reconstructionist view of American history that tends to elide the Articles of Confederation as a foundational document in order to confer on the Declaration of Independence most, or more perfect, importance. By and large, it adopts a Lincolnian view of what the Constitution means to constitute from an entirely believable, but nonetheless postulated, construction of the intentions of the Framers. And, indeed, when the Union Army won the Civil War and the North embarked on the project of reconstructing and then restoring the South, "America" was buttressed in its hegemony as the meaning of the "United States." A unionist-republican understanding of the "United States of America" has been, from 1865 onwards, what controls the terms of the acculturation and any kind of debate about what America is, what it means to be an American, and the relation between the "United States" and "America." It is the understanding against which critics react, either from within a unionist understanding, seeking to tweak its definitions, or from outside of it in an anti-unionist stance. The "States," however, form the grammatical subject of the phrase "United States of America." "United" and "America" are modifiers, a recognition that opens up the confederate-democratic reading of the name, reflective of another construction of history. Here the Articles of Confederation as the first formation of "union" reclaim their position in history, as does a confederate reading of not only the subsequent Constitution but also of federalism and the telos of the United States. In this reading, the "United States" also promotes an ethos, but one in which the identity of America is the commitment to a political organization that protects the rights of individual and group development of identity without creating its own cultural identity for the purposes of national public assimilation. In the confederate reading, America is only ever a process, a federalism committed to the negotiation and protection of the differences of self-representable citizens in group-based

11 Introduction formations. Uniting States in America creates a procedural republic. The Constitution represents the agreed-upon principles of democracy and justice, which can be amended and which will govern, not the identity of individual or group lives, but the thresholds and contact zones at which they interact and may clash. There need not be a nation as the ideological construction that manufactures its own culture and demands the assimilation of citizens to it. Persons are sovereign in themselves, and their decisions to unite into groups must be respected, including their decision to unite in and as states of America. Citizens are those who agree with the procedures of democracy and justice. Since they create the republic, Americans do not need to be manufactured by what they produce. The analyses of unionist-republicanism and confederate-democracy detail how the different politics of power justify themselves by way of their own constructions of ethics, from which they employ theories of language implicated in their practices of reading the Constitution and in the product of their speeches. Nowhere does Abraham Lincoln or John C. Calhoun, for instance, set out linguistic treatises of the American language; however, what I do argue is that the different ways in which they read the Constitution and phrase those readings imply discreetly different approaches to how meaning is made in written language. Given that the Constitution has become another American bible in the fields of law and politics, the hermeneutics of reading the creative word is approached with almost the same liturgical care as found in biblical theology. In chapters i and 2,1 ground the idea, process, and stakes of constitutional hermeneutics in the theocracy of Puritan Massachusetts Bay, where the stakes of reading the Word impacted upon the individual through the community and vice versa. Theological issues were always simultaneously political issues, and the theo-political issues in focus in chapters i and 2. are gendered differences within hermeneutics, the stakes of the agency they represent theoretically and practically to the male-governed community, and the potential of rethinking how creative language functions. THEOLOGICAL POLITICS

Researching a time long before the Revolutionary or Civil Wars, for instance, Perry Miller focused on the structure of the jeremiad, written and performed, as the guise under which "the Puritans launched themselves upon the process of Americanization" (Errand 9). Taken up and adapted critically by Sacvan Bercovitch, this connection was amplified by content-matter building blocks of what is American - an economic focus, capitalism, the chosenness of destiny and freedom - all structured within

12. The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

the Puritan "errand" (see, for example, "Modernity"; American Jeremiad}. I think it also necessary to perform the backward glance in this study, because I see a certain "America" nascent in Puritanism. The early theocratic society struggled consciously and publicly with issues of language and self-governance in the then inseparable domains of religion and politics, and those issues have had an afterlife in the America that followed. While much history has passed between the time of John Winthrop, the Federalists, and Abraham Lincoln, during that time a potent theo-logos, or theological style of logic, passed into the American unconscious. I do not mean that Lincoln was a closet Puritan or that American politics secretly harbours the desire to fulfill America's destiny as a City upon the Hill. Thomas Scanlan is therefore entirely correct to assert that "conventional - American exceptionalist - accounts are fundamentally anachronistic, insofar as they read back the later construction of an American national identity to its putative colonial 'beginnings' " (i). Attempting to do so as a project of legitimate history ends up seeking to legitimate a fallacy. However, the ways in which the American theo-logos operates in the nineteenth century has a tropological relation to Puritanism. Faith in the Constitution as an ethical expression of justice, the belief that American democracy is specifically constituted in and for justice, and the liturgical approach to the hermeneutics of constitutional language manifest themselves as redemptive mechanisms for continually striving to realize the ideal of justice that America hopes to be. One reason for returning to Puritanism is to avoid what I see as the error of theorizing "America" only as a political concept, developed in relation to Locke and Paine, political discourses of negative liberty and without recognition of this unconscious theo-logos. Dismissing the theocratic history evades the theological factor in the unconscious that affects the political in America and amplifies how language signifies. Pursuing the questions, however, of how to open the word in reading (revelation) and of what is made manifest in language beyond its function of representation shows how the relation between the real and the ideal of America is highly unstable. Politics has constructed its own hegemony by attempting to fix how the language of the United States of America is read. In the ensuing chapters, I turn to specific incidents of conflict between diverse expressions of America and the largely successful political attempts to shut them down through the assertion and further stabilization of the hegemony of a national discourse. These conflicts generate competing definitions of how to live in the tension between the ideal and the real. By "competing definitions," I mean the different ways of trying to articulate the ideal connection between democracy and justice manifest in America and to bring it into language. There are also, however, the politics involved in marketing def-

13 Introduction initions to the people, seeking their agreement and empowerment. Articulation and persuasion attempt to create and institutionalize what I call the nomos of America, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as the Law or the "law of life," in theological and legal contexts. As I explore in chapters i and 2., in the American Puritan context the nomos was foundationally a question of language, of the Law of the Father which meant "God" and "God's Law," as well as what Lacanian psychoanalytic critics may term language itself. God's Law as a law of life was manifest in the Bible. The question, however, was how to read it, how to know what the Law of the Father was saying, so as to express the nomos to the people and to live by it. Thus I explore the nomos of America in various forms, such as a formal grammar of articulation, a law of political realization, or an ethos of conduct, depending on the context. My particular interest is in what diverse expressions are able to say about America, which a politically controlled discourse cannot or refuses to articulate, given the conception of language it employs. In this sense, my task is akin to that of Priscilla Wald in Constituting Americans, in terms of analyzing the "Official stories [that] constitute Americans" (2). "Official stories are narratives that surface in the rhetoric of nationalist movements and initiatives - legal, political, and literary" (2.), into which citizens and persons are supposed to translate and otherwise incorporate their personal stories (identities and experiences) in the process of becoming American. Wald establishes Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Harriet Wilson, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Gertrude Stein as loci around which she analyzes various stories that critically disrupt what is "official." I endeavour in my analyses to supplement Wald's work with a literary-philosophical inquiry that develops thoughts and theories which emerge from texts and their disruptive language and ideas. The loci that I establish are Anne Hutchinson, Mary Rowlandson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Abraham Lincoln, John C. Calhoun, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rebecca Harding Davis, Sojourner Truth, and George Washington Cable. The readings of these texts are generated in affinity with Anne Norton's foundational premise in Alternative Americas: A Reading of Antebellum Political Culture: "Americans have ordered their understanding of themselves through contradiction ... It is fitting that the portrayals of America as a comprehensive consensus should be opposed for their partiality" (3). The white Americans in my study do consider themselves to be legitimately part of the polity and thus perform critique - indeed, outrage - as American patriotic work. "The genesis of the nation," says Norton, "in a collective act of will, however accomplished, however signified, entailed an affirmation of the latent right of insurrection. It suggested the possibility of endless and

14 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

varied self-determination" (4). But that "collective will" was a very limited collectivity, constituted first by exclusions. According to Daniel N. Hoffman, "by some estimates fewer than five percent of the population had taken part in choosing the delegates to the ratifying conventions" (63). How this collectivity signified the "nation" (which is a term I put in question) specifically excluded many from being granted that "right" of insurrection. The white women I examine called themselves "American"; for African Americans, accepting the label was more conflictive. Even when it was desired, its acceptance generated conflictive politics. Largely, but not exclusively, the "insurrections" for justice are found in literature. For those without access to political power, literature enables the possibility of public dissemination while providing a venue for diverse expression. Here "diverse expression" also indicates a different relation to language in which writing signifies multiply and sometimes otherwise than in ways that politics can appropriate. In this sense, the literary holds the potential for an alterity of signification to be made manifest as a revelation of America. In the long history of what is now the United States of America, which includes Puritanism, there are significant moments where the hegemonic nomos of America resorted to the judging of its opponents negatively as anti-nomian, fearing the power of their ideas and responding with powerful unilateral action - censure, imprisonment, war - in order to silence debate and maintain governance. I investigate specific instances of anti-nomian conflict, played out in language, and the sorts of unnegotiable, aporetic spaces that emerged in articulations of the anti-nomian ideal. The most important of such "incidents" is the Civil War. Here the nomos as a law of life implicated the ethics of the definition of America and the moral constitution of its people's lives. In constitutional terms, slavery was recognized as the issue that challenged how federalism was conceived as a realization of America. What proved to be the terrible irony, pointing directly to the aporia between the nature of the ideal and the real, was recognized by Lincoln as he sought from the language of the Constitution an answer to the nature of the union, the legality of secession, and the justice of slavery: the "Constitution does not expressly say" (Lincoln, "First" 2,2.0). Ultimately, his response to this aporia in the language of constitution was that "right makes might" (Lincoln, "Address" 130). The "correct" attribution of the definition in the face of language's inexpression would be proven materially in military power. Lincoln's rhetoric, which speaks over the aporia, was and is remarkably persuasive; however, it should not be so persuasive over subsequent historiography that it comes to cover the fact that "might" also creates "right" in the political terms it requires. Northern

15

Introduction

military victory allowed for Lincoln's unionist-republican reading of the Constitution to re-establish the principles of Tightness, as pronounced in subsequent constitutional amendments, and under which, by and large, Americans live today. The importance of the constitutional and language crises of the Civil War gains a somewhat different showing when their mise en scene is shaped within a diorama of history in the colonies concerning language and expression and the power to set their terms. The first scene is that of the Antinomian Controversy, the Trial and the Examination of Anne Hutchinson. Billed as "a monumental crisis of language" by Patricia Caldwell ("Antinomian" 346) and by Charles Francis Adams as "hot wrangling over the unknowable" (qtd. in Caldwell, "Antinomian" 346), the Antinomian Controversy yokes together what would later come to be quintessentially American issues: the possibility of reading the text that fundamentally constitutes the society - here, the Bible; later, the Constitution - and individual readings and realizations of the law and the power of a hierarchy's censure. What Anne Hutchinson points up, with Hawthorne and Lincoln to follow her in the ensuing chapters, is the constitutive gap between the Word as God's language as such and the word as human expression in writing and speech. It is not that the language of the Constitution of the United States is that of God or that the Constitution becomes another god. However, there are analogous moments worth considering in terms of the function of linguistic performatives, their readability, the changing nature of what they produce, and most of all, their authority in people's minds. For if the New Jerusalem of the Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony strove toward redemption and the image of perfection here on earth, the Constitution strove for the "more Perfect" possibility of states united according to right principles of justice. Each of these cases is cast in a triadic or trinitarian temporality of creation, revelation, and redemption, which organize the difficulties of thinking about and working within their relations. Founding the Massachusetts Bay Company and declaring independence create the possibility of the coming of the New Jerusalem and of America respectively. Attempting, through ministerial pronouncements in congregations and the Magistrates' Court, to discern the balance between the pragmatic work of building and sanctifying the New Jerusalem on earth and the state of grace that justifies it was the principal problem of the Puritans. Writing and then discerning how to put the Constitution into operation, so as to enable America continuously to come into being - its procedural republican status - is still very much a problem. Just as the New Jerusalem is here in possibility and always "not yet," so too is America not yet here as a realized union of democracy and justice. According to theo-logos,

16 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

revelation of the ideal of America confirms the existence of such a perfect union. Just as language can do when trying to speak about redemption, it can only name this kind of existence, which is "not yet" in itself as "more Perfect," as something that exceeds ontic existence in the here and now. The trace of this excessive existence of the ideal reveals the tension of real life. Real life's constitution is yoked to, and indeed governed by, an ideal of perfection that is simultaneously an absolute alterity. America is radically Other, and the United States is constituted by the relation to this Other; which is to say, how it can be thought, represented, and brought into being. The framers of the Constitution represented it in creating democracy as the system of representing differences in relation, and justice as the system that seeks to order relations according to the principles of Tightness, while judging the performance of democracy. And it should be no surprise that in charged moments, the pursuit of America as Other and as the union of democracy and justice is represented by the question of the other as a racial body in the day-to-day reality of the United States. To have U.S. systems of democracy and justice unite in their dealings with race would perhaps be a sign that "good works" do admit of some kind of sanctification of how America is realized. Allowing theology to put pressure on political philosophy and praxis amplifies the nature of representation and unfolds its ethical stakes. If in political philosophy, democracy and justice can only represent their ideals and so live in the tension of trial and realization, theology reminds how that structure is constitutive of humanity itself, as created in the image of God. Genesis, on the one hand, and the idea of redemption, on the other, call for thinking about a different order of thought and temporality in relation to which philosophy, idealism, and politics are made possible. In a Genesis narrative, their possibility occurs only after the break into human time, space, and language after the expulsion from the Garden. A philosophical conception of humanity can only begin in thought, which is in theological terms only possible east of Eden. Philosophy is able to recognize the limits of the ontic domain as signified variously by such concepts as Ideal Form or Being; but for theology, such concepts trace only the perfection of the Garden, where Adam and Eve are perfect and where language functions in a one-toone relation of the name constituting the thing, with no remainder. However, theology seeks also the order that enables even Being as such, and consequently the possibility of thinking Being, which is the Creator and creation as such. Spoken into being in an act of language that enables the ideal of human language from which it will be derived subsequently, creation details that God is not the world; rather, the world as humans can conceive it is derived from God's image. This double re-

iy Introduction move suggests a certain negativity: that idealism and philosophy more generally are very much image-inanes made possible and productive from their prior and constitutive relation to that which is wholly otherwise, but to which their possibility is enabled in reflection. Humanity's construction of the world in relation to human ideals, Genesis reminds, is a dynamic that can never be fulfilled, such that human terms could meet in a one-to-one relation with the terms of a perfect language which could make the ideal a reality. Only the in-breaking of the Alterity can make such a union. So, Genesis also reminds, ideal strivings that try to repair the world in democracy and justice must try to think in the impossible time and space of a return to the Garden of Creation that is a rush toward redemption as itself the image of the relation to the absolute Other that enables such human strivings at all. In order to theorize the difficulty of language as manifestation as it annunciates itself into politics and theology in America, I begin with the Examination and Trial of Anne Hutchinson. "The Justice of Sentencing, or How (Not) to Speak" explores how the tension between revelation as direct annunciation and revelation by the word instigates conflict in the political sphere dominated by men who have an investment in reading the nomos in materially governable ways. While the court examination begins with the charge laid by the magistrates and ministers that Mrs Hutchinson accused them of preaching a covenant of works over that of grace, by the end of the trial in the Church of Boston, the irony is that they figure her as an overdetermined materiality, equating her doctrines with an aberrant body. Their anger at her theological difference and increasing influence within the community becomes simultaneously in their minds a problem of gender dialectically realized with a female sex that has exceeded its bounds. Though inextricably woven together, theology, politics, and gender are constructed as distinct cords within arguments that respond to the shifting power dynamics in the Examination and Trial. This is not to say that power overtakes Puritan belief; rather, my interest is in tracking how and in what kind of discursive construction power manifests itself within the confines of belief, where in this theocracy, belief cannot be thought as only a theological term, because theology is always realized within gendered and politicized discourses. As the title of the chapter suggests, the theoretical focus concerns whether it is possible to speak a content that is annunciated to the soul as something otherwise than socially constructed communicative language can represent or trans-scribe (literally carry in to language). On the pragmatic level, how (not) to speak is, of course, about word choice for clarity, where the choice negotiates between fealty to the content alterity to be represented and recognition of the dynamics involved with

18 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

the audience in the context of reception. However, while remaining within a certain theological discourse, the broader issues concern the creation of language, the relation between the Word and the communicative words, syntax, and semantic laws of human language. If revelation annunciates itself to the soul, the product of which is the self witnessing an opening of human words in Scripture, how is it possible to have an ethical relation to revelation when one is faced with the justice of sentencing? - which I mean as the translation of what is not of human language into something communicable and understandable. Employing Emmanuel Levinas's terms, how is it possible to speak Saying, to trace Saying in the Said, while recognizing its necessary failure ? (Otherwise 34-8). If Saying, which I term as a certain annunciation in the context of the Examination and Trial, performs to language but cannot be captured within it, how is it possible to hear its trace in the Said, in a communicative discourse, in phrasing that seeks to articulate annunciation, where articulation is conceived as enabling a passage through language to listeners? Opening of the word would require a consonant opening of hearing selves that would overcome the dynamics of power, gender, and the govern-mentality of social control over language's meanings. I argue that Anne Hutchinson's use of "light" attempts but fails in this regard; however, it directs attention to the issues in the transcripts concerning grace and works, judgment and expression, privacy and publicity, distinctions between the soul, body, and spirit and, most generally, that of knowledge of election. All of these issues realize different aspects of the overall problem of "passage," which I hold under the rubric of the spirit and the letter. Theology provides appropriate terminology in the concept of the Trinity for theorizing language, specifically passage into language, the possibility of manifestation, and an approach to reading and addressing the materiality of language. Analogous to how God takes the form of flesh and spirit, thought is figured into language and meaning. One needs to think of language as a certain trans-figuration, in terms of the irreducible figural status of its construction in transition from thought. Thought does not become something other at the expense of itself but, rather, "remains entire in itself and assumes the form" (Augustine 14), or is figured as word. The Examination and Trial transcripts show Anne Hutchinson as captive to a number of governing forces, not the least of which is the seeming inability of communicative language to accept and make publicly hearable the manifestation of alterity. If Hutchinson's conversion experience involved the turn to a new language, the trans-figuration that opens the word, then Puritan Boston demanded its own turn toward its socially and legally accepted form of speaking the name of the

19

Introduction

Father. Hutchinson's situation demonstrates how conversion finds itself performing a certain captivity narrative, one caught between the poetics of private expression and the public construction of meaning. The irony might be phrased as the recognition that language as the Name of the Father cannot communicate the Saying of the Father. Chapter 2,, " 'A' Confession: How to Avoid Speaking the Name of the Father," amplifies the relation between conversion and captivity, first with an examination of Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, and then with an analysis of the politics of (not) speaking in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Rowlandson's narrative is a confession not of sin but of trauma, generated by both Indian captivity and the return to Puritan life. The ostensible desire for restoration to a Puritan world view, whose discursive symptom in the narrative is typology, is challenged by the desire for the kind of transgressive agency she experienced within Indian captivity. The tension between these two manifests itself as performative friction between the content of the narrated events and the discourse of their telling. While typology seeks to figure a providential significance onto worldly events, it does so by drawing readers' attention to the actuality and literality of the event itself. For typology to argue for signs of providence, the suffering incurred has to be materially real, and here Rowlandson's rhetoric dwells sumptuously in the literal, in a carnal materiality that typological form cannot fully digest. Through a complex interplay between abjection and introjection dramatized over the sites of food, maternity, and community, Rowlandson never fully dissolves the letter into the spirit, clinging to a new female agency facilitated by captivity as "sweet meat," devoured "with the blood about [her] mouth" (335). Ironically, it is the written discursive structure in which she hopes to dissolve personal agency that facilitates its revelation in reading. A reversed dynamic plays out in The Scarlet Letter, for the mode of public censure of Hester Prynne that singularly labels her under the law for marginalization reveals how the subject is able both to adhere to the letter of the law and to appropriate its office, repointing its performance in order to rearticulate herself to the community. Working with the A as a sign both of the law and of language, I consider Hester's embroidery as loopholes and as script, emblematizing what I call her "versive" agency. Not exactly subversive of the letter's office or predicated upon inversion of its logic, Hester's writing circumlocutes as a writing around the A with threads of the same agency that enabled her to break the law with her adultery. Embroidery works within this letter of the law, piercing it and affixing it to the self, so as to sentence the public from within the same logic of power. Drawing on Judith Butler's theories of the citational subject, I argue for the embroidered A as a

2.o The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

citation, signalling at once Hester's marginalized position and the ability of that margin to work within the logic of power to create a conversion that reassociates the community to her. However, while Hester appropriates the law's signification, Pearl underscores how signification can also performatively exceed its appropriation. Her speech and actions allegorize how the office or intention of the law cannot fully control the effect of the sentences it utters, because language is always an overdetermined medium. Pearl is the secret of Hester and Dimmesdale revealed as "all plainly manifest" (180). She annunciates this revelation pointedly in her speech, but in so doing, she demonstrates how manifestation and annunciation function otherwise than as social communication. The problem with presence is not its reality but its readability, and in terms not just of Pearl but also of Dimmesdale. He performs a version of this problem in two ways. First, whether his guilt is "there," manifested as a writing on the body, depends upon who is reading and the reader's sympathies. Second, in his frequent public confessions of sin, he speaks as the third person of the "sinful" family but also in the third person. He speaks of himself as "him," and I turn to question the ethics of this kind of circumfession which "says" the self in the third. Finally, any analysis of how the letter speaks includes the performance of The Scarlet Letter by implication, which I consider briefly in terms of how the text speaks and so avoids communicating history. Just as the scarlet letter found in Surveyor Pue's documents communicates to the narrator's " sensibiliites" but evades the analysis of his mind (32,), so I consider whether the past does not make passage to and thus be articulated in The Scarlet Letter, but on the level of the letter, materially manifested; which reading can apprehend but not fully comprehend, or can sense but not know. From the issues around the performance of the law opened in The Scarlet Letter., I turn to consider the political discourses that read the law, focused around the documents that unite the states in America. If what is annunciated into language and so made manifest there as an alterity cannot be read on its own terms, but must always be understood only insofar as language can phrase it, I focus on the relation between justice and representation, in terms of language, politics, and the law. Can there be justice in representation? Can justice be rendered by and through representation? Chapter 3 examines the ways in which two narratives of justice, as articulated in the writings of Abraham Lincoln and John C. Calhoun respectively, are based upon divergent readings of the Constitution as to nature of the country it means to constitute. What is at issue here is a theory of representation appropriate to the definition of American democracy in which the different interests and

2.1 Introduction

identities of Americans can be realized and united together in justice to all citizens. The Constitution constitutes the United States as it constitutes the definition of persons, citizens, and the right principles by which they can realize their interests as the good. However, as is well known, in the antebellum period the Constitution allowed the enslavement of African Americans as a legitimate interest in the South, creating the controversy over how realization of this good could simultaneously be right and thus opening a gap between the principles of justice and those of humanitarian ethics. With the Civil War and the reconstruction of the country to conform to the unionist-republican reading of the Constitution, the Constitution itself was quickly amended to redefine the nature of justice through a redefinition of the person and the citizen. While positive in intent and humanitarian in effect, this unionist move begins the larger project of employing a constructed national political category (citizenship) as a limiting cultural category (American), which devolves over time, I argue, into a coercive pressure on the different identities of persons. Together, the positive amendment of the Constitution and the negative restriction of identity reopen the possibility of considering how the former confederate-democratic narrative can be rethought in terms of the post-Reconstruction Constitution. As a theory of federalism, can it restore constitutional legitimacy to a pluralistic formulation of justice appropriate to the makeup of an American democracy? Central to this critique is the argument that the Constitution promotes plurality, not singularity, and resists the concretization of a national sense of justice based upon a dominant numerical majority. And while confederate-democracy initially theorizes itself in terms of the rights of states, I argue that the theory can be reconstructed to articulate the rights of persons as well. Based upon an amended Constitution, the reconstructed confederatedemocratic reading can help to ameliorate the politically and socially repressive structures that the unionist-republican narrative has left as its legacy. This reading comes by way of thinking about the promotion of plurality and equalization of minorities inherent in confederate-democracy in terms of the discourses of contemporary identity politics and the self as a confederacy of difference. While confederate-democracy was regarded as the major opponent of unionist-republicanism, the latter was not without its own internal critique. In chapter 4 I turn to Harriet Beecher Stowe as a northerner and unionist who retheorized the relationship between political equality and social difference in ethical and non-repressive ways. Stowe's theories of whole womanhood, the value of sentiment, and the spiritual unity of religion provide the terms for her articulation of an ethical

2.2, The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

justice in our relations with others. By considering her skill as a biblical reader, I argue that Stowe recuperates the Old Testament from its subordination to the New in order to promote the concept that sentiment and love are only as useful as the material ethical action they motivate. In this sense, while critical scholarship since Ann Douglas and Jane Tompkins on feminization and the power of sentiment has been fundamental in helping to explain the literary and political value of Uncle Tom's Cabin, it has tended to generalize the connection between Stowe's theology and politics and her commitment to "feeling" over "doing." Her "religious" writings present a different emphasis. While Jesus is presented as the archetypal blend of masculinity and femininity, Mary is given the priority as the material site that produces. And what she produces, according to Stowe, is no sensitive man hoping for tears to change the world. Stowe's men, with good sentiments and who might " feel right," make good speeches, but their inaction is figured as reprehensible. Feminization is not just a plea for "feeling" but, more importantly, a call for "doing" that transforms the world. As a product of her anti-Lutheran reading of the Pauline texts and her feminist reading of Genesis, her combinations of femininity and masculinity and of sentiment and activity are predicated on an understanding of divine unity as that which contains but does not subordinate human difference. God is a plurality of states - indeed, an infinity. Any federalist political structure must become a just representation of this understanding, thought through at the level of the person and the nation. Any unifying sense of justice must function in concordance with the biblical commandments, which detail the ethical conduct appropriate to individuals. Unethically, then, does unionist justice redefine the person under the law, and inappropriately does the law prioritize a discourse of economics rather than ethics, an apportioning of humans into fractions (slaves as three-fifths of a person) and laws that conceive justice in terms of money rather than human relations. In trying to build a national community economically, the law promotes a possessive individualism over the ethical individualism found in the covenant with God. Within the context of joined differences, the figure of racial mixture is positioned as the abject product of both the unionist and confederate models of the federalist person. Chapter 5 explores the ways in which racial mixture is presented in the writings of Stowe and Rebecca Harding Davis as a site in which difference is politically, legally, racially, and socially constructed by nineteenth-century patriarchy. As "the mulatto" becomes the bastard of the social contract - constructed within it, yet expelled from it - the various means of liberating "the mulatto" and

2-3

Introduction

otherwise negotiating a legally recognized relation to the Father (as pater and patria) inform possibilities for other sites of human difference that are constructed and rendered into subordinated positions within patriarchal " democracy." Here I consider, most particularly, femininity and homosexuality both within the traditional white patriarchal narrative and within those of predominantly masculinist African American discourses of emancipatory resistance. The availability of abolitionist discourse for structuring arguments for female equality with men finds a sustained and compelling formulation in Davis's Waiting for the Verdict, which weaves race, class, and gender together and into arguments whose resolution were found in the Civil War. What is unique in Davis's work, however, is the view that equality of the sexes is further complicated by gendered identity politics, such that arguments for equal treatment of femininity are structured in terms of both male and female bodies, male performances of femininity, and female performances of masculinity. In this novel, the mixed-race character passing as white in the white community allegorizes the situation of the closeted homosexual living in fear of being "outed," something that resonates strongly in Davis's language. The captivity of the closet or passing provides access to "rights" afforded to "normal white men," underscoring how "rights" in American democracy are rather dissimulated privileges. Working from George Harris's narratives in Uncle Tom's Cabin and from Sarah J. Hale's Liberia, I examine the politics of positing Liberia as a type of Canaan, a discussion that ushers in a consideration of postcolonial politics and modern and contemporary liberation theology. Related to Stowe's maintenance of the distinction of the Hebrew Bible within an overarching Christian unity, the different uses of Exodus tropology in African American texts underscore the difference of chosenness as they relate racial distinction to the ethical project of Exodus and emancipation. Ethical projects and ethical intentions do not always involve ethical means of promotion, and I suggest this consequence in terms of the structure of representation itself, rather than in terms of conscious underhandedness. The question that interests me is whether representation is by definition unethical, because of how it inevitably appropriates and translates the other into the limited terms of the discourses of power within which representation can be most easily read. The alterity of the other may be the very thing against which injustice is dealt; however, that alterity gets represented as simply difference within an economy of essential sameness in order for justice to be fashioned into something legal, political, or economic and then rendered. To say that representing the other as simply different is just an aesthetic aberration

2.4

The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

in representation, prioritizing a political or legal definition of representation while leaving unchallenged whether all are, in fact, united in "essential sameness," incorporates a flaw in representation as part of the cost of rendering justice. What I explore in chapter 6 are some of the long-term effects of that cost. In choosing George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes for analysis, I seek to yoke politically charged linguistic and literary issues to the linguistic and literarily charged political issues in the discourses of federalism; for en route to the conclusion of this study, I show how unionism and confederacy exemplify the always multidisciplinary nature of representation and the effects that such multidisciplinarity has on ethics and justice. Because Cable brings proto-ethnography, literature, and politics together, he stands in my mind as an early practitioner of what is now called cultural studies, and his writing provides a context for how contemporary advocacies of justice within cultural studies still assume the same cost. I begin with a critical account of the relation between the aesthetics and the politics of advocacy and examine the multiple sorts of representations needed to translate the discourses of other cultures into that of American justice. While The Grandissimes pushes the boundaries of a single national, unionist-republican theory of justice, the aesthetics of representation that it employs battle the justice of this possibility. The multiple renderings of minority languages, cultures, and discourses, which perform as a confederacy of difference, cannot be contained by a logic of union. Cable's text comes to allegorize the contemporary scene of a multicultural America whose vehicle of representation is still predominantly unionist, while its goals are predominantly confederate. This mismatch causes more tension and conflict between justice and advocacy than it does resolution of them. Finally, I consider how strains in contemporary social and political criticism employ a unionist-republican discourse to theorize what they see as an American sociality rendered dysfunctional by its fragmentation into diversity. Without a cohesive unity of social similarity, America has become a procedural republic in which government has been restricted from promoting a unitary definition of the common good. Just as Lincoln turned in his later career to the invocation of God as that to which American society and its sense of justice are answerable, so contemporary critics have begun to theorize how a common sense of morality can be reinstituted into American society and government to combat fragmentation. In response to these concerns, I suggest that a conception of unity is productive for a cohesive sociality only in a metaphysical sense, and it is this metaphysical sense that enables the ontological being of a pluralized sociality. The

2.5

Introduction

appeal to God is an appeal to an absolute alterity as constitutive of persons and their constitutions. People cannot, then, be indifferent to difference. If God is postulated as alterity and goodness simultaneously, then any sociality constituted by the invocation of God is one that is non-in-different. If today's society is to represent this sense of a non-in-different sociality, to trace it within ontology, then it must constitute government as a certain kind of confederacy that protects and promotes the rights of difference.

i The Justice of Sentencing, or How (Not) to Speak For where a testament is, there must also of necessity be the death of the testator. For a testament is of force after men are dead: otherwise it is of no strength at all while the testator liveth. Hebrews 9:16-17T

In the Epistle to the Hebrews, Paul culminates his discussion of the old covenant and the kinds of material sacrifices it demands with the difference of the new: "How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God? And for this cause he is the mediator of the new testament, that by means of death, for the redemption of the transgressions that were under the first testament, they which are called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance" (Heb. 9:14-15). In Christian theological terms, this passage is important in explaining the primacy of the Crucifixion, that in the death of the Son, the new covenant is "cut" (berit) with the people. The substitution of the new for the old comes by way of the substitution of the living Word for the death of the Son. Such is the process of revelation. It effects a kind of transubstantiation or transference of life from the body to the Word. At the crossroads of this creative transfer is the Crucifixion as emblematic sign. For the testament truly to be revealed, to give and to save, its materiality is given God's breath from the human body. The Son becomes the sign; the Word becomes life. There is something quite literally productive and wondrous in this logic in terms of language, the nature of meaning, and ultimately literature in general as a testament of a people. How do the documents of American writing testify, and to what, in the wake of their testators ? In the exploration of the transcripts of the Examination and Trial of Anne Hutchinson found in this chapter, I inquire as to how these documents testify and so speak forth antinomianism as part of the breath

2,7 The Justice of Sentencing

with which early America is infused with life. What kind of shapes and states does such an antinomianism take? Anne Hutchinson as testator of a revelation of union certainly dies in 1643, from a Puritan viewpoint, in the wilderness of the heretic (near Rye, New York) and at the hand of "Indian savages," an end that participates in giving an afterlife to her transcribed testament.2 However, I wish to explore how the theological understanding of revelatory testament informs both the structure and the afterlife of Anne Hutchinson's language as reported in the Examination and Trial transcripts. Specifically, how she was speaking, I argue, transfigures what she was saying, and I examine where and how she attempts to manifest the creative breath in her words as a revelation of union with Christ. In turn, I explore the dialectical exchange between Hutchinson's language and biblical theology. The application of theology to the historical fact of her language offers the possibility of rethinking theological issues, particularly those relevant to materiality and spirituality, manifestation and revelation, the letter and the spirit of reading the Word. In this regard, what Anne Hutchinson's language highlights are both the creativity and the potential difficulties arising from the structure and status of agency in language: while people certainly speak and write language, language and meaning in language may also speak through us, synonymously or contradictorily, simultaneously or in the afterlife of our words. When the testator lives, one may engage the issues of how to speak, but also how not to speak, choosing one's words in a dialogic relation between these two. The lesson of Anne Hutchinson's trial, and perhaps antinomianism thought broadly, certainly concerns how (not) to speak, when the context of reception is hostile, and when making a "mistake" may cost a life. Her decisions concerning how to speak may, in their very choices, perform how not to speak of God, in the sense of how it is not possible to render the Word in human language. Or, put differently, every rendition of speech of this fundamental Other is constitutively rife with misprision. This formulation, following Derrida, would move from the everyday problem of choice of phrasing to an examination of the work of silence, avoidance, denial, and de-negation, whose relation to apophantic discourse is one of various points on a continuum. Thus, in question in this chapter is antinomianism as a theology, philosophy, and performance of language that "goes against the law" in its speech and writing in ways that transgress the authoritative laws of speech and writing. It speaks incorrectly, and so against the law or doctrine, but as a certain apophantic discourse that seeks revelation of the meaning as the spirit of the law, as necessarily traced in contra-diction to the authorized and governable discourse. It performs "how not to speak" as a certain poetics, as, modifying Derrida, that which "exceeds even the order and the structure [and

28 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

semantics] of predicative discourse. It 'is' not and does not say what it 'is.' It is written completely otherwise" ("How" 74). The conception of language that I wish to develop is derived from the implications of theology and biblical hermeneutics, and it requires some explanation at the outset. According to St Paul, death creates the possibility of mediation, which is to say in the divine context that for the Word of God to employ human language as its signifying system, the letter is rendered as a dead materiality. As the Son, Christ is the fundamental Sign, in which is the perfect union of Spirit and Word, which must undergo a certain death. The letter undergoes an erasure so as to give significance and power to meaning. Meaning becomes the spirit of the word. In so doing, this transfer leaves the relation between spirit and temporal word as revelatory but not redeemed, not perfect. Human language as testament always functions in the image of God's language, and in Paul's Christian theo-logical understanding of it, the relationship between the letter and the spirit in human language reflects the nature of God's language, if in a broken or fallen way. As God's language is perfect creation, so human language is imperfect construction. If Word and Spirit are simultaneous and synonymous in God's language, then in human language, word and spirit are separated. The word mediates as a representation, and its meaning or spirit is gained by passing through the word or "letter." Meaning is never perfect in human understanding, but awaits its redemption in union with Christ. In a Pauline Christian theo-logic, human language is always in a proximate relation to God's Word or Eternal Spirit, because it can always show or reveal the structure of revelation and redemption manifested in God's Word, even if it can never achieve that perfect relation itself. This is one way of understanding how human language can be in the image of God's language and so reveal it, but always only in a representative way. In this sense, the image is not that of mirror reflection but, rather, a figural representation. That difference does not put human language far away from God's language at all. Its representative structure is in proximate relation to God's simultaneity of Word and Spirit. Crossing the letter of human language, passing through materiality, and eternally enlivening testament through the death of the testator reveal this proximity. God's "simultaneity" is free of time. Humans and our language are bound by it. The eternal life of spirit, its continual resurrection as new meaning each time it is read, is one human process that traces how humanity exists in this proximate image of God. The desire, I argue, of preserving language by seeking an eternity of writing and reading, which is to say testament, is for miraculous annunciation, the in-breaking of spiritual redemption or perfect meaning through the ontic, with and on its own

2.9

The Justice of Sentencing

time. While any reading always forges some relation to a meaning, enabling a diversity of meanings for any text at any time, the eternal return to read is to seek meaning's relation to Meaning or Spirit. Text is always in a proximate relation to creation and redemption, and thus reading texts is our way of always striving to know who we are and where we are in relation to Spirit, or Truth, to use a more philosophical term. Knowledge is the striving after this relation. In my particular context of American literature and Americans reading their literature, much is opened up by exploring how texts testify. Examining a text's language in this theo-logic of testament becomes revelatory of what the text is in relation to what it was and what it shall be, to use phrasing that maintains a trinitarian logic of existence. Listening for the theological resonance of American language pays attention to another order (the Other's order) of signification, which stands outside of time, articulating creation and redemption, whose trinitarian unity with the word as text establishes the unseen mise en scene against which reading America takes its energy and possibility. What I hope is clear is that in explaining the structure and significance of a Pauline understanding of the relationship between the letter and the spirit, I am taking the opportunity to argue for its relation and relevance to human language. Understanding this relation makes a difference, for instance, in how one reads Anne Hutchinson's words. From that particular venue, I begin to set the ground for how language that does not only or specifically concern biblical theological questions can still be impacted upon by a theo-logical understanding and a theo-logic of reading. The relation to Puritanism is, of course, specific. As Darren Staloff details, "In identifying the word, or logos, with the Holy Ghost, or spirit, orthodox ministers had asserted the indispensability of preaching the word as the necessary cause or 'means' of salvation or grace" (45). Language is the necessary medium into which Spirit can and within which union can occur. Hence the necessity to preach, to testify, and to read the Word. What I will explore in subsequent chapters, however, is how literary, judicial, and political language that engages issues of ethics, morals, and justice which are definitive of America also functions in this theo-logic relation between the letter and the spirit, revelation and redemption. REINVESTING MATERIALITY: FEMALE LIGHT, MALE BODY

In the Examination and Trial transcripts and related contexts, what appears as bound together as that of ecclesiastical and civil law is the effort to work out the relation between justification and sanctification, grace and works, and the authority of private behaviour and public

30 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

behaviour. Since Anne Hutchinson is a woman and the magistrates and ministers are men, sex and gender issues are integral and not separate concerns.3 They too contribute to the power dynamics of this controversy. There is a tendency in much of the scholarship on the Antinomian Controversy to separate the theological from the gendered political issues. This is to say that while most critics recognize that both gender and theology are issues, most separate the two, aligning gender with politics, and making it "the real thing" in question; or they nod to gender and delve into Hutchinson's theological errors as the heart of the matter. I will argue in further detail in this chapter as to why theology, gender, and politics are discursively wound together. Their separation in criticism does a disservice to the language of the historical records of the event. Recent scholarship, however, is correcting the problem, which, to be charitable, employed adherence to disciplinary boundaries as a mechanism for not noticing or valuing the constitutive relevance of gender and gendered differences in rhetoric, poetics, and politics.4 To my mind, for all the attention to the impact of rhetoric on theology and biblical hermeneutics, there is a dissatisfying lack of consideration regarding how Anne Hutchinson's distinct rhetoric manifests what I call a theo-logic of language. Her theology transforms her language - how it is annunciated and how annunciation relates to meaning. Impacted in that transformation is an important consideration of how language can function as manifestation, a "material shape," to use Ann Kibbey's terminology, and as revelation. Manifestation and revelation exist together in the dynamic tension of the relationship between the letter and the spirit; however, what I feel that Hutchinson's language demonstrates is the way in which the manifested letter is performative in its own right and difficult to pass through. In negotiating the passage to what manifest language reveals, which the pursuit of meaning will always do, a trace of irreducible alterity is confronted, apprehended, or perhaps felt by the reader, but is never fully comprehended. And this alterity is part of its revelation. Importantly, then, the language that Hutchinson articulates implicates a distinct theology, particularly in terms of what divine revelation does to human language, and what and how human language reveals in turn. Following Susan Howe's claim that "The antinomian controversy was the primordial struggle of North American literary expression" (3-4) and the idea that grace provides a new aesthetic (Knight 2.1), I pursue how Hutchinson's language fashions a unique poetics that appears in crucial moments of biblical interpretation. While ultimately coming to focus on eighteenth-century women's speech, Laura Henigman notes of "all Puritan women's discourse in the seventeenth century: that their speech was dangerous to themselves and

31 The Justice of Sentencing

others, that any dialogue in which they engaged would be highly coercive, that in any event they were silenced either through exacted conformity or banishment, excommunication or ... execution" (i). Anne Hutchinson's speech did become dangerous to herself, because its influence troubled the stability of the polity. That speech was first theological speech, "teaching" akin to preaching in the privacy of her home. The influence of that theological speech, however, had political ramifications, with criticisms of congregational ministers and subsequently magistrates. As both Ann Kibbey and Darren Staloff detail, antinomian speech was aggressive and sometimes suggestive of violence against ministers and the governor (Kibbey 93, Staloff 59), thus reversing the coercion that the male, patriarchal, intellectual, class-based governmentality sought to impose on women.5 As Amy Schrager Lang phrases it, "the problem of Anne Hutchinson ... [is] the problem of the public woman" (4). Antinomianism has been fashioned in its critical reception from its earliest accounts as the figure of the woman speaking - talking back, talking past, speaking for herself, and speaking otherwise. In theological terms, what is on trial in the Antinomian Controversy is the issue of how to express God's "speech" as a voice that reveals the Word. What is in contest is the factuality of Hutchinson's claim to private revelation, insofar as she has any ability to express it in a language convincing to those in the public who hold the human and temporal power to judge it as true. To be blunt, this woman must convince male magistrates and ministers of the validity of her experience through the accuracy of her theological language. Fearing the political power that her theological teaching was gaining, the men whom Hutchinson was criticizing felt that they must examine and try her language. Logically and theologically, they could not examine and try interiority (Hutchinson's private conscience and the content of her revelation) other than by its expression; but not incidentally, expression is judged in terms of its external condition and product, that is, whether it speaks to their public discourse and the kind of influence over others it performs. Rendered schematically, the private, interior revelation unbound to the female is judged in its expression by the public, external, temporally governable standard of expression of the male. There is little room in this structure, at least politically, for Hutchinson's language to perform any alterity appropriate to the experience of direct revelation and still be convincing to the governors of public discourse, and particularly so when what she is voicing is a certain an-archy that a discourse of public governance cannot get its hands on or wrap its mind around. As an articulation of the wholly otherwise - an annunciation from God Hutchinson's speech cannot be heard by anyone who has not had her experience. I take issue, therefore, with Jim Egan's otherwise indispensable

3 z The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

book, Authorizing Experience, because of his erasure of Hutchinson's claims to experience, upon which, it seems to me, and particularly Governor Winthrop in the Examination, everything turns. Egan states that he has "no interest in participating in the ongoing debate over what precisely led the magistrates to banish Hutchinson and whether Hutchinson and the magistrates' theological differences represent competing orthodoxies or variations within a single religious ideology" (67). Bracketing the theological issues causes a serious misreading on Egan's part: "Nowhere in her two trials nor in other contemporaneous accounts of the Antinomian controversy does Hutchinson describe or defend her actions through recourse to the authority of experience" (79). Indeed, as I hope to show, practically everything she does and says is grounded in this most important experience of revelation a Puritan could have - and particularly so for a woman. The authority of female religious experience and the influence it can generate in politics are precisely what need to be shut down by male authority. As different speech, where difference is the comparative and evaluative term in relation to the male, public discourse of the law, Hutchinson's speech can only be condemned. As "different" and ultimately "wrong," her speech can only be heard as proffering a competitive content that would unbind social and political behaviour in the Company because of its theological "errors." It is important to underscore that the theological issues are not just justifications for what today we might lump together as political concerns - language, female power, governmentality, and the like. In speaking about the simultaneity of theology and politics in the Puritan theocracy, I hope to implicate the mutual constitution, rather than the separation, of theology and political philosophy more generally. As Janice Knight formulates it, "To be sure, religion was at the heart of New England life and of the contentions of these decades; but the debates about divine essence and human nature, about the underlying meaning of history and the constitution of the church in the world, involved larger questions than doctrine alone could embrace. Personal allegiances political affiliations, convictions about the self and society, Utopian ideals, and practical politics were enmeshed in the events here described" (30) - utterly and inextricably "enmeshed." The covenant in Massachusetts Bay is a political structure just as it is a theological structure. Acceptance of the covenant limits the behaviour of humanity and God by establishing the terms of the Law. A sign of God's "self-limitation - the willingness to bring justice in the judgment and to fulfill the law - is the revelation of the Law in terms that humanity can comprehend. Humanity can then sentence, but from the Word already given. God's beneficent character in giving justice and

3 3 The Justice of Sentencing

mercy is yoked to the reciprocity of covenant and the creation of comprehensive and comprehensible laws and to rationality (see P. Miller, Errand 66). As the theory goes, God limits Itself in beneficence for justice for humanity, and to do this God self-limits to rationality so that God's nature can be understood insofar as it is related in and by the covenant. Human goodness is disciplined by the Tightness of the Word as law. The reciprocal element is that God's appearance as rational is the self-limitation that people can understand as showing how reason is divinely given. Therefore, because of the covenant, it is not only right to be good, but it is also reasonable, and justice, mercy, and punishment all become rational theologically. A tension in this logic, however, fundamental to American Puritanism arises from the pull of divine temporality in which rationality and its work must function. Within the belief that the New Jerusalem was to become the site of the possibility of redemption, its character is tied not to temporal categories, such that character is dialectically derived from and imposed onto the land as such, but rather to a millennial understanding, which exists in a temporality other than that of the here and now. As Kai Erikson notes, Puritan time is not national, historical, or secular, but rather, it exists as successive moments of representations analogous of what has happened before (49). However, typologically linked to the past, the New Jerusalem in the here and now is derivative of the "not yet," ever-present possibility of New Jerusalem to come in redemption, but it is not necessarily causally predicative of redemption. It is not as if performing the law and living a life of saints brings about redemption and a New Jerusalem. That would be to invoke a covenant of works pre-eminent over grace as God's choice. These very issues, of course, of causality, predication, and possibility are part of the resonance of the debate over sanctification and justification, works and grace, and ultimately, as I will argue, over the relation between the Hebrew and Christian texts of the Bible, all of which are implicated in the Antinomian Controversy. Using the work of Perry Miller and Sacvan Bercovitch respectively, I would argue that because the Puritans' project is the construction of the City on a Hill, material issues and the pragmatics of governance insinuate themselves into positions of first importance. The members of the Massachusetts Bay Colony validated their construction of the law as the union of Tightness and goodness, and the materiality of the law as a code of conduct sets the stage for sanctification and good works to gain primacy over justification and grace, at least pragmatically. In no way do I mean to suggest that grace takes a secondary theological importance. It motivates all hope and anxiety and becomes constitutive of the ability of Puritans to rationalize the simultaneous existence of

34 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

"backsliding" and possible salvation. Backsliding, which enables the slow development of secularism and eventual cultural diversity, opens a space for Puritan reason to develop what appears to modern eyes as a middle-class ideology of socio-economic progress (Bercovitch, Jeremiad 17-2,8). The "wilderness" of the "New World" is as much that of the mind, where employing reason, assessing, evaluating, judging, and deciding are forced into prominence. One has the law, to be sure, but new applications of it have to be thought through and made in this unfamiliar contact zone. Massachusetts Bay was a company, formed by a charter establishing an economic base for this religious society.6 This civil structure came about, according to Erikson, when English law itself was in debate over Coke's codifications (56). American Puritans sought to translate biblical law into civic governance for ordering society and limiting deviance. Social and legal standards were pegged to biblical standards. It is a short step through application, from reason to creative resourcefulness, in which reason valorizes pragmatism. When the goal is to build the New Jerusalem on earth, the two-pronged venture of discerning and realizing graceful being and controlling behaviour so as to build a sanctified polity becomes unbalanced. Pragmatically, in this contact zone, the building of civic Tightness in order to discipline and thus construct goodness justifies itself, as if such behavioural control was simply realizing itself as the sign of election, of a goodness and Tightness conjoined and predestined. For those who were closer to Calvin's thought in their Puritanism, in this contact zone the covenant of grace was beginning to appear as just the nominal term for a practical covenant of works. Anne Hutchinson became one of those people. The politics of pragmatically building a theocracy in the "wilderness" enacted a double conversion, for as the Puritans sought to convert the "New World" into a divine space, its rigours began to convert the theological tenets of Puritanism themselves. To a certain kind of conservative Puritan, the politics of the Company were "reasonably" and pragmatically creating heresy. But for the religious politician, this is a necessity that reason can come to justify. For instance, when the Court came to legislate against the immigration of new citizens who held views in opposition to the orthodoxy, Winthrop simply asserted the Court's right to do so: "If we conceive and find by sad experience that his opinions [are] such as will cause divisions, and make people look at their magistrates, ministers, and brethren as enemies to Christ and antichrists, &c, were it not a sin ... to receive more of those opinions, which we already find the evil fruit of?" (qtd. in Knight 27). Certainly oppositional, one of the intentions of antinomianism is to overturn the hierarchy of theology subsumed by politics. It can be re-

3 5 The Justice of Sentencing

garded in this instance as quite a conservative force that threatened the liberties taken by the magistrates and ministers.7 It warned them that they were getting increasingly caught up in the manly ventures of building a divine polity, and that they had rationalized the transformation of the theological underpinning of the project into a justification or cover. While employing theological arguments and functioning in the theological sphere, the reaction against antinomianism shows up a resistance to an oligarchic political structure, to which Congregationalism in Massachusetts Bay had devolved.8 This way of reading antinomianism, as a conservative project, places the Puritanism of the magistrates and ministers in an ironic situation, suggesting that the power of political organization will always abuse theology, which is a version of what Puritan Congregationalism originally criticized in Anglicanism. American congregational Puritanism's initial move away from the hierarchically organized structure of Anglicanism realized a number of social and political consequences. If there was disagreement over the dogma of Anglicanism in theological terms, such resistance was simultaneously against the power of the ecclesiastical hierarchy within a national framework to enforce its dissemination and acceptance. The removal to the "New World" in order to found the New Jerusalem on a model of federated congregations employs a certain "democratic" ethos within a more levelled structure of church and governance. In political and more modern terms, congregationalism's reform of ecclesiastical hierarchy employed a federated structure of governing the relations between churches in the Company and structured intimate relations of balance between civil and religious authority. A later American political and governmental idiom would realize the idea of congregated federalism as a confederate model. As Larzar Ziff has noted, "Modern scholarship has vigorously and effectively discounted the notion that the American Puritans were early democrats who farsightedly planted the love of liberty that was to flower at the American Revolution. Cotton spoke for the majority of his brethren when he wrote, 'Democracy I do not conceive that ever God did ordain as a fit government either for church or commonwealth'" (27-8). However, while the intent of Congregationalism might not have been democratizing in any liberal sense, the performance of the structure itself - a congregational federation - functioned in what contemporary eyes would regard as a proto-democratic mode. Similarly, the congregational practices derived from the different ministers' theological doctrines and interpretations had democratic structures and effects to them. As Ziff reports, in Salem, John Cotton "strengthened the democratic element in the Massachusetts system, though Cotton himself was far from a democrat, insofar as it assured local autonomy in the most

3 6 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

vital matters and brought all persons, however eminent or lowly in the world, to an asocial and apolitical standard: no one could presume too far on reputations earned elsewhere but had to sue again for admission into the community" (i8). 9 Yet, while Puritanism sought to conserve Calvinism, its model for doing so created its own version of political control over theological interpretation. Derived from the possibility of the radically transformative capacity of redemption, the New Jerusalem is not a state in the sense of a nation, but a structure reflective of a state of grace, the sign of redemption to come. That said, and if it points to the intention of such an organization and federal structure, its performance is, of course, always temporally in the here and now. And here the practical politics of the governance of behaviour within the fold of theology are readable in what will later appear as unionist and nationalist terms. "According to the premises of the Congregationalism as a system of church-government, each particular congregation - over which stood no ecclesiastical power - held the 'Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven' " (Zakai 10). This "confederate" ethos bespeaks a certain proto-democracy, in terms of the disassembling of national-theological hierarchy into a structure in which identity and behaviour can be derived within a certain, though very limited, variety of Puritan discourses of interpretation of Scripture and the issues of justification and sanctification drawn from it. However, what the Antinomian Controversy and the Anne Hutchinson trial demonstrate is the unbinding power of a confederate model, that within its understanding of federalism is a more radical democratic principle or a less confinable and restrictively governable principle of the person, self, subject, and identity. Congregationalism felt the pressure to become more oligarchic and hence hierarchical in its functioning than it might have thought necessary.10 It recognized the irreducible pull of the temporal, the lockstep of governance, and the materiality of temporality. That materiality promoted, consciously or unconsciously, a recourse to shaping rhetorically the idea of works within the terminology of grace - to be constantly pursued by the relation of sanctification and justification, and to try to take command of the terms to better control the behaviour of the elect and possibly elect. When we regard Congregationalism as a proto-democratic structure in terms of its social and political consequences, "proto" is an important distinction. Seen generally and in broad perspective, Anne Hutchinson's sex and the attendant gender issues show quite clearly that Congregationalism does in no way mean equality of access to the power of the church to teach and to enforce the law as it is derived from the Bible. Access to the power of public voice and its persuasiveness is restricted to men. Whether Hutchinson believed it or simply used it as a

3 7 The Justice of Sentencing

justification for her actions within a legal argument, she stressed the distinction between private voice and public voice in their relation to power, claiming privacy as an argument for there being no case against her ("Examination" 319). In the trial, Mr Coddington attempts to defend her on these grounds ("Report" 345-6). Drawing on Patricia Caldwell's work, Lad Tobin links the gendered terms of the feminine private and masculine public to the difference of Hutchinson's speech. Yoking theories of Carol Gilligan, Sherry Ortner, and Nancy Chodorow to those of Julia Kristeva and Helene Cixous, he argues that Hutchinson's speech is particularly female and feminine, which is partially why the male magistrates and ministers cannot understand or sanction it. Her choice of or recourse to privacy, intimacy, a "passive" voice, according to Caldwell ("Antinomian" 356), personal revelation, and the indwelling of Christ valorized "particular circumstances over general principles" (Tobin 2.57-8), which Tobin accepts as a condition of feminine speech, as a trait or strategy. The argument is compelling in terms of isolating how gender and language come together in the Controversy, and it looks forward to nineteenth-century issues of True Womanhood, maternal influence, and the power of "the kitchen." However, to indicate gender as the source or cause of Hutchinson's language profoundly neglects religious experience and, to some extent, the content of what she is saying. By neglecting her religious experience, one misses how her language attempts to represent a theology that cannot be sanctioned on political terms, accepted on gender terms, or understood fully even in conventional linguistic terms. I wish to take up the plating of gender, domestic politics, and theological controversy by tracking the contest of private and public voice on its legal and theological ground. If "public voice" is that found in the Examination and Trial, with its theological speech rife with political issues, then I use "private voice" as a figure open to three significant senses: conscience; speech in confidence or confession, which includes instruction of others within the home; and revelation. The three may be regrouped under two categories, however, as an interiority of passivity in which the soul or the Spirit speaks, and as an active expression or vocalization of the self. The relation between the two is significant in this controversy of what is figured as the anti-womos on the site of Anne Hutchinson. Revelation and conscience are similar in that they mark a certain kind of "call" to which an address is demanded; they are vocative within the context of self in a state of passivity. One is certainly more radical than the other: revelation as the call of God and as radically immediate operates otherwise than in the categories within which the self realizes and controls itself. Conscience, I believe, is a derivative, in that the soul speaks to the self, who cannot but hear.

3 8 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

What is at issue in the Controversy, however, is the ability to translate the unvoiced vocative into the language of expression, and ultimately, I would suggest, whether the nomos or law can express the Word. Both issues question whether correct translation is possible, and whether the nomos and anti-womos are not similar in their structures as erroneous expressions of the inexpressible, or that which does not enter into the temporality of the ontic by the force or skill or will of the self. The nomos or law is what it is, and the anti-womos calls the nomos on its politics of influence and behavioural control. At the beginning of the Examination, Hutchinson is there to "answer" for her "doings," harbouring and countenancing the parties of the antinomian faction. She replies, "That's matter of conscience, Sir" ("Examination" 312.), in a rhetorical movement that passes through materiality (doing) to thought (conscience), from exterior action to interior voice. Winthrop, in response, articulates the politics at stake and their power: "Your conscience you must keep or it must be kept for you" (312,). If Hutchinson asserts a remove to Anteriority, Winthrop counters with an argument designed to get his hands on interiority, one that delivers it to the exterior and public space, legitimate for judgment.11 If "conscience comes into act in giving countenance and entertainment to him that hath broken the law he is guilty too" ("Examination" 313). If he induces birth, so to speak, he does so by translating conscience into influence as an act, or "spirit" into a material "letter." Hutchinson's claim that under the law she has an obligation to teach other women within the confines of the home (Titus 2,:3-5) stresses the private space of interiors. While she acknowledges the presence of men at some meetings, she stands firm on the distinction that she did not teach the men, where "teaching men" stands for the public power of voicing the word with governing authority, within the context of a system that assigns sex/gender-value distinctions to private and public spheres and behaviours. While current sensibilities would question a rigid public/private - outer/inner split, fearing essentialism, it is significant that the rigid division aligns itself with Hutchinson's own views on the rigorous distinction between the letter and the spirit, works and grace, law and belief, sanctification and justification, immediate revelation (voice) and mediate revelation (reading), God's Word and the Bible, even the Law and the Gospel. Indeed, the theological issues of antinomianism and heresy, according to the magistrates and ministers, determine the question of equality and access to power in large part. But the rhetoric of the magistrates and later male recorders of history demonstrates that issues of sex and gender are not just symptoms in this regard. I will take these up in some detail, because it is not just the crime of heresy that enables the rhetoric of misogyny, but rather that

39 The Justice of Sentencing

these are dialectically related. A suspicion of female action and access to power helps to realize the charge of heresy and antinomianism. The issue over Hutchinson's justification for teaching women is indicative of the larger stakes at issue. After strongly and for the moment successfully questioning whether her keeping of her conscience encouraged others to transgress the law, she justifies her holding of meetings under Titus 2:3,4: "that the elder women should instruct the younger" ("Examination" 315). One well imagines that she believed her teaching to be of "honest things," as is demanded in Titus 2:3; yet what she elides is "that they may teach the young women to be sober, to love their husbands, to love their children^ To be discreet, chaste, keepers at home, good, obedient to their own husbands" (Titus 2:4-5), highly gendered and confined behaviour. What Hutchinson taught the women may not have been exclusive of such behaviour, but in question is whether she taught other things as well which may have transgressed what completes the verse in Titus: "that the word of God be not blasphemed" (2:5). The phrasing is grand and broad, but in this particular context it would seem to include the teaching of conduct that exceeds the confines of feminine behaviour. For his counter-argument, Winthrop infers I Corinthians 14:34, 35, which is emphatic: "Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church." Ironically, the congregational structure does not adhere to this pronouncement literally, for women do "speak in the churches" in order to ask questions and to learn, which they need not only do at home from their husbands. In this practice, Congregationalism follows the pronouncements in the rest of Titus and Timothy with greater adherence than to this particular sense as found in Corinthians. "The church order of the Pastoral Letters," according to Robert Karris, reflects "the somewhat loose structure evident in I Clement (ca. 95 CE), in which bishops and elders exist side by side. With their offices of bishop (I Tim. 3.1-7; Titus 1.7-9), elders (I Tim. 5.17-22; Titus 1.5-6), deacons, both men (I Tim. 3.8-10, 12-13) and women (I Tim. 3.11), and widows (I Tim. 5.3-16), the Pastoral Letters reflect the transition period between Paul, who taught that the church was animated with diverse charismata, and Ignatius, who insisted that one individual be in charge of the churches of a distinct area" (575-6). However, read so that "speak in the churches" and "ask their husbands" become figures for women not to interpret Scripture themselves and teach their husbands, I Corinthians 14:34-5 yokes femininity back into the gendered sphere of marriage and the home, to bar it from blasphemy. In response, Hutchinson levies

40

The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

a more literal reading of the verse - "I do not conceive but that it is meant for some publick times" ("Examination" 316) - thus challenging the idea that the rule has any purview over the private sphere of women's conduct in the home and reading the congregation as a public space.12 While Winthrop rejects her argument, his recapitulation of his various responses to her arguments has a telling order. She will not be suffered because, in his view, her conduct is, first, "prejudicial to the state"; second, seductive to honest persons who come to her (particularly, young women); and third, that her opinions are "known to be different from the word of God" ("Examination" 316). He caps the list with a further yoking together of political and gendered concerns: "it will not well stand with the commonwealth that families should be neglected for so many neighbours and dames and so much time spent" (316). His point appears to be that her theological errors are one thing, and in this list, the last thing; however, her influence is another, and that influence, while potentially causing theological trouble (heresy), immediately causes socio-political trouble, because women are being taken away from their duties of running the home and caring for their husbands. Implicit is the concern that they are being given education that is not derived from the minds and wills of their husbands; and there is the suspicion that even their husbands are receiving such education from a woman, which is less a theological problem than a contravention of how Winthrop reads the legal pronouncements on social behaviour in Corinthians and Titus. Although the magistrates are in uproar over a criticism attributed to Hutchinson's lips - that they preach a covenant of works while she preaches a covenant of grace - the theological content of the attribution produces real concern only when her influence in the community grows. Theological interpretation becomes an issue only when it begins to produce material effects, influence over the polity, and the work of the covenant of the Massachusetts Bay Company. Whether the ministers do or do not preach a covenant of works is certainly in question. What is not, I feel, is their concern for the workings of the covenant of the Company, which has acceded to a certain understanding of a gendered division of Puritan labour. In the minds of the magistrates, the New Jerusalem in Massachusetts must function in a certain way, which is their understanding of a Christian way. The anxiety over the charge they lay against Hutchinson is overdetermined because of the imbrication of theology and politics. In their minds, her influence might unravel the working of the Company and the magistrates' and ministers' own influence. It serves to reinterpret their particular understanding of works and grace, politics and theology, material concerns and spiritual

41 The Justice of Sentencing

concerns, threatening to develop a different sense of justice and division of labour or laborious life in the relation between things temporal and spiritual. In this new interpretation, different choices would be made in reading Scripture in terms of "which letters," so to say, should be passed through in order to get the sense of the spirit. Winthrop reads I Corinthians 14:34-5 literally. Anne Hutchinson's actions imply that she does not, but rather that she regards it as a "legall" pronouncement of the same order as the law of the "Old Testament." If one fixates on it literally, obeying it to the letter, one is threatening to establish the temporal and its orders as more important than spiritual justification. The importance of sexual and gender hierarchy is realized in Winthrop's rhetoric when he defines Christian or moral liberty in this life on earth. Unlike "natural liberty," which is fleshly, carnal, and part of our natures as creatures of the earth expelled from the Garden, moral liberty is created in the "covenant between God and man, in the moral law, and the politic covenants and constitutions, amongst men themselves" ("Authority" 39). It is the "proper end and object of authority, and cannot subsist without it" (39), whereas natural liberty "is incompatible and inconsistent with authority, and cannot endure the least restraint of the most just authority. The exercise and maintaining of this liberty makes men grow more evil, and in time to be worse than brute beasts: omnes sumus licentia deteriores" (39). [Moral] liberty is maintained and exercised in a way of subjection to authority; it is of the same kind of liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free. The woman's own choice makes such a man her husband; yet being so chosen, he is her lord, and she is to be subject to him, yet in a way of liberty, not of bondage; and a true wife accounts her subjection her honor and freedom, and would not think her condition safe and free, but in her subjection to her husband's authority. Such is the liberty of the church under the authority of Christ, her king and husband; his yoke is so easy and sweet to her as a bride's ornaments; and if through frowardness [sic] or wantonness, etc., she shake it off, at any time, she is at no rest in her spirit, until she take it up again; and whether her lord smiles upon her, and embraceth her in his arms, or whether he frowns, or rebukes, or smites her, she apprehends the sweetness of his love in all, and is refreshed, supported, and instructed by every such dispensation of his authority over her. ("Authority" 39)

The analogy of husband and wife in relation to the church and Christ is certainly common enough in Christian rhetoric, but in the context of Anne Hutchinson's behaviour regarding the church and the Company, it takes on a more material and literal residue. As Amanda Porterfield cogently argues in relation to Thomas Hooker's theology,

4Z The Letter and the Spirit of i^th-Century American Literature

Hutchinson's nonconformity to gendered, social roles in marriage and society simultaneously stood to undermine the analogy between wifely submission and Christian grace (49). For here was a woman who justified her "manly" behaviour in her certainty of union with Christ. Consequently, for both political and theological reasons, Winthrop and the other ministers and magistrates must see in her a move toward excessive carnality, as a woman exceeding her place, not just in terms of her gender position but even as exceeding the category of woman. Her behaviour has become beastly, fleshly, wrangling under just authority, and thus evil. She is in the carnal position, in which her fleshly womanliness is, as Cotton will say to her in his admonition, "being puft up with your owne parts" ("Report" 372,). Hence Winthrop will refer to her heresies as "monstrous births" (Short Story 2.14). The anxiety over the materiality of the political, the theological, and the feminine intertwine to realize this discourse and activity. GOING INTO HAGAR AND COMING OUT ABRAHAM

If the fear of the feminine within the political is significant in these texts, phrases such as "puft up" and "monstrous birth" also suggest how these fears realize themselves theologically. Rhetorically, what is at issue here is how the feminine becomes the fertile site for the relation between works and grace. In his Sixteene Questions of Serious and Necessary Consequence., John Cotton makes an ample attempt to articulate to the Elders the various possibilities between sanctification and justification, and works and grace. In Proposition 4 of Question xm, however, he identifies Abraham as an example of one who is "truely justified, and seeth it not" and who "doth then betake him to his Workes for the hastning of his Assurance. As Abraham when he had long waited for the promised Seed, [though] he was justified by beleeving the free Promise: yet, for the more speedy satisfying of his Faith and Hope, he turned aside to goe into Hagar, (who was a Type of the Covenant of Workes}" (Sixteene 55).Hagar, (who was a Type of the oo" Here Cotton refers to Galatians 4:22-31, in which Paul so figures Hagar and Sarah as "an allegory: for these are the two covenants [the Geneva Bible says, "the two Testaments"]; the one from the mount Sinai, which gendereth to bondage, which is Agar. For this Agar is mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children. But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all" (Gal. 4:24-6). Going into Hagar becomes a type of the covenant of works because it reflects Abraham's own action, uncommanded by God, hastening the fulfillment of the promise in Genesis 15:5 that his seed will be as numerous as the stars. But in Cotton's and Paul's

43

The Justice of Sentencing

cases, it is the feminine that is the exemplary figure as the site of the covenant of works, and doubly so. For while the hastening action may be Abraham's to go into Hagar, the idea itself comes from Sarah: "And Sarai said unto Avram ... pray come in to my maid ... Avram hearkened to Sarai's voice" (Gen. 16:2.), as he hearkens elsewhere to the voice of God. Male "going" and the choice to rely on human agency and things carnal establish the "work," but female influence, woman as the site of the going and the place of the work, enables the going. It is the carnal working of the fecundity of woman, such that human agency choosing carnal union will multiply the seed, which enables this action to be a type of the covenant of works. That "type" is reduced to the name of Hagar. Importantly, the Elders agree with Hagar as this type; however, "to seek to see the Lords face by seeking to feel the Lords own Work in us, is not going aside to Hagar. All doing or use-making of Works implyes not straightway a Covenant of Works" ("Elders" 74). I would argue that, given the context of Genesis, feeling "the Lords own Work in us" means that when the influence is that of faith wrought in us by God, works are not an attempt to base justification on sanctification. When the influence is, however, that of another person, and particularly that of the woman, one is proceeding along a covenant of works. From the rhetoric of the Examination transcripts, the magistrates' fear of Anne Hutchinson appears to be at root a political fear, a fear that the act of teaching and its content had the potential to overthrow their temporal governance and gendered social order. Thus they push the charge of Familism, assuming that Familists "were popularly (and incorrectly) supposed to believe in 'free love' between the sexes," as David Hall notes (Report 3611111). Yet this political fear is wrapped in the implications of Anne Hutchinson's theological position, meaning both "monstrous" doctrine and "excessive" place. Hagar and Abraham, as much as Hagar and Sarah, are linked thematically in Genesis. To both Hagar and Abraham is it revealed that their seed will be multiplied exceedingly. The easy fecundity of Hagar is a material worry to the ministers. When Anne Hutchinson gives to them "the ground of what [she] know[s] to be true" ("Examination" 336), she says the following: "The Lord knows that I could not open scripture; he must by his prophetical office open it unto me. So after that being unsatisfied in the thing, the Lord was pleased to bring this scripture out of the Hebrews. He that denies the testament denies the testator, and in this did open unto me and give me to see ... I bless the Lord, he hath let me see which was the clear ministry and which the wrong" (336). Questioned by Mr Nowell as to how she knew that it was the Spirit, she replies, "How did Abraham know that it was God that bid him offer his son, being a breach of the sixth commandment?" (337). She continues, "So

44

The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

to me by an immediate revelation." "By the voice of his own spirit to my soul," which she further lodges in Jeremiah 46:27-8, Isaiah 30, and Daniel 6:4-5 (337)- 13 "But after he was pleased to reveal himself to me I did presently like Abraham run to Hagar. And after that he did let me see the atheism of my own heart, for which I begged of the Lord that it might not remain in my heart, and being thus, he did shew me this (a twelvemonth after) which I told you of before. Ever since that time I have been confident of what he hath revealed unto me" (337). Winthrop finds the justification he needs: "The case is altered and will not stand with us now." "The ground of her revelations is the immediate revelation of the spirit and not by the ministry of the word ... This hath been the ground of all these tumults and troubles" (341-2). Seconding Mr Peters's charge that her claim to immediate revelation is "enthusiasm," Winthrop chimes in, "It overthrows all" (343). I4 If, in this detailing, the concern is over the validity of immediate revelation, Mr Brown makes plain the gender issue constitutive of the problem. "I find such flat contradiction to the scripture in what she saith, as to that in the first to the Hebrews - God at sundry times spake to our fathers" (344, emphasis added); "for this is the foundation of all mischief and of all those bastardly things which ... have all come out from this cursed fountain" (344). There are false revelations that can cause damage to the faith to be sure, such as those the magistrates mention of the Anabaptists and Enthusiasts ("Examination" 342,), but much of the problem here is that a woman is claiming to have experienced that which is the purview of the fathers, particularly of Abraham.15 I agree with Lang that to see the issue here as simply one of authority runs the risk of suppressing "the role of gender in our formulation of the heresy" (14). However, to examine the political power issue as one of gender without locating how both simultaneously arise from the theology and radically implicate patriarchal exclusivity in Congregationalism and biblical interpretation is equally insufficient. The theological implications are no less important than the others, and particularly so in this controversy because they are all interwoven. In terms of the Bible, then, Daniel 6:4-5 1S tne main and controversial proof text revealed to Hutchinson for her deliverance by Providence, along with Jeremiah 46:27-8 and Isaiah 30; however, Abraham is the stated example, demonstrating in similarity the possibility and quality of revelation. In citing Genesis 22, the binding of Isaac, and Abraham's test or trial, Hutchinson brings the context of the covenant to the fore in relation to her own situation. To the magistrates, suggesting herself as similar to Abraham is as frightening as it is heretical. In Christian terminology, the covenant in Genesis 22 is one uniting God and Abraham reciprocally. Because it gets read as an origi-

45 The Justice of Sentencing

nary typological scene concerning the union of justification and sanctification, Puritans hold it as constitutive of their own claim to election. Abraham's "faith," given to him by God, enables him to go forth in pure intention to perform a work for God at the highest expense to what is human, familial, and temporal - sacrifice of a son, futurity of the name, the seed - in the faith that what is given by God is God's to take. "Faith" exceeds the condition of the human and the capacity of human understanding with it. It allows for the possibility of fulfillment of the promise in an act that is not just illogical but also one that works otherwise than in human ways. If faith exceeds and functions otherwise than human capability, it troubles any idea of human decision and action being able to realize the promise on its own terms. Faith must be of a condition in which temporal human action and event become, not the ends, but things passed through, quite literally, to the Spirit. When the condition is given to humanity and the person can somehow muster all that is human to act in radical opposition to all that is human, the union with God is materially sealed. God sees, intervenes, and provides, and the provision, signified in the immediate materiality of the ram, is the provision of eternity. As Genesis 22:17 confirms the revealed promise of Genesis 15:5 and 17:2, so it seals the Word in the cutting of the covenant. Because Abraham "hearken[ed] to my voice," his seed will be blessed in all the nations of the earth (Gen. 22:18). Given the ramifications of this passage, particularly in its originary status for Puritans, the fear of the magistrates is that the "seed" of Anne Hutchinson will multiply exceedingly as well. In claiming immediate revelation, exemplified in the situation of Abraham and seconded by the theme of deliverance from death by God's providence, she can be read as standing in the position of the covenant as a woman. While she is claiming clarity, almost intellectual ownership, of the covenant of grace and the "other-worldliness" of faith in its ability to exceed and so pass through temporality, she threatens the works-based construction of the Company and the congregation. She offers the possibility of not just a different (and in some sense, more Calvinist) Puritanism but also a different way of being-in-the-world. Isaac in the Akedah becomes the metaphor for Abraham, who, through God's intervention, is unbound and saved from the work or act. Hutchinson's other proof texts further this reading: "Fear thou not, O Jacob my servant, saith the Lord: for I am with thee ... I will not make an end of thee" (Jer. 46:28). Isaiah 30 reiterates the story of Israel in Egypt, saying that God will make right the wrongs of the position of bondage. God is the God of judgment, and the oppressors shall flee in God's rebuke. In texts that Hutchinson cites, she becomes the beacon on a hill. Resonating with Winthrop's use of the "Citty vpon a Hill" to the travellers on

46 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

the Arabella ("Modell" 32), Hutchinson's use of Isaiah 30 figures her, in addition to Abraham, as a type of Moses, himself for Puritans a type of Christ. Furthermore, employing Daniel 6:4-5 not only suggests that she will be delivered from peril by the help of the Lord, but also that she is knowledgeable about the political work of the magistrates' endeavours: "Then the presidents and princes sought to find occasion against Daniel ... but they could find none ... as he was faithful [and without error]. Then said these men, We shall not find any occasion against this Daniel, except we find it against him concerning the law of his God." The threat she embodies, then, is double. The idea of immediate revelation positions her as Moses or a prophet. As Thomas Shepard writes in his journal, "the difference between our knowledge of God and the prophets' is that they received the word immediately from God, but we are to look for it and so to hear it mediately by man" (215). As her claim to immediate revelation implies, her status as prophet, for Winthrop, "overthrows all" ("Examination" 343), because, I would suggest, what she seems positioned to overthrow is the social control of church dissemination of theology and personal behaviour. If immediate revelation implicates the status of prophet, denying the necessity of men's interpretation of Scripture, the position of being a prophet threatens the civic structure and social order built upon the supposed authority of male interpretation. What they must show, then, is that Anne Hutchinson is not like Abraham but like Hagar, her seed not blessed of Isaac but banished like Ishmael, the one from whom election is emphatically not derived. Hence their rhetoric: like that of Hagar, her "seed" issues forth bastardly things, a "monstrous birth, which ... [Mr Cotton] declared to be twenty-seven lumps of man's seed without any alteration or mixture of anything from the woman" (Battis 347). Their disbelief in the possibility of immediate revelation to a woman results in the narrative description of her inability to produce from it in mutual connection with man. All she can issue forth is man's seed, agglomerated together and wrapped in aberrance.16 REVELATORY READING

The report of the Trial of Anne Hutchinson spends much of its time focused on theological issues and biblical hermeneutics; however, what it shares with the Examination is the concern over revelation, but on the level of the word. If her immediate revelation of God opened Scripture to her ("Examination" 336), then the Trial interrogates how well, in fact, she reads because of it.17 What kind of revelation can she make of the itten word? To this end, there is a long discussion over the status

47

The Justice of Sentencing

of the body, soul, and spirit in redemption, and whether the resurrection, as particularly mentioned in I Corinthian 15, is of the last day or a signification of the union with Christ. As reiterated by Cotton, the first charge is "That the Soules of all Men by nature are mortall and die like Beastes, and for that you alledge Ecclesiastes 3.i8-z[o]" ("Report" 354), and Cotton instructs that in Ecclesiastes 12.:7 it is clear that the spirit does not return to dust but to God; thus the soul of man is immortal. Hutchinson counters with two things: first, that this mutual substitution of the spirit and soul cannot be made, according to Hebrews 4:12, and second, that both the soul and body of Adam die, which is in a sense necessary for the possibility of redemption to be lodged with Abraham, whose children Puritans are, and not with Adam, of whose seed they are not. "For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts of and intents of the heart," says Hebrews 4:12. As the word of God is able "even" to divide soul and spirit, one can infer that the relation of these two are as close as joint and marrow; furthermore, God's word can "pierce" so as to discern the thoughts and intents of the heart from any kind of outward expression. If joint and marrow exist in necessary relation, there is the sense, however, that thought and word may not. Outer may not express inner by intent, and there is the possibility that outer may not express inner thought, even though the intent was that it would do so. God's word can know the difference; human judgment may not. If one has faith, one finds a kind of certainty even in the face of what human judgment would call contradiction. Is it possible to read the citation of Hebrews within the context of the Trial discussion as suggesting that, while there is a necessary relation between soul and spirit, they are not the same? Yet each word may in some cases, and may not in other cases, be used synonymously with the other. How human words translate the Word may not be consistent in each formulation.18 It is in this sense that Cotton speaks when he substitutes soul and spirit, lodging the possibility of the resurrection of the soul in Matthew 10:28; however, Hutchinson questions his citation of I Thessalonians 5:23: "And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and / pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." If soul can mean spirit and spirit can mean soul, why are they separated in this key passage? She retorts, using Cotton's own logic, that in the very passage of Matthew which he uses - "And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell" - soul "is ment of the Spirit" ("Report" 355). In his frustration, what Cotton comes to

48

The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

say is that because the spirit is sometimes used as a figure for conscience and for what is fitted to the soul, enabling us to do good works, the soul is, in fact, God's mechanism in us for receiving the multiple work of the spirit. Hence the soul as a human word can be multiply pointed in signification, but that to which soul "refers" is God's ultimately, and to God it returns in death. What Hutchinson is questioning is how mortal that thing called soul actually is. If the soul is of the body, even as a place of reception for God's word, it is a perishable "organ." While the spirit might reside in it, upon death the body and soul return to dust, and the spirit returns to God. However, she concedes that she does not distinguish between the soul and the body, but the Holy Ghost (Spirit) does, and, given Hebrews 4:12,, the spirit can divide them, if they be so divisible. Perhaps this is why she pauses to consider Winthrop's claim that she mistakes the curse upon Adam. It is not an "Annihilation of the soule and body, but only a dissolution of the Soule and the Body" ("Report" 356, emphasis added). But notice, however, that this phrasing of "a dissolution of soule and body" demonstrates how human language is always a certain mistranslation of God's word. The conjunction "and" yokes soul and body together, suggesting that they dissolve together. Yet "dissolution" demands that the conjunction continue the work of separation, soul from body. Cotton's intermediate summation is that Hutchinson thinks the soul in humans is just like that of beasts unless Christ redeems a person's soul. If not, it dies a mortal death, as do those of the animals. The ministers, however, believe that the soul is immortal by creation. If there is confusion over the meaning of "soul" and "spirit" and the status of "soul" and "body," it is intertwined with confusion over what is meant by redemption. The ministers mean redemption as the Judgment. Hutchinson means redemption as the union of Christ with the self in election. The entire context within which she is trying to understand the various words is within human time as revelation of the covenant of grace. While this immediate moment may temporarily pierce time, and so dissolve reason within the operation of thought, the self is returned to time to live with the knowledge of her election and acceptance of free grace. Her proof text is rendered obscurely in the transcripts as I 46 4 ("Report" 358). David Hall's authoritative edition follows Adams's suggestion of Romans 6.4, which seems appropriate: "Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection" (Rom. 6:4-5). ^ tnis is her proof text, Hutchinson's understanding would be based heavily on the figure of "likeness." Union contains a certain death of the carnally material as the role of life and

49

The Justice of Sentencing

gives a new life of election, which appears in time. Shortly on, she becomes emphatic: "The Soule is immortall by Redemption" ("Report" 359). The magistrates understand redemption millennially, where it reiterates the immortality of the soul in creation. They can make no sense of what Hutchinson is saying, except as a heresy that shakes the foundation of their faith. Mr Davenport presents an explanation in a phrasing that enables a compromise: "The soule cannot have Imortaletie in itselfe but from God from whom it hath its beinge" (359). The "not having immortality in itself" enables her to hear the soul as of the body. The achievement of "immortality from God" allows her to hear her sense of redemption as union in time. "From God whom it hath its being" enables Hutchinson to hear that in union the soul's nature is changed. It also allows the magistrates, I would argue, to hear that the soul is immortal from creation, for its being is of God, from whom its immortality is made. At this point, however, there is more confusion of words in the report for readers, but not necessarily for the participants of the Trial. The confusion concerns how to read Hutchinson's use of "Light" and "Life," her most unique figures for the issue concerning the soul and the spirit. Mr Eliot charges that Hutchinson "thinkes the Soule to be Nothinge but a Breath, and so vanisheth" (356). She responds, "I thinke the soule to be nothing but Light" (356). As if not hearing or wanting to hear any distinction between what "Breath" might mean to Eliot and "Light" might mean to Hutchinson, Mr Wilson continues to use the word "Breath." Two readings are possible. The first mines the distinction between "breath" as signifying mortality and the body, and "light" as something given to the self as altering knowledge. The second considers "light" as a mistranscription of "life." On the one hand, one could argue that Hutchinson uses "light" as understanding, for after achieving clarification from Davenport and others, she says, "I thanke the Lord I have Light" (359). However, even here, it is not clear that she is truly referring to knowledge gained from the men in the Trial situation. As she was to have said in the Examination, and as is reiterated in the context of the Trial, both to fear men and to trust in men is a snare ("Examination" 32.0, "Report" 352). Hutchinson may well be thanking God that God has given her light, revelation, union, and the knowledge both of it and from it. She may well be reiterating her confidence in her own judgment given from God in words that are exactly to the point of her thinking. For words may or may not represent clearly the intention of the thought. Reading "light" as a transcription error for "life" seems to suggest the same thing, at least in the case that she is using words "legally"; which is to say that she mines all that is afforded on the level of the

50 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

letter and the strategic deployment of a literal meaning, and she speaks to and agrees with pronouncements that try to keep her within the letter of the law in the Trial, while at the same time affording her the space to signify what she means to herself as best as she can. For after the discussion of the soul and spirit, she declares, "I am clear in this now"; to which Davenport asks, "Than you renounce what you held in both those poynts[?]" She replies, "Yes I doe, taking Soule as Mr. Damphord doth. So thear was my Mistake. I tooke Soule for Life" (360, emphasis added). Given Davenport's compromise phrasing, "taking Soule as Mr. Damphord doth" is a significant condition. "Mistake" may well signify to her the mistake she made in her phrasing strategy during the earlier part of the Trial. "I tooke Soule for Life." She used the wrong word. If "light" is a transcription error, such that in response to "Breath" she said, "I thinke the soule to be nothing but Life," then she is in no different a position at the end of the clarifying session than she was at the beginning.19 IRONIOUS SPEECH

What seems to support this reading, though it offers additional complications, is that Anne Hutchinson tries to bring into immediate proximity what at least the ministers feel are radically different senses of things. For when Davenport asks point blank whether she now understands that "the Coming of Christ in Thessalonians to the soule is not ment of Christs Coming in Union but of his coming at the day of Judgment" ("Report" 361), she replies that she does not acknowledge her reading of it as union to be an error but rather a "Mistake." "/ doe acknowledge my Expression to be Ironious but my Judgment was not Ironious, for I held before as you did but could not express it so" (361). And she entrenches this position at the end of the Trial, when she confesses that her expression was one way, "but it was never my Judgment." "My Judgment is not altered though my Expression alters" (378). Here, she passes through the letter, so to say, to the spirit of her judgment, which she feels may well be as theirs, though her words are not the same. While he thinks that he is disagreeing with her, Davenport continues to press the issue of the rising of the body, and in so doing, he reiterates Hutchinson's own logic, though he lodges it in the word of Scripture. In response to her question as to whether "the same Bodies [sic] that dies, shall rise agayne" (361), he says, "The same Body that is sowen the same body shall rise agayne. It is sowen a naturall Body but it shall rise a spirituall Body" (36i). 20 The possibility of resurrection and the issue of what shall rise are, of course, central to faith, and on the face of things, the anxiety of the

51 The Justice of Sentencing

ministers is that Anne Hutchinson simply does not understand this central tenet. Their fear is that from this misunderstanding may follow all sorts of radical heresies propagated as truths of God. However, it is worth considering whether the ministers do not also mishear and so misunderstand not simply what Hutchinson is saying but also how she is speaking. Tobin perhaps goes too far in asserting that Hutchinson " argue[s] that the meaning of any individual word or statement is not absolute but rather is determined by the context in which it [is] spoken" (2,61, emphasis added), though her transcribed words may suggest this possibility. Caldwell argues that "Mrs. Hutchinson's testimony ... [has] a tendency to separate words from their referents" ("Antinomian" 353). Battis notes her tendency "to simplify, to construe, to hack away the empirical qualifier" (91). However, all of these arguments invest the agency with Hutchinson, with a theory of language that is hers, without considering how that theory of language is Christian theological at root. She is speaking, I would argue, as the Bible speaks. As Lisa Gordis phrases it, "the revelations to which Hutchinson confessed were for the most part strikingly biblical, and in fact seemed only subtly different from the norms of Bible reading that the Massachusetts Bay clergy advocated" (169). In relation to the good Puritan magistrates and ministers, she is not articulating something so radically different from how they are articulating it.21 The difficulty of the relation between God's word and the word of Scripture is the central paradox of capturing what I call the theo-logic of Christianity within the language of humanity, and the logic of philosophical reason that underpins the possibility of language's communicative function. What language asks us to conceive is a principle of sameness-indifference. In the case of the resurrection, it is the same body that dies and rises, one that is in life both natural and spiritual simultaneously. Yet in death one is required to think sameness as the separation of the natural and the spiritual, within the concept of the body as the same. The theo-logic of resurrection described is derived from and consistent with the tripartite logic of the Trinity, which our finite or "fallen" capacity of logical rationality must represent by pushing what we call contra-diction to its absolute limit, such that it becomes a contradiction which is not one. When articulating the theo-logic of the Trinity, for instance, St Augustine teaches that of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, "each of them is a full substance, and at the same time all are one substance" (Doctrine 10). Faith, I would argue, becomes exactly that capacity given to us to be able to conceive, if not necessarily to understand purely, the otherwise than logical operation of divinity. Language tries to present what is constitutively unrepresentative, of what is otherwise than ontic

5 2. The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

being as it is the possibility of the conception of Being itself. Faith is that which enables us to understand the temporality of the here and now and the materiality of the body as substitutive of the "wholly other" (Earth 139). It enables us to recognize that what takes the place of God (substitution, representation) does not usurp God but, rather, achieves its freedom to be in subjection. As Barth explicates Calvin on this issue, "The history of the individual is here a means by which to recount the eternal history of the acts of God that we do not see as such on the plane of historical things ... Calvin equates the sudden conversion with the taste for the things of true piety that is much less evident. This is how what is divine impinges on what is human. The radical sudden conversion means a relative taste for other things, the wholly other becomes a modest something" (139). Faith brings with it a version, con-version, of what is wholly other to humanity within its terms of logic and conception and language. But what this version, this modest something or trace of the Other as represented and representable in consciousness and language, is, is the understanding that humanity is itself a version. Language, logic, rationality are all "likeness," in the image. Hence Earth's substitution as reversal: "Historical assessment can deal only with the new taste, not the sudden conversion. The new taste is the event, the sudden conversion the recognition of it. The new taste is in time, the sudden conversion beyond all time in eternity" (140). This logic grounds the concept of time in relation to what we have come to call eternity. "Eternity is seen as the negation of all time and the position that underlies time, hence not as a second and different thing in a moment of time, but as the primary-finite thing of every moment of time, its meaning, its transcendental content" (155). From these understandings, faith enables the conception/recognition of God as Other, and humanity as likeness or the image of God as simultaneous and in dialectical relation. If faith is given freely by God and occurs simultaneously as conversion, there are three concepts to be considered. First, what is the language of conversion and the conversion of language in faith? Second, how does faith make possible a version and a version with (con) another and the Other? Third, what turns in language in faith, such that the letter or the materiality of language represents meaning understandable not only to humans and within the logical economy of sense but, at the same time, within the Spirit, by which I wish to suggest, following Barth following Calvin, that which is wholly other ? The principle of sameness-in-difference of humanity in relation to God, of language to thought, is conceived by St Augustine, for instance, as the logic of the Trinity.

5 3 The Justice of Sentencing How did He come except that "the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us"? (i Cor. 1.2.1) It is as when we speak. In order that what we are thinking may reach the mind of the listener through the fleshly ears, that which we have in mind is expressed in words and is called speech. But our thought is not transformed into sounds; it remains entire in itself and assumes the form of words by means of which it may reach the ears without suffering any deterioration in itself. In the same way the Word of God was made flesh without change that He might dwell among us. (14, emphasis added)

God is the Word, but with the capital; Word is the sign of that which is Other to and otherwise than the capability of human language and its ground. But in the same way that thought takes the form of speech, God as Word takes the form of flesh. In both cases, the thing comes into being, figured; hence, theo-logically, the Trinity is the concept of transfiguration. However, as functioning in the same way, one needs to think language as also a certain trans-figuration, in terms of the irreducible figural status of the construction of language in transition from thought. Thought does not become something other at the expense of itself, but "remains entire and assumes the form" or is figured as word. The figural status of the word is most important. While it is fundamental that God's word becomes flesh as figure, is there anything of absolute necessity in the figure of Jesus as figure? I do not mean to sound heretical, any more than, I would argue, Anne Hutchinson does. What I mean to suggest is that it is not the physical appearance and attributes of Jesus (maybe a beard, maybe not; long hair; underweight) that enables understanding of the Word, but that the figure, as it appears, speaks. The material appearance of the Word as figure is one thing, but its performative function is what is decisive. If one part of transfiguration is figuration as coming into being of the Word, its complement is the act of the figure to be performative, to make the transfer through its letter to its spirit as (if) a thing/being there. In Patricia Caldwell's incisive reading of the transcripts, she proposes that "Mrs. Hutchinson was speaking what amounts to a different language" ("Antinomian" 346). Hutchinson's "tendency to separate words from their referents" (Caldwell, "Antinomian" 353) suggests that for Hutchinson, "Words are part of what one has, not part of what one is" ("Antinomian" 356). I would further specify that Hutchinson does not conceive of the material signifier as having a necessary or essentialized relation to "thought," though thought here has to be understood as that which is the product of revelation, as opposed to what people on their own might generate. Thus linguistic constructions chosen by humans may be mistaken or, as she says of the ministers'

54 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

teachings, less clear, not of light or of the life of the spirit. But that is a problem, and particularly so in this context, of the human's relation to language, not the problem of the spirit to language or of revealed thought itself. A mistaken expression - illogical, underivable, nonsensical - does not alter the thought that generated it, which itself is not constructed in language, but of which language is its figure. In the context of the Examination and Trial, some of Hutchinson's word choices stand in an erroneous relation to her judgment, and these are, as she acknowledges, mistakes ("Report" 360). But the principle - that human language is always already an arbitrary representation of the Word as God's language revealed - is a joy in other contexts. It enables a poetics of representing divine alterity and inconceivable purity, of which figuration is the most creative mechanism. Within the conception of language as trans-figure, Hutchinson is even more Pauline than Paul, for she allows for the most radical dissolution of the letter in relation to the spirit. God is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. In relation to the politics of the magistrates and ministers, this emptying out of the temporal as necessary in itself cannot be abided. They conceive that there must be a necessary relation between what the human word can say and what the Word means. As Staloff argues, the male ministers are afforded cultural domination because of their position as authorized readers of the Word to congregations. In reading the Word differently, Antinomians threaten the hold on dominating power (15, 45). However, the antinomian position on temporality and language is even more radical. In separating human words from God's word, they put Scripture in jeopardy as the fundamental connection of the Word and word for humanity. Furthermore, as with scripture, the elect have to be able to "get it right" if they are to believe in election and to minister at all. Erikson seems exact when he argues that what Anne Hutchinson recognizes is that the "ministers were not arguing that outer conformity was necessary to earn salvation, but they seemed" to be saying that outer conformity was a convenient way to prove salvation" (86). What Hutchinson takes issue with is their idea of representation: that works are clearly and accurately readable as signs, and that signs can properly - indeed, perfectly - represent not simply human intention but God's intention. This dynamic over the issue of language is another aspect of the sanctification/justification question in terms of the binding of theology and politics. And as it is an issue of language and of revelation, it is also a problem concerning gender. The figure speaking this language is feminine, one who has already typed herself in her proof texts as Jacob, Daniel, Abraham, and Moses, if not Jesus himself. Just as the material body and the spiritual body must be thought of as "the same"; and just as words may be mistaken or more or less clear and still be equally rep-

5 5 The Justice of Sentencing

resentative of the spirit or fundamental meaning; and just as the letter is immaterial in itself but functional only as it trans-figures (to) spirit; so the sex and gender of the figure are not germane to revelation, election, divinity, or governance. The argument that her rhetoric of unjudgeable interiority and her use of the "passive voice" (Caldwell, "Antinomian" 356) are figures for a certain feminism is important to underscore as one cause of the ministers' and magistrates' fear in the politics of building a theocracy. The political implication of her understanding of language is that, if in union with Christ, she and women generally can "teach" with human authority and do so in a language that calls into question the validity of men's seeming need to control materiality and to govern works in a particular way. However, theologically, the immateriality of the letter, such that its materiality is passed through, implies that gendered constructions of sexual difference as unequal are irrelevant to authority and the authorizing function of grace. Union with Christ in revelation tears open time and consciousness so as to articulate the double truth of creation and redemption. It would seem that in Anne Hutchinson's understanding, creation is Genesis i, underscored as a representation of the fundamental equality of the human and the interhuman relation that redemption would bring about and so restore. As Genesis 1:26 recounts, "Let us make humankind, in our image, according to our likeness! Let them have dominion over ... all the earth." As God is rendered in the plural, "us," so God's likeness is plural as "them." While Genesis 1:27 initially seems to reduce that plurality - " God created humankind in his image, in the image of God did he create it" - that reduction is supplemented immediately with an appositive: "male and female did he create them." The "event" of Anne Hutchinson presents its own kind of controversy for readers, because from the transcripts, retellings, contemporary analyses, and the ways she is variously maintained in the American literary, historical, and religious imaginations, readers are asked to reflect for themselves on "what, in fact, happened here?" and "what significance can I take from all of this?" It is entirely possible - perhaps probable - that Hutchinson's enthusiasm for Christ and union led her down a path of belief that exceeded her hermeneutic abilities with Scripture when pressed to the wall and tried. Perhaps it was naivete or a truly devout generosity that led her to misread people's characters and thus the dangerous political waters she was entering, hoping instead that the verity of theological understanding would be engaged for its own sake, regardless of gender politics and the force of governmentality. And fundamentally, I think, readers have to decide whether they believe she experienced annunciation and revelation in union or not, because, as I have suggested, the event of union testifies to the otherness of her speech

56 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

and her fundamentally new recognition of "self." It calls attention to how, while her speech cannot prove union, it performs the trace of a signifyingness dealt to her language, which necessitates antinomianism as the attempt to unsay phallic speech-sense and to work otherwise than how socially controlled "rationality" would limit knowledge. As an intervention in the course along which American Puritanism was running in its valorization of rationality and reading in the relationship between sanctification and justification, Hutchinson performs grace as a way of being and "knowing" otherwise. Election is exceptional, and attempts to define and otherwise thematize it or to find some mathematical percentage for it are anathema to the radicality of the exceptionalism it embodies. For election is an exception to the kind of socially constructed sense certainty and knowledge that people derive from language as a shared communicative medium. Communication is a concept of understanding in human language. Annunciation, whether by a direct voice or by bridging the gap between the word and the Word, is not this kind of communication. According to Anne Hutchinson, "The Lord knows that I could not open scripture; he must by his prophetical office open it unto me" ("Examination" 336), "By the voice of his own spirit to my soul" (337). It does not happen in human language and in our heads but, rather, to human language and to our souls. "Annunciation" and "speaking to the soul" are themselves reasonably lame figures that our language can provide which do not describe the event of election itself, but only mean to effect recognition of the difference from understanding election as rational communication. Thomas Shepard chooses different phrasing to effect the difference, wishing that God "would be pleased to reveal himself by his own beams, and persuade my heart by his own Spirit of his essence and being" (44). Union with Christ certainly makes contact. It is not uncommunicative, irrational, or unknowable, which is to say that it is not the opposite of communication, reason, or knowledge, but that it does not partake of these dichotomies or even the economy of sense as we have constructed it for ourselves in language and consciousness. According to Shepard, "Nothing reveals a thing so clearly as the spirit, more clearly than by all reason, which is but weak and dim in respect of the spirit" (166). It signifies to language and to the self wholly otherwise. Thus Scripture is opened, which is not a figure for how the word was allowed to be conventionally understood by unconventional means but, rather, I suggest, for how language is broken apart, shown as uncommunicative for this kind of content, and that what is radically interior to language and gives it life is read in relation to language in pieces, fragments. The call to the soul or heart is a pure Saying that

57 The Justice of Sentencing cannot be contained by human language or represented thematically by it; thus it opens our signifying chains. The kind of revelation that is enabled by Saying, to use a term from Emmanuel Levinas, is the radical apprehension of the Other as otherwise than being in time, or reason, or consciousness, and these human terms which mark out our totality as made in the divine image. Indeed, "apprehension of the Other" cannot at all designate the alterity of revelation, for " God is not simply the 'first other,' or the 'other par excellence,' or the 'absolutely other,' but other than the other, other otherwise, and other with an alterity prior to the alterity of the other" (Levinas, Of God 69). God is beyond, and thus both before and behind what our conceptual apparatuses and their logical extensions can construct and retain. Revelation is of the Spirit, not simply the spirit of the letter, which would be only to designate the meaning of our language as the meanings of words. The Spirit is that which enables the coming to be of language as something humanity could make, and thus is radically prior to it. While revelation opens the signification of language, it simultaneously closes the gap between the Word and the word of Scripture. It is here that the spirit of the letter and the Spirit meet, or meaning in the language of sense receives the address of Meaning. It quite literally meets its maker, for revelation enforces a re-"cognition" of creation, that it is created and has, of its likeness, the power to construct meaning. What revelation does to language is that from which the account of the first access to knowledge - taking the fruit of the tree of knowledge - is its scripted analogy. Our biblical theme of taking the fruit is, I would argue, nothing more or less than the approach to a first cognition of being, where "human" is implied within "cognition" as only a human process. What this choice for being accepts without yet knowing is the beginning of time, separation from that which only afterwards language can come to conceptualize as wholeness, perfection, the Edenic state. Being (in time) human (for knowledge) shatters the totality of Eden as the separation of moments that cannot be pieced together again for wholeness or pure "duration," but from which we are able to construct an identity for time. Analogous, then, is the Talmudic story of the world for humanity as a shattered vessel, which ushers in the human necessity and impossibility of repairing the world. Only redemption (or moshiach in Judaism) will seal time's moments and fully articulate the pieces of language and the world with a finality of perfection, and this is God's action. By performing the opening of language for the subject of the annunciation of alterity, revelation reveals the fundamental relation between creation and redemption. Language can only trace the relation in sense without knowing, for that is its necessity. By opening language, however, revelation renders human structures of sense otherwise and so able to apprehend the strange

58 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

"synonymy" and "simultaneity" of creation and redemption. In The Star of Redemption, Franz Rosenzweig phrases it succinctly: "Revelation: the ever-renewed birth of the soul" (156). It is little wonder, then, that Anne Hutchinson "confuses," according to the ministers and magistrates, union as redemption with redemption as the final judgment. What the revelation of union with Christ redeems is the separateness that cognition employs for time in its closed world of language and thought. Redemption as a final judgment can only be postulated as a great ending. While, conceptually, believers render its possibility at any moment and say that its time is otherwise than human, doing so may neglect that union gives a taste of redemption, as one is opened out of time in the experience. Thus Shepard says "that the spirit doth not leave the soul to conjectures it is so and to fears it may not be so, but it is a most clear evidence of truth, as tasting of honey is to the tongue, wherein without discourse the soul knows certainly honey is sweet. Hence David saith, Psalm 119, Give me good taste" (166). I HAVE SEEN GOD H I M S E L F AND HAVE BEEN RAVISHED

TO B E H O L D H I M

Shepard 136

Conversion turns one to a new self, such that "ravished" indicates that one is carried away, while standing fast to one's place in his or her body. This is the force of the Spirit and the coming into Christ from the socially constructed self. For Christ to "die for me" takes on the height of its dialectic, for one recognizes his or her death in relation to one's own ravishment, or being carried from self - indeed, carried away from being as a conceptual category and knowing as an ontic discipline. Being is now for death and death for Being in a wholly new way that comes in a circum-vention of thought in human language to be fundamentally a re-"cognition": redemption as creation as redemption, encircling ad infinitum. Rosenzweig explains this "logic" with the example of the structure of divine promise: What is, after all, the difference between promise and fulfillment if not that the former remains stationary, finished, immovable while the latter happens, or, better, materializes. Thus nothing has changed on the way from promise to fulfillment. The content of the promise and the phases of the fulfillment are one and the same, only what was finished thus transformed itself into a beginning. Therewith, however, the constituent pieces which produce the finished product are transformed into predictions of the process which emerges out of the finished product become beginning again, (nz)

This "circum" process is performed in the subject of revelation, for the self is turned to God, ravished, and so re-turns, but not to the same

59 The Justice of Sentencing

"place," or back as the same "self." The soul has been spoken to in Language, the Word, what enables the possibility of human language as image, broken, similarity not sameness. Just as one is ravished in being, she or he cannot return to human language in the same relation as before the interruption of annunciation. It would not be that the subject could now thematize God or revelation better than before. The limit of language still appears firm. Human thought still functions within the logic of correlation, which would necessitate denial of alterity in the process of its representation. Anne Hutchinson's "light" in this sense is no better or worse a descriptive representation of the soul than the words chosen by the ministers, though it fails to cater to "Puritan sociolect" (Staloff zo) or communally accepted terms of reference. However, it does, I argue, mark that something has happened to Hutchinson and has happened to her language, which she herself recognizes. "Light" traces the "modest something" for which she has new "taste," to use Karl Earth's words. That taste is, in part, the recognition of the essence of language annunciated in union. This new "cognition" finds one's relation to language with a difference, a trace of the manifestation of God that retreated in enabling the possibility of signs. The trace is not something visible, or even structural in linguistics, but is rather something that happens in retreat from language in its coming to be. According to Levinas, Expression, saying, is not added on to significations that are "visible" in the light of phenomena, to modify them or confuse them and introduce into them "poetic," "literary," "verbal" enigmas; the significations said offer a hold to the saying which 'disturbs' them, like writings awaiting an interpretation. But herein is the - in principle - irreversible antecedence of the Word with respect to Being, the irretrievable delay of the Said after Saying. Of this antecedence, the significations which, meanwhile, suffice to themselves, bear a trace, which they forthwith contest and efface. (Basic 73)

Recognizing the structure of the trace, however, has a persecuting effect on one's relation to language and its construction of representations. " G O D SAID, LET THERE BE L I G H T " - AND WHAT IS THE LIGHT OF G O D ? IT IS THE SOUL OF

MAN.

Rosenzweig in I T H I N K E THE SOULE TO BE N O T H I N G BUT LIGHT.

Hutchinson in "Report" 356 I T H A N K E THE

L O R D I HAVE LIGHT.

Hutchinson in "Report" 359

If Anne Hutchinson's "confusion" as to the nature of the soul is perhaps the fundamental part of her "heresy," it is also the site where

60 The Letter and the Spirit of i^th-Century American Literature

her "different language" signifies. "Light" becomes the multiply or ultimately unreadable word in her discourse. It may mean knowledge. It may mean breath. It may mean life. It may have been no recognizable word at all but, rather, a transcribed substitution. What is important to make clear is that the experience of annunciation as the sign of union and certification of conversion does not just give one new capability with figurative language or demand that one speak theology poetically. The ministers and magistrates do not misunderstand Hutchinson because she exceeds their "plain style," as Perry Miller phrased it.2Z As the traditional figure of understanding, it is easy to appropriate it into an enlightenment discourse, such that one could position Hutchinson as still within, ultimately, a phallo-logocentric view of cognition and knowledge. As Andrew Delbanco explains, "Anne Hutchinson was saying absolutely nothing at odds with Puritan biblicism" and "was in fact speaking firmly within the Pauline tradition" (135). Philip Gura claims that "[objectively speaking, the difference" in content between Hutchinson's views and those of the governing Puritans "was only a matter of degree" (257-8). Certainly, the ministers and magistrates have to understand revelation as a cognitive structure of consciousness in order to maintain the controllability and readability of conversion and to figure her as deluded. But rhetorically and performatively, the appearance of "light" in the transcripts has a strangeness to it that evades conventional explanations, in that something remains to bother consciousness with a persistence, as if one constantly feels a draught in a perfectly sealed room. While her use of "light" may well mean a certain kind of understanding to Hutchinson, she also deploys it as a means of evading the ministers' and magistrates' discourse, mining the letter of language to keep her legal within the examination and the spirit of her understanding simultaneously. But there is another significance to this evasion, for she clings to the language of Scripture, which performs a certain kind of poetics in this context of examination and trial. Light is that which is not in itself seeable or readable, but which enables sight as such. As a figure for God as creation and redemption, it seeks to signify that which is manifest without presence as humanity could grasp it. One could not agree more with Levinas, particularly given the context of Hutchinson, that poetic and otherwise figurative attempts to signify Saying merely confuse things, because Saying is not represented by language and cannot be brought into appearance but, rather, happens to language. What "remains" in language is the trace, which is not a mark or visibility, as if some ghostly Shroud of Turin, but "an indication that would reveal the withdrawal of the indicated, instead of a reference that rejoins it" (Levinas, Basic 69). Hutchinson simulta-

61 The Justice of Sentencing

neously may and may not know what she is doing. Her attempt at faithful expression seeks synchrony of meaning and expression, but what the performance of her expression enacts is "a meaning that is not synchronized with the speech that captures it and cannot be fitted into its order; everything depends on the possibility of a signification that would signify in an irreducible disturbance" (Levinas, Basic 67).

2, "A" Confession: How to Avoid Speaking the Name of the Father

It sounds highly reductive to suggest that the language lesson learned by the Antinomian Controversy, focalized in the Examination and Trial of Anne Hutchinson, was "how not to speak." But this formulation does bring together the problems of language as situated in the tension between the Word and words, grace and works, the spirit and the letter. In terms of representing revelation in speech, "how not to speak" would open upon the various and creative ways that one could attempt to use language other than within its traditional laws of grammar, syntax, and semantics so as to represent the word as opened. This kind of representation is a type of translation, but one in which the original language, God's, cannot be articulated in or by human language. Language as such articulates (in)to human language by way of the self, now converted and so turned from the social milieu that constructs self-consciousness. The translation is, as I have argued, a trans-figuration, or a passage into figures, a passage into human language that figures an other way of speaking, which makes an original text. The translation is a human construction, dependent upon a now soulful self, recognizing the self's relation to God as creator prior to the constructive and constructed relation to the social. As human and singular, the translation is not given by God. What God gives is a certain knowledge, otherwise than in selfconsciousness, which opens the Word, but the translation is thus open to the variety of constructions in language that the self can create, relative to how he or she reads the context in which the translation must function. The principle of translation, to argue following Walter Benjamin, is to "lovingly and in detail, in its own language, form itself according to the

63 How to Avoid Speaking the Name of the Father

manner of meaning of the original,"z which in the case of revelation is the conveyance of a knowledge beyond even pure knowing of that which is inexpressible. What one seeks in translation, then, is to create the tension in our language of an articulation that passes beyond, leaving behind a trace of what might have been known, could it have entered consciousness. Anne Hutchinson's "light," I suggest, functions in this way. Her speech is "ironious" ("Report" 361), where the sight and sound of this early spelling allows for the trace of "irony" to be seen in the "erroneous" sound: it does not say what it means. Those in charge of language for communication within the society are suspicious of the possibilities inherent in translated representations of revelation, possibilities that extend to any person. Revelation predicates the possibility of a certain pluralism of translation as interpretation, its representation and articulation, and the "sense" it seeks to communicate as its task. The initial, perhaps inherent, singularity of revelation challenges the community of organized faith, here Congregationalism and its association as a theocracy, because such signs of faith become unverifiable by the collective and those empowered with authorized judgment. There is a certain ecstasy of individualism associated with revelation of union in grace, because one's soul, body, and spirit are singled out in that moment as beloved - singled radically out of time and place. After the event, union returns the self to communal time and a community of the elect. The singular nature of the event finds its residue in speech and the use of language that must simultaneously represent revelation on its own terms, yet reveal it within the community's terms of knowledge. The initial product is the conversion narrative. During the time of the Antinomian Controversy, English Protestantism was becoming suspicious of conversion narratives, even while the American tradition of their necessity for church membership was beginning. Not only could the ecstasy of revelation cause the subject to produce dangerously singular narratives, but there was also no certain mechanism for verifying from these narratives the difference between true revelation and utter delusion. In theory, the elect should be able to know the elect. For instance, there is the sense in Calvin's writings that the elect are given a better capacity for interpreting and understanding the words of Scripture. For the elect, parables are not particularly mysterious, but speak clearly of their meaning. For those not elect, parables are technically not even parables, but nonsensical or non-referential (Calvin 95). But the practice of the conversion narrative puts this hearing sense to the test, for a "bursting] forth into eloquence," as Hawthorne calls it ("Hutchinson" 2,3), effusion, rhetorical flourish, and unique syntax, which might seem to be the first means for representing

64

The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

a divine event that exceeds not just the capacity of the everyday but also consciousness itself, might then be a sign equally of the devil or of insanity. Given the tremendous uncertainty over proof of faith spawned in the anxiety over the relationship between a covenant of grace and that of works, it was found to be better to err on the side of delusion, particularly when the ministers themselves were not hearing words and interpretations that concurred with their own. It was better to err on the side of the collective, of controllability, of power and governmentality, of, ultimately, masculinity, than to sanction a singular and, in the case of Anne Hutchinson, woman's voice. Thus Thomas Shepard judges Hutchinson harshly, pronouncing to her and those in attendance "to suspect herselfe and to know it is not Gods Spirit but her owne Spirit that hath guided her hitherto, a spirit of Delusion and Error ... For she is of a most dayngerous Spirit and likely with her fluent Tounge and forwardnes in Expressions to seduce and draw away many, Espetially simple Weomen of her owne sex" ("Report" 365). If the voice of God to the heart could be translated easily, and even translated at all and so captured in the communicative capacity of human language, then there would be no real problem about the relation of sanctification and justification, no anxiety over the issue of election. Even if knowledge of God's communication were in a language wholly otherwise, or not in a language at all, the assumption would be that any justified person would be able to work out language to capture it as not just believable but as knowable to the self and others. Translation, even reading as such, would be a perfect process. But the Judeo-Christian tradition in general has little faith in this possibility, let alone this ease. Prophecy - take the case of Jonah - is not immediately hearable, let alone understandable. The word of Scripture is not immediately or perhaps ever perfectly clear. Not only are humans able to lie as part of our evil inclination, but we can also misrespresent in language and because of language, against even our best intentions. For our language to be communicative, its process is dialogic between speaker and hearer. What I say may or may not be what you hear or understand, even as we both smile and nod our heads in agreement. John Norton, speaking for many Protestants, says emphatically that "the inward side of the event [of conversion] in a person cannot be known by others" (qtd. in Caldwell, Puritan 83-4). In courting the whole conversion narrative "test," New England Puritans, in the minds of the English, were encroaching on God's territory, the interiority of humanity (see Tipson 466). Yet, as Patricia Caldwell demonstrates, the conversion narrative as a test of admission to the congregational church was a response to various conditions generated in the situation of the colony and the immigrant people that sought to share experi-

65 How to Avoid Speaking the Name of the Father

ence, and even the anxiety itself of sharing experience, with a community of others in the church. To that end, while it did tread entirely on the sanctification/justification issue, it sought to do so in a "safe" way. Godly conversation may be a sign of election, but the other members of the church are empowered to judge whether one has godly conversation or not. Thus, while a certain kind of behaviour is being generated and taken as a sign of justification, it is behaviour that is neither individualistic nor extraordinary, but "common," or "communal," "essentially known and understood and felt in common by all the other members" (Caldwell, Puritan 86). In an effort to control the problem of effusion, Puritans argued that it is not so much the meaning of the language or the description of the "event" that needs be validated communally, but, more importantly, "the 'tast' of another saint's spirit despite that ultimate privacy of all experience" (95). The "tast" means, loosely, the tone and feel of that spirit in one's language. The language of the conversion narrative, then, is doubly strange, because it is caught in tension between inside and outside. Dutiful to Christ in union, the self's necessity is to be faithful to her inner experience of the opening of the word and indwelling. But the narrative is for an audience, and the stakes of persuading these hearers are high congregational membership as elect at best and excommunication at worst. The speaker of the narrative has to know her audience, perhaps better than she knows Christ, so that she does not figure the inexpressible (the content of revelation) as incomprehensible. Ironically, the "proof" of conversion depends less on God than on conferral and legitimation by the congregation. The language chosen in figuring a certain "tast" has to try to represent what the subject would already have had to have known of her community. Her chosen figures would have to turn to, and so represent, this "outside" of community knowledge and sentiment more than an "inside," personal experience. In this sense, the conversion narrative is aptly but ironically named, for it turns from inside to outside to find the content to be represented. In Anne Hutchinson's case, for instance, she would have had to have lied about her experience and been submissive in order to have escaped excommunication and banishment, and to have protected her election/ The conversion narrative always, then, has an irreducible politics. While the responses in the Examination and Trial do not form a conversion narrative proper, they are the only venues we have of Hutchinson's words about her conversion. She must have given her formal conversion narrative in 1634, as she was admitted to the church on z November, though even then Battis notes that her questioning by the congregation took longer than that of her husband (4). What the Examination and Trial suggest, however, is that in 1634 Anne Hutchinson

66

The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

probably knew better how (not) to speak, which is to say, she was shrewd enough as to how the dynamic of congregational conferral of election worked. But by 1637-42, perhaps because of the authorizing and validating function of election, her language does not attempt to return to the congregation. To her ears, while she has "light," the ministers' language is not clear, excepting that of John Cotton, her teacher. The Examination and Trial actually provides Hutchinson with the opportunity for a double conversion narrative. While she tells of her revelation, she also has the possibility to turn on it, to recant it and turn back, and to turn her figures outwards. Even though she admits of certain mistakes of interpretation and understanding, the magistrates and ministers do not convince her that she is deluded, but only so in their eyes, and she does not accept that they have valid judgment in this matter. "The fear of man is a snare" ("Examination" 320). She can only trust Christ, not men, and can best muster the conditional: "If this be Error than it is myne and I ought to lay it downe. If it be truth it is not myne but Christ Jesus and than I am not to lay it downe" ("Report" 352,). In the conversion narrative, according to Anne Hutchinson's teacher, John Cotton, Candidates are called for before the Church, ... and each one maketh confession of his sinnes, and profession of his faith. In confession of his sinnes (that it may appear to be a penitent confession) he declareth also the grace of God to his soule, drawing him out of his sinfull estate into fellowship with Christ: In his profession of his faith, he declareth not onely his good knowledge of the principles of Religion, but also his professed subjection to the Gospel of Christ, with his desire of walking therein, with the fellowship of that Church, (qtd. in Caldwell, Puritan 65)

Hutchinson admits not of sin, but tells of an Other knowledge of the Word. One would expect, then, that since she is admitting full "subjection to ... Christ," her "good knowledge of the principles of Religion" would be exceedingly good and her "subjection to the Gospel of Christ" supreme. And yet this is not what the ministers and magistrates hear. They find errors. She admits of mistakes. Election should confer to human language something new, a fullness, a certainty of the connection between knowledge and representation. As Janice Knight phrases it, following John Cotton, grace confers "a new aesthetic" to the convert (21). Language becomes, in a certain sense, new and is to be shared by the elect as a medium of communication. There is a vicious circle in this structure. Conversion produces a new language in which the narrative of conversion is told to those who are also converted. Understanding the language is a necessary condition of

6j

How to Avoid Speaking the Name of the Father

ieving in the conversion; however, there seems to be no room for the possibility of believing in the conversion and not understanding the language. Anne Hutchinson's son-in-law and other supporters indirectly pose this problem when they question whether she needs to be excommunicated, when all she has said is that the words she chose for expressing her judgment were mistaken ("Report" 365-7). She admits subjection to Christ - indeed, radical subjection to Christ - even in her last words. Yet what she feels is opened to her in the coming of Christ is the fact of her subjection to the Gospel as distinct from the Law. To her supporters and eventually herself, Hutchinson simply professes her faith poorly, mistakenly. However, what seems clear in the transcripts is that the ministers would first have to validate her conversion by admitting a sharing of its "tast" in order to believe her profession of faith as simply mistaken. This validation they cannot make, ironically, because they do understand her language, or so they feel. And what her language says is that she has experienced a very singular occurrence, an immediate revelation such as experienced by Abraham and Hagar. More complicatedly and ironically, however, what her language continues to say is that not only does it not reflect her judgment, but that one cannot judge her, then, from what her language is saying. A certain differend emerges in the structure of the conversion narrative, for the radical singularity inherent in union and then performed by the converted in narrative claims for itself a status which the collective must sanction so as to legitimate, but which they cannot even hear.3 The structure thus enables the situation in which the convert is interpellated as delusional because she is speaking from the effects of conversion. In this sense, the conversion narrative becomes a certain captivity narrative, for the subject is caught between two forces of subjection, employing different orders of power, one divine and atemporal, the other communal and temporal. Anne Hutchinson at least tries to explain and to mediate this position by asserting a difference between her expression and her judgment ("Report" 378). Her expression is formed in relation to Christ; her judgment, she now understands, she must try to fashion in relation to the power of the community. CAPTIVATING

DISCOURSE

This is a lesson that seems to have been learned by Mary Rowlandson, whose captivity narrative of i68z speaks doubly, adhering to the communal structure of typology while reserving in its tropological structures, moments of singular experience uncontained by typology.4 Rowlandson's is not a narrative of her conversion to Christ, but something more like a reconversion or performed affirmation. Her position

68 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

as a Puritan " Goodwife" is asserted at the beginning, and the typological structure of the narrative seeks to reaffirm that position by showing how her salvation from captivity by "savages" with her sexual chastity and Puritan faith intact is a feat of God's providential power. Indeed, its publication history suggests that while, in the main, it was published and marketed under the rubric of religious writing that made up the bulk of New England publications of the time, it was also partially recognized a "steady seller" that combined "historical content" with sensationalism (Derounian, "Publication" 248-5o).5 As Kathryn Zabelle Derounian demonstrates, while the first three editions were entitled The Soveraignty & Goodness of God, Together, with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed; Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. Commended by her, to all that desires to know the Lords doings to, and dealings with Her. Especially to her dear Children and Relations, the fourth edition carried the title A True History of the Captivity & Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, A Ministers Wife in New-England, Wherein is set forth, The Cruel and Inhumane Usage she underwent amongst the Heathens, for Eleven Weeks time: And her Deliverance from them ("Publication" 2.50, 254). 6 The different titles reflect the tension in the narrative itself, because under the rubric of religious experience, there are moments of secular personal experience that emerge in the negotiations of cultural contact. As facilitated by the rigours of Indian captivity, these experiences demonstrate an agency by Rowlandson that is otherwise "foreign" to life in the Puritan community. They suggest that there is a another kind of conversion which takes place, or at least threatens to take place, one that shares with Anne Hutchinson's a turn to a more self-directed sphere of female agency. By no means do I wish to suggest that divine revelation and Indian captivity are the same, but rather that the singularity of challenging experience, in which the self has to muster resources within itself that it did not know it had when in the community, makes it so that through subjection the self is turned to a new self, individuated and liberated from some of the confines of socially constructed gender. This new self cannot be fully returned to the original community with ease or in some cases at all. It can certainly be argued that Mary Rowlandson wants to be returned to the community. Mitchell Breitwieser suggests that the "desire to share or participate," which is to say, the desire to write a public narrative of private experience, is "a desire to belong again among the lives of those from whom she has been torn, a desire not only to communicate with them but also to share meaning and thus to have been fully rather than only physically rescued" (8). Hers is a confession, but one that sits on the threshold of the secular and the re-

69 How to Avoid Speaking the Name of the Father

ligious. She is not confessing sin but, rather, trauma. Derounian postulates that Rowlandson suffered from what we now call the "survivor syndrome" ("Publication" 2.40).7 For me, what is in question is how the trauma confessed is an unsettled mixture generated by the captivity among Natives and the certain "captivity" of the return to the Puritan community.8 Typology becomes the heavy-handed discourse used in her narrative to justify and so explain what appears in the narrative as her own ability to deal with the trauma of Indian captivity. It attempts also, through the soothing words of God's grace, to negotiate the residual trauma of return. Michelle Burnham's persuasive account of Rowlandson's narrative argues for how the particular agency emerges in Rowlandson's language as a supplement or critical remainder from the exchange between two cultures and sets of discourse. If the "wilderness-condition" (Rowlandson 329) in which Rowlandson finds herself captive arises between the camps of Puritan and Native, the discourse of the narrative finds itself in another contact zone that facilitates the narrative telling - that which is structured between typological and sentimental discourse. "Typology ideally operates through a structure of equivalence, in which events in scripture reflect and foretell the outcome of events in the world, just as figures and incidents in the Old Testament prefigure those in the New Testament" (Burnham 16). Breitwieser's remarkably thorough study of Rowlandson's narrative employs different figures, those of exemplarity and mourning, to account for the tension in the narrative. While exemplarity provides the mechanism with which "Puritanism could once again govern, by virtue of explanatory cogency, the entire range of human experience" (Breitwieser 8), its attempt to shape a text that performs mourning meets with resistance. Rowlandson "comes across intensities of memory that resist rather than aid exemplary reduction, and, as a result, moral clarity becomes forcible clarification, conspicuously coercive with respect to the material it putatively summarizes, and marred by intrusive dissonances" (Breitwieser 9). Thus typology is an explanatory technique used by Rowlandson to shape the meaning of her ability to survive and be returned. It figures her in a certain conversion narrative, in which, because she often turns in faith to the Bible and God during her subsequent "removes" with the Natives, she is providentially restored. From the particular to the general, however, typology is also used as a vehicle for managing the meaning of King Philip's War, of which the sacking of Lancaster, Massachusetts, and Rowlandson's captivity are a part.9 Yet the major part of her narrative is written in a sentimental discourse that moves along with Rowlandson, further and further from Puritanism. The punctuations of typology attempt to restore her place, but the " 'moving'

jo The Letter and the Spirit of i^th-Century American Literature

qualities" (Burnham 3) of sentimentalism escape that pinning down of equivalence, necessary for typology to work properly. The emotional, moving, mourning nature of her narrative "challenges the fundamental premises of Puritan exemplaristic typology, and with them the social project they were intended to justify and sustain" (Breitwieser Z9). As Breitwieser notes, "providence remains the narrative's announced argument to the end, but by the end it has dwindled to an extrinsic credo alienated from the intensities of what is going on" (9). Typology starts to fall in on itself, as the descriptive support of the events removes itself with an excess of sentiment just prior to typology being able to capture Rowlandson's experience back into itself. The relation between typology and sentimentalism is allegorized as the relation between the Puritan army and the Native captors. At the first moment of possible capture, when the Natives must pause to cross a river, the army appears unable to perform what the Native band, including Rowlandson, can do; thus the Natives move away, leaving the army to retreat, regroup, and mount another attempt. In the end, it is the exchange between these two groups that returns Rowlandson to the Puritan community, but for a sum, "twenty pounds" (352,); and while equivalence is negotiated between the two parties, there is a remainder for Rowlandson which troubles, if not bars, her restoration. In the narrative, her use of anaphora and incantatory discourse troubles the temporality of the "then" of captivity and a "now" of restoration, for she can still taste the food of captivity. "See, I pray you, how mine eyes have been enlightened, because I tasted a little of this honey, i Samuel. 14.29. Now is my spirit revived again" (Rowlandson 349). Given identification in reading, which sentimentalism encourages, the "now" of the telling moves into the present of reading, so that not only is one led to feel that captivity exists even now, but also that through the various I's and we's of the discourse, readers find themselves interpellated. Because the narrative thematizes the exchange between opposing poles, it allows for the performance of an exchange between the reader's situation and that of the text, where the remainder of this vicarious experience would be the consciousness of one's own potential captivity. The standard use of typology seems uncontroversial enough at the beginning of the narrative. After the bloody siege of Lancaster, when Mary Rowlandson is taken captive, and after three removes into the wilderness with her dying daughter in her arms, she is given a Bible by one of the Natives (330). She opens it to Deuteronomy 2,8, which gives her no comfort, for it explains that "if though shalt hearken diligently unto the voice of the Lord thy God ... God will set thee on high above all nations of the earth" (Deut. 2,8:1); however, the "if" turns by 28:15 to detail, "The Lord shall send upon thee cursing, vexation, and rebuke ... until thou be

71 How to Avoid Speaking the Name of the Father destroyed" (2.8:2.0), if one does not hearken unto the Lord. "Thy sons and thy daughters shall be given unto another people" (28:32,); God will afflict your body with wounds and bring you to another nation to "serve other gods, wood and stone" (2,8:36). "The tender and delicate woman among you ... her eye shall be evil toward the husband of her bosom, and toward her son, and toward her daughter" (28:56). Nevertheless, Rowlandson thanks the Lord for allowing her to persevere to chapter 30, where it is said that if she returns to God, even amidst this adversity, "then the Lord thy God will turn thy captivity ... circumcise your heart ... and the Lord thy God will put all these curses upon thine enemies, and on them that hate thee, which persecuted thee" (30:3-7). Typologically, Deuteronomy maps out Rowlandson's experience and attempts to provide a frame within which to read her experience and her use of biblical citation. Her captivity by Natives is turned, and I do not think that it is in question whether she loves God. The question is whether the return is not its own kind of captivity and, as the narrative progresses by removes, whether her biblical citations do not accentuate in their clumsiness the incompetence of the English army, the ingenuity and humanity of the Natives, and the liminal status of Mary Rowlandson. Typology is itself a certain instance of how not to speak, for while the description of the event is the subject's, the significance rendered the event is given to God. Thus in the Twentieth Remove, the final section of the narrative, Rowlandson presents "a few remarkable passages of providence" (3 58) as a laundry list that punctuates events which furthered her troubles, less because of Indian "savagery" than the remarkable incompetence of the army: Of the fair opportunity lost in the long march a little after the fort-fight, when our English army was so numerous, and in pursuit of the enemy, and so near as to take several and destroy them, and the enemy in such distress for food, that our men might track them by their rooting in the earth for ground nuts whilst they were flying for their lives. I say that then our army should want provision, and be forced to leave their pursuit and return homeward, and the very next week the enemy came upon our town, like bears bereft of their whelps, or so many ravenous wolves, rending us and our lambs to death. But what shall I say? God seemed to leave His people to themselves, and order all things for His own holy ends ... It is the Lord's doing, and it should be marvelous in our eyes. (358, emphasis added) When the English army with new supplies were sent forth to pursue after the enemy, & they understanding it, fled before them till they came to Baquag river, where they forthwith went over safely, that that river should be impassable to the English. I can but admire to see the wonderful providence of God in

72, The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature preserving the heathen for farther affliction to our poor country. They could go in great numbers over, but the English must stop. God had an over-ruling hand in all those things. (358-9)

"What shall I say?" indeed, for has she not said much? Even accounting for the Puritan world view in which God's ways are so radically distinct that human perceptions of what would be just cannot fathom such intentions and works, there is a tone to Rowlandson's words that becomes critical and personal, with phrases directed at human agency. No amount of attribution to God's providence can silence the scathing criticism of the army in these passages. The issue is that what began as a critical voice against Indian savagery has, by removes, turned to point out "white," Christian incompetence. Rowlandson becomes the limin of these two cultural zones. Not only is the critique cultural and racial, but it is gendered as well, for she herself crosses that river and learns that the greater providence of God is his provision of fruit of the earth at all times - ground nuts, horse's hoofs, bear, and deer. She does not starve in the face of not having the luxury of turning back for better provisions. One could argue that Rowlandson's critical voice emerges in the final section because she is not employing typology to the letter, but attributing the significance of the events to God's providence, rather than working it through with proof texts of chapter and verse. However, if typology writes the significance of the event over the temporal content, what can be said of the agency of the speaker when the narrative event overwrites a significance onto the content of the biblical passage ? For here, on the margins of the biblical citation, Rowlandson performs how (not) to speak of the difference of her situation. At the end of the Eighteenth Remove, she snatches a piece of boiled horse's hoof from a child who is too slow it to eat it and consumes it herself, pausing to remember, as she does every time she describes eating something repulsive, that "savory it was to my taste" (350). She chases this pronouncement with a quotation from the Book of Job: "The things that my soul refuseth to touch, are as my sorrowful meat" (350, Job 6:7), which she glosses as proof that God can make abominable things pleasant and refreshing, and that therefore it was God who made the horse's hoof palatable. If God makes abominable things delicious for Rowlandson so that she is able to transform repulsion into attraction, the proof she cites is Job saying that he is unable to stomach his lot.10 Breitwieser argues effectively that "for Rowlandson the wonder of experience lies in the uncanny literalization of Scripture -Job's sorrowful meat means just that, the horse's hoof" (105). The biblical figure becomes literal for Rowlandson, and "these rhymes between Scripture

73 How to Avoid Speaking the Name of the Father

and experience are eerie realizations of the figure, the sacred happening here and now to her" (80). Her problem, for Breitwieser, if such is the case, is that there is "an imbalance between the literality of the afflictions and the allegoricity of the reimbursements" (105). If she sees herself actually as a type of Job, with divine trial and providential sight as really happening now, then redemption approachs. The promised return "from the land of the enemy" (33z) that she cites from Jeremiah 31:16 would need to be understood "anagogically, as referring to the soul's entry to paradise" (Breitwieser 105). If she is using typology in this way, then she creates for herself a situation in which the "peacetime restitution of ordinariness, despite its relief for stomach, knees, and so on, is not the ordained consolation for the loss, and the credibility of the promise remains to be seen" (Breitwieser 105). Typological understanding of this sort creates a temporal and cognitive gap that hope and trust must fill in waiting, but it is one with which Rowlandson has great trouble. In it she takes on the activity of writing her narrative, publicizing her self and experiences in an act of agency facilitated by the experience and changes to self of Indian captivity and survival, more than, even rather than, Puritan existence. Because of the traumatic redeployment of her life as actual example of the literal coming into being of typology, ordinary life feels like abeyance, which she attempts to activate by reliving captivity in writing. Certainly one can account for this move as a return to re-member trauma, seeking understanding and closure, but what troubles that reading is the link between the activity of writing, the exemplarity now created as a publicly writing woman, and the significant moments of positive female agency figured as a sweet and savoury pleasure in the narrative; where, as with her use of typology, the figure takes on a certain and significant literality. That is to say, Job's meat is "sorrowful," and he implores God to kill him (Job 6:9-10); Rowlandson's is "pleasant refreshing, which another time would have been an abomination" (350). " 'See, I pray you, how mine eyes have been enlightened, because I tasted a little of this honey,' i Samuel I4:z9" (349). In the exchange between her experience and Job's, between Indian captivity and divinely authorized persecution, between her use of Scripture and the significance that Scripture is supposed to give, there is friction. In doing the good Puritan thing of writing typology into the narrative, she creates a situation in which her difference is highlighted. These sweet and savoury moments in Rowlandson's narrative signal how food becomes an overdetermined category, the site of much of her movement within Native territory - its culture. While the preface to the narrative by "Ter Amicam"11 assures readers of Rowlandson's fundamental modesty and privacy (Rowlandson 321), and Rowlandson relates

74 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

no instances of sexual defilement, her relation to food suggests that she embraces a certain kind of defilement, which exceeds the justification of necessity. "Necessity" here would mean both physical survival and the typological explanation that her situation was made as the worst of tests so as to underscore in faith the best of providential ends to come. And what is at issue does not concern the fact that she was forced to adopt Native ways and eat their "filthy trash" (333), but rather that she liked the experience and likes it still. Rowlandson "sins" over food by countenancing the ways of the "savages," digesting them, and pointedly coming to enjoy them in ways that exceed spiritual joy. In so doing, she separates herself from her Puritan community by nourishing herself on what is unclean, so to say, and by electing to become part of the heathen. Her coming around to what "would have been an abomination" (350) is a turning to unclean things, part of what is abjected from the Puritan body, the community, in its chosenness of election. Her coming to enjoy the sweet meat overwrites the physical issue of survival with another kind of survival - female agency that can only exist independent of the Puritan community and, here, in relay through a return to reingest the abject. On horse's hoofs and deer fetuses, Rowlandson nourishes her self, developing and employing a kind of agency that she could not access within the confines and regulations of the "pure" body and the Puritan community. Indeed, she reaches a stage at which she is taking the food from the mouths of children (350), fighting with Natives for it (335), and savouring horse liver, "with the blood about my mouth" (335). The Levitical overtones in these moments suggest that, relative to conversion, Rowlandson turns the figures so that it is not the exclusion of the impure that designates chosenness, but rather the return to the "impure" that actualizes the self's agency. And this is particularly a female agency, realizable apart from the Puritan community and its gendered construction of the "Goodwife." Explanation of this connection is facilitated by Julia Kristeva's work on the abject, the maternal body, and the constitution of the subject.12 Drawing on the logic of Leviticus, in which distinctions and exclusions made in terms of foods, sacrificial conduct, and life practices shore up and maintain the separation of the chosen people from "the others," Kristeva reflects on the psychological significance for the construction of the ego of the human condition of expelling waste material from the body. Referencing Mary Douglas, Kristeva notes that "filth is not a quality in itself, but applies only to what relates to a boundary and, more particularly, represents the object jettisoned out of that boundary, its other side, a margin" (69). From this position, she argues for the primary relation of the abject to the self, such as is found, for instance, in the necessary nature of expelling feces or the self-protective process

75 How to Avoid Speaking the Name of the Father

of vomiting (2). "Since the food is not an 'other' for 'me,' who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself with the same motion through which T claim to establish myself (3). "The abjection of self would be the culminating form of that experience of the subject to which it is revealed that all its objects are based merely on the inaugural loss that laid the foundations of its own being" (5). Decidedly, Kristeva's context here is distinct from mine; however, the idea of a self formerly constituted within the boundary of a community (Puritan) and expelled out of it (removal) into a relation with an other (Native), who is constitutive of the self-definition of the initial community and consequently the self, resonates in Rowlandson's case. Furthermore, the turn from the Native's food as "filthy trash" to sweet meat that she comes not only to desire but to thrive on suggests, "There is nothing like the abjection of self to show that all abjection is in fact recognition of the want on which any being, meaning, language, or desire is founded" (Kristeva 5). Psychoanalytically, philosophically, and theologically, however, the feminine and the maternal body are the original abject materials that are sloughed off, thrown aside, and separated from, in order to constitute an "I." Kristeva works this argument out in relation to the sacred and the logic of Leviticus, which argues for distinctions between the pure and impure. Blood, in this context, takes on prime significance: On the one hand there is bloodless flesh (destined for man) and on the other, blood (destined for God). Blood, indicating the impure, takes on the "animal" seme of the previous opposition and inherits the propensity for murder of which man must cleanse himself. But blood, as a vital element, also refers to women, fertility, and the assurance of fecundation. It thus becomes a fascinating semantic crossroads, the propitious place for abjection where death and femininity, murder and procreation, cessation of life and vitality all come together. "But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat" (Genesis 9:4). (96) Dietary abomination has thus a parallel - unless it be foundation - in the abomination provoked by the fertilizable or fertile feminine body (menses, childbirth). Might it be that dietary prohibitions are a screen in a still more radical separating process? Would the dispositions place-body and the more elaborate one speech-logic of differences be an attempt to keep a being who speaks to his God separated from the fecund mother? (100)

The other side of the coin, then, is that "What we designate as 'feminine,' far from being a primeval essence, will be seen as an 'other' without a name" (58), not the foundation of, or even accessible to,

j6

The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

ownership of the Name of and Law of the Father, nor anything other than second, the "help meet" to the adam, a function of his rib in relation to God the Father. "Are you pure enough to meet God?" is a question whose answer to a large extent depends on one's responses to impure substances and ultimately thoughts, in relation to which bloodlessness and the repudiation of carnality and maternity take on significant weight. The more one separates herself from them, the more distinct she becomes from the mixtures and decay they represent, the more she becomes expert, through repetition, in negotiating that original separation from the mother's body; thus the more prepared she is to be sacred, which in the Puritan terms relative to Rowlandson would, be the meeting of Christ in union. The exclusion of these things marked as filthy and defiling is what establishes not only the clean and proper body but also the proper corporate body, the social group. The failure to exclude abject things results in a kind of sinking into undifferentiated material, a turning back on oneself in a refusal to meet God, a failure of the chosen people to protect their distinction and hold themselves together as a separate group. In the Second Epistle of Peter, for instance, we find that a person who, once converted, turns back to sin is as the dog turning back to its own vomit (2 Pet. 2:22). In Rowlandson's narrative, events involving both food and blood, two significant sites of the abject, add up to such a figure. In her description of the scene of carnage at the siege of Lancaster, she begins to figure herself in a condition of non-differentiation. "The bullets flying thick, one went through my side, and the same (as would seem) through the bowels and hand of my poor child in my arms. One of my elder sister's children (named William) had then his leg broke, which the Indians perceiving, they knocked him on the head. Thus were we butchered by those merciless heathens, standing amazed, with the blood running down to our heels" (32.4). The "we" in these lines is made up of Rowlandson and her daughter, Sarah, as a composite subject whose body is wounded thrice by the same bullet. This initial failure to differentiate becomes important later, I would suggest, when Sarah turns into a corpse, the depth of the abject for the self. However, the "we" in "Thus were we butchered" suggests an identification with the others who are dying or already dead, a failure to perceive them as objects or others, and a perception of them instead as part of "me." Non-differentiation is manifested in the strange statement "Thus were we butchered, standing amazed, with the blood running down to our heels." It implies a simultaneous consciousness (we were "standing amazed") and becoming waste material ("with the blood running down to our heels"). It is a moment of sublime alienation in which an "I" is watching itself turn into abject material. That dynamic is re-

77 How to Avoid Speaking the Name of the Father

peated in Sarah's death, in the Third Remove. Up to this point, Rowlandson has referred to Sarah's wound and her own wound as if they were almost the same (32,4), and she has also referred to the dying Sarah as her own wound. "I may say, as it is in Psalm 38:5,6. 'My wounds stink and are corrupt' " (32,8). "I cannot, but take notice, how at another time I could not bear to be in the room where any dead person was, but now the case is changed. I must, and could ly [sic] down by my dead babe, side by side, all the night after" (32,9). Here what Rowlandson seems to want to mark is the new possibility ("could") and, indeed, the new imperative ("must") of remaining close to a corpse, and the "now" in "now the case is changed" can be read both as the present of the Third Remove and as the present of writing, which would mean that Rowlandson continues to live under this new imperative. Remembering, then, the condition of non-differentiation that is set up in the scene of siege, when the same bullet passes through the mother's and the daughter's sides, as if suturing them through a wounding, it is possible to see this new "side by side" as another moment of sublime alienation. Rowlandson is watching a part of herself become abject and hugging her own corporeal "waste" to her. Rowlandson makes particular note of the fact that Sarah does not get a proper burial. Indeed, she says: "I went to take up my dead child in my arms to carry it with me, but they bid me let it alone" (3x9). She does not get to see the subsequent burial, and she has only the satisfaction of being told that Sarah's body is under the newly dug-up ground (3x9). She comments on this unfinished state of affairs by saying that "there I left that child in the wilderness, and must commit it and myself also in this wilderness-condition, to Him who is above all" (32.9), again suggesting that she has had to let a part of herself loose. Only after this trauma, in the Sixth and Seventh Removes, when Rowlandson is beginning to enter into a Native economy, exchanging her labour for scraps of food and for tobacco, which she trades for more food, does she begin to find "pleasant and savoury" what was previously filthy trash - horse-leg broth, half-cooked horse liver - describing herself as eating it "with the blood about my mouth" (335). "Ye shall eat the blood of no manner of flesh: for the life of all flesh is the blood thereof: whosoever eateth it shall be cut off," commands Leviticus 17:14. Certainly, Puritans did not live under the laws of Kashruth, but Rowlandson's tendency to literalize what in the Bible is of figurative significance to Puritans foregrounds its materiality performatively. Tropologically, if the " blood running down to our heels" signals the onset of non-differentiation from the abject (the dead as waste), here "with the blood about my mouth" signals a more-than-willing ingestion of the abject. By the Fourteenth Remove, Rowlandson eats a deer's foetus, which

78

The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

"was so young and tender, that one might eat the bones as well as the flesh, and yet I thought it very good. When night came on ..." (347). Her narrative moves swiftly forward, mentioning this incident only in passing; but it seems to me that the ingestion has an excess of significance, for the dead young fawn comes to stand in the place of Sarah, whom Rowlandson reingests, as if introjecting the abject - Sarah here, a non-object. As Mary Clare Carruth argues, the fetus-Sarah substitution suggests a figurative transgression of the incest taboo (15960), which is arguably a sign of Rowlandson's more general remove from Puritan exclusivity. I read this substitution, however, as Rowlandson reingesting a part of herself, part of the "me" expelled from the "I," as if a dog returning to its vomit. The scene of the deer fetus becomes that of a significant exchange or conversion of one self, constructed as Puritan Goodwife to another - not Native particularly, but one in a "wilderness-condition" facilitated by Native American culture. She rushes as if to the altar to consume food prohibited in that moment to humans because it is designated as a sacrifice to God. Because she is willingly partaking of food and performing practices of a culture whose expulsion and prohibition is fundamental to shoring up the boundary of American Puritan life, Rowlandson performs what amounts to a refusal to meet God. If the fetus can be read as carrying the trace of Sarah, then simultaneously Rowlandson is reclaiming a part of her self by way of an other, which takes the form of a new self-agency. Just prior to the scene of the fawn, Rowlandson recounts her subsistence on a piece of cake that had been given to her by a Native, which had fallen to crumbs and had gone mouldy "for want of good baking," she says parenthetically (347). Between this scene and that of eating the fetus is a transitional sentence that heralds what is to come: "It was in my thoughts when I put it to my mouth, that if I ever returned, I would tell the world, what a blessing the Lord gave to such mean food" (347). Even if her consciousness reflects the typological desire to tell of God's good graces and providence, her self-consciousness about the desire to "tell the world" opens up the possibility of an ironic (ironious) inscription, for it is as if this narrative is the fulfillment of that promise to tell the world that abominable objects are delicious. The event content and the typological rendering converge to bring the logic of providential suffering to its own conclusion: I love suffering, abominable things are tasty, and I am going to stuff myself with them and announce to the world that they are delicious. The tension that opens up the irony is that the logic of exemplarity is destabilized by being carried to its extreme. As Carruth notes, Rowlandson's narrative "foregrounds her sinful flesh more than its promised sublimation to such a degree that her

79 How to Avoid Speaking the Name of the Father

tale threatens to destabilize the model of conversion to which it attempts to adhere" (12.9). Breitwieser comes to a similar conclusion within the context of his different terminology: "I think that Rowlandson's appeals to Scripture in some cases express an anti-ideological typology, thereby challenging the safety of corporate sovereignty and the incipient positivism of the watchmen and expressing or providing a vehicle for the errant perception" (95). In the typological exchange between actual secular events that are supposed to perform as signs of providential meaning, an untranslatable materiality remains. Carnal or carnivorous pleasure cannot itself be abjected from the performance of reading Rowlandson's language in the negotiated move by writer and reader to spiritualize the event. The shifting contexts in which readers of this best-seller have found themselves in the years since its publication reingest this abject, one for which the tropological construction of Rowlandson's work allows. Thus, relative to the self with its own agency, within the context of a narrative that attempts to restore the self as a limb of the corporate body, her narrative performs how (not) to speak as a speaking doubly. In Rowlandson's case, the captivity narrative tells a certain conversion narrative, such that the turning to Native culture returns a subject uneasily and uncannily "home." Captivity by Natives enables her to use the very goodwifely skills of home economy, sewing, and cooking, and to function as a self-interested mercantilist, trading her wares for food and increased freedom of movement and ordering from suppliers. The parcels that she is allowed to receive from her husband contain regular allotments of tobacco, which she trades for money (356). Breitwieser notes that "Puritan women regularly participated in extramural exchange, disbursing what was produced in domestic industry and procuring what was necessary for domestic maintenance" (147), but such activity was contingent upon their husbands' approval (Koehler 47). "Single, widowed, or divorced women of means could open mercantile shops, own land, and maintain inns ... [and] sue on their own behalf in court," but these situations were not the norm, nor were they easy, selffulfilling, or attached to any contemporary sense of sexual liberation (Koehler 48). I3 Following Burnham (2.^-4), the issue is that the very skills honed in Puritan "freedom" allow Rowlandson to achieve something tangibly "self"-related, individuated, and in a certain sense liberated, with the dollops of joy these entail. Because they are used not just for quotidian maintenance but for immediate survival, they foreground to her a self-invested agency that the context of Puritan "freedom" could not so strikingly reveal. As Christopher Castiglia phrases it, "In entering the Indian economy, Rowlandson transforms herself from an object of exchange in a trade conducted between men ... to an agent of

8o The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

exchange (47, emphasis added). Once she is empowered, her return to the Puritan community necessitates a restriction of such agency, which is not to say that she is not allowed to sew or trade, but rather that these skills now have less significance for self-formation, and there is no place to spend the profit transgressively for self-actualized development. Koehler argues that there were virtually "no avenues for women to seek fulfillment outside of marriage" (44), and Rowlandson's marriage to Captain Samuel Talcott in 1679, after Joseph Rowlandson's death in November 1678, possibly underscores the point (Derounian, "Publication" 2,43), particularly since she was awarded an annual pension of £30 after Joseph Rowlandson's death, though "the Wethersfield town records do not indicate its ever having been paid" (Slotkin and Folsom 303). The element of conversion is that Rowlandson is turned to recognize that her former freedom now appears as a certain and seemingly inevitable captivity; the providential punishment of captivity by savages reveals itself as more the fault of lazy soldiers and bad planning than of God's curse. Typology, the intent to hold the meaning of events captive to a providential reading, cannot perform its office because what is providential turns out to be significantly the opportunity for female self-development and empowerment. The desire to write the narrative, to "tell the world," must be restored to the fold of typology in order to speak, but within that fold, it recovers its own space from which to speak, performing an excess that typology cannot contain, but which, oddly enough, it facilitates. MARGINAL CONVERSION

On the threshold of the captivity narrative and the conversion narrative, Nathaniel Hawthorne issues forth The Scarlet Letter. Beyond a certain anti-nomianism of which Hester Prynne partakes in her refusal to speak the name of the father of little Pearl and the captivity of the A in which she is held (so much so that she returns to it of her own will), there are broader features of both the captivity and conversion genres in which The Scarlet Letter is implicated. The text is fiction, but with a referential relation to the ideas of captivity and conversion, including, in part, the specific situation of Anne Hutchinson. Yet as "The Custom-House" introduction appears to call forth, the story figures itself as a reading and embellishment of the letter of Surveyor Pue, a story that focuses on how embellishment of the letter and its performance can interrupt and ultimately convert the office of the letter (A). Given the temporal span between Surveyor Pue's writing and the narrator's, and the context of "custom" presented by Hawthorne, there are issues concerning how (not) to speak about history that may well figure

81 How to Avoid Speaking the Name of the Father

the truth more tellingly than any official account. My interest, then, is the performance of language in The Scarlet Letter as it can now appear, with captivity and conversion fashioning its mise en scene. At issue are the tensions between private and public speech, private voice and public discourse, the letter and the spirit of the law and of Hawthorne's text. As allegorized in Hester's refusals, the text thematizes how (not) to speak in order to deal with problems of representation and judgment. It suggests that the way (not) to speak is to lodge all on the materiality of the letter, which is the basis for the reading the office of the A in Hawthorne. This is to say that the text makes "the letter" literally a letter, capable of affording/representing multiple readings. Either the letter has a plethora of spirits or the spirit is best captured by investing the letter as letter, a manifestation, whose meaning is ultimately undecidable. Undecidability, particularly in the wake of deconstruction, does not seem satisfying to many readers. However, within the theological context of captivity and conversion, undecidability becomes a place-holder in human language for that gap between the otherwisethan-being whose pre-original priority for being and language cannot be communicated in but only to our language. Undecidability is not so much its own content or the signification of a non-content (nothing totalizes and can be pinned down) but, rather, something akin to apophantic discourse, in which a trace, not of presence, but of relation is manifested into language: Let there be "Light" unto the world. SPEAKING IN TONGUES

The idea of manifestation as a process that happens to language is rendered by Hawthorne analogously as a function of language on the reader. What language gives in reading is not necessarily or not only a communication. "The Custom-House" introduction presents the role of the Inspector as a kind of reader, in that he is to "peep into the holds of vessels!" (Hawthorne, Scarlet 17), in a speculative and specular operation that is to determine the relation between outside and inside to discover the contents. However, not a rational operation, this initial reading functions according to "instincts" (20), at least suggesting another mode of reading that works on a certain kind of "faith" which the exterior sign does not particularly tell of the inner contents. One has to pass through the letter, which is literally here to get into the hold of the ship, to derive the content. However, once inside, once reading, fussy attention to the little matters creates an obtuseness about larger ones. "[A] wagon-load of valuable merchandise had been smuggled ashore, at noonday, perhaps, and directly beneath their unsuspicious noses" (17). Closing the barn door after the horse has left, "nothing

82 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature could exceed the vigilance and alacrity with which they proceeded to lock, and double-lock, and secure with tape and sealing-wax, all the avenues of the delinquent vessel" (17). Certainly, Hawthorne's description of the inspectors is a skewering of their abilities, but what interests me is that for all the satire, the process described is one in which something passes from language when the reader passes through the letter. There can be knowledge of the passage, if not necessarily the content, and vigilant attention to language comes mostly after the fact of this recognition. After the recognition of passage, language becomes unreadable, for one has taped and otherwise sealed it up with conscious self-presence. The idea of a certain kind of communication as passage, where the contents are not discovered so much as impressed upon the person that there was a content which had already passed, is furthered in the narrator's first relation to the letter found in Surveyor Pue's documents. "My eyes fastened themselves upon the old scarlet letter, and would not be turned aside. Certainly, there was some deep meaning in it, most worthy of interpretation, and which, as it were, streamed forth from the mystic symbol, subtly communicating itself to my sensibilities, but evading the analysis of my mind" (32). Transfixed by the letter, the gaze of the reader, ready to interpret, is invoked within some kind of perception or apperception able to feel the passage of meaning outwards; but this meaning passes by the mind. Reading the letter is not a function of cognition but a relation to sensibility. The process seems akin to ascertaining the "tast" or feel of a narrative through its language, in which the story of the conversion narrative and its particular words find themselves in secondary relation to this particular kind of communication. Hawthorne underscores the difference between the communication of the letter and the performance of passage by figuring it as if a burning impression given when his narrator affixes the letter on his breast (32) - as if, for the relation is not one of expression that makes an impression, but as if so. This experience is a "sensation not altogether physical, yet almost so" (32). Is it so emotional that it was almost physical?14 Perhaps, but in a way that the "emotion" cannot be described because it does not enter thought as, or be cognitively constructed by, linguistic content. Is it a sensation that is about to be manifested physically and about to gain materiality in itself and not in representation by a letter, but which passes instead? Hawthorne does not yet clarify, but leaves us lingering on the gap constitutive of the sensation, where sensation is a figure for the kind of "communication" the letter renders. The specific "inspector" of The Scarlet Letter, the man'whose personal obsession it is to find out the name of Hester's partner in adul-

83 How to Avoid Speaking the Name of the Father

tery, is Chillingworth. He is figured as a reader par excellence, and his "bleared optics had a strange, penetrating power, when it was their owner's purpose to read the human soul" (55). But if the blearing of the optic does not alert us to a potential difference to this kind of reading, Hawthorne expands the description further on: Believe me, Hester, there are few things, - whether in the outward world, or, to a certain depth, in the invisible sphere of thought, - few things hidden from the man, who devotes himself earnestly and unreservedly to the solution of a mystery. Thou mayest conceal it, too, from the ministers and magistrates, even as thou didst this day, when they sought to wrench the name out of thy heart, and give thee a partner on thy pedestal. But, as for me, I come to the inquest with other senses than they possess. I shall seek this man, as I have sought truth in books; as I have sought gold in alchemy. There is a sympathy that will make me conscious of him. I shall see him tremble. I shall feel myself shudder, suddenly and unawares. Sooner or later, he must needs be mine! (69, emphasis added)

With the ministers and magistrates relegated to the position of notwell-devoted and clumsy readers who try to "wrench" the contents out of the text, Chillingworth figures himself as something beyond and superlative, exercising a technique appropriate to a kind of devotion whose religiousness exceeds theirs. His is a fanaticism that reads for the truth, but now the formerly described "bleary optics" signify some other sense, which is not or not solely sight. This kind of reading is a "seeing" that functions as a relay for a sympathetic bodily sensation: "I shall see him tremble. I shall feel myself shudder." The sympathy will make him conscious. What is performed by the "text" will be enacted by the reader and then read. The reader reads himself in order to be made conscious. The structure is not dissimilar to the annunciation given to Anne Hutchinson, such that the divine voice opens the word, which she then reads and makes conscious to herself. The trouble, as Hutchinson discovers, comes in terms of how to be certain of the conscious representation, of how one phrases it in thought. Perhaps this trouble is why Hawthorne figures the surety of reading as the surety of the process of alchemy, a process that has never been known to work, but holds forth the lure of possibility. If the process of reading seems problematic, the texts to be read are particularly difficult. The corporeal texts of The Scarlet Letter often refuse to speak, or they speak otherwise. While the focus of the novel and much of the attendant criticism concerns the readability of the A and what it stands for, the A, as mute, is a sign affixed to the human texts, Hester, Dimmesdale, and Pearl. "Our narrative," says the narrator, is personified as Hester, the "narrative, which is now about to issue

84 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

forth" through the prison door, treading in the "footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson" (46). The Hutchinson reference immediately introduces the question of what kind of narrative Hester is. How will she (not) speak, and (not) do so in relation to Anne Hutchinson, who speaks otherwise? The theological context is reasserted by Hawthorne in that, particularly when entering a church, Hester "find[s] herself the text of the discourse" (77). "She will be a living sermon" (58), but one that "absolutely refuseth to speak" (58). Indeed, as Michael Ragussis claims, "The act of speech is baffled during the entire course of the tale" (59). However, if Hester does not speak the name of the father outright and as a name recognizable in the conventions of socially constructed language and discourse, she does perform signification, all derived from the stitches of her embroidery. This kind of "speech" announces itself in a perlocutionary process, for it creates events in time. Ultimately, as I will argue, it sentences, but in such a mode as to convert and so turn the reader around. Dimmesdale's modes of signification are various. He speaks out the truth of the name of the father of Pearl to the public and later to the congregation, but as initially concealed in the use of the third-person pronoun (62, 126). Further, he appears to somatize his thoughts, seeming to confirm Chillingworth's assertion that the body is the "instrument" of the spirit (119), between the two of which there is a "strange sympathy" (120). "Dimmesdale's life fluctuates between two linguistic poles - between asking another to speak for him and speaking for another" (Ragussis 66). Finally, Pearl speaks in tongues, or a certain ornamentalized discourse that functions in an idiosyncratically ironic mode - ironic in so far as it reveals and conceals what it says simultaneously, but idiosyncratic in that her language does not represent a content that she knows verifiably but, rather, a certain positive non-knowledge that she senses. As the scarlet letter in human form (90, 100), she voices the multiplicity of the A in so far as it has been embellished by Hester's "speech." To ask the question of how the A speaks demands no singular answer. Millicent Bell argues that it exemplifies "the almost infinite potentialities of semantic variety" between how, as a material object, it authenticates a past and how, as an abstract sign, it speaks both to Hester's past and her present condition (162,). Yet as a letter of the alphabet, it is also "an initial, a sign of a sign, since it represents a word," though the most obvious one, "adultery," is never articulated in the text (Bell 162). "What the A 'stands for - a near-infinity of A-words, for starters, and then everything that the A-words represent," says Patricia Grain, "is a red (or scarlet?) herring" (174), and I tend to agree. It is, for me, an initial, and in the word "initial" one needs also to find signified the idea that it is the first letter of the alphabet and so can be

8 5 How to Avoid Speaking the Name of the Father

read to stand as an abbreviation or acronym for language as such, for the ushering in of the tools of linguistic signification, and thus its possibility. I would also add that A is a character, as is said of the letters of language in type, and it is the character of the A that is in question, meant both as its materiality and its performance as a sign.15 The ministers and magistrates intend the character to be "a mark of shame" (58), and a young wife in the crowd notes that "the pang of it will be always in her heart" (49). Thus it is set up as a letter with a spirit. They intend it as a punishment that will turn Hester's strong-willed heart, so that she will speak the name of father in a double sense - to name her fellow adulterer and, in so doing, to appeal to the mercy of God. The command to speak the name reflects the public desire for "justice" to be performed by the adulterer. The public nature is constitutive of the construction of the A and its office, for in an exchange economy, the community has got its hands on private performance, positioning the A as the marker of that forced publicity. Figured as the A in human form, Pearl is, of course, the analogue of the A as much as it is of her. Their analogous relation is constructed in "The Market-Place" (47), in which they are both displayed, subtended to Hester as their backdrop. Certainly, Pearl is the result of intercourse and biological gestation, but she becomes a product of adultery only within the marketplace, the economy of public trading in which discourse, the law, can reconstruct the contexts in which material objects take on meaning and in which they are given value. The material marketplace exists as a representation in dialectical relation to its representation as conscience. The imposition of communal language and the shared understanding of the signification are fundamental to the A to perform its office. But in this theocracy, the origin of the "crime" is biblical and religious. It is fitting, then, that the call for Hester to utter the name of the father is both civil and religious, such that to speak "Dimmesdale" is to say "Abba." In choosing not to speak, Hester rejects this mode of speaking doubly, but elects for another. EMBROIDERY AS SIGNIFICATION

As both an object of and a product for the marketplace, the A awaits its display. John Carlos Rowe argues that "Hester still has not made it her own" (1214), as if "ownership" is solely internalization of its spirit, and in that sense, the letter would rather own Hester, for it would have done its office.16 "In the initial stages of her exile, Hester remains fully within the Puritan system of signification" (Rowe 1214), a claim that overstates the case. Or, it is so macro in its formulation that it misses any hiding spots within that signifying system. Rather, in

86 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

contrast, Hester has appropriated the letter in a fashion and has added not just value but new signification to it - and not just significance but an additional mode of signification, a private discourse both fashioned and figured as the embroidery that adds value and alters public performance as it circumnavigates the A with gold thread, in affixing it to her bosom.17 I do not mean to be too literal-sounding here, as if I am suggesting that appropriation hangs on her ability to stick the letter on her dress. Rather, her manner of fixation signifies appropriation. In affixing it - in a sense pre-fixing it as the article in front of her body, turning her name into an object - Hester obeys the law to the letter, and at least the outline of its spirit, by taking fixed hold of the letter, adding herself to it in both body and personal skill of craft. While not his intention, Henry James's assertion that "Hester is an accessory figure" (147) takes on an appropriate meaning in this context, signifying that she is a figure who, in her ability to accessorize her dress, becomes the accessory of the A, yet one who accesses the power of its office for simultaneous redeployment. Her embroidery of the letter incenses the public, and not only because it adds excess to a style of dress that already proved itself to be "greatly beyond what was allowed by the sumptuary regulations of the colony" (Hawthorne, Scarlet 5o).lS In embellishing it with another (mode of) signification, she has trans-figured it, in the sense of fashioning it from one figure into another. She "make[s] a pride out of what they, worthy gentlemen, meant for a punishment" (51). The incensed reaction of the public might also signify their unconscious recognition that Hester materializes in her trans-figurative act the dynamics of the constitutive Puritan relation to human experience - in a word, typology. As Evan Carton argues, "More precious than the fabric of experience itself is the application of a design, the inscription of a purpose, upon it. The insistence upon such a societal inscription lies at the heart of Puritanism" (103). What performs as insubordination, haughty pride, and a figure epitomizing a Puritan relation to experience structures its own commentary on Puritan agency in relation to the construction of Puritans' world view, available then for readers to take up. The fantastic embroidery and illumination makes the pride (Hawthorne, Scarlet 51), but this kind of "making" is one that alters the letter to become fully a figure. If the public types Hester's act of intercourse with a figure, the A, her appropriation, which affixes it, figures it again. She adds a seme/seam to it. The embroidery does not cover or conceal the A, but rather is part of what enables the A to attempt its office, because it requires public display in order to function. Hester's appropriation of the article exchanges display for spectacle. The irony is that in following the letter of the sentence upon her, in taking ownership of the A as hers, her embroidery of it makes it into an object as such,

8 7 How to Avoid Speaking the Name of the Father

and more particularly an overdetermined object of fixation. Its now spectacular appearance demands to be looked at in itself. The scene of the convex mirror in Governor Bellingham's house only hyperbolizes the performance of the A. Hester " saw that, owing to the peculiar effect of this convex mirror, the scarlet letter was represented in exaggerated and gigantic proportions, so as to be greatly the most prominent feature of her appearance. In truth, she seemed absolutely hidden behind it" (94). If the convex mirror suggests the warped optics of the public, what compels that warp is the A's spectacular construction. If the initial office of the A is to turn Hester's heart, part of the uniqueness of the story is that through her appropriation of the A and her living under its sentence according to both the letter and the spirit, what happens over time is that the hearts of the public are turned. In "Another View of Hester," the narrator relates that over the seven years since the imposition of the sentence, the embroidered A has become "familiar" (139), and that "a species of general regard had ultimately grown up in reference to Hester Prynne" (140). From the beginning of its spectacular appearance, we learn that the continual display of her embroidery skill in the marketplace nets her a subsistence business of needlework for the community, including the heads of state. The public comes round to her style. "By degrees, nor very slowly, her handwork became what would now be termed the fashion" (74). Over seven years, just as the number seven has a biblical significance of rebirth and renewal, A Hester achieves certain rights in the community, naturalizing her new position "as a rightful inmate, into the household that was darkened by trouble" (140). To her needlework, she adds her services as caregiver and nurse, such that she became a "Sister of Mercy," ordained by "the world's heavy hand" (141). What begins with a fascination and desire for the embroidery of the A becomes additionally a call for her aid as caregiver, and I would argue that the fascination with her embroidery is as much an intrigue over her agency, her ability to take on and care for the worst, the most punishing, and to call for that agency to be directed upon them. "In this manner, Hester Prynne came to have a part to perform in the world" (76). As always A Hester, that part performed is by definition an enactment, a playing out of the letter as an "undying ... ever-active sentence" (77), but it is her addition of signification in appropriating the letter that turns its spirit out to the public to change their hearts. "It was none the less a fact, however, that, in the eyes of the very men who spoke thus, the scarlet letter had the effect of the cross on a nun's bosom" (142.). If the A is a sign of a sign, the sign of language and the possibility of sentencing, her needlework, which affixes it onto the female subject, is another discourse that circumnavigates the A and its

88 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

office. Here it is only the "feminine" and "expressive" circumnavigation that can affix the language of sentencing onto the female body as her own. Figured by the narrator as a certain mode of expression (76), the discourse of gold thread re-points the A to signify additionally and differently. Her needlework is a certain phallic work, which "by degrees, nor very slowly" sutures the language of sentencing to her self and, in so doing, alters the sentence of the A.19 It does not alter the ministers' and magistrates' intention of the sentence and how the A sentences her, but how the A now begins to sentence and thus perform additionally and otherwise than in its initial office. In being affixed, it is embellished. If the initial direction was from the public to the private or the community to the individual, so much so that Hester was in a "sphere by herself" (51), her circumnavigation-as-circumlocution (a discourse around) of the A turns the direction from the private to the public, even as it still maintains its original office. Through embroidered appropriation, Hester does, in fact, speak the name of the father, but in the sense of embroidering in a phallic function that which, in suturing the A-sentence to her breast, conserves its office while expending her own onto the public. I do not think that this is an act of fully redemptive agency but, rather, something "versive," if I am permitted a neologism. By "versive" I mean an agency that does not entirely subvert or simply invert the dynamics of the letter's office, but one that stands at crossroads of verso and verse, turning while employing the dynamics of the letter to sentence anew. If the spirit and the letter together perform the office or the task of the letter as sentence, much as a signifier and signified together perform the work of the sign, then affixing the letter to the self in Hester's way enables it to speak again and in such a way as to turn the office around to a new object - the "master" of its original intention. Hester's "versive" agency is enabled as the loopholes, the embroidery, within captivity by the communal and masculine derived and employed capacity to sentence (language and punishment). Hester's liberation as a woman does not come until she throws off the A in the forest (176); it is curtailed when she takes the A back again. The loophole that enables "version," embroidery as expression, has the cost for Hester, in Hawthorne's text, of conventional femininity itself. "All the light and graceful foliage of her character had been withered up by this redhot brand, and had long ago fallen away, leaving a bare and harsh outline, which might have been repulsive, had she possessed friends or companions to be repelled by it. Even the attractiveness of her person had undergone a similar change" (142,). "There seemed to be no longer any thing in Hester's face for Love to dwell upon; nothing in Hester's form ... that Passion would ever dream of clasping in its embrace;

89 How to Avoid Speaking the Name of the Father

nothing in Hester's bosom, to make it ever again the pillow of Affection. Some attribute had departed from her, the permanence of which had been essential to keep her a woman" (142-3). It depends upon one's commitment to the traditional social constructions of "femininity" and "beauty" as to whether readers are to pine for Hester's "loss." Hawthorne rhetorically constructs it as loss and a certain tragedy, yet at the same time Hester gains association with a community of women who sentence freely in the marketplace economy of Puritanism - those "beef and ale" (48) women who sentence her to stronger punishments according to the law of "Scripture and the statute-book" (49). The argument, then, is that female sentencing, which must be heard as a dialectical relation between the power of masculine speech to sentence the feminine (to construct it, position it, and condemn it) and the agency derived by women in appropriating the language to sentence performatively in turn, is what taxes and so saps traditional femininity. At this moment, Hester appears as the sister of both Anne Hutchinson, who has "rather bine a Husband than a Wife" ("Report" 383), and Margaret Fuller, whom Perry Miller called "phenomenally homely," following in a long line of male "critical" thought spawned by Emerson (qtd. in Dickenson x). Hawthorne seems acutely aware of the politics of this dialectic, as brought out in his description of the malaise with which Hester Prynne looks out on the world. The narrator asserts that she had "assumed a freedom of speculation" (143) aligned with theories that had "overthrown and rearranged ... the whole system of ancient prejudice" (143), including gender prejudice, which, we are to infer, contributed to her following her heart and sleeping with Dimmesdale. The embroidery of the letter as a certain perlocutionary performance is a thread of that speculation exercised while under the A's sentence - from speculation to spectacle. It contributes fundamentally to Hester's malaise because it signifies that the freedom of speculation that was constitutive of her attractiveness as a free(er)-thinking woman is still hers, enacting in a fashion, but only as a thread of its self. That she can throw off the letter and that all her femininity can return in a rush are the testament to its continued existence. What appears to be suggested by the narrator is that it is the push to the margin of the social and communal, here signified by the forest, that is constitutive of the move toward having one's cake and eating it too, here of throwing off the letter (full agency) and having the beauty of one's self (re)bloom. It is important to stress, however, that the narrative does not simply suggest that one has to be persecuted and marginalized in order to find the strength to fight back aggressively and to win on one's own terms, but rather that "marginalization" partakes of a certain reassociation

90 The Letter and the Spirit of i^th-Century American Literature

with the community, one that enables the development of agency, and an agency that is not simply subversive or "other" than that employed by the centre, the community, men, or power, but one always derived within that same logic of power. So while the move to "throw off the letter" as a figure for self-defined agency is positioned in the shadowy margin of the social and communal, one gets there not simply by being pushed but by appropriating the power of that push, appropriating the power of performative agency from wholly "inside" the marketplace, the economy, and the "logic" of the community and social construction or sentencing.10 I stress this process, in the hope of displacing the binaristic assumptions that get brought to the text, which Hawthorne's language does not wholly support. Rather than an outside and an inside, isolation and communal integration, or a margin and a centre as conceived within the figure of a circle, Hawthorne constructs a more dynamic three-dimensional doughnut shape, where the margins always return toward and so form the "centre," which, in turn, does not itself have an essential core of value in its own right, but shows itself to be an empty construction, requiring its "margins" for its central shape. Thus Hester's art of making loopholes with that phallic needle creates "compositions" that "influence" (74), and in so doing, "Hester really filled a gap which must otherwise have remained vacant" (75, emphasis added). The idea that the margin is part of the centre and that the centre of society is really the stuff that circulates endlessly around a kind of absent centre is furthered by the figure of the Black Man, who is simultaneously the spectre of some kind of devil lurking at the forested margin and the beloved minister at the centre of the community, Dimmesdale himself. Hester affirms, "Once in my life I met the Black Man! ... This scarlet letter is his mark!" (162.). Dimmesdale is the only man in black whom we see in the forest. On the level of the spirit, he is the one with bad morals who will not seemingly confess responsibly/1 In fact, Dimmesdale's speech is entirely appropriate to his doubled and duplicitous position. Early on, urged by the Reverend Wilson to speak publicly from his balcony position down to Hester on the scaffold, Dimmesdale performs how (not) to speak privately as publicly, self-referentially as referring to another, and literally as figurally - here in the sense that his figures continuously turn to another as himself, his self as other: "[BJelieve me, Hester, though he were to step down from a high place, and stand there beside thee, on thy pedestal of shame, yet better were it so, than to hide a guilty heart through life. What can thy silence do for him, except it tempt him - yeah, compel him, as it were - to add hypocrisy to sin?" (62). "I" is spelled as "he," "me" as "him." Although, in one sense, this structure hides the "I" while calling for it to be revealed,

91 How to Avoid Speaking the Name of the Father

it also performs the "I" speaking in the third person. Speaking in the third person is simultaneously speaking as the third person, given that the call for Hester to speak out the name is a call for the name of the adulterer as a father of the child - a call for the third member of the family. I would also suggest that this structure of employing one's position of public power to call for a confession that performs a certain confession of its own, a circum-fession, is a central performance of phallic language as the Name of the Father under the Law of the Father. As a version of the masculinist construction of language that would have the supposedly neuter and general "one" replaced by the gendered "he," what Dimmesdale accesses is the agency of male power and its "ownership" of language to deploy "him" as the replacement for "me." This is to say that men's or male power's relation of ownership to language and the law of sentencing enables this substitution as "legal." It is a function built into the structure of language to allow for pronouns to replace, and in that sense conceal, subjectivity on the level of the letter while revealing the gender of the referent on the level of the spirit as immediately re-placed in ways that are barely conscious because they have been so hard-wired and thus "naturalized." Indeed, the narrator notes that no one in the crowd picks up on how Dimmesdale is (not) speaking and thus saying. They all reach an "accord of sympathy" (62,) with his speech, which is constitutive of their glossing over what the pronouns are confessing. However, Hawthorne is surely aware of the structure, because readers have no doubt as to what Dimmesdale is saying. We have the sympathy with language and reference, and make the pronominal replacements quickly. Dimmesdale's speech, then, performs a certain confession in the form of a circum-fession, one that calls out to another as the turn to say the self. And there is a hint that the confession is not only for readers, but comes in the form of a Puritan confessional narrative par excellence. "The feeling that it so evidently manifested, rather than the direct purport of the words, caused it to vibrate within all hearts, and brought the listeners into one accord of sympathy" (62.). Dimmesdale's actual confession does not, as we know, concern the direct purport of the words but, rather, their indirection, the turn back. But if, according to CaldwelPs research, the "tast" of the words is the deciding factor in a successful confession, such that the congregation can create a relation of sympathy with the speaker, then Dimmesdale is remarkably successful. And the narrator clarifies that it is not sympathy for Hester and her inability to confess the name but, rather, a specific sympathy for Dimmesdale. "Even the poor baby, at Hester's bosom, was affected by the same influence; for it directed its hitherto vacant gaze towards Mr. Dimmesdale, and held up its little arms,

92. The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

with a half pleased, half plaintive murmur" (62). As time passes, Dimmesdale modifies how (not) to speak, volleying "self-condemning words" at his congregation "more than a hundred times" (12,6), shaping a "confession" that the narrator terms "vague." It is not vague on the level of speech and the formed sentence. "He had spoken the very truth" (126). "Could there be plainer speech than this?" (12,6). However, Dimmesdale is said to know that the reception of his words would, in fact, sentence the sentences, with the context of the listening congregation transforming the literal content of self-incrimination and recrimination into that which "did but reverence him the more" (12,6). Thus he is condemned by the narrator as putting "a cheat on himself" (12.6), that the meaning of his words does not match the intention of their construction and dissemination. Knowing full well the necessity of having the congregation sympathize with the "tast" of the confession, here Hawthorne, through Dimmesdale, suggests that "tast" and the literal meaning of words have little to do with each other. The intrigue, however, is that simultaneous with this disjunction, intention and reception are fused. Dimmesdale's supposedly "actual" confession on the scaffold with Hester and Pearl at the end of the novel maintains the (k)not of speaking until the bitter end. His declared self-referential "I" first asserts that " [he] withheld [himself] from doing [something] seven years ago" (219), but not what. The what comes in performance, the mounting of the scaffold, to be later affirmed as only that: "At last! - at last! - I stand upon the spot where, seven years since, I should have stood" (220). While the public is to infer a confession by his physical performance, Dimmesdale never speaks his name as the name of the father, never conjoins "I" as the pronominal replacement for "Dimmesdale." What he does is to confess in the third person once again: "It was on him!" he continued, with a kind of fierceness; so determined was he to speak out the whole ... "But he hid it cunningly from men, and walked among you with the mien of a spirit, mournful, because so pure in a sinful world! - and sad, because he missed his heavenly kindred! Now, at the deathhour, he stands up before you! He bids you look again at Hester's scarlet letter! He tells you, that, with all its mysterious horror, it is but the shadow of what he bears on his own breast, and that even this, his own red stigma, is no more than the type of what has seared his inmost heart!" (2.21)

The determination is for the "he" to "speak out the whole," but as Chillingworth has already noted, "this man ... hurrieth him out of himself!" (120), which is to say, as if in the voice of Dimmesdale, "I am out of my self as he"; he hurrieth out as the public "I."

93

How to Avoid Speaking the Name of the Father

Within the context of Dimmesdale's hundredfold circum-fessions, the narrator asserts that the minister had spoken. "Spoken! But how?" (12,6), and the questioning of how he spoke, such that his speaking was a certain non-saying, is as much a part of the intrigue of Dimmesdale's character as it is of Hester's. Part of the loophole of public disclosure or the cheat of publicity that reserves a space for the "not," the negation or other avoidance of speaking such that meaning and reception do not bond but the intention of dissemination and reception do, is the bodily performance of signification so associated with Dimmesdale. What obsesses Chillingworth as Dimmesdale's apparent somatizing of his moral anxieties is figured as a kind of writing, with the body both as a sheet upon which writing is rendered and as visual text itself, whose shapes of deterioration and changing coloration seem to offer readable meaning. The question of writing appearing on the body is left as a question by Hawthorne. There is debate over whether an A is revealed on Dimmesdale's chest when he finally rends his garment and speaks the name. "Most of the spectators testified to having seen, on the breast of the unhappy minister, a SCARLET LETTER - the very semblance of that worn by Hester Prynne - imprinted in the flesh" (2.2.3). However, "certain persons, who were spectators of the whole scene, and professed never once to have removed their eyes from the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, denied that there was any mark whatever on his breast" (223). The argument for the A's appearance is set up by Dimmesdale, who publicizes the "red stigma" as a "type of what has seared his inmost heart" (2.21). It is seconded by the narrator, in the sense that he argues for regarding Dimmesdale as "a false and sin-stained creature" proven "clear as the mid-day sunshine on the scarlet letter" (224). The ground for the argument is laid by Chillingworth, who earlier reacts with a foot-stamping and arm-raising "wild look of wonder, joy, and horror" after opening the sleeping Dimmesdale's shirt and staring at his chest (121). We are to infer at least that something profound was seen there, confirming Chillingworth's theory that Dimmesdale manifests a "strange sympathy betwixt soul and body!" (120). Body as text or writing on the body is a performance in its muteness of how (not) to speak. But when speaking is taken as a figure for signification, the parenthetical (k)not of how to speak is performed by Hawthorne himself in his presentation of the proof of the existence of the writing as undecideable. Most testify to it, but others who never took their eyes off of Dimmesdale profess otherwise. Surveyor Pue's document is the testimony; Hawthorne's story is the profession. In Pauline fashion, testimony's existence and its "proof" demand the death of the testator and, in this case, the materiality of the text itself, Dimmesdale's chest. Hawthorne's profession, his writing and publication of the novel,

94 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

is overdetermined with the senses of a profit-making career as well as a certain vow of faith, as in the sense of "profession" that emerged in the fifteenth century: the active declaration of belief and faith (OED). The point is that nowhere is there a binding together of saying and speaking, of the truth of history, or even of narrative as corning together with the meaning of words as indissoluble. Hawthorne increases the challenge to the state of undecidability of Anne Hutchinson's ambivalent relation between human language and interior revelation of truth, such that the word can be erroneous yet judgment be sound. The theological valence to the question of "speaking" is underscored in very Hutchinsonian terms, for when Dimmesdale tears away his ministerial garb, "It was revealed! But it were irreverent to describe that revelation. For an instant the gaze of the horror-stricken multitude was concentrated on the ghastly miracle" (zzi). If the "secular" and "religious" contexts are brought together so that the A as the sign of human language as such and revelation as the opening of the word as Word by God are mapped on to each other, then the (k)not of speaking is made constitutive and absolutely fundamental to the idea and the process of trying to reveal the truth. It is irreverent to try to describe the miracle, and that irreverence can only manifest itself in "ironious" signification, the reading of which is undecidable. SPEAKING AMISS

The most complex speech comes from Pearl, and even in the sense of comes as Pearl, for she is "the scarlet letter in another form; the scarlet letter endowed with life!" (90). If the A sentences, its vocal form becomes Pearl, whose speech is a discourse in the language of the A. The A, however, is a sentence whose office is to exact punishment, whose performance would repair the breaking of a law by exacting compensation. As the A in another form, Pearl is both the product of adultery and the iterative reminder that the A has not and is not doing its office. "The child could not be made amenable to rules. In giving her existence, a great law had been broken; and the result was a being, whose elements were perhaps beautiful and brilliant, but all in disorder; or with an order peculiar to themselves, amidst which the point of variety and arrangement was difficult or impossible to be discovered" (81). The idea of Pearl's disordered relations as the result of the breaking of a law is a simple enough one-to-one representation, but the figure of Pearl as the A suggests that disorder is part of the nature and functioning of the A, of the sentencing function of the law itself. As a certain text, she becomes the object of Chillingworth's questioning as to her "composition" (117). "Hath she any discoverable principle of being?" he asks Dimmesdale.

95 How to Avoid Speaking the Name of the Father

"None, - save the freedom of a broken law" (117). And so what this constellation of figures suggests to me is a complex interweaving of the categories of social law, identity within definitional boundaries, and regulated, discernable behaviour with those of language, text, the rules of grammar, syntax, and semantics that seek to set readability. In both cases, Pearl's principle of being is freedom from the law. She is what erupts from the breaking of the definitional boundaries, socially and linguistically. As the product of adultery and as the A in human form, she calls into question the product not just of the law broken but also of the legal recourse to compose the effect of the broken law. If the A is supposed to shore up legal boundaries by socially containing Hester, Pearl as the A indicates that such sentencing binds and unbinds simultaneously, in a sense similar to how the affixing of the A and thus the following of the punishment to the letter are what structure their own loopholes which turn the structure of sentencing around. Pearl is a "living hieroglyphic" (180), and the senses of movement and stasis associatively link to her double role of unbinding and binding. That unbinding nature is made manifest in both her bodily presence and her speech. On the one hand, her very presence "revealed the secret they [Hester and Dimmesdale] so darkly sought to hide, - all written in this symbol, - all plainly manifest, - had there been a prophet or magician skilled to read the character" (180). On the other, her speech performs revelation, for the principle of a broken law is traced and thus made manifest in how she employs language. The problem with presence is less its material reality than its readability, and as such, Pearl exemplifies the Hutchinsonian problem of the translation from revelation to manifestation and from manifestation to understanding. Revelation opens the word. The representation of revelation demands that the law of language be broken - opened on the level of the letter and the sentence. With Pearl, the opening of language is the performance of the spirit without the employment of the socially sanctioned letter, and this structure takes various forms. In the face of social and religious authority, which, beyond the particular magistrates and ministers, is the socially accepted form of speech and conduct, Pearl refuses to speak, misspeaks, or speaks in figures that are not clearly readable. In her interview with Governor Bellingham, Pearl ... could have borne a fair examination in the New England Primer, or the first column of the Westminster Catechism, although unacquainted with the outward form of either of those celebrated works. But that perversity, [of] which ... Pearl had a tenfold portion, now, at the most inopportune moment, took thorough possession of her, and closed her lips, or impelled to speak words amiss. After putting her finger in her mouth, with many ungracious

96 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature refusals to answer good Mr. Wilson's question [of who made her], the child finally announced that she had not been made at all, but had been plucked by her mother off the bush of wild roses, that grew by the prison-door. (99)

Along with her simply not speaking and speaking amiss, Pearl's final response seems exactly right, but to the question of origin as if asked in a different context. She responds to the question of the origin of her significance and signification, her spirit as opposed to the creation of her physical material. If the rose bush was said to have sprung up under the footsteps of Anne Hutchinson (Hawthorne, Scarlet 46), then Pearl's "figurative" response speaks clearly to how Pearl speaks, how she employs an Hutchinsonian principle of language, generated from the mediation of her mother's actions connecting wittingly or unwittingly to and through history. If Anne Hutchinson's erroneous words were her monstrous birth, then Pearl is Hester's, because like Huchinson's language, which attempted to represent and so bring into human language the unrepresentable in thought - the open word - Pearl "lacked reference and adaptation to the world" (81). On the one hand, she represents and so "reveals" that which remains unspeakable and unspoken, as quite literally never spoken in The Scarlet Letter - the name of the father. On the other hand, as the scarlet letter itself, she performs its function as an open figure, one that keeps turning, signifies multiply, is the sign of a sign, and remains unreadable, in so far as readers employ the traditional definition of reading for meaning and understanding that functions as the truth. Like Anne Hutchinson, who could not control her discourse so as to make a non-erroneous translation of revelation in social language for communication, Hester "failed to win the master-word that should control this new and incomprehensible intelligence" (83). Pearl, like Hutchinson's language, is monstrous in the first sense of the definition provided in the OED - " of things material and immaterial." She performs as the attempted translation between the two, exemplified in the various speakings in tongues that she delivers in society, from "that [which] sounded, indeed, like human language, but ... was in a tongue unknown to the erudite clergyman, and did but increase the bewilderment of his mind" (137), to different phrasings in question form of the same revelation: "What does the letter mean, mother? - and why dost though wear it? - and why does the minister keep his hand over his heart?" (158). A S T I T C H IN T I M E : H I S T O R Y

What cannot be forgotten in any treatment of how (not) to speak in The Scarlet Letter, and in any treatment of how the scarlet letter

97 How to Avoid Speaking the Name of the Father

(avoids) speaking, is the consideration of Hawthorne's text itself. "The Custom-House" introduction to the story of Hester Prynne and the A asserts that relations to history establish the frame of the tale. Surveryor Pue's documents purport one relation; the Hawthornenarrator's retelling of the story fashions another; The Scarlet Letter as a whole functions in relation to Puritanism in general and the Anne Hutchinson affair in particular, as well as to the time of its writing and the time of our reading. How do these texts (not) speak to the past, the events irretrievable in themselves? Hawthorne constructs his narrator's relation to the (fictionally constructed) documents of Surveyor Pue in a multi-faceted way. If Surveyor Pue is anything like the Inspector in Hawthorne's time, then one should not necessarily lodge much hope in his documentation of the Prynne affair as being thorough and accurate. If Pue is anything like the recorders of the Anne Hutchinson affair, then the document may not be in any better position. Readers know that it is "not official, but of a private nature" (30), which may not necessarily be a demotion. "Official" documents are prone to cast events as the officials require them to be recorded and to signify in the house of custom, which is both the official language of communication and the social structures and mores that it constructs and upholds. The "private" nature of the documents might suggest them to be cast more as narrative, certainly as remembrance, and potentially not far in structure or tone from the "romance" that Hawthorne will come to write. Given that he will romance the documents for his own "profit" (33), he continues the "official" structure demonstrated in both the Hutchinson and Prynne affairs. He makes the private public, transcribing it into a discourse and form consumable by the public. As cast in an unearthly voice annunciating its own revelation in religious rhetoric, the "official ancestor" of the narrator exhorts him "on the sacred consideration of my filial duty and reverence towards him ... to bring his mouldy and moth-eaten lucubrations before the public" (33). As if writing history were a certain type of missionary work to disseminate the word publicly, Hawthorne then turns the figure, or so comments on the figure, by having the voice say, "do this, and the profit shall be all your own!" (33). Rather than for the glory of God or here Pue, the command to publicity results in the writer's profit. In the recording and thus the constructing for posterity the Hester Prynne affair, the male writers enter into a profit-sharing enterprise. Hawthorne is explicit that the writing will take place "with one remove farther from the actual, and nearer to the imaginative" (36), and his noted qualm that the characters would say, "What have you to do with us?" (34) does little to alter the ethics of the enterprise.

98

The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

Profit for the writer and the age of the writing is the motive and goal. Hawthorne's narrator justifies the venture as inevitable: It was a folly, with the materiality of this daily life pressing so intrusively upon me, to attempt to fling myself back into another age; or to insist on creating the semblance of a world out of airy matter, when, at every moment, the impalpable beauty of my soap-bubble was broken by the rude contact of some actual circumstance. The wiser effort would have been, to diffuse thought and imagination through the opaque substance of to-day, and thus to make it a bright transparency; to spiritualize the burden that began to weigh so heavily; to seek, resolutely, the true and indestructible value that lay hidden in the petty and wearisome incidents, and ordinary characters, with which I was now conversant. The fault was mine. (37)

The "actual" remains a category of the present in this passage. It intrudes on the possibility of reconstructing the past, which is only a "soap-bubble." The wiser effort would have been to write allegory, which is the figure and technique for going after the spiritual value. The value of the incidents, as given to us in the words, is covered by them, and in order to best represent the hidden value, one needs to trans-figure, change the figure, rendering the opacity of today into a transparency. Eric Savoy argues that prosopopoeia is the engine of the ensuing fiction, such that "the ghosts of the past are made to perform - to speak, and in speaking to authorize Hawthorne's literary labors history itself is reconceived ... History itself, its illegibility at least provisionally diminished, becomes a palimpsest to be overwritten" (399). Pue's A is overwritten by Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, where Hawthorne's A is first for "allegory." Hawthorne allegorizes the Hutchinson affair as that of Hester Prynne by translating its deeper issue concerning how the feminine can (not) speak revelation of private importance as a "monstrous" birth. However, rather than allegory being typological in kin, it is tropological, or what I have been calling transfigural. The tropological is, according to J. Hillis Miller, the only kind of relation between literature and history that "will escape some more or less subtle reaffirmation of historical determinism" (12,7). The ghosts of the past do speak, and what is allegorized is the issue of how they speak, if not what they say. In the various modes of Pearl, Dimmesdale, and Hester, The Scarlet Letter speaks to the history of transcribing history in the Antinomian Controversy, while in an Hutchinsonian fashion, it seeks to communicate and (not) reveal its divinely original source.

3 Constituting Justice: Unionist-Republican and Confederate-Democratic Narratives

The relationship of Hawthorne to history is the stuff of constant inquiry, principally, I would offer, because his are "twice-told tales," as he labelled his 1837 volume of collected stories. Whether set in the distant or the recent past, given the time of his writing, his stories and novels always present the aura of allegories, and ones that appear to be doing double duty in terms of speaking to the past and his present simultaneously. But history is there in Hawthorne's tales as a kind of purloined letter. As in Edgar Allan Poe's story of that name, the socalled knowledge of the presence of history seems to infuse the idea of history's presence and influence with its own almost controlling power over the task of reading. In Hawthorne's case, his tales are about history so as to invoke the idea of an American past, and in terms of reading, one feels compelled to look for how the tale comments on actual events. "The Custom House" introduction to The Scarlet Letter is a prime example of such a set-up. Hawthorne's rhetoric seeks to authenticate the historical reality and objective materiality of the scarlet letter and its attendant notes of record by situating his construction in a context of the verifiably "real": there is a Custom House in Salem, at which Hawthorne worked from 1846 to 1849, appointed by the government of President Polk; the Annals of Salem, edited by Joseph B. Felt, do list one Jonathan Pue, searcher and surveyor in 1752,, when William Shirley was governor of Massachusetts; and so on. "Facts" of history have the rhetorical effect of verifying the very object that authorizes and so "verifies" Hawthorne's tale - the notes of Surveyor Pue. If history is authenticated by its written record, then what Hawthorne

i oo The Letter and the Spirit of i ^th-Century American Literature

wants "history" to do here is to have the effect of authenticating a fictional version of the very thing that authenticates history, found in this instance in the notes of Surveyor Pue that are attendant to the scarlet letter. With the scarlet letter and its notes cast in a liminal position, Hawthorne motivates a dialectic between the real and the fictional, between writing as authenticating history and history authenticating his writing. What this dynamic dialectic should also do, however, is to make readers question such authorizing techniques of writing and recognize that the authority of authentication falls as much on writing itself as on, for instance, the more general and accepted assumption that the real events of history authenticate or even authorize the "truth" of fiction. In terms of The Scarlet Letter, readers can figure out that the events of the plot are fictional - which the Hawthorne-narrator of "The Custom House" suggests when he admits that his telling of the tale takes " one remove farther from the actual, and nearer to the imaginative" (Scarlet 36) - but the one remove closer to the imaginative in writing may move readers one remove closer to the actual, in turn. This is to say, as I argue in chapter z, that what The Scarlet Letter authenticates is Anne Hutchinson's history, but that history is not the events of her life - Michael Colacurcio is right to say that " The Scarlet Letter is probably not to be read as an allegory of New England's Antinomian Crisis" (178) - but rather, of the mode of her speech. It does not replicate Winthrop's Short Story and the governmentality of patriarchal history, but instead works tropologically, adhering to the ethos of Hutchinson's testimony. The Antinomian Controversy is all about her speech, and in performing how (not) to speak at the core of The Scarlet Letter, the novel takes the effect of validating or authenticating Hutchinson's mode of (not) speaking while saying the truth of her experience. As the limin between history and writing, Hawthorne's mode of presentation also allows him simultaneously to (not) speak to events in the now of his writing. While there are jabs at the election of Zachary Taylor to the presidency, which caused the summary termination of Hawthorne's appointment to the Salem Custom House (Scarlet 39), the main text of The Scarlet Letter does not speak to the specifics of the late 18405 or necessarily use the plot as a double allegory of events in 1638 and 1849 Massachusetts. However, given that the 18405 were such aggressive years in the pursuit of manifest destiny,1 it seems difficult not to feel the presence of issues of negotiation between the margins and the centre of power as part of the context of The Scarlet Letter. For according to its plot, The Scarlet Letter is at least in one sense about how the law constitutes the community by constructing the definition of the person. Expulsion, as in the case of Anne Hutchinson, or marginalization, as in the case of Hester Prynne, is a constitutive

ioi

Unionist-Republican and Confederate-Democratic Narratives

part of the dynamic that defines the boundary of the community - the elect in Massachusetts Bay and Americans in Hawthorne's United States. The text presents a story in which the performance of the law represents the character of the community via the construction and abjection of the other; however, the story is also about how the character of the community is reshaped by the adherence of this other to the letter and the spirit of the law in order to appropriate its discourse, perform its loopholes, and turn the community to recognize the necessity of its abject other in the constitution of the community's own core character. In this chapter, I wish to focus more specifically on the constitution of community, where "community" is the American polity. If one takes the "United States" as signifying the legal and political structure of the country and "America" as signifying the cultural-political character of the country, both are constituted through the performance of language. Consequently, both are put in jeopardy when reading discovers loopholes that appear around the question of the "other," figured as an alterity at the centre of that performative signification. I turn to consider the reappearance of "union" in the political governmentality of the United States, though in the context of the 18508 and the impending Civil War, when "union" is cast in an explicitly political discourse, even if the distinctly religious overtones are quite loud: the Constitution becomes the bible of this period. The questions of reading that bible in relation to the Father - here, the Founding Fathers - hold life and death stakes. The undecidability of the Constitution, its inability to pronounce authoritatively on the issues of slavery, economics, and federal-state jurisdiction, precipitate the Civil War. In this political discourse concerning the letter of the law and the spirit of what it means to constitute, the logic of union becomes equally amazingly powerful. Confederacy, as an alternative federative logic, becomes a new kind of anti-nomianism. In the historical American context, constitution has a capital sense as the document that has defined the nation since 1787. The definition is structural in one sense, in that the Constitution establishes the framework of government, the separation of powers, and their procedures and spheres of influence. Yet the definition is characterological as well, because it constitutes what the United States is as a country, the principles of its core being. "The People" of the United States of America represent themselves in this document and pronounce it as their constitution, the constitution of their principles as persons, organized in states and united as a country. The questions that Americans have had to address ever since 1787 concern how to represent who they are as persons and how politically to represent the constitution of their collective sociality. This

102 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

representation has to stand as the articulation against which they will judge the behaviour of citizens and their representative governments and thus control the nature and direction of their development as a collective people. Representative of selves and creative of governmental structures, the Constitution becomes, therefore, the representative principles of justice in the United States. These principles, however, are more than the effect of the Constitution: they are the Constitution - simultaneous with it and constitutive of it. The People (re)presented themselves as Americans in the constitution of a representative government, and in the shuttling back and forth of that dialectic between the character of popular identity and that of American government is justice woven as constitutive of the fabric of the United States of America. The Constitution was designed to better represent the people of the United States as a "more perfect" union. Constituting justly and for a more perfect justice in and as representation is the cornerstone of the experiment of 1787-89. The debates surrounding the writing and ratification of the Constitution concern central questions about the nature of representation, the kind of justice that would be constituted in representation and as representative of "the People." The most available and popularized account of these questions appears in the federalist and Antifederalist papers. They detail the debates over the translation of the Articles of Confederation into the Constitution and its subsequent marketing, and they generate the terms for the ways in which that debate smoulders, is fuelled by the subsequent unionist-republican and confederate-democratic spokesmen, and eventually flames out as the Civil War. Throughout, the crucial focus concerns the relationship between the states and the federal government as the way of defining the identity of the new U.S. federalism. However, by no means did debate end after the signing of the Constitution. Subsequent Supreme Court cases involving questions of jurisdiction between individual states and the federal government had to pronounce upon the identity of the federation as they negotiated issues of jurisdiction and legal authority; cases involving the constitutionality of individual interests waded into the nature of justice intended by the document; Justices and professors of law who wrote commentaries contributed to various interpretations of the relation between states and the federal government and, more generally, the character of the Constitution, as underpinnings necessary to their characterizations of justice. These commentaries would engage such issues as the nature of sovereignty and the theory of compact as categories under which their interpretations of the Constitution would fall. While the history of political party names shows effective plurality up until the 18508, with the affiliations of Americans moving diversely be-

io3 Unionist-Republican and Confederate-Democratic Narratives

tween them, for my purposes, I seek to employ two categorical names to indicate two broad ways of thinking into which the debates fell: unionist-republican and confederate-democrat. For both, the first term indicates roughly the conceptual logic and the kind of federalism its proponents believed the Constitution to have created. The second term indicates not so much a political party as a distinct logic as it coalesced in the 18508. Unionist-republicanism views the Constitution as uniting states into a nation. In their unity, parts may constitute the whole, but the character of the nation becomes something other and more than the structure of its constitution. This leap from "federal government" to "nation" is the movement that confederate-democracy comes to criticize as a politically motivated conceptual translation hiding behind a pretext of synonymy that perverts the intent of the Constitution. In confederatedemocratic terms, one can only say that states have united in America; hence, the term "United States" designates the whole by describing the relation of its parts. The unionist-republican and confederate-democratic debate is about the constitution of identity as it is formed by and in representation, and the identity of representation as a process itself. What these theoretical issues impact upon are the practical concerns of federal policy leading up to the Civil War, most particularly the distribution of political power between minorities and the majority and the possibility of representing interests in government. CONTRADICTORY CONSTITUTIONS

Reading the compilations of debates from the Federal Convention of 1787 and those from the state conventions on the adoption of the U.S. Constitution makes at least one thing clear - that the Constitution was a compromise document between different desires for the character of the country and different understandings of the priority and authority of interests pertaining to individuals, states, and the general government. At the New York convention for adoption of the Constitution and in relation to the clauses pertaining to slavery (Art. i, sec. z; 4; sec. 2-3), for instance, Alexander Hamilton attests to "the spirit of accommodation, which governed the convention; and without this indulgence, no union could possibly have been formed" (Constitution 45). During the Federal Convention itself, Gouverneur Morris protested to those in attendance on 12. July 1787 that "as the compact was to be voluntary, it is in vain for the eastern States to insist on what the Southern States will never agree to. It is equally vain for the latter to require, what the other States can never admit" (Constitution 19).* For all the reason and nicety of this rhetoric, Hamilton also notes that while the compromises generally were made along North-South lines, they were

104

The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

prompted because of the economic advantages that the North derived from the South.3 And as General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney retorts to a dissenter at the South Carolina convention, "The honourable gentleman alleges, that the Southern States are weak, I sincerely agree with him - we are so weak that by ourselves we could not form an union strong enough for the purpose of effectually protecting each other" (Constitution 63).4 That " spirit of compromise," however, also seems to have afforded a situation in which justices, law professors, and politicians - indeed, interested citizens as well - could feel comfortable asserting different and often competing views of the Constitution on such crucial issues as whether the document represented a theory of compact or not, which pertains directly to the character of the "union" and the legality of state secession. For instance, 1803 saw the Marbury v. Madison decision rendered by Chief Justice John Marshall, which was regarded as a nationalist and centralizing decision because of its reinforcement of the Constitution as superior over the representative Congress and its reinforcement of the Supreme Court in its ultimate jurisdiction over both the state courts and Congress when Congress makes laws inimical to the letter and the spirit of the Constitution. That year, however, also saw the publication of St. George Tucker's Blackstone's Commentaries, a product of his teaching of law at the College of William and Mary to that date. As Elizabeth Kelley Bauer remarks, this edited volume "shows that a Southern judge was teaching in a southern law school a different theory of the Constitution from that expounded by Marshall" (z6), one far more inflected toward states' rights from a different understanding of sovereignty, compact theory, and thus how, why, and to what end the various states united to draft the Constitution. In 1776 each of the colonies revolted. When they declared independence, they did so to become sovereign states. "The sovereignty did not pass to the people as a whole, because they had never constituted one whole. 'The whole continent was not our country. Virginia was our country, and the government of Virginia passed of course to the people of Virginia,'" Tucker asserts (qtd. in Bauer 2.49). Indeed, Virginia declared its independence in June 1776, before the 4th of July. However, Nathan Dane, one of the great legal minds spanning the period from the Revolution to the 18308 and a member of the Confederation Congress,5 argued vociferously that in drafting the Constitution, the people of the United States acted as one people. "As one people, they could not form two parties, so could not form a compact - and as the people of separate states, they could not act as one people" (qtd. in Bauer 277). Paraphrasing Dane, Bauer notes, "The state constitutions were not designed as compacts, and therefore the Federal Constitution par-

io5 Unionist-Republican and Confederate-Democratic Narratives

takes of no such character either" (2,77). The best "compromise" position that Dane could formulate as to the theory grounding the Constitution came in a neither/nor processional logic: the government "is neither a federative compact nor a confederacy., a consolidation nor a central government ... The whole American system is sui generis" (qtd. in Bauer 2.79). With a lack of consensus as to how the Constitution was formed and the theory of federalism that it represents and then enacts, problems necessarily arise when those interests over which the Framers compromised appear in the different sections as that other sense of compromised interests - injustice. The problem, as Lincoln articulated it, is that "no organic law can ever be framed with a provision specifically applicable to every question" ("First" 2,20); however, human anxiety for certainty often demands that it must. And the anxiety is not surprising when the issue at stake in the unionist-republican/confederate-democratic debates concerns the readability for sense of the Constitution as a whole, of what it means to say and to constitute. At a time when "the People" were grappling with questions central to their identity as a collectivity, the move to put those questions to the Constitution resulted in the recognition that the Constitution "does not expressly say" (Lincoln, "First" 2,2,0). Rather, reading the Constitution articulated a split constitutive of its writing; non-specificity and inapplicability are lodged at the heart of what constitutes the United States as self-consciously "more perfect." In this text of constative utterances, which must collectively function as a performative, non-expressive saying leaves readers to seek what the words then gesture.6 There is space, aporetic space, at the heart of the Constitution, and the undecidability of reading that it causes can be forgotten about or compromised around until particular matters of justice at the heart of democracy, equality, and liberty demand decision. The divine American move for perfection in politics performs too well, perhaps, for as Emerson asserts, "There is a crack in every thing God has made. It would seem there is always this vindictive circumstance stealing in at unawares even into the wild poesy in which the human fancy attempted to make bold holiday and to shake itself free of the old laws, - this back-stroke, this kick of the gun, certifying that the law is fatal; that in nature nothing can be given, all things are sold" (174). From this constitution of the "more Perfect" political society to the quasi-religious grounding of the pre-Civil War debates, through its continual articulation in constitutional judicial decisions, human language of judgment and repair represents the crack in God's language of creation. In a linguistic discourse, the grounding of constitutional interpretation in "Our Fathers" speaks to the hope that the addresser's intention can govern the addressee's reception with legitimacy and

106 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

singularity. This hope must forget the crack between meaning and saying in order to speak, only to have it remembered in reading, revealed as it is sewn back up with interpretation. Between intention and reception, the nature of language institutes a lien. The crack generates the competing interpretations even in the Preamble, the first words of the Constitution. The North maintained what can generally be called the unionist position, which after the LincolnDouglas debates becomes more properly the unionist-republican. This reading maintains that these are united states of America. "We, the People," a people already constituted, "form a more perfect Union," a noun, a thing, more than the processional relations of the Articles of Confederation. We people constitute "America," the nation, as that which is beyond the "United States of." America designates the "more perfect" status of the Union in which the nation has an identity and gives definition in turn to its citizens. As Justice Baldwin asserts in his General View of the Constitution in 1837, "the constitution, the creature, prescribes rules to its creator" (qtd. in Bauer 301). While Baldwin's rhetoric gives a heretical theological ring to the characterization of the political process and product, the main stress in the unionistrepublican interpretation is that of a numero-logic, for the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Lincoln, for instance, is masterful in working the numero-logic, adding numbers to construct majorities; for the stability of the Union, which is his prime commitment, can only be guaranteed when a majority can be found. In this regard, the "Address at Cooper Institute" is his masterwork. Under the auspices of discovering what the Constitution means to say about the issue of slavery for the ratifying member states, and so to extend that pronouncement onto the legality of the federal government's desire to restrict slavery in the territories, Lincoln grounds right reading on prior discovery of the intentions of the Framers. The process of this discovery turns on a numerical reading in two ways: it deploys voting numbers to determine intention, while situationally absenting the stated reasons for a member's vote being cast in that way; and it uses ratios and fractions as an objective language to obfuscate the shifts in context that generate those numbers. In doing so, Lincoln's argument makes specious translations from the quantitative "art" of arranging and adding numbers to a qualitative conclusion, employing the rhetoric of a majority construction of opinion. In the attempt to answer the question "What is the frame of Government under which we live?" ("Address" in), so as to address the right of federal government control, Lincoln seeks the understanding of the "'thirty-nine' who signed the original instrument" (m). For him, that understanding is to be found in their voting patterns on the issue of federal con-

ioy Unionist-Republican and Confederate-Democratic Narratives

trol, surveyed historically from the question of the Northwestern Territory in 1784, before the signing of the Constitution, to that of Missouri in 1819-20, with an eye, of course, to the escalation of tension over the broader slavery question in 1860, the year of the Cooper Institute address. While no consideration is given to any complex reason or to the balancing of compromise for why one might vote for a particular bill, and while dissenting votes of members of the "thirtynine" are explained away as the members having "some cause ... [for thinking it] improper to vote for it" ("Address" 112,), Lincoln figures that, in the end, 21 out of the 39 Framers voted for restrictions on slavery. Presuming the logic of the numerical argument in question in the larger debate by not questioning the definition of a majority or its relation to equality, Lincoln asserts that 21 out of 39 is indeed "a clear majority," sufficient to decide the Framers' intentions and consequently the intention of what the Constitution means to say.7 In the American context, "the despotism of numbers," as Jefferson Davis calls it, was always at the forefront of the confederate mind, in which the unionist-republican strategy of reading American democracy numerically is the real "revolution" at work in the prelude to the Civil War (Davis, "Inaugural" 15). At issue is whether the democracy constituted in the United States emanates from an understanding of a concept of equality that is not at root a function of counting individuals, or whether democracy is something that emerges within a mechanism that seeks the creation of a numerical majority within the country as a whole. Confederate thought in this regard does not dismiss the idea of majorities of persons, but it situates their construction within the voting mechanisms of local communities and the individual state. As for the country as a whole, the various states united with a commitment to the equality of the ways of life found in the North and the South, as represented by the equal number of states consenting to the Constitution. Toward the semantic investments and aesthetic movements that construct a whole as other than the sum of its parts, the confederatedemocratic narrative is antagonistic. America as a name is only a place-holder, actually a land-claim title, in existence well prior to the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation. In New Views of the Constitution (182,3), John Taylor of Caroline asserts, "There are many states in America, but no state of America, nor any people of an American state ... The word America is used to designate the quarter of the globe in which the recited states were established, and not to designate a nation of Americans" (qtd. in Bauer 238). "America" has no legitimacy as a separate or different identity other than as the federated uniting of states. In fact, what makes the possibility of even trying to constitute a more perfect union legitimate

io8 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

is that "the People" had the sovereignty to do so from their prior capacity as states. Following Madison - whom Benjamin Fletcher Wright terms "more nearly the author of the Constitution of 1787 than any other man" (8) - the perfection of the union in the Constitution is founded on the assent and ratification of the people of America, given by deputies elected for the special purpose; but, ... this assent and ratification is to be given by the people, not as individuals composing one entire nation, but as composing the distinct and independent States to which, they respectively belong. It is to be the assent and ratification of the several States, derived from the supreme authority in each State, - the authority of the people themselves. The act, therefore, establishing the Constitution, will not be a national, but a federal act. (Hamilton, Madison, and Jay 2,83)

Or Calhoun: "The great and leading principle is, that the General Government emanated from the people of the several States, forming distinct political communities, and acting in their separate and sovereign capacity, and not from all of the people forming one aggregate political community; that the Constitution of the United States is, in fact, a compact, to which each State is a party" ("Fort" 370-1). "It was ratified by the people of each State in convention, each ratifying by itself, for itself, and bound exclusively by its own ratification, and by express provision it was not to go into operation, unless nine out of twelve States should ratify, and then to be binding only between the States ratifying" (Calhoun, "Speech" 491). According to Jefferson Davis, the creation of America as constituted by a national government means that "the creature has been exalted above its creators" ("President" 2.1). Over the years, governments certainly attempted to formulate laws to structure compromises between competing interests, justified by competing constitutional readings. In that sense, laws flagged the split, but they gave this recognition only in order to placate anxiety as they attempted to bridge difference with compromise. When practical policy issues stem from questions of identity, however, recognition only placates anxiety for the time it takes people to feel compromised by the practical results. The issues then repeat themselves in a downward spiral concerning the ability and efficacy of government to make political and legal address actual and practical redress. When justice in representation and a just product of representation appear as linked in the downward spiral, one recourse is to a more forceful self-representation. Secession becomes a response; "right makes might" is the reply (Lincoln, "Address" 130).

io9 Unionist-Republican and Confederate-Democratic Narratives

In terms of the Civil War and the political, economic, and social issues paving its way, the debate over representation was twofold, involving the status of the state and the status of the slave. From a contemporary vantage point, the questions of justice concerning the relationship between the state and the nation perform in ironic similarity to those of the slave minority and the white American majority, because the issue involves how a minority lacks political equality in the American democratic system. As the North continued to expand in terms of population and political power, and as the western territory began to be divided up and admitted as states, the South found itself facing a future minority position, both politically and socially. With the institution of laws concerning tariffs and trade, the South was already beginning to feel the effects of laws that were formulated to aid the majority of people in the country, living in the industrial North, to which it had no recourse within the channels of representation in Congress other than argument as persuasion. That recourse worked longer than it would today, but the increasing impotence of argument in the face of numerical majority was recognized early on. Given the pronouncements of the majority against, in varying degrees, the particular interests that the minority sought to protect, numbers-based democracy seemed to be decreasingly the system in which minority self-interest could be realized. When one's interests cannot be realized, particularly when they are interests that are believed to be constitutive of the self and lodged in one's particular culture, then participation without the efficacy of influence on the construction and implementation of law in a democracy begins to feel like subjection. As Madison argued before the Federal Convention for the formation of the Constitution on 30 June 1787, "every peculiar interest, whether in any class of citizens, or any description of states, out to be secured as far as possible. Wherever there is danger of attack, there ought to be given a constitutional power of defence" of those interests (Constitution 14). This is the logic of the Declaration of Independence which gave performative voice to the revolutionary spirit. Certainly, the criticism is that slavery is a moral wrong and a violation of human rights and that any definition of the self predicated upon both has no legitimate right to seek participation in a democracy in order to protect those interests. Abolitionists further argued that, because the economic interests are built upon a slave economy, participation to protect those interests is rendered illegitimate by contamination. In William Lloyd Garrison's words, "the existing national compact should be instantly dissolved ... NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS" (Constitution 93). The problem in the American situation, however, is that the South had an arguable right to maintain this inhumanity and

i io The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

its economic advantages in the very principles of right which constituted the United States in its "more perfect" structure. The confederate-democratic reading of the Constitution advocates that the document legitimates the legality of slavery. Slavery, in this view, is a socio-economic institution of separate state concern not falling under federal jurisdiction, except as it pertains to enumeration (Art. i, sec. 2.), the return of fugitive slaves who cross state lines (Art. 4, sec. 2), and the power of the Congress to make laws concerning the regulation of the territories as different from states (Art. 4, sec. 3). Indeed, the temporary provision of Article i, section 9 specifically blocked the Congress from prohibiting the "Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now exiting shall think proper to admit," yet it awarded only an indirect regulation by enabling that "a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person." Because the Constitution does not say that slavery falls under the power of the Congress of the United States - the Constitution does not mention slavery by name at all - by its silence, it relegates the issue to the regulation of the separate states.8 Citizens have the right to develop the content of their lives; therefore, according to the Ninth Amendment, if the Constitution does not expressly mention a particular content as unsuitable, then that content is allowed. In the confederatedemocratic view, the Constitution does not make pronouncements upon the institution of slavery in terms of morality; it is not a document that prescribes and tabulates the particularities of a conception of the good to which the country as a whole must adhere. Rather, the Constitution is a codification of the principles of the right, of justice in and made through representation. Content components of the good may be as diverse and representative of the people as the separate states that ratified the Constitution, and those components are left to the administration of the states themselves. What this reading of the Constitution in terms of the doctrine of states' rights - the rights of a state to administer its own representative and socially determined good as rights granted by the Constitution suggests is that the Constitution is a "resilient realisation" of principles of liberty, equality, and representation drafted by the founding fathers. I adapt the philosophical conception of resilience developed by Philip Pettit, thought through in terms of a conception of negative liberty; for example, a "resilient realisation" would be a structure that does not simply deflect interference from liberty, but also attempts to lessen the effects of such interference, should it appear, despite the best structural attempts at deflection (Pettit 17). "Resilience" is a structural condition that adapts its system of deflection and reduction of interference in order to mend its own loopholes, which in turn are only made known by

in

Unionist-Republican and Confederate-Democratic Narratives

the appearance of interferences not previously conceived of. The Constitution, then, is a resilient realization of liberty because it separates the principles of the right that it pronounces from the diverse representations of the good that citizens are free to develop. No single definition of the good may gain hegemony over the principles of the right; however, justice must make sure that any representation of the good can at least seek its development via representation in a confederal structure. When thought of in terms of a socio-cultural and economic minority facing the numerical power of an oppositional majority, the historical fate of the southern confederate-democratic reading provides an ironic similarity with informative consequences to the other issue of representation, slavery. As the South began to feel that its power to represent and to realize its cultural and economic interests was decreasing, so too did its constitutionally founded confederate-democratic argument lose persuasive efficacy. Numbers trounced it. Industrial capitalism and moral rhetoric denounced it. The southern response of secession and the ensuing Civil War eventually decided the issue of representation by might, which is not to say, by determining the final truth of the constitutional argument. Rather, "might" made that which at the time was taken to be "right." It is important to recognize that the war was not explicitly fought over which representative reading of the Constitution - the sorts of rights and the content of those rights - was more just, contrary to Lincoln's early "right makes might" formulation and contrary, for example, to George Washington Cable's ascription that the states warred over the principles of public society's safety and development ("Negro" 149). Cable does come close, however, to declaring that the war was fought over the question of the two readings when he suggests that "the Northern cause in our Civil War was not primarily the abolition of slavery ... The Southern cause was not merely for disunion ... The Northern cause was pre-eminently the national unity. Emancipation - the emancipation of the Negroes - was not what the North fought for, but only what it fought with. The right to secede was not what the South fought for, but only what it fought with" ("Negro" 148). These weapons of war were stationed upon two "antipodal and irreconcilable" principles concerning the civil organization of society: that of the North concerned the elevation of society generally and the lowest element of society in particular, under one common code of equal civil rights; that of the South required societal development by way of subjugation of the lowest element ("Negro" 149). I would grant Cable's reading of these antipodal and irreconcilable principles accuracy, inasmuch as his reading functions as an ascription of the political intentions of the unionist and confederate narratives up until the

iii The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

judgment pronounced by the Civil War, and inasmuch as he figures slavery and secession as being the issues the war was fought with and not the principles it was fought for. The war laid to rest the question of the legality of slavery and the right to secede, and in so doing, it made the decision concerning the competing narratives as they spoke to those particular issues moot. But that is not the same as saying that the Civil War decided the constitutional question of the readings as readings and in terms of legal interpretation. To have done so would have been an impossibility in pure terms, given the express silence of the document. What was significant about the victorious and now national unionistrepublican conception of representation was that it moved to emancipate a portion of the population that was heretofore not self-representable into a position of political equality conferred by the right of suffrage. Lincoln added the fractional supplement to the constitutional representation of slaves, the two-fifths necessary to translate their identity into that of "freedmen," "whole" persons. Former slaves and now African Americans generally became a self-representable social minority with legal equality. That equality was the right of representation within a system that functions in terms of a numerical majority which governs all. This position is similar to that to which the South felt itself relegated in face of the northern numerical majority. The bind that African Americans came to feel was similar to that felt by the South, which has to do with the relationship between the possession of political equality and the position of being a minority with social inequality. Political equality and the right of suffrage are, among other things, a means to the promotion of self-identity through the representative participation in policy formation and implementation designed for that realization, be it in terms of laws or in terms of programs. When in the position of a numerical minority, however, minority groups depend upon fraternity and the sharing of common goals in order to form coalitions that may form a numerical majority necessary for the construction, passage, and implementation of public policy. Yet when the minority group is also reviled, regarded by the majority as a social unequal, then fraternity is knocked out of the equation and the possibility of coalition formation becomes functionally improbable. In this instance, political equality cannot find the translation to the realization of policy concerning identity and so devolves into having very limited efficacy. Representation as suffrage for the socially unequal minority functions as politically or legally inclusive, but at the same time, as practically and effectively exclusive. When government functions according to numerical majority alone, without the possibility of an effective check on the content of subsequent policy by the people and in particular by the unequal minority, suffrage and political equality begin

ii3 Unionist-Republican and Confederate-Democratic Narratives

to feel like just the bone thrown to placate the need to realize identity through self-government. It is as if liberty and political equality are sufficiently compelling rights to obfuscate the fact that in pragmatic terms they do not guarantee the promotion of self-interests in practical policy. What the double gesture of the Civil War and the Reconstruction did was to decide the state of representation in favour of the unionistrepublican conception, which encourages minorities to fold themselves into the production of a governing majority but does not provide any concurrent recourse to the loss of self-determined identity and of the efficacy of promoting identity within that structure. The confederate-democratic argumentative and theoretical response to the situation facing the South structures an antidote to the bind of the minority within the unionist-republican structure of representation. The antidote, articulated persuasively by John C. Calhoun as the "concurrent voice," is derived from the Constitution as a practical structure meant to facilitate the possibility of governing peoples of socio-cultural, economic, and political differences. The concurrent voice is a politically equalizing voice. In Calhoun's terms, it is a "mutual negative among conflicting interests, which invests each with the power of protecting itself" ("Disquisition" 2,8). Because the numerical majority needed to form government also by definition creates a minority as the remainder outside, the system must afford this minority a concurrent voice in the construction and implementation of policy if the workings of government are to adhere to justice as a constitutional principle. If the Constitution is read as constructing justice only in terms of the representation of numbers without being concerned with the representation of interests, then the United States would not be the foundation of a democracy but, rather, that of a democratically styled tyranny of the numerical majority. And surely that is not what the socially diverse people of the separate states ratified in the constitution of their "more Perfect" union as justice for all. Certainly, a democracy that develops the principles of justice for itself regards the people as equal in their ability to make free and rational choices. The category of rationality is singular and equal in all people - hence the primacy of choice in constructing what is representative of the people. Free choice constitutes a democracy as its first principle. If we were all socially similar, then free choice would go beyond being a necessary condition for the construction of justice in representation to that of a sufficient condition. Social similarity would be the necessary security for a reliance on the equality of rationality. But all people are not socially similar; diverse interests are part of the construction of a person. Consequently, though the ability to choose is equal in all, the product of our choices will not be the same. Without

ii4 TheLetter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

social similarity, there is no security or check on what equality of rationality will produce. Therefore rationality itself recognizes that checks and balances must be instituted if the principles of justice are to be translated into the practice of self-governing social dissimilarity. Simply translating equality of rationality into the principle of suffrage provides no security against a tyranny of the majority. Numerical majority must be checked by an equal provision for the representation of social dissimilarity and the diversity of interests. This provision, as Calhoun articulates it in his "Disquisition on Government," must be "of a character calculated to prevent any one interest, or combination of interests, from using the powers of government to aggrandize itself at the expense of the others" (2,1). Government, then, must be constructed on the basis of two majorities, a numerical one produced by suffrage and a concurrent one produced by the representation of interests: Each collects the sense of the majority. But one regards numbers only, and considers the whole community as a unit, having but one common interest throughout; and collects the sense of the greater number of the whole, as that of the community. The other, on the contrary, regards interests as well as numbers; - considering the community as made up of different and conflicting interests, as far as the action of the government is concerned; and takes the sense of each, through its majority or appropriate organ, and the united sense of all, as the sense of the entire community. The former of these I shall call the numerical, or absolute majority; and the latter, the concurrent, or constitutional majority. (Calhoun, "Disquisition" 2.3-4)

The concurrent or constitutional majority is the organ informed by the understanding that, in a federation of natural human dissimilarities, each must have the security to pursue its liberty. The construction of a negative power of equalization that accords people both the recognition and the practical implementation of their own inalienable sovereignty to be human is the Constitution of the United States. Undeniably, Calhoun's practical concern is over the possibility of minority interests gaining the majority position, but the philosophical issue is that hierarchical structures are incompatible with and inappropriate for the realization of the equal liberty of persons. Equal liberty must provide an organ for the equal rationality of persons, but that organ must be able to function with the understanding that "rationality" sits alongside the highly diverse interests of actual persons. In order to provide such an organ, government must place alongside the numerical majority the concurrent majority: [Take] the sense of each interest or portion of the community, which may be unequally and injuriously affected by the action of the government, separately,

ii5 Unionist-Republican and Confederate-Democratic Narratives through its own majority, or in some other way by which its voice may be fairly expressed; and to require the consent of each interest, either to put or to keep the government in action ... [In this way] the different interests, orders, classes, or portions, into which the community may be divided, can be protected, and all conflict and struggle between them prevented, - by rendering it impossible to put or to keep it [the government] in action, without the concurrent consent of all. (Calhoun, "Disquisition" zi)

In this way, the dual identity of citizens is always represented. One represents their consolidated interests as Americans; the other represents their self-determined interest - states united. The concurrent majority keeps the conversation between the United States and American going on all pragmatic issues of governance. The idea of a concurrent voice to protect the rights of difference is derived from the confederate theory of democracy, which is conceived in terms of a logic of human behaviour and understanding. An individualistic liberty may be that for which humans are fitted, but they are also social by nature. This sociality is not some sort of universal friendliness that draws the individual to social formation by the necessity of affection. Affection is much more particular. Human affection is for the familiar, for like kinds. Thus the homogeneous community as an affectionate social entity - derived, for example, from the family - may naturally arise, but the formation of a larger heterogeneous society depends upon the necessity of satisfying needs which may be met through relations that are other than affectionate. In this sense, the logic of human nature that grounds the confederate narrative of the origins of social formation comes from a position between that of Hobbes and Locke. I cannot imagine the confederate narrative mythologizing people as brutes in a state of nature, but they are xenophobic. If the individual affectionate communities of like kinds could function self-sufficiently, then the sense is that larger political society would not have to be constituted. The mythic ideal is the agrarian commune in which the social is not political because there exist no invidious distinctions to be made between individuals, and in which the simple economics of self-sufficient subsistence would not require the introduction of trade that is synonymous with comparison and commensurability as well.9 RETHINKING CONFEDERATE DEMOCRACY

The famous retheorization of the agrarian commune comes in the form of the collection /'// Take My Stand, by "Twelve Southerners," which certainly has its roots in the confederate-democratic narrative and its understanding of human socio-economic relations. However, in the

116 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-Century American Literature

ideology of post-Reconstruction southern agrarianism, invidious social and economic distinctions are everywhere present, however dressed in a romanticized rhetoric of simplicity and the evils of unnecessary complexity. And to be true to the sense and the context of Calhoun's earlier formulation, affection for the familiar, for like kinds, is racially valenced. Human beings form communal society for the preservation and protection of racial sameness (Calhoun, "Disquisition" 8). While the structure of the confederate-democratic narrative is cast as both a political and a social philosophy, Calhoun's particular political interests, tied as they are to his time frame, cast the social philosophy as racial through and through. What I will come to argue is that the political philosophy of the confederate narrative does not by necessity demand a social philosophy determined by race. Because "interest" is the keyword in the narrative, the groups whose interests compete can be as fluid in their makeup as the particular interests demand, and as fluid in their constitution and dissolution as particular moments in history demand. Though the South once felt that its interests demanded an economic and social organization based upon slavery, this is not to say that the afterlife of confederate-democracy needs to be tied to that immoral interest, which humane citizens would not want to promote today. In addition, the mythic origin of the racial bias, the affection for the similar, is recognized within the narrative as just that, mythic and originary, something postulated as the origin of, but made impossible by, heterogeneous civil society. There are a number of reasons one could attribute in order to explain why the ideal cannot sustain itself, and it would have to be attribution because nowhere does the confederate narrative fully articulate the reasons for the development of civil society. It does not develop a theory of the self, for example, which would speak to issues of material desire, envy, the causes of a movement from xenophobia to aggression towards an other. But whatever the combination of economics and defence, for example, which are found in the classic state-of-nature to social-contract theories, heterogeneous civil society will form, and the point is that it is only in this larger society that government must also be constituted in order to regulate the social relations between heterogeneous groups. As influenced as it is by Greco-Roman philosophy, and as much as it romanticizes that influence, the confederate narrative conceives of politics and the governing of relations as the great civilizing influence, a notion that highlights the fact that xenophobia, though perhaps natural, is something to be civilized out of humankind, or at least that it is something that must be checked in order for society to function. A democracy of confederated groups is the type of organization in which both liberty and the regulation of interests can be contained without undue political re-

iiy Unionist-Republican and Confederate-Democratic Narratives

straint upon either. It provides both liberty and security. "Liberty leaves each free to pursue the course he may deem best to promote his interest and happiness, as far as it may be compatible with the primary end for which government is ordained - while security gives assurance to each, that he shall not be deprived of the fruits of his exertions to better his condition" (Calhoun, "Disquisition" 40). The full conception of democracy, infused with a rhetoric of the rights of the minority, can function as something remarkably inclusive. It champions democracy derived directly from the Declaration of Independence with a substitution: all voices are equal. However, the way in which this discourse was employed was to call for the continued inclusion, on an equal political basis, of only a particular minority - that of white agrarians - even if the discourse itself could support the inclusion of other minorities. In order to achieve their political and derivative economic ends, confederate-democrats had to ground their claims in a discourse of rights readable in the Constitution. Hence, the grounding of legitimacy - a legitimacy structured within the rights-based tradition of Western justice. In so doing, however, they found themselves with a constitutional discourse of inclusion or representative democracy.10 It is impossible to postulate all the intentions that may have gone into the constitutional grounding. The move can be read as simply a pretext by design for the perpetuation of privilege and immorality, or it can be read as stemming from a more honourable anxiety over the fate of the founding principles of American democracy, over whether they were being hijacked by the concerns of industrial capitalism. Of equal possibility is the claim that the rhetoric was more innocent, the discourse far more transparent and "literal," than we are apt to think today. The discourse concerns those who are politically self-representable, who at the time of the Constitution and of the later development of the confederate-democratic narrative, were by and large literate, propertied white men. At that time, neither women nor wage labourers nor people of colour were considered to be politically self-representable. However, postulating motivations does not alter the effect of the discourse in its particular application. The confederate-democratic narrative did not work to the advantage of any one in the South other than one particular minority, who articulated it in the name of the South as a whole. By the singular promotion, the equation of the part to the whole, which is the fact of political representation, the narrative functioned to the detriment of those on whose backs the propertied white male minority stood. From a northern, unionist-republican perspective, indeed, there is gross injustice in humanistic and economic terms, an injustice sufficient to take up the gauntlet of war. From this perspective, the effect of the

118 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-Century American Literature

confederate discourse was to promote "minority privileges rather than rights" (Hofstadter 90). But the confederate-democratic claim is that there was no constitutional political injustice in the "peculiar institution" and so, legally speaking, no recognizable injustice. The constitutional injustice recognizable to the South was the interference by the northern-controlled Congress in states' rights. In opposition to Richard Hofstadter, for example, I adhere to the argument that the confederatedemocratic narrative is a discourse of rights grounded in the Constitution of the time; however, critics would now rather call them privileges in an effort to shield subsequent generations from a citizen's relation to the Founding Fathers' and thus the nation's collective hand in the propagation of slavery derived from these rights. Doing so lessens the guilt by pointing out the greater blame of others.11 If the confederate-democratic narrative at the time of its formulation did not function to promote the interests of all minorities, then why bring it up in terms of its similarity with informative consequences to the situation of African American freedmen? How can the constitutional theories of the subjugator be used to ameliorate the consequences of the emancipator? Does not the motivation and the particularity of the context and the issues contaminate the legitimacy of the confederate-democratic theory of constitutionalism itself? If it does, then the legitimacy of the theory read in and out of the Constitution of the United States is removed, since the theory simply becomes an ideological import mapped on to the Constitution. The reading is rather a fudging, a using of the Constitution to legitimate particular oppressive interests. Carole Pateman, for example, lodges a similar critique of many of the discourses of feminism that argue for the recognition of women's rights of property in their bodies and for political equality to regard women as the same as men. She suggests that these lines of feminism structure their claims in a patriarchal discourse because they accept the terms of property right in the body and equality between individuals conceived of only as men, which ground the social contract as a patriarchal mechanism. According to Pateman, the story of the social contract is told as the overthrowing of paternal right in order to establish fraternal right, or the equality of possessive individuals. What that narration conceals is that the original paternal right exists only if men become fathers. "In other words, sex-right or conjugal right must necessarily precede the right of fatherhood"" (Pateman 87, emphasis in original). "The origin of political right must either be repressed or reinterpreted if the creation of civil society is to be represented as a victory over patriarchy, and the sexual contract is to remain hidden" (Pateman 108). Because the subjugation of women constitutes the possibility of

ii9 Unionist-Republican and Confederate-Democratic Narratives

the patriarchal social contract, feminist discourses that employ patriarchal terminology, even if against itself, necessarily acquiesce in that which constitutes their own oppression. They continue to further patriarchal structures even when they think they are working for their abolition. My response is twofold. I make a separation between what I am calling a confederate-democratic reading of the Constitution and the way in which the reading was taken and in a sense co-opted as the ground for the political ends of statesmen in the South and in the subsequent Confederacy of southern states. The reading of the Constitution formulates a theory of political compact and constitution derived from the philosophies, histories, and experiences that went in to the making of the Articles of Confederation and their subsequent attempted perfection in the Constitution of the United States. The theory of constitution and compact is tied to the Constitution as its legitimator and not to the particular application or implementation of the derived theory. The confederate application of its theory was politically, economically, and immorally motivated. This fact must be recognized. But if any theory can be interpreted and applied in motivated ways, does the immorality of one application necessitate all applications as immoral and the theory as irredeemable? To reapply the theory does not make it illegitimate but, rather, contests the previous application. I contend that how the confederate-democratic narrative functions as a legal reading of the Constitution is not illegitimate or immoral, yet how the Confederacy applied this theory in the antebellum period was immoral and therefore illegitimate. It seems that the contamination response comes from an equation of writing with only the realization of intention, which would be to suggest that the confederate-democratic theory of constitution performs in no way other than how critics reduce it to what they ascribe the intentions of its authors to have been. Besides reflecting a parochial conception of the performance of language, the contamination response reduces the process of reading to the formulation of an ascription and so misses the opportunity for readers to rescue the significance of the theory in the now of the reading. To follow Walter Benjamin here, for example, in reading, language affords the perception of certain similarities between the significance in the then of the writing and the situation of the here and now of the reading. In this sense, reading the past affords historical understanding which must be viewed, according to Benjamin, "in principle, as an afterlife of that which has been understood" ("N" 460). The afterlife is constituted by perception as events are rescued into the here and now. As such, it leaves "that which has been understood" in the anterior and captures that which must be

12.0 The Letter and the Spirit of i^th-Century American Literature

understood as it flits past. In the "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Benjamin suggests, "The true image of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again ... It is an irretrievable image of the past that threatens to disappear with each present moment \jeder Gegenwart] that does not recognize itself as intended in it [in the past, als in ihm gemeint}" (Illuminations 2,55, translation altered to follow the German). Related to the issues of both reading and application is the position of the confederate-democratic reading relative to the expandability of the Constitution itself. The idea that the confederate southern application of the confederate-democratic narrative is the only possible application, even now, is negated by the fact that the Constitution after the Civil War and beyond is not the same as before the war. If the reading of the Constitution is said to produce the particular application of the theory, then any confederate-democratic reading now would have no legitimate basis for propagating a system of slavery - that which the criticism suggests would be the contaminant. With the question of the legality or constitutionality of slavery decided by the war, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, slavery is, constitutionally speaking, no longer a component of what might still be called a confederate-democratic reading of the Constitution in its post-Reconstruction afterlife. The amendments construct a different Constitution. What might be ironic, given the antagonistic history, is that to posit this justification for rescuing the confederate-democratic narrative depends upon the emancipatory work of the unionist-republican victory. By emancipating slaves and amending the Constitution, that victory predicates the resurrection of a reconstructed confederate-democratic narrative to loosen the binds of representation tightened by unionist decrepitude. I am interested in what becomes and what can become of the competing narratives after their day. The "after their day" in which I am interested is my "now" of reading them. After the war, the unionist-republican narrative lived on into a decrepitude of numerical majorities - legal equality but with social and practical political inequality. It laid the foundation for the situation of dominance and conservative totalization under which many people feel oppressed, whether they be racial and ethnic minorities, the poor, the homeless, "illegal" immigrants, or activists, academics, and politicians, sickened at what they see as the unjust enfranchisement of privilege in a democracy which on paper should facilitate a diverse and plural population, but which in practice cannot achieve its promise. The confederate-democratic narrative dies a certain death while periodically

i2i

Unionist-Republican and Confederate-Democratic Narratives

knocking on the coffin lid - certainly, in the southern public consciousness - at particular moments of unionist aberration. This lost discourse, a discourse legitimately of the United States, can stand as a contemporary critical response to the fear of a future which Americans inhabit today. The purpose of rescuing the confederate-democratic discourse is to recover the origins of what radical democratic critics are pursuing, with the hope that rescuing the past into the here and now can come to inform both the "then" and the "now" in educationally and politically necessary ways. Does the path not taken go farther to remedying the problems of representation and of valuing identity that are harming political and social relations nationally and globally? Since the theory of democratic confederacy, in particular, and of the Constitution as a compact, in general, regards the uniting of states as the product of a consensus of sovereign bodies, a contemporary confederate-democratic theory works to champion the differences between members of the whole in a way similar to current postmodern multicultural theories of a social and political mosaic. Richard Hofstadter is exactly right when he asserts of Calhoun that "not in the slightest was he concerned with minority rights as they are chiefly of interest to the modern liberal mind - the rights of dissenters to express unorthodox opinions, of the individual conscience against the State, least of all of ethnic minorities" (89-90). However, because Calhoun structured the confederate-democratic narrative as a constitutional reading and as a discourse of rights particularly, the narrative can still be brought to bear on the contemporary Constitution, which legally validates what the rhetorical performance of the confederatedemocratic narrative - ironically and unfortunately for Calhoun, perhaps - has always said. Current debates about the political responsibilities of a multicultural society usher in the relevant contemporary importance of resurrecting the suppressed confederate-democratic understanding of the relationship between the social and the political. For some time now, global and American national events have reflected that identity, be it of the individual or of the group, is not something purely or simply social; rather, while it may be constitutively social, its effects and its development are deeply political. The need for self-constitution and self-representation arises from a deep dissatisfaction with previous models of representation, usually viewed as misrepresentation with lack of recognition by another.12 Geopolitics has provided a great many examples just in the past twenty years, from the breakup of the former Soviet Union, to the former Yugoslavia, to the calls of Quebec for sovereignty and recognition as a society distinct from the rest of Canada. In the other direction, however, the formation of the new South Africa can be characterized as

122 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

the task of reconstituting a nation in which otherness has an equal right of representation. Because of that equal right, otherness is no longer a term of subordination as well as one of difference. And that equal right is a fundamental right which cannot be curtailed by the particular majority makeup of government that suffrage could produce. The governing majority has no right to restrict and thus to violate the rights of the minorities. Otherness has an equal right of representation, but one which cannot reduce otherness to that of the one or the same. On the one hand, the irreducibility of difference and the equal right to representation of that difference sound like fine liberal multicultural theory. There is no value distinction between different groups, and all cultural differences are valued equally in terms of respect of culture. The theory, in this sense, is eminently ethical. It both refuses to characterize difference in terms of a single cultural group, which ushers in terms of opposition sliding to subordination, and it avoids the traditional remedy of "value-free" description, which would try to make differences understandable to all in terms of some sort of metalanguage of cultural communication. This second alternative functions as the justification for the first, in that the impossibility of the valuefree or of the meta-language in linguistic description and communication soon comes to reveal the particular and political origins of the attempt. The problem with the theory occurs when it makes the translation to practical public policy. If we are to be ethical and multicultural, equally valuing difference and characterizing difference only in culturally specific terms, what then becomes of justice, for example, and of judgment between cultural groups? Does not justice need to function as a meta-category and as a meta-language such that it can mediate claims between the different parties? If making judgments between categories of difference and translating those judgments into a language of justice are constitutive of justice, theoretical and practical, does not contemporary multiculturalism become the contradiction of justice as it is traditionally conceived? Back when the "melting pot" rhetoric was dominant, American multiculturalism did not function as the contradiction, the oppositional discourse, to justice because the two functioned analogously. To a large extent, in so far as they functioned publicly and impacted upon public policy, cultural differences were to be united by and exist under the allencompassing national category called the "American."13 What all peoples of colour and of different religions and heritages shared in the public sphere was their "Americanness." And just as difference constituted what it was to be American, so the national status was supposed to be the legitimator and protector of difference, now as politically and legally equal, but therefore as one with limits. It is within that conglomerate cat-

123 Unionist-Republican and Confederate-Democratic Narratives

egory that American justice as a discourse could speak, and upon that category that justice could act. Since the ideology attempted to make the category representative of difference in translation, justice functioned upon the representation, upon the translation, and the thinking was that it had to. How else can justice be just if it is not making pronouncements upon people as if they are the same, figuratively the same, translated into the same? If we accord people their irreducible differences, where is the sameness upon which justice depends for its universality? Hence the need for a multiculturalism of sameness to fit the workings of the traditional conception and process of justice in the West. Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan claim, "The idea of the melting pot is as old as the Republic" (2.88), a claim they support, interestingly enough, by recourse to literary, not political, sources from Crevecoeur (1782) to Israel Zangwill's 1908 play, The Melting Pot. In a certain, very general sense - one that figures America as the great refuge for those who were different enough from their home countries to emigrate and to meld together under the national banner of the United States - the claim is supportable. But this sense of the age-old "melting pot" is national in a predominantly white sense. Even in a northern sense, "melting" was not advocated either as the social mixing of race and colour with white or as intermarriage. Peoples of all races, creeds, and cultures could meld together in terms of political or legal equality, but real social equality and integration without the prejudice of caste was not the agenda of the "melting pot." Perhaps the broad national definition of the "melting pot," which finally sought the integration of socio-cultural equality alongside the political and legal, was really the intent behind the popularization of the multicultural rhetoric of the 19508 to late 19708. Loving v. Virginia (1967), in which the Supreme Court of the United States struck down Virginia's anti-miscegenation laws as unconstitutional, stands, for example, as a critical moment when federal law, eminently politicized, extended its protective force into state, social, and private concerns in the name of multiculturalism and justice. The case was argued and won, however, according to the post-Civil War Constitution by way of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, adopted on 28 July 1868. The ability to include the social and cultural aspects of race in law nationally only came into being during the Reconstruction. This ability hedged and fudged its way along through the " separate but equal" justifications put forth in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which stood intact until Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Certainly, Brown deals with the personal issue of choice of school and manner of education, but the venue of education exists in the public social sphere. Loving v. Virginia marks the entrance of multicultural justice into the

12.4 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

private sphere. However, the problem is that law can change both personal action in the public and private spheres and legal status, but it does not have a necessary and sufficiently direct effect on private opinion or belief. The Supreme Court could practise a certain multicultural policy, affecting the legality of interracial marriages and the legality of the melding of races and cultures, but it could not directly affect the perception of cultures to desire melding. I am suggesting that the effect of multicultural rhetoric and the instances of the performance of justice to support multiculturalism did not realize their full intent in the minds of those for whose benefit they were supposed to act. The intent was for public and private melding of cultures. The effect was to create the legal possibility while contaminating racial and cultural desire. If the addressees' perception of the intent of the addresser runs counter to that intent, then the effect of the addresser's utterances and actions cannot be said to have been wholly realized. The system of justice aligned with "melting pot" multiculturalism is, I would suggest, "modern justice," and the quotation marks are meant to indicate a postmodern definition of modernity, for it is in the postmodern that we have come to characterize modernity in terms of absolutes and meta-languages and their impossibility. Postmodern justice is still, theoretically, in pieces, which is at once to suggest that it is nowhere satisfyingly articulated such that it might be put into practice and to characterize its basis of separation. If there was dissatisfaction with "modern" justice and its attendant policy of multiculturalism, it was in part due to the injustice of representation found in that multiculturalism. What "Americanness" came to be, because it had to fit with Western justice, was a certain whiteness and a discourse of difference that American white people could cast in their own terms, that is, in terms of the self as their selves. Certainly, "whiteness" is meant to designate the white people who comprised the hegemonic social, political, and economic order. But the word does designate a kind of homogeneity as well, a bleeding out of differences into the same. It is a common and unfortunately misleading term since the hegemonic order was and is not a singularity but, rather, a variety of national heritages, religions, and to some extent, cultures. However, whatever social differences there may have been, the hegemonic power structure functioned as if it were homogeneous because the internal differences did not, in the long run, manifest themselves differently in the politics of power. As Gregory Jay describes it, " 'White' designates the supposed common culture binding diverse European immigrants. Since their ethnic and national groups do not constitute a common culture, historiography had to invent one for them to help justify the project of colonialism and the institution of slavery. In fact, 'white' replaces ethnic taxonomies with a racial one, producing real confusion

12.5

Unionist-Republican and Confederate-Democratic Narratives

and misrecognition ... White is a political category, not a cultural one" (624-5). By translating cultural difference, difference is not what is represented but is rather what gets left behind. Otherness is rendered similar, and it is in terms of the same, of whiteness, that justice is rendered as well. Postmodern justice begins with the right of difference, its irreducibility, and the mutual exclusivity of irreducibility and translation. If difference is to be translated in order for justice to be rendered, then justice cannot be rendered. Justice rendered to the one and the other cannot be constituted by injustice in representation. The result in the postmodern, which needs to be thought through, is what Jean-Frangois Lyotard characterizes as "the idea of a justice that would at the same time be that of a plurality" (Just 95). This movement of uniting for legitimation and protection has a home in the Western rhetoric of constitution and freedom in that it is similar to the legal formation of a political union or nation-state. In the latter, the uniting of distinct and free persons is for a shared, common political end. In that narrative, freedom may constitute government, which in turn legitimates freedom, but such legitimation functions only under the limitations imposed by government or law. This is the contract or agreement according to the traditional narratives of the social contract. According to Kant, for example, The whole concept of an external right is derived entirely from the concept of freedom in the mutual external relationships of human beings ... Right is the restriction of each individual's freedom so that it harmonises with the freedom of everyone else (in so far as this is possible within the terms of a general law) ... [A] civil constitution is a relationship among free men who are subject to coercive laws, while they retain their freedom within the general union with their fellows ... Men have different views on the empirical end of happiness and what it consists of, so that as far as happiness is concerned, their will cannot be brought under any common principle nor thus under any external law harmonising with the freedom of everyone. ("Common" 73-4)

The sense is that while the principle of uniting for government limits absolute individual freedom, government cannot prescribe the end for all freely contracting agents in terms of freedom within the pursuit of happiness. The unionist-republican narrative, which is the discourse that provides the terms for traditional multicultural theory, affords the legal possibility for diverse individual pursuits of happiness and personal formations of the good, yet its rhetorical stress on the limitations of freedom that ground the possibility of individuality and difference causes a backlash and ushers back the importance of the confederate-

i z6 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

democratic conception. Calhoun, for example, is explicit when he notes that in the Constitution of the United States, the federal government is only a "political union" and not that which creates or limits a people "socially united" ("Discourse" 8z). If the confederatedemocratic fear has always been that the unionist-republican stress on the word "Union" tends to translate "federal" government into "national" government, and "political" union into "socio-political" union, I would suggest that the rhetoric and the intended effects of traditional "melting pot "-style multiculturalism mirror those fears as well. Rather than the legitimating effect of translating cultural, conceptual, ideological, and lifestyle differences into the united category of the "American," the translation functioned with coercive effect and with the singularity of the word "American" being underscored. The short form of this explanation is to say that the attempt to translate cultural differences into a national category resulted in the subsequent translation of the national category into a singular, if rather enormous, cultural category. Cultural critics and the wide variety of social and political groups working for greater democratic reform in general and in the name of multiculturalism in particular are trying, I would suggest, to achieve this goal, in which all groups have a right of voice. "I believe," says Jean-Francois Lyotard, "that it is now a matter of doing a politics of opinions that would give us the capacity of deciding between opinions and of distinguishing between what is just and what is not just; and to have this capacity of deciding, one must effectively have an Idea; but, in contradistinction to what Kant thought, this Idea is not, for us today, an Idea of totality" (Just 88). The idea of the numerical majority is not and cannot function as the totality because of the obligation that it be interposed by the judgment of plurality, of the concurrent majority. An idea derived from the principle of equal rationality and formulated by the numerical majority is not particular enough to account for the multiple interests, some in congruence with the majority and some not, that all persons possess. "Every one of us belongs to several minorities, and what is very important, none of them prevails," and none should in an eternal way (Lyotard and Thebaud 95). The problem, however, is that the terms and methods with which we are trying to create such a structure are contaminated by a system whose construction disallows it by definition. In other words, we are trying to create a confederatedemocratic scenario, a federal structure, with the unionist-republican tools at our disposal. It is not surprising, therefore, that the governmental pronouncements concerning multiculturalism sound like lip service. A unionist-republican discourse cannot speak confederatedemocracy.

4 The Feminin , the Judaic, the Pauline, and the Political: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Ethical Critique of Justice

In the summer of 1963, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, Martin Luther King Jr detailed his dream of a time when his four children would be judged by the content of their characters and not their skin colour. He was speaking to effect a time when the legal and political equality of persons would be uniform across the board, and sociality would respect the actuality of human difference (King 95). He was hoping for Americans to judge the content of their own characters. What is the constitution of Americans as a people if the character of that people is racist and xenophobic? The question has a long socio-political history in America, a history of holding a mirror up to the various originary pronouncements constituting the people, a history of asking Americans to judge their conduct by their words. I would like to focus on some of those words, how they are spoken or declared and what they perform, and particularly those whose origins are found in a discourse figuring America as the New Jerusalem, the great experiment of making the legal and political biblically ethical. The sense of these originary words came back to haunt Americans in the decades immediately preceding the Civil War. The textuality and interpretability of Judeo-Christian morality and the possibility of a just immorality in secular law formed the bind wrapping the United States as it tightened in the issue of slavery. Predominantly northerners and then increasingly southerners began to worry over the status of a country that sanctioned immoral conduct but also believed it still had a divine destiny. As the debate over slavery was catalyzed by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law and wore on into the 18505, moral arguments

128

The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

began to tackle legal and judicial questions on their own terms. Those terms accept and, indeed, thread theological concepts into the texture of secular law, grounded by the idea that the Constitution is a document designed to secure the "Blessing" of liberty, as stated in the Preamble. I wish to read "Blessing" as not "just a figure of speech," where the quip seeks to reduce the meaning of figures. The importance of taking this constitutional pronouncement at its word and reading it to the letter as fundamental to the spirit of the law was foregrounded in the 18508. Americans questioned whether, if slavery is immoral and just, the Constitution constitutes America as the land in which these two can be held together, and therefore as the land in which justice need not be ethical. If it does, and if the Constitution represents "We the People," need not Americans search the content of their characters to determine whether they themselves are, in fact, constituted in this way? In legal and theological terms, the issue of self-constitution, which includes questions as to the representative relation between the Constitution and Americans' selves, is implicated in the broader relation between different kinds of law. What is the relation between positive, natural, and divine law, and does one take priority over the others and become their constitutive ground ? For the majority of southerners, it seemed basically clear that slavery was constitutional and therefore just, and for a great many plantation owners, it was moral - indeed, biblically sanctioned. Thus the internal critique of the confederate-democratic narrative concerning the pragmatics of slavery revolved around the question of how best to fulfill this morality, how best to deal justly with the slave according to this morality. Northerners, by and large, may have felt that traffic in human property, its mistreatment and murder, was immoral, but they debated the justice of allowing its existence in southern states, according to the Constitution. Belief in the sovereignty of the state, as guaranteed and limited by the Constitution, enabled northern states to enact legislation for gradual emancipation, with the Pennsylvania Act of 1780 serving as the prototype (Cover 62,). As Robert Cover reports, by 1827 New York had freed all remaining slaves born prior to its Emancipation Act of 1799. By 1840 Pennsylvania could boast no slaves enumerated in its census. New Jersey had only 700 remaining in 1845; and while Connecticut formally ended slavery as late as 1848, there were only 54 slaves enumerated in the 1840 census (Cover 160). The internal critique of the unionist-republican narrative centred on how just this more perfect union could be when it constituted America with a constitutive immorality. In order to ensure domestic tranquility, general welfare, and the blessings of liberty to the people through its laws, the government of the United States was condoning immorality and thus corrupting

iz9

Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Ethical Critique of Justice

justice. In order to ensure justice for posterity, both the confederatedemocrats and the unionist-republicans had to have rearticulated forcefully to themselves that liberty is a "Blessing," secured for persons as citizens by the Founding Fathers but bestowed in persons by God. Any nation constituting itself for justice with the blessings of liberty cannot be so severed from a morality derived from God. Particularly in the voice of women, the internal unionist-republican critique was rising to say that justice in the United States had better start governing by at least the general principles of Judeo-Christian morality if it wished to ensure justice and maintain a blessed liberty for posterity. This call comes in its most famous and critical formulation in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly. Through a particular representation of slavery in America, Stowe weaves a careful critique of the country's relationship to otherness and difference. Her charge is that no justice is rendered by laws that attempt to redefine persons hierarchically and politically within the nation. One's status as a person is awarded by God the Father, not the Founding Fathers, and whatever the definition of a "citizen," it cannot contravene that of a "person." Human attempts to overwrite the ethical relations given to humanity in the Bible must necessarily result in cataclysm. This understanding is part of Stowe's aggressive interpretation of the Bible, which motivates all the political arguments in her text. By interpreting the Pauline Epistles as a discourse on the nature of a true and most ethical unity, she reargues the terms of unity grounding the northern unionist-republican political positions. Rather than incorporating minorities into a unitary national whole that effects their subordination, Stowe's anti-utilitarian sense of a just unity preserves particularity and distinguishes it as constitutive of any definition of unity created by national law. Significantly, this argument is articulated by the women in this text, and I assert that the ethical critique of American justice is gendered as feminine and particularist throughout. Stowe lays the responsibility for the legalized social and political injustices at the feet of men, and she subsequently argues that the source of national and social repair is to be found in the nature of women. Women's ability to love and their roles as the educators of the family in the home can convert male brutality and lift the fallen. There is no dearth of scholarly criticism of Stowe's writing, particularly of Uncle Tom's Cabin, in terms of her politics, her use of sentimentalism to promote them, and the politics of her stereotypical representations of African Americans, which mark out the limitations of her views and her consciousness.1 While many note the connections between her "religious sense" and her sentimental style, and assert a relation between her theology and the transformative power of her

130 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

literary style, few explore seriously the transformative power of the theology itself. This is to say that while Jane Tompkins's study wishes to take seriously the claim that tears can change the world, and Karen Sanchez-Eppler and Marianne Noble admit the ability - indeed, the necessity - of the writing to "translate words into pulse beats and sobs" (Sanchez-Eppler 36) or "to provoke knowledge through the body" (Noble 2.96), they do not consider Stowe's theology as a theology or her literary writing as its representation. However, to do so creates its own set of problems. If, as I will argue, her theology interprets ethics as something predicated upon human differences, which recognizes that ethical responsibility to the call of difference is the basis of realizing justice in this world, then how can a literary text that contains racist stereotypes of African Americans be a representation of such a theology? How can ethics and racist stereotyping go together?2 The problem is similar to the consideration of the confederate-democratic reading of the Constitution in relation to the actual Confederacy. I derive Stowe's theology from her religious writings and her literary works, but also recognize that, as representative, her writing, particularly her literary writing, fails to capture, present perfectly, or mirror the potential found in her theology. Furthermore, because what I am calling her theology is only derivable from writing that includes irreducible racist elements alongside intelligent appeals for justice and a certain type of equality, one could well argue that racism is irreducibly part of her theology as well. Without having any kind of Hutchinsonian claim to revelation and annunciation, Stowe's theology is written in a socially and historically determined use of language, and her "thought" or "judgment" is nothing other than what this constructive discourse can allow. Mainly, but not absolutely. I disagree that one should let that rendition of the relation between thought and language shut down completely the possibilities of how else language might perform and what might be thought from that performance. It is worth exploring how her thought might be something other than her discourse, leaving open the possibility that racist elements, clumsy phrasings, and ill-thought-out structures may well be "ironious" and otherwise erroneously chosen in an Hutchinsonian sense. And to make such a claim is not to dissolve the racism and make it as if it were not there. The complexities of representation notwithstanding, racism is there in Stowe's writing. She does not escape her social construction, but she does, I think, exceed it, which is also there in her writing, ironically standing alongside the rest of her limitations. The fact of the proximity of racist and ethical representations in Stowe's writing would involve its own politics, and to question how these elements stand side by side politically may not be the same as to

131

Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Ethical Critique of Justice

ask how they do so char erologically, on the one hand, and aesthetically and literarily, on the other. A similar line of inquiry would involve the relations between realism and sentimentality found in her work. "How racist are her ethics?" is structurally a similar question, though with a different politics, to "How real is her sentimentalism?" and vice versa. My sense of Jane Tompkins's work, for instance, is that it is predicated on the belief that the sentimental is really felt. The two are not separate but mutually condition each other so as to be, in the practice of life, one and the same. Hence the transformative power of the sentimental. While it may seem retrograde, however, I would like to return to a more traditional axiom: that style is a style, a shaping that works for a historically conditioned market, and so is either chosen or the constructed default setting of a writer. This assertion leaves open the idea that the relations between textual elements - style and content, language and thought, sentimentalism and realism, racism and ethics afford more possibility than a reduction to dialectics or mutual conditioning would allow. Elements are distinct, with complex relations within the unity of the text. Emblematic in this line of argument for inquiry is chapter 6 in Uncle Tom's Cabin, appropriately named "Discovery." As Eliza flees with her son, just after Mr Shelby has sold her to the trader Haley, Sam and Andy are put into service to help Haley capture her. Andy overhears Mrs Shelby say that she hopes that Eliza escapes, and Andy and Sam pull out various methods of delaying Haley, protecting themselves under the cover of so-called slave incompetence and tomfoolery. As a "scene," the description presents the stuff of minstrel shows, complete with overacting and stereotypical dialect renditions; however, in so doing, it indicates not only Stowe's understanding of signifying structures, whereby in this case slaves protect their own designs under the cover of playing to white stereotypical mindsets, but also Mrs Shelby's understanding of such structures, and Sam and Andy's understanding of Mrs Shelby's understanding. By altering her tone in her word choice, Mrs Shelby speaks a silent discourse to Sam and Andy, acknowledging that she and they have read each other correctly (H.B. Stowe, Uncle 99). The multiple acknowledgments between characters, readers, and the author made within the use of a certain kind of representation, here to be thought of as a complex performance or playing out, are all part of the "Discovery" indicated by the chapter title. Here, stereotypes are stereotypes and motivated constructions simultaneously, the intelligence and productivity of which have to be held alongside other representations that may not seem so easy to redeem - "that the very effort to depict goodness in blacks involves the obliteration of blackness" in other moments (Sanchez-Eppler 39). Of the character Sam, James

132. The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

Bense argues that Stowe writes "subversively within the rhetoric and culturally invented myths that held sway over slavery propaganda to convert the most egregious kind of slave stereotyping among her contemporaries into a shape-shifting, encompassing figure who would, through his words and enactments, deflate major tenets of American ideology that had made is 'creation' possible" (189). Following a similar trajectory, highlighting Stowe's critique of public discourses, I shall explore these issues within the text's own terms and "world." I wish to examine how they are created within the performance of this text as an internal critique of the unionist-republican narrative of justice. Whatever Stowe's realism or her sentimentalism, each is rendered to affect how the discourse of justice in the United States was being taken up and internalized in the minds of U.S. citizens. THE NIGHEST NEIGHBOUR

When Eliza and her son, George, flee the Shelby plantation and cross the Ohio River to freedom, they are met by Mr Symmes, an uneducated neighbour of the Shelbys in Kentucky. Glad to help, he points Eliza to safety and exclaims that of course he will not tell of their whereabouts. In his " ignorance," he figures that any slave who can escape has earned her freedom. "Somehow I never could see no kind o' critter a strivin' and pantin', and trying to clar theirselves, with the dogs arter 'em and go agin 'em. Besides, I don't see no kind of 'casion for me to be hunter and catcher for other folks, neither" (H.B. Stowe, Uncle 119). It would be in his pecuniary and lawful interest for Symmes not to help Eliza and to return her according to the Fugitive Slave Law, but the character indicates by his actions that there are other more important interests: for instance, ethics, following one's own desires for one's actions, conscience. These still fall within the purview of "self"-interests, but the interest of the self is its constitution in relation to the other, cast in the justice of the social. "Ethics" becomes our temporal word for honouring the social and the self as mutually determined. Symmes functions according to a non-possessive individualism that is prepared to weigh a self-reliant and self-determined sensibility against the common law of the land and to interpret the law according to the in-between spaces of the letter and the spirit. Symmes knows that, according to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, he cannot shelter Eliza and George, but his interpretation of "aiding and abetting" suggests that verbal advice and "pointing" them to safety do not fall within the restrictions. This individual right to interpret the law according to one's own conscience realizes that it does so at the cost of community and neighbourliness, but the sense is that community cannot be enforced by laws that go against

133

Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Ethical Critique of Justice

individual conscience. Symmes's logic is that even if Mr Shelby "won't think this yer the most neighborly thing in the world ... If he catches one of my gals in the same fix, he's welcome to pay back" (119). This logic suggests a libertarian justice of process that sees itself as fitted for the American realization of laissez-faire economy within individualism and individual social relations. The government is not the one to restrict social relations to the point where one is not allowed to aid and abet another. One has to obey one's humane conscience, and if that results in an economic detriment to someone else, then that other person may respond in kind. What Stowe suggests here is that individualism is not an evil unto itself; rather, it has the capacity to realize a situation that is both just in respecting the rights of persons as created by God and more just than the result of the common law. When the law disallows one's individual humanity and its realization, then the law is unjust. It favours and rewards one category of persons over another and does not justly measure and order relations. To suggest that to obey the Fugitive Slave Law is to be neighbourly, that it promotes a common good, is to restrict racially the definition of who is the neighbour. Symmes, however, defines the neighbour in terms of humanity and proximity. Shelby is not his only neighbour. Eliza and George are neighbours, immediately presenting themselves in need, who would receive nothing under the law for trying to realize their humanity. As Mr Jekyl says in Dred, Stowe's sequel of sorts to Uncle Tom's Cabin, the law figures the slave as "pro nullis, pro mortuis; which means ... held as nothing, - as dead, inert substance. That's his position in law" (4:4). It is not one's position in humanity as a creature of God, however, neither dead nor inert, but living as an other, to whom one has an ethical responsibility. This relationship need not necessarily be the same as that regulated by the law, as the situation in America before the Civil War demonstrates. Law may attempt to measure relations between individuals so as to mete out justice, but that is not to say that justice and the laws meet the criteria of ethics as right relations between individuals. Justice is mediated by law, and the mediation may veer from both ethics and the justice that is supposed to reflect it. The individualism of Mr Symmes is one that asks him to operate economically in his relations with others, to measure and to calculate in his judgments according to the value of humanity in all persons. This individualism enables one to answer the call of the most proximate neighbour, to judge the consequences of the action and its effects on other neighbours, and to allow an individualistic and libertarian economy of reparation to take its course. This is, I would suggest, an ethical individualism, which is counterpoised in Uncle Tom's Cabin to the national justice of American law. Legal

134 The Letter and the Spirit of i^th-Century American Literature

justice mediates relations between persons first by measuring humanity. Some are persons; others are three-fifths of a person and classified as property, pro nullis, pro mortuis. The gulf between ethics and this realization of justice is as wide as the Ohio River. It can be bridged provisionally when the "dead, inert substance" of the other flees to an individual, not a category, whose response is immediate and vocative. In an ironizing voice, the narrator comments, "So spoke this poor, heathenish Kentuckian, who had not been instructed in his constitutional relations, and consequently was betrayed into acting in a sort of Christianized manner, which, if he had been better situated and more enlightened, he would not have been left to do" (H.B. Stowe, Uncle 119). A possessive individualism that constructs the person around the means of pecuniary gain would have "better situated" Mr Symmes. He would have been enlightened by this philosophy as to both the Constitution and the relations between the people and things it constitutes. Thus, he would not have acted in such a Christianized manner. If the ethical relationship between individuals is "Christianized," then the suggestion is that the Constitution secularly overwrites and attempts to restructure such human(e) relations. We are human first. National, positive law orders the human and (re)constructs us. It does not have the right, but simply assumes the power, to create an order that attempts to organize humanity hierarchically, as if it can mete out what is human more to some than to others. Persons become socially constructed under positive law, but this discourse and technique of construction is not that of the constitution of the human, which precedes it and has a fundamental priority. The movement from the constitution of the human to the construction of the person is the movement from ethics in its theological idiom to justice and the secular discourse of national law. Stowe advocates an individualism which recognizes that God's word is paramount and unchangeable in how it determines the ethics of human relations; humanity's word is an imposition, fallible, changeable, open to interpretation and subversion. Possessive individualism is a construction of a fallen humanity; ethical individualism founds the person in the divine. When Mrs Bird, for example, questions her husband over the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, she argues that the law is unchristian because it does not allow one to be even a minimally good Samaritan, to "feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and comfort the desolate" (H.B. Stowe, Uncle 144). Given the separation of church and state, one could argue that what the law does is to intervene in one's ability to realize her conception of the good and to limit one's practice of religion. Christian practice requires ethical conduct; thus the argument is that the Fugitive Slave Law is unconstitutional according to the First

135

Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Ethical Critique of Justice

Amendment because it curtails the pursuit of happiness and the freedom of religious expression. Mrs Bird responds, "I'll break it, for one, the first time I g'et a chance; and I hope I shall have a chance, I do!" (144). The "justice" involved in passing the Fugitive Slave Law judges the divergent claims in the Constitution of the pursuit of property and the pursuit of religion as unequal, prioritizing the economic. Mrs Bird's retort is that the individual right to practise ethics freely must not succumb to this motivated judgment. Senator Bird indicates, however, that practising ethics can be curtailed if it goes against the common principles of Tightness, as derived by the collective will in representation. Individual ethical conduct can be curtailed "where your doing so would involve a great public evil" (144). Stowe inscribes a gendered difference, then, to the reading of "We the People." For Mr Bird, "People" is plural, as "public." For Mrs Bird, "People" signifies "We individual persons." The "evil" would be to deny Americans their material property and to question the definition and priority of property in the Constitution. Mrs Bird replies, "Obeying God never brings on public evil. I know it can't. It's always safest, all round, to do as He bids us" (144, emphasis in original). She appeals to a higher justification, one that grounds the fundamental definition of the person in creation. As God's creatures, we cannot be our own property; we are God's. Senator Bird attempts to quiet his wife by delegitimizing her arguments as based upon "private feelings," which must be put aside when "great public interests" are at stake. This utilitarian form of argument, placing the good of the many over that of the individual, is employed to give politically persuasive weight to the traditional masculinist subordination of sentiment and the domestic sphere to that of politico-economic interest and the public sphere. The individuality of the "private" is divorced from the community of the "public" as if it were not a constitutive part of this community. In response, however, Mrs Bird argues the case for aiding and abetting the desolate not from private feeling as domestic sentimentality. Rather, she reiterates precepts from the Bible, which may engender sympathetic feelings to be sure, but are of the order of obligations and responsibilities initiated by the covenant cut with Abraham and promoted throughout the Hebrew and Christian texts. She stresses ethical action, doing as God bids us, not sentimental feeling. The obligatory ethical work of each person is reciprocally contracted with each individual in Judaism. Or, in Christianity, Jesus dies for each person's sins. Ethics, the conduct of all God's creatures, is articulated as the relationship of the one to the other, which is immediately extrapolated for all others. The individual work of ethics is that which builds the community and constitutes its interests. As such, Mrs Bird's response underscores the untenability of Mr Bird's false constructions.

136 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

Furthering the work of Jane Tompkins by proceeding, as I do, with a response such as Mrs Bird's, I am arguing that Uncle Tom's Cabin is as much a biblical reading and a discourse of human responsibilities as it is a novel of sentimentality. I do not want to denigrate sentimentality as "all tears and flapdoodle," as Tompkins notes that critics have labelled it (130). Rather, I agree that sentimentality was the popular literary discourse shared by women of the nineteenth century which enabled them to promote social change through a change of heart. "The tears of Topsy and of Miss Ophelia, which we find easy to ridicule, are the sign of redemption" (Tompkins 131), which can be read as one of the predicates of the possibility of social change in the actual world. But it is, on the one hand, only a sign and, on the other, only one type of predicate - perhaps necessary but not sufficient. Jesus does not proceed through Galilee weeping; he acts, repairing the world for redemption. Certainly, it is presented in the Christian Bible that he does so through infinite loving-kindness, but he is not a particularly sentimental character. When he answers the supplicant plea of the leper for healing, Jesus simply says, "I will" (Matt. 8:3, Mark 1:41, Luke 5:13). When he foretells his death (Matt. 16:21, 20:19-20; Mark 8:31, 9:30, 10:33; Luke 18:33; Jonn 12:32-3) and acknowledges his betrayal in the Last Supper (Matt. 2,6:20-35, Mark 14:12-21, John 13:21), he is said to narrate the fact simply in recognition. Indeed, any sentiment for the family of blood relations and marriage seems completely dispelled by Jesus's proclamation that he is on earth to divide families so as to reconstitute Christian humanity as one family. "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law" (Matt. 10:34-5). "Who is my mother? and who are my brethren? And he stretched forth his hand toward his disciples, and said, Behold my mother and my brethren!" (Matt. 12:48-9). In Uncle Tom's Cabin, children and slaves do the weeping; Miss Ophelia weeps through her conversion, figuring tears as the sign of conversion to the recognition of both responsibility and sympathy. But the women - Mrs Bird and Mrs Shelby, for example - call for action and their emotion is anger. The sense here, I would argue, is that of a Protestant reader of the Christian and the Hebrew Bibles who does not dissolve the Jewish ethic of activity and the responsibility to repair the world in its incorporation by Christianity. I will continue in this chapter to argue that the critical stance is as significant for Christian theology as it is for the national politics of justice. Further, I take to heart the claims of Mark Vasquez and Gladys Lewis, respectively, that Stowe's "sermonic" (Vasquez) or "preacher"

137

Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Ethical Critique of Justice

(Lewis) discourse provides a rhetorical authority that works in tandem with her "instructive" (Vasquez) or "storyteller" (Lewis) discourses to promote her sentimental politics of domesticity. However, one cannot just say, "Yes, yes, she musters God on her side to legitimate her politics" and then forget about it, as if theology does not make a difference, but only sentimentalism and domesticity do. If critics ostensibly follow sentimentalism and domesticity, they end up misinterpreting the weight that Stowe gives to certain key terms. For example, Catharine O'Connell rightly asserts, "The confrontation between Eliza and the Birds acts out the representational goals of the work as a whole" (15). In confrontation are the terms of various binaries: black and white; slave and free; private and public; feminine and masculine; individualism and utilitarianism. If they are analyzed without attending to the religious pronouncement about ethics, however, one would conclude, as Amy Shrager Lang does, that feminine feeling cannot translate into masculine deed (2,13), and that the "solution to slavery the novel offers is not social but individual, not political but spiritual, not public but private" (2.13). Mrs Bird's influence and activity are in the home. She cannot vote in the Senate; only Mr Bird can. However, religiously speaking, individualism, private and singular action in the gendered mix of femininity and masculinity - namely, Jesus's life - is worldtransformative in its effect and significance. Unless one is prepared to wave away the significance of Jesus's life, the religious discourse is the powerful discourse of action in this text. The action that Stowe calls for, however, is best made sense of from an understanding of her own theological work of biblical interpretation. A GOOD JEWISH MOTHER

Harriet Beecher Stowe's theology suggests that she has a relationship to the Hebrew Bible and the Judaic which is both related to and different from that of St Paul. Much of the Pauline Epistles articulates a Christian understanding of the relation between Judaism and Christianity, the letter of the law and the spirit of the law, ritualistic activity and salvific feeling, with Paul valorizing the second term of the pairings over the first. Stowe comes to rethink the relations, arguing for a certain recovery of Judaic materiality as necessary for Christian efficacy in transforming the world. In Romans 2:2.8-9, for instance, Paul says, "For he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision, which is outward in the flesh: But he is a Jew, which is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter." For Paul, the true Jew is the one who has made the inward conversion through Christ from reliance on the outward form, the

138

The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

letter of the law, to the inner spirit of the law. Stowe is aligned with this doctrine in as much as she absolutely asserts the importance of faith and the inner knowledge of the law through feeling. And I would agree that for her those who are most predisposed to inner faith and the knowledge called feeling are women. Asserting the priority of women's predisposition for feeling and their ability to be the true Jews functions as a figurative circumcision of men, read as a certain castration of patriarchal reliance on only the temporal world and the efficacy of politics and secular law. In this sense, Uncle Tom's Cabin follows Paul's admonition to the Galatians, but reinterprets both "man" into a gender argument and "the law" into a critique of just behaviour in America. "But that no man is justified by the law in the sight of God, it is evident: for, The just shall live by faith. And the law is not of faith: but, The man that doeth them shall live in them" (3:11-12,). Men who follow American laws and particularly those laws which demand that they commit atrocities against God's creatures, are not justified in the ethical and moral senses of the Bible. They will not be justified in the Judgment. They follow a law written for the land, written to conserve the nationality of this people, "America," by constructing hierarchies and redefining the essential unity of God's creatures. These men are not just. Women have a greater tendency to live not by these laws alone but by faith, which I would translate into Stowe's discourse as the sentiment of love. Through love, women possess the understanding of God's laws in letter and spirit. This is not to say that she renders all American laws as unjust. Rather, I find her to be a sharper reader of Paul, who finds him ultimately to be articulating both the spirit and the letter, faith and the law together. Daniel Boyarin's critical reading of Paul argues for a similar connection. According to Boyarin, Paul's divisions between the flesh or letter and the spirit are not, strictly speaking, binary constructions in which the former is completely subordinated to the latter. It is not that following the laws of the Hebrew Bible is, as Boyarin says of Paul, " opprobrious in itself, but it is surpassed in the Spirit" (70). Thus, a reliance on the letter of the law without the Spirit is unjust, which is not the same as a performance of the laws as events of conduct guided by the spirit. So, for example, in a Boyarin reading of Pauline thinking, keeping kosher or not keeping kosher is not the point. Believing, however, that keeping kosher is that which will enable one to be justified and saved because of its observance is wrong since it goes against Jesus's teachings of the meaning or spirit of the laws of God. Boyarin notes that this particular way of reading Paul has antecedents in the nineteenth century, not with Stowe but with EC. Baur in Germany,

139

Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Ethical Critique of Justice

someone whom Stowe's husband, Calvin Ellis Stowe, had read and criticized with vigour (if not, however, with especial rigour).3 In Harriet Beecher Stowe's discourse, certainly, most laws promote right conduct between individuals, and these have made American democracy the most promising secular form for the realization of the New Jerusalem on earth. However, officious adherence to American law as if it were an end in itself, a temporal end that overcomes divine salvation, is what is unjustified and unjustifiable. The idea that temporal, secular law is the good end in itself that must be followed without dissent or question makes individuals blind to those particular laws that are unethical, those that overwrite the place of the temporal and the national. Nations of human beings hold their right to be by fiat of God, who created them as persons. According to the Bible, when human beings begin to legislate themselves in ways that countermand God's laws, God immolates - a sufficient sign, one would think, not to allow temporal governments to contradict the ethical conduct devised by God. Faith, love, the understanding that all temporal and national laws are not good in themselves but only good for now if they are ethical, is what enables women to be far more visionary in terms of government than men. However, it is as if Stowe also reads Paul's words in Romans 2.113 "literally" and with paramount importance: "For not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified." If my interpretation of Galatians articulates the way in which the passage can be allegorized as speaking to the American political scene, here I would suggest reading Romans with its religious referents intact, because Stowe seems to recuperate and even prioritize what has been a problem for the Lutheran Reformation: the Judaic itself. According to Romans 2,:i3, circumcision of the heart and faith are fundamental, but faith without action is inadequate. Christians with faith become the doers of the law, superseding the "hearers," the Jews at Sinai. Relative to Romans z:z8-9, then, one is the real Jew only by becoming a Christian, which is the sense of the Pauline text. Paul delegitimizes Hebrew biblical action in and of itself and repositions it as acceptable only insofar as it is promoted and does not contravene the spirit as articulated by Jesus. With the stress on the spirit, and the subsequent Lutheran Reformation's prioritizing of the spirit at the expense of the letter, there is the tendency to develop Christianity into a religion of faith that does naught. In nineteenth-century America, for example, Christians could witness - indeed, perpetrate - dehumanizing brutality against slaves and yet not act to intervene. Faith could be used to argue that even the brutality was God's will to discipline the undisciplined sons of Ham; thus active intervention would be to countermand God and to doubt

140 The Letter and the Spirit of i^th-Century American Literature

faith. In response, Stowe argues for a different relationship between action and faith, or the letter and the spirit. Uncle Tom's Cabin functions in accordance with Romans 2:13 and stresses the opposite direction of the pairing. For her, one is a whole Christian only by becoming a Jew in the sense of being absolutely informed by the letter. Faith cannot be true faith if it does not do. This "Judaism," or at least Hebrew biblicism, evolves from Stowe's Puritan heritage, her lineage to a history that founded America as the New Jerusalem and created colonial law in relation to the Mosaic code and the Hebrew Bible. Isabel Calder traces the various calls for positive laws to be created, where ministers and magistrates were "intreated to make a draught of lawes agreeable to the word of God, wch may be the ffundamentalls of this comonwealth" (87). John Cotton's "Moses His Judicials," so named by John Winthrop, appeared in October 1636; it followed the Hebrew Bible particularly for laws concerning crimes and inheritance, and otherwise provided scriptural notes for detailing how the new positive laws derived functioned in accordance (Calder 87). With the intervention of the Antinomian Controversy and the Pequod War, Nathaniel Ward had by 1639 produced what came to be called his "Body of Liberties," which ultimately superseded Cotton's document. However, whereas Calder gives the sense that the more strictly Mosaic or Hebraic document of Cotton's "had been superceded everywhere and forgotten" by 1660 (93) and that Ward's document helped to erase Hebrew biblical influence in positive law, Abraham Katsh traces the less obvious influences of the Jewish letter of the law in the founding colonies. He details the presence of biblical pronouncements in the Connecticut Code of 1650, whose fifteen Capital Laws, with their citations from the Pentateuch, become the base of the Massachusetts Code of 1660 (41). According to Katsh, the Puritan idea of liberty under the law is ultimately derived from the Torah, and he notes correspondence on this subject between Thomas Hooker and Governor Winthrop (42.). Hooker grounds the relationship in Deuteronomy 17:10-11: "And thou shalt do according to the sentence, which they of that place which the Lord shall choose shall show thee; and thou shalt observe to do according to all that they inform thee: According to the sentence of the law which they shall teach thee, and according to the judgment which they shall tell thee, thou shalt do." Stowe's Puritanism enables her to write Uncle Tom's Cabin as a treatise on the reformation of the nation through a discourse of Christianity, a Christianity that does not dismiss the Hebrew letter but revives it with what is felt to have been revealed as its spirit. Faith is fundamental, or in the rhetoric of Uncle Tom's Cabin, feeling, tears, sympathy, and sentimentality are neces-

141

Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Ethical Critique of Justice

sary, but faith and feeling alone do not do much if they are not employed as informing action, as translating the letter of the law into its meaning for conduct. In this sense, Stowe does not make a radical break between Christianity and the Hebrew Bible. If, in a Christian rhetoric, the New Testament "completes" the Old, it does so by reviving the letter of the Hebrew Bible, not by rejecting the relevance of the letter of the law. She does not read Jesus as disputing the Sadducees, for example. "It is a blot upon this beautiful story to speak of Jesus as 'disputing' with the teachers of his nation, or setting himself up to instruct them. His position was that of a learner, we are not told that he asserted anything, but that he listened and asked questions" ("Footsteps" 43). From the Sadducees, she suggests, Jesus obtains the seeds of the Sermon on the Mount. "To study the life of Christ without the Hebrew Scriptures is to study a flower without studying the plant from which it sprung, the root and leaves which nourished it. He continually spoke of himself as a Being destined to fulfill what had gone before" ("Footsteps" 69). Regarding her Puritan roots, it is as if Stowe follows the example of Jesus, endeavouring at least to argue for the revivification of what had gone before, the foundation of secular society and law on the laws of ethical conduct in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles. Ethical conduct between one another must be the foundation that American secular laws then codify nationally. This is not a call for the unification of church and state. Stowe does not call for biblical laws to be those of the nation; rather, national laws must translate the letter of the Bible to reflect the spirit within it in order to maintain a national and secular justice grounded in the ethical. Furthermore, answering the call of the other is a human response that enables one to be chosen by God in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Religion may develop the person, but the ethical response is in us prior to the structuring of religion and the giving of commandments. Ethics is the foundation of the person as a creature of God. To call for the promotion of ethical conduct through national laws is to ask temporal governments to develop a system of justice appropriate to our constitution as persons. Temporal governments will find that the most just system already exists in a religious idiom, and they should look to that as their original. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe speaks of one's true liberty within a nation "under laws which insure to him the rights that God has given to man" (549). Any national system that makes laws to curtail the ethical response of humanity cannot be just for humanity. Any law that comes in the form of promoting a justice partaking of a quasi-utilitarian justification overriding individualism, such as the Fugitive Slave Law, promotes a

142. The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature redefinition of the person. To do so would be to enslave one to a motivated sense of justice not grounded in ethics and the ethical ground of humanity. From the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution of the United States, the movement from " life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" to the protection of "property" adds a fundamental economic and materialist element to the definition of the American nation and its persons. Certainly, Stowe claims that a conception of property so radical as to consider even persons as property is evil - a moral evil - but the possession of inanimate property in itself is not evil. Rather, employing the voice of the Quakers in Uncle Tom's Cabin, she suggests that property is the medium with which one redistributes justice in the temporal world: "The Lord only gives us our worldly goods that we may do justice and mercy; if our rulers require a price of us for it, we must deliver it up" (2,24). Redistributing worldly goods, the measured giving to the other, aiding and abetting the desolate comprise the merciful justice of humanity as God's creatures. But one is God's creature in America, and according to the Quaker sensibility, America reinterprets ethical redistribution and taxes the performance of humane justice. Recognizing the fallibility of American law, the Quakers suggest that the possibility of imprisonment for rendering an ethical justice is part of the price of being human and acting upon one's humanity in a land that values possessive individualism and worldly goods as ends in themselves over the divine definition of the person and its concomitant relationship with worldly goods as means to the realization of a just end. Possessive individualism is seductive, particularly when it is promoted by national law. It is easy to believe that being an American and working for American "justice" takes precedence over being an ethical individual and a creature of God. With daily affirmation, possessive individualism reverses the relationship between justice and mercy and the price exacted for promoting it. In the America of 1850, it is just to redistribute property in its radical definition, where persons are property. Justice is the attaining of the highest economic price for the movement of goods, yet what is now God's price for the transaction, the guilty conscience, is not paid but repressed. As the narrator of Uncle Tom's Cabin comments, daily affirmation of the justice of possessive individualism makes one blind and deaf to the vocative call of the face of the other.4 One's "response" is to sell the other from his sight: The trader had arrived at that stage of Christian and political perfection which has been recommended by some preachers and politicians of the north, lately, in which he had completely overcome every humane weakness and prejudice. His heart was exactly where yours, sir, and mine could be brought, with proper

143

Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Ethical Critique of Justice

effort and cultivation. The wild look of anguish and utter despair that the woman [whose family he has just separated] cast on him might have disturbed one less practiced; but he was used to it. He had seen that same look hundreds of times. You can get used to such things, too, my friend; and it is the great object of recent efforts to make our whole northern community used to them, for the glory of the Union. (H.B. Stowe, Uncle 208)

In continually practising his lawful profession, the slave trader, Mr Haley, is by and large inured to the face of the other. But a trace of the ethical haunts the possessive individual with conscience. "The trader turned away in silence" and reconsiders his career in this "dangerous" business, dangerous to the one's future retirement after death (2,02). By promoting slavery with the Fugitive Slave Law under the pretext of national unity and what Senator Bird calls "great public interests," the North and its good Christian communities deal with their guilt, not through ethical conduct in the social sphere of the North, but by hardening their hearts and sending the other out of their sight: "You would send them to Africa, out of your sight and smell, and then send a missionary or two to do up all the self-denial of elevating them compendiously. Isn't that it?" St. Clare charges Ophelia. She replies "thoughtfully, 'there may be some truth in this' " (2,73) - some truth in its criticism of northern abolitionist discourse, of unionist-republican justice, and in a certain self-awareness by Stowe of her own construction and limitation; for in this moment, I would argue, Stowe assumes the character of Ophelia as her representative. To repress even the trace of a conscience, Haley must reaffirm the merits of the pursuit of property as the constitutional method of pursuing happiness: "he took out his pocket-book, and began adding over his accounts, - a process which many gentlemen besides Mr Haley have found a specific for an uneasy conscience" (2,02-3). And he supposes that such calculations and substitutions form the general American way. When Mr Shelby details, for example, that Eliza is not to be sold in deference to his wife's wishes, he continues that his wife would not part with Eliza for her weight in gold (46). Mrs Shelby understands the calculations, but rejects them and the substitution of human life for pecuniary gain. Misogyny helps Haley to reply, "Ay, ay! women always say such things, cause they ha'nt no sort of calculation. Just show 'em how many watches, feathers, and trinkets, one's weight in gold would buy, and that alters the case, I reckon" (46). Gold in itself may not demonstrate the value of selling human life; however, if the exchange value of gold is stressed in its translation into personal commodities, then women will understand why the pursuit of property is that of happiness.

144

The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

Underscoring her knowledge of calculations, the purpose of worldly goods on this earth, and that Mr Haley's proposal only alters the case for him, Mrs Shelby proposes a reverse transaction. She offers to sell her only expensive possession, her gold watch, in place of Tom and George (85). Unfortunately aligned with the discourse of men and their accounts, Mr Shelby ultimately prioritizes property over humanity: "I can't help myself," he says; "in plain words, there is no choice between selling these two and selling everything. Either they must go, or all must ... [T]he price of these two was needed to make up the balance" (84). As an American, a southerner, and a man, he sees no choice between selling others and giving up something of one's own for them. Real women, however, know that there is a choice, and that sacrifice of the self for an other is a calculation that does not really even partake of decision. In these pronouncements, Stowe's discourse does not necessarily make an articulation we recognize as contemporarily feminist. As Lora Romero argues, "We need not call domesticity 'feminist' in order to appreciate its antipatriarchal motivations ... [B]y calling domesticity feminist we prepare ourselves for disappointment over its lack of radicalism at the same time that we obscure the interventionary value that it did have" (zo). Stowe acknowledges that the private and domestic spheres constructed by marriage and motherhood are mainly those to which patriarchal politics and religion have relegated women. Those to whom a woman gives first are her husband and her children, who constitute the foundation of domesticity, and then others are brought into it, as, for example, with Eliza and George at Mrs Bird's. It is within the private and domestic spheres that women's power will primarily manifest itself.5 This is not to say, however, that the effects of women's power remain bound to these spheres. The power of the "whole woman," as Stowe terms it, affects the lives of others who traverse the permeable borders of the public and private. Indeed, Jane Tompkins argues that the power of women comes in the form of an "ethic of sacrifice" (iz8) which through love has the power to convert others to the ways of religion and to promote their spiritual redemption. Furthermore, she contends that Uncle Tom's Cabin is a novel that "insists on religious conversion as the necessary precondition for sweeping social change" (i3z). Hence, when Marie St. Clare is criticized as falling short of being a whole woman, she falls short of being both a truly religious woman and therefore a powerful politician of social change. "Had his wife been a whole woman, she might yet have done something - as woman can - to mend the broken threads of life, and weave again into a tissue of brightness" (H.B. Stowe, Uncle 241). Life is a textile whose threads are spun and woven from the home into the light of the world, and the woven textility of life indicates the

145

Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Ethical Critique of Justice

imbrication of privacy and the public sphere, religion and social change, which is made by women for others. As the weavers, however, they are the nexus of this power, and as such, the most powerful of people. I would not venture as far as Jane Tompkins does when she asserts that "the woman ... is God in human form" (i4z), or Gillian Brown, who attributes to Stowe "a mother God, even though Stowe retains the traditional name of God the father" (33). Stowe "retains the traditional name of God the father" because she is working within the patriarchal institution gendering God as masculine necessarily so that she can read the relationship between God and woman as a discourse on the salvific potential of a unity that maintains the categorical distinctions that construct it. However, I would agree that the whole woman partakes of the divine in her work on earth. Though Stowe does not exactly make women God, she does feminize her conception of Christ.6 In "Footsteps of the Master," she details Jesus's public life as "a constant act of self-abnegation. It was a foreign thing to him to be out in the hot glare and dust of publicity, and to battle in the crowded ways of life, as to the most gentle woman ... 'He was in the world,' says St. John, 'and the world was made by him, but the world knew him not' " (John 1:10; "Footsteps" 36). This characterization suggests that Stowe adapts and interprets the Pauline invocation that in Christ Jesus there is neither male nor female (Gal. 3:2.8). Her narrative representation of Christ in "Footsteps of the Master" reads the Pauline "neither/nor" of sexual distinction as a "both/and" weave of gender in the actuality of Christ. Her reminder from John suggests that Jesus manifests his power as a woman does hers and not necessarily the other way around. She makes the world, is in it, but is not recognized for it. As Gayle Kimball argues, Stowe relates Jesus to Eve, in that just as people both listened to and betrayed Jesus, so have men "both obeyed women and used them as scapegoats, thus diminishing much of their salutary power" (75). Stowe's response in Uncle Tom's Cabin is to reseat women's power in the female domestic sphere of the home and at home in the religious teaching of ethics. HOME WORK: INDIVIDUALISM AND COMMUNITY

Home is where the heart is, when the heart is both love and a Tocquevillean sense of the habits of the heart, which Robert Bellah glosses as "notions, opinions and ideas that 'shape mental habits'; and 'the sum of moral and intellectual dispositions' " of society's members (37). The power of Christian feeling - feminine sentiment and the understanding of the actions such feeling informs and promotes - collects

146 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

both the power of religion and social action in the home. It is, for example, within the Quaker household described explicitly as a "home" that, for George, " a belief in God, and trust in his providence, began to encircle his heart, as, with a golden cloud of protection and confidence, dark, misanthropic, pining atheistic doubts, and fierce despair, melted away before the light of a living Gospel, breathed in living faces, preached by a thousand unconscious acts of love and good will, which, like the cup of cold water given in the name of a disciple, shall never lose their reward" (H.B. Stowe, Uncle 224). According to Theodore Hovet, Harriet Beecher Stowe follows Thomas Upham in dismantling a vertical sense of God's relationship to humankind and rearticulating it in a rhetoric of centre and centrality. Thus every person has a centre of spirituality within herself and the home becomes the centre of cultivating that spirituality into civilized conduct (14-15). Because women are designated the home by the sex/gender system and have come to be at home in the home, they become the centres of power, if, that is, they are "whole women." Stowe, however, goes beyond Upham and her Puritan ancestry in terms of her theoretical sophistication. Hovet underscores that Thomas Upham reads the Bible with an eye to its significance for daily life, and he indicates, for example, that Upham equates original sin with individualism and materialism (14). Bellah traces how the Puritans stressed the centrality of the community to the individual and employs this way of thinking to promote his investment in substantive justice (28). Following Upham and, in this particular Puritan case, Winthrop, both Hovet and Bellah assume that the uniting of individualism and materialism produces possessive individualism, which will pursue the interest in property over that of the humanity of community.7 The sense is that there is no equation of individualism and materialism other than the negative one of possessive individualism; hence, both must be denigrated. Stowe, however, argues that the redemption of individualism and materialism begins with the recognition of their roots: individuals and material. Ethics requires a strong conception of individuals with individuality, such that there can be otherness for the one and others to whom one can respond. Distinctions and difference may well be brought together in Christ Jesus, and this perfect community is the result of redemption. But until then, individual differences make up the community of humanity on earth. The task of ethics, as located in the individual, is to render justice to the other in the temporal world of secular America. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, that other is the African American slave, and in this novel, materiality and possessions are necessary parts of the means of rendering justice. One can use them as means for giving to the other,

147

Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Ethical Critique of Justice

and in a revised Protestant sense here, the more one has, the more one can give. Bellah is right to note that the understanding of the utility of the individual as one who can make money and possess for the self can be lodged at the feet of Benjamin Franklin (33). It'is historically important to note, as he does, that "the new American republic of the nineteenth century was the era of the independent citizen" (Bellah 40). What Stowe is arguing, however, is that the nineteenth century, with its profit-making independent citizens, stands as the best structure with the greatest potential to realize the community of humanity through ethical action between individuals and the redistribution of material in justice. It has followed a course that has heretofore jeopardized this potential, and Stowe intervenes with her own "specific." This specific or corrective is the sentiment of love and the active ethical guidance of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles.8 Whole women become the prophets of this guidance, like Miriam of Exodus 15:20-1, and lead the way in this redistribution from the home through the spiritual education of the habits of the heart. In the home, Stowe gives priority to the mother who is the whole woman and relates that mothers should strive after the model of the archetypal mother, Mary. Mary was blessed because "she was the one human being who had the right of ownership and intimate oneness with the Beloved" (H.B. Stowe, "Footsteps" 34). "All that was human in him was her nature; it was the union of the divine nature with the nature of a pure woman (36). "And when he [Jesus] came and lived a mortal life what did he show the divine nature to be ? It may all be told in one word: - LOVE" (H.B. Stowe, "Introductory" xi). The revelation, the fundamental revelation, is that God is love, and it is revealed in and by Jesus as the union of God's and woman's natures. This similarity of natures is what enables the mediation of categorical differences. Masculinized divinity and divine femininity unite in love, and the result of this union is the Saviour: Jesus, the man who loves. Femininity is constitutive of the production of the Saviour, and feminine love has, then, a necessary relationship to the possibility of human salvation. As Stowe writes to her children, "love me, then God asks no more - he sends me to you as his representative."9 The pure woman fulfilled as mother is the representative of God on earth. This formulation sounds similar to Jane Tompkins's assertion that "the woman ... is God in human form" (142), but the difference is significant for two related reasons. The issue in Stowe's rhetoric is that of a sense of representation which is both apostolic and political in definition, and not some form of transubstantiation. And Stowe's formulation suggests her priority given to Genesis i over Genesis z regarding the status of woman from creation onwards. When God and woman

148 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

unite, they produce the Son, whose revelation is that God's nature is love, as is woman's. So she both represents and is necessary in the conception and delivery of God on earth. The express similarity of natures indicates that woman is created in the image of God equally as is man, rather than being a creation secondarily out of man. The support is Genesis 1:26: "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion ... over all the earth"; and 1:27: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them," rather than 2:2,2: "And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man" (emphases added).10 I would suggest that the way Stowe deals with Genesis 2, the secondness of woman and the labelling of her as man's helper or "help meet" (Gen. 2:20), is to stress the complementarity of women and men to each other in the relationship of marriage. As Kimball suggests, this relationship for Stowe "was capable of fostering a sort of soul cooperation," which Stowe saw reflected in the unions of Jonathan Edwards and his wife, Sarah, Lyman and Roxanna Beecher, and Calvin Ellis Stowe and herself (72). In Uncle Tom's Cabin, love is what enables mothers "to mend the broken threads of life, and weave again into a tissue of brightness" (241), but as this love is only the representation of God's love, it cannot redeem the world as God can. Woman is not God on earth, but she acts in similarity with the temporal life of Jesus. Her love can teach goodness tirelessly, but the efficacy of the teaching is tied to the disposition of the receivers. According to St. Clare, "My mother ... she was divine!" (333). "She was a direct embodiment of the New Testament, - a living fact, to be accounted for, and to be accounted for in no other way than by its truth" (333). Characterized as a blend of Eve and Rebecca, she bore twin male sons, in "all points a contrast" (334): one dark, fiery, strong, and active; the other golden, blue-eyed, fair, and inactive. Both were honest and truthful, but the first from pride and courage, and the second from abstract ideality. The first classes others in hierarchical relationships, being generous to equals, dominant over inferiors, and unmerciful to opponents. The second is sensitive, with acuity of feeling. Stowe continues the Rebecca parallel by aligning the first with the father and the second with the mother, but she expands upon gendered parental influence, suggesting a gulf between masculine and feminine natures while giving power to both. Of sensitivity and ideality, the proud brother and father "had no kind of understanding, and with which they could have no possible sympathy" (334). Only the mother does, and it is from her that Augustine St. Clare receives his comfort, education, and development.

149

Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Ethical Critique of Justice

It would be easy to claim that Stowe is writing analogously here, following the traditional Christian interpretation that maps the idea of wrathful power onto the Hebrew Bible and the sympathetic power of love onto the Christian. However, true to her rescuing of the Hebrew Bible within this traditional interpretation, she reincorporates wrath into love and revives the Hebrew biblical terminology in order to deconstruct the binary. The divine mother is both a ministering and a fiery angel. As Augustine recounts, "she impressed, burnt into my very soul, with all the force of her deep, earnest nature, an idea of the dignity and worth of the meanest human. I have looked in her face with solemn awe" (337, emphasis added). Similarly, when Legree reads in a letter from his mother that she forgave him and blessed him, he is tortured. The words become a "damning sentence" (529). Stowe comments, "Ye who have wondered to hear, in the same evangel, that God is love and that God is a consuming fire, see ye not how, to the soul resolved in evil, perfect love is the most fearful torture, the seal and sentence of the direst despair?" (52,9). Stowe here is the evangel annunciating the both/and of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles. The covenant of reciprocity expounded at Horeb is what initiates the role of conscience in making love both selfless care and a consuming fire. Were there no prior covenant in which the Jews agreed to obey, there would be no torturing force to the subsequent love of Jesus. One would not have been obligated in religion to the Father, from whom the shirking of obligation is registered in one's conscience. One would not have been obligated in American society to the mother and thus a victim of a mother's love. Like Mary, whole women as mothers in Uncle Tom's Cabin are all "Jewish mothers." They have to take a certain relay through the Judaic in order to become Christians. Ophelia's "conversion" to sentiment and true Christianity comes when, by adopting Topsy, she fulfills Jesus's pronouncement in Matthew 18:5: "And whosoever shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me." But as the weave of Christianity, sentiment, and politics, Stowe's text figures the reception of this child as a conversion to sentiment and political emancipation as the union of Judaism and Christianity. In order to effect the emancipation of Topsy, Ophelia does so through the law: " 'I want her [Topsy] mine legally,' said Miss Ophelia" (445). Treating the spoken words of Augustine's promise as immaterial, Ophelia demands the letter, a "legal paper," a covenantal inscription whose demand circumcises the immateriality, the spirit of the promise, inscribing it as a letter. The inscription will need to be read and reread - to be a proof text, so to speak. And she demands that it be done now, not postponed into the future,

150 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

"because now is the only time there ever is to do a thing in" (445), a demand that functions, I would argue, as the troping of Judaic temporality focused on the actuality of the here and now. The time of the temporal life is the time for repairing the world, this world. The time is not that of waiting for the good to come later. Augustine asks, "Can't you take my word? One would think you had taken lessons of the Jews, coming at a fellow so!" (445). While his retort is meant antiSemitically, Stowe's investment in this scene lies with valorizing Ophelia's demand. And in a sense - a very Pauline Christian sense Ophelia and Stowe have taken lessons of the Jews. She demands the covenant inscribed by the letter, and in so doing, she "enslaves" Topsy. This enslavement and requirement of the letter is explicitly figured as the absolutely necessary route for the future liberation to come. As she says, "I want her mine, that I may have a right to take her to the free States, and give her her liberty, that all I am trying to do be not undone" (445). There is a gendered investment here as well, in terms of demonstrating how women can employ the masculine law situationally and pragmatically in order to use it to their own ends. The problem, of course, is that the valorization of female decisiveness and activity comes over the continued, if temporary, enslavement of the African American girl: "I want her mine, that I may have a right." In theological terms, however, the pragmatism of the Judaic adherence to the letter of the law has the material efficacy that the spirited moral rhetoric of Christianity alone was failing to achieve. Ophelia takes a relay through the letter of the slave law in order to subvert its spirit. It is only by moving into the literal, the letter, the temporal here and now of national law, that the spirit of ethical Christianity, the law of emancipatory loving, can have effect. In Stowe's discourses, Ophelia becomes a Jewish mother like Mary, whose nature is like God's, and as such, a liberator like Jesus. Ophelia follows what the other divine mother, Mrs St. Clare, teaches, that Jesus heals the destitute by putting "his hands on him!" (338, 410, emphasis in original). In a religious interpretation, Jesus makes what is broken and partial whole by first taking it in hand, in order to liberate it from its partiality. In Stowe's political context, Ophelia must take Topsy in hand, in the hand of the law, and obey the law in order to effect a real emancipation.11 The physicality and materiality are stressed as fundamental to the process of liberation or emancipation. There are, of course, women like Marie St. Clare who are not whole, not divine; but generally, men receive the more severe pronouncement in this regard. Representative of God, the mother can produce the spectrum of the world, from darkness to light and the full human emotional range, but the human father is unrepresentative of God the Father; the

151

Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Ethical Critique of Justice

human father is limited. Between the breadth of maternal production and the limitation of paternality there is "no kind of understanding," "no possible sympathy" (334). This narrative of creation in the mouth of Augustine St. Clare maternally rewrites Genesis. Of the human father, what is "begotten in his image" (335) is that which Stowe writes against. Inasmuch as her text works the theological as a political discourse, this interpretation of Genesis figuring the limitation of the father writes against what the father produces in the world: hierarchy, pride, and a devaluation of the humanity of African Americans. Of Augustine's father, " he considered the negro, through all possible gradations of color, as an intermediate link between man and animals, and graded all his ideas of justice or generosity on this hypothesis" (335). In his image, his first son, Alfred St. Clare, "is as determined a despot as ever walked" (340), who holds to a line of self-justifying defensive argumentation that presents the negative potential within a Lincolnian rhetoric of reasoning. Like Lincoln's "right makes might" ("Address" 130), Alfred stands "on that good old respectable ground, the right of the strongest" (H.B. Stowe, Uncle 340, emphasis in original). In contrast, as influenced by the mother, Augustine St. Clare follows in the footsteps of Jesus, staying among the lowly on the plantation and interceding with his mother on their behalf. In this way, mother and child work together and " hindered and repressed a great deal of cruelty" (336). This action of repairing the world in a way similar to Jesus's also has a socio-political component when related to the life of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Calvin Ellis Stowe informs his wife in a letter from i84z: "My dear, you must be a literary woman. It is so written in the book of fate. Make all your calculations accordingly. Get a good stock of health and brush up your mind ... Then my word for it, your husband will lift up his head in the gate, and your children will rise up and call you blessed" (qtd. in Harker 52,). IZ Her sister-in-law, Mrs Edward Beecher, reiterates this call for Harriet to write with a much more explicit political component: "If I could use a pen as you can, I would write something that will make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is," to which Harriet responds, "I will write something ... I will if I live" (qtd. in Douglas, "Introduction" 8). Through love - love of the children, love for one's country - the tissue of brightness that Stowe weaves takes the form of writing. As a powerfully sentimental and political text, Uncle Tom's Cabin marks the product of a whole woman's nature who loves and who can centre the nation onto an ethical course through its laws. A clear case of what the ethical course would reject is the masculinist system of justice aligned with slavery and propounded by severe and

152. The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

mild slaveholders alike. When the Samaritan zeal of Augustine and his mother offends the overseer, who threatens to resign, both mother and child are banished from performing interventions and ministrations that upset the ruling system (H.B. Stowe, Uncle 336). The father's reasoning mimics that of Mr Shelby and Mr Bird in its rejection of particularity and of judging case by case. Unity of the system is paramount, as is the universal application of a single system of justice. He must sustain the administration "as a whole, even if there are, now and then, things that are exceptionable. All government includes some necessary hardness. General rules will bear hard on particular cases" (336-7, emphasis in original). Such a pronouncement is to Augustine, in the case of his father's administration of slavery, as it is to Stowe in her understanding of unionist-republican justice, simply a pronouncement - not a reason and not a logic - marking the gulf between male power of pride and hierarchy and female power of sympathy and a recognition of difference. In political rhetoric, the hard bearing of universality on particularity - which is to say, the utilitarianism of unionist-republican justice - obfuscates the inhumane reality of this hardness. In order to deny the rights declared in the concept of human rights, it first denies the human, categorially prior to and constitutive of "rights," which are constructed and realizable within a discourse of justice. The denial is not just of the slave as human but of one's own status as such. While seemingly general in concept, the human is a term of individuation in creation, because creation is the origin of a binding into responsibility for the other. The very "desire" or prelude to the "coming to be" of God to fashion the creature is marked by a more than oneness in God's being: "Let us make" (Gen. 1:2.6). The creation of the human exceeds the goodness of what had been made before, marking a difference in both the category of the human and its relation to God, for "it was exceedingly good!" (Gen. 1:31). This surplus or excess of goodness constitutive of the human signifies its relation to the Other in creation, to which we have given a meaning within the discourses and possibility of knowledge after the expulsion: justice. On the plantation, just as the universality of the system enslaves and brutalizes human beings, so the universality of this system of national justice enslaves all Americans and brutalizes their human condition. The equation of the plantation and the state gains clarity when Augustine says of his father that he "showed the exact sort of talent for a statesman" (H.B. Stowe, Uncle 337, emphasis added). There is no justice in promoting unity by subordinating and brutalizing particularity. There is no united community that is built upon the beaten and murdered bodies of others in humanity. Any justice that promotes unity must first recognize particularity and individuality, the ethical conduct between persons generated by

153

Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Ethical Critique of Justice

them, and the necessity of articulating a humane relationship that builds universality upon particularity, or the community from the distinction of individuals. The laws of justice must secure our humanity within individuality by curtailing the communal or utilitarian justification for the transgression of ethical conduct. C I R C U M C I S I N G PAUL

In Uncle Tom's Cabin, the revolutionary political and gender critique has an equally revolutionary counterpart in a religious critique. By equating the masculinist political stress of universalization with brutality and murder, the contravention of God's laws, and the subordination of particularity and difference, Stowe implicates the Pauline stress on the universality of spirit over the particularity of the letter. If Paul is read as saying that only faith saves at the exclusion of the works of the Law, such that belief, faith, and the love of Jesus supersede doing the works of the law, then he becomes the anti-Judaic Paul of Reformation readings. Christianity becomes, then, the single universal faith based upon a divorce from Judaism. Paul's charge was that adherence only to the letter kills the spirit, but the sense of the Lutheran reading of Paul is that the stress on the universality of the spirit kills the letter. In this sense, Christianity does not simply perform a Derridean erasure of Judaism, such that the trace of the Judaic remains as a spectre within Christianity; rather, it supersedes so as to overcome it completely. Jews cannot be saved because they are, materially, Jews; the universality of spirit opposes their particularity. This reading, which radically opposes Judaism and Christianity, the letter and the spirit, is, I feel, a dangerous misreading because of the way in which it inscribes oppositions - ones which, with the stakes as high as salvation, breed the possibility of aggressive hatred. Following Boyarin and James Dunn, this essentialist reading also fails to address Paul's own Jewish religious heritage (as Saul) and does not deal adequately with passages pertaining to the law that seem to contradict the essentialism. Traceable to the nineteenth century in the work of EC. Baur and currently argued by both Boyarin and Dunn, an important line of interpretation centres upon Paul's "profound concern for the oneness of humanity. The concern was motivated both by certain universalistic tendencies within biblical Israelite religion and even more by the reinterpretation of these tendencies in the light of Hellenistic notions of universalism" (Boyarin 52,). I3 The two sides of Saul, Israelite religion and Hellenism, are folded into the oneness that will be Christianity and the Christian named Paul. The particularity of these two sides do not sappear in the incorporation called

154 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

Paul and Pauline Christianity but, rather, establish the terms of the incorporation. Pauline Christianity is produced by them. However, that is not to say that the oneness of Christianity is simply reducible to the two particularities. Jewish particularity cannot simply be incorporated into Christianity on fully Jewish terms. Its particularity is fundamentally its claim of chosenness, a separation and elevated singularity in its relationship with God. Chosenness is both ethnocentric and nationalistic, and is constituted by a covenant of reciprocity cut with God, which is incised as inscription on the body and is ineradicable. The oneness of Christianity in Paul has to do away with this physicality and the literality of the status of chosenness, while simultaneously being able to keep a certain priority of Judaism within Christianity. This certain priority is one whose sense is temporal. The particularity of Judaism is maintained as that which came before Christianity; it is valued as that which had to have come before Christianity in order to enable Christianity to be. Saul had to be Saul before he could be Paul. The priority of Judaism, the physicality, the literality, the letter, must necessarily be in place if the spirit, faith, and belief of Christianity were to be derived from it. According to Boyarin, the role which Hellenism plays is that of the enabling, mediating aesthetic idea that provides the symbolic (synecdochic) structural understanding upon which the Pauline formulation of Christianity is based.14 One must have the letter, literality, in place in order to be able to go through it to the spirit, the meaning. "Paul nevertheless remained convinced that the Hebrew Scriptures contained God's revelation and the Jews had been at least the vehicle for the communication of that revelation" (Boyarin 5z). But they were a faulty vehicle, according to Paul. The literal adherence to the letter of the law constructs a scenario in which one can become a mindless doer, enslaved to the physical action without a motivation of spirit or understanding behind it. Jesus's arrival on earth, then, is the gift of God as a specific. He teaches the spirit of the letter, breaks the physical chains of the letter, and demonstrates to the Sadducees how to read. In line with the Hellenic idea of aesthetic mediation, Jesus teaches the world a definition of representation: that the letter and literality are the outer form of an inner spiritual content and that particular aspects of the outer representation are disposable. According to Paul's reading of Jesus's teaching, the aesthetic relationship between literal Judaism and the spirituality called Christianity is a double definition of representation as both pure reflection and metonymic construction. Some aspects of the outer form have a direct correspondence to the inner spirit; for example, all the acts of loving-kindness in the Hebrew Scriptures directly represent the spirit of Christianity as love and its expression as good Samaritanism. However, other aspects of the

155

Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Ethical Critique of Justice

outer form are disposed of in the metonymic translation: actual "circumcision, kashruth, and the observances of Sabbath and the holidays," as Boyarin details them (53). As Dunn argues and Boyarin supports, excised in translating the representation are the ethnocentric and nationalistic particularities of the covenant, which had become "too closely identified as Jewish ... God's purposes and God's people have now expanded beyond Israel according to the flesh, and so God's righteousness can no longer be restricted in terms of works of the law which emphasize kinship at the level of the flesh" (qtd. in Boyarin 54). For Paul, then, the oneness of Christianity is a universality that maintains a certain bringing together of particularities, the Hebrew Scriptures and Hellenism, in order to construct this universality. But the universal construction must "bear hard on particular cases," so to speak, because it pits itself against those particularities that play a constitutive part in ethnocentric and nationalistic difference. If these particularities are to be maintained, those people will not be part of the One; furthermore, they will be figured as damned because of their adherence to the maintenance of ethnocentric and nationalistic difference. Why, then, is Stowe's work a critique of Paul? One might say that this Pauline structure is exactly what she does to the materiality of blackness in her fictional representations. In order to make the call for justice, she must whiten blacks so as to bring them in to an American One.15 That argument generalizes Stowe's practice, not only by eliding moments where she does not whiten or stereotype, but also by refusing to underscore distinctions between her political and theological arguments and her fictional techniques or styles. In promoting a universal sense of American justice that does not redefine the person against God's pronouncement of all humanity as God's creatures, Stowe argues that colour, race, and ethnicity are important particularities (among others) that must be recognized in themselves and as constitutive of this universality. American justice must be a universal system that renders justice to African American slaves and not be something that bears itself hard against them. Justice is universal only if it functions as //there were neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, yet it must also recognize and address these actual distinctions in the makeup of persons against which injustice is perpetrated. Rather than Pauline dissolution, justice requires recognition of the particular. America is not a country filled with a homogeneous people. Indeed, its Constitution prioritizes the liberty of individuality and secures legitimate space for the development of social plurality. Injustice occurs when the priority and the materiality of these spaces are violated. Difference is a site upon which injustice is perpetrated, and American justice must address the difference of injustice in all its particularity, and do so universally.

156 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-Century American Literature Importantly, a fuller sense of particularity must be understood here. Stowe is no proponent of social integration in the material world. The oneness of justice must be constituted by particularity and be represented as maintaining particularity in the actual world, because one must not carry over any sense of homogeneity that might come from the idea of universality. Stowe accepts the Pauline separation between the spirit and the letter, figurality and literality. The spirit of universal oneness remains on the metaphysical level as "all God's creatures," but not on the ontological level of actuality. The spirit of justice is to promote unity, but the material way to do so is to maintain the space and separateness of particularity. The prejudice and racism we now locate in Uncle Tom's Cabin are the negative and very real ways of reading Stowe's recuperation of the "ethnocentric and nationalistic" parts that Paul must negate. She must recuperate and prioritize these particularities because she does not want racial homogeneity through miscegenation or social equality through a Reconstruction version of affirmative action, but only the legal equality necessary for ethical justice. She promotes the nationalistic sense of the particularity of being African American, because it enables her to include the right of former slaves to constitute themselves as a nation in Africa. She is Pauline enough to recognize that black people cannot be a legal nation within America. Jews cannot be Jews and be saved as Christians simultaneously. But both Jews as one nation and Christians as another are included, differently, in different ways and on different courses, in the oneness of God's humanity on earth. Both are susceptible to redemption when the Judgment comes, but the Judgment will cater to the difference of the particular terms. That said, however, Stowe does not think that African Americans must form a nation in Africa, as if making an argument that would exclude the right to a space of difference. What the actuality of her socio-political critique performs in terms of Pauline Christianity is a critique of Paul's limited view of oneness and his refusal to allow a legitimate place for ethnocentric and nationalistic particularities. The social plurality of America, as a New Jerusalem, has the potential to be addressed universally by a reconstructed system of one justice. This America would demonstrate the short-sighted essentialism of the Pauline church as that which is not itself a faithful representation of God's will towards humanity. STOWE AND THE STAR Harriet Beecher Stowe's understanding of the relationship between universality and particularity, figurality and literality, and the necessary connection between the Hebrew and Christian Bibles in their promotion of ethical conduct positipns her as a female Franz Rosenzweig writing in a

157

Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Ethical Critique of Justice

nineteenth-century American idiom. In The Star of Redemption, Rosenzweig argues that Judaism and Christianity form the two ways of revealing God to humanity; thus they depend upon each other. Judaism is the star; Christianity is its rays shining forth to cover the earth. Like the temporal delay of rays from a star reaching the eye, Christianity is that which comes after Judaism, as of it yet apart from it. What both modes of the revelation of God reveal is that God loves us. God reveals this love to us when he names us. This naming as revelation, however, is complex, because what it performs is that God will love us when we are redeemed from the finite and the material exceedingly in death as soul and one with God (Rosenzweig 164, 169-71). As humanity awaits this love, we must follow what is revealed to the material in humanity, to living persons, in this direct address. Simultaneously revealed to the ear of humanity is the commandment, the commandment of all commandments (Rosenzweig 176): v'yehavtah - thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy might. But how to do this is to work with the material God gives us, with humanity as the image of God. To love God is the commandment to love the neighbour (Rosenzweig 2,14). Love of the neighbour expresses the love of God. Certainly, Stowe derives her understanding of the meaning of the Hebrew biblical laws from Jesus's responses in the Gospels. He replies that the greatest commandment in the law is the v'yehavtah and that the second, "like unto it," is to "love thy neighbour as thyself" (Matt. Z2:36~40, Mark i2.:29-3i; Luke io:z6~7). However, I align Stowe with Rosenzweig because of how both interpret these passages as presenting the connection between Judaism and Christianity in terms of the importance of the law, rather than its subordination. Stowe is Pauline in a sense, because whereas Paul mediates the relationship between Judaism and Christianity with a Hellenized aesthetic, she bridges the two with a secularized national politics. Rosenzweig is Stowean and Pauline in a sense, because he bridges Judaism and Christianity with secular philosophy. The way in which he clarifies the ideas of the "neighbour," for example, has an important similarity to Stowe's. Her "neighbour" is certainly that presented in the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-7), but because she invests it as a socio-political discourse and as a prescription for ethical conduct in the here and now of secular social relations, she reads her religion philosophically and pragmatically for the temporal world of society, politics, and the nation. As Rosenzweig says, in the revelation that God is love is a process for its fulfillment: to love the neighbour: [T]he word designates in the Hebrew original as well as in Greek, the nearest neighbor precisely at the moment of love, the one who is nighest to me, at least

158 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-Century American Literature at this moment, regardless of what he may have been before or will be afterward. Thus the neighbor is only a representative. He is not loved for his own sake, nor for his beautiful eyes, but only because he just happens to be standing there, because he happens to be nighest to me. Another could as easily stand in his place - precisely at this place nearest me. The neighbor is the other, the plesios of the Septuagint, the plesios allos of Homer. Thus the neighbor, is as stated, only locum tenens. Love goes out to whatever is nighest to it as to a representative, in the fleeting moment of its presentness, and thereby in truth to the all-inclusive concept of all men and all things which could ever assume this place of being its nighest neighbor. (Rosenzweig 218)

Thus, when Mr Symmes aids Eliza and George, it may well be that he likes the two of them as people, knows them, and so on, but what is ethical in his act is that he responds, and responds to them as neighbours, as nighest neighbours. What is ethical in the act is that which comes immediately and prior to what is personal. Symmes would respond to any "kind o' critter a strivin' and pantin', and trying to clar theirselves" (H.B. Stowe, Uncle 119), anyone who calls. To St. Clare, Tom says it succinctly: "We does for the Lord when we does for his critturs" (442,). The ethical may not satisfy our desire to have the material particularity upon which injustice is perpetrated recognized and addressed on its terms. Such address-as-redress is the task of a system of justice to be built in relation to the ethical, should we decide to maintain our investment in this politics of recognition. As response to the call of the nearest neighbour, to the face of the other in whose proximity one is, the ethical exceeds justice, which is only a system of measurement and limitation. From within a commitment to justice that is coterminous with a system of recognition and knowledge, one may not like how the excess of the ethical might appear in the ontic field of vision, and how it might not cater to human limitation of it and the discursive rendition made from it called justice. This kind of love as ethics, as response to the other, in either Rosenzweig or Stowe does not demand a rhetoric of similarity or an identity of the personal. What appears as a rhetoric of similarity is, rather, an equality of difference and a knowledge of the equality of persons in a non-hierarchical structure. Rosenzweig reasons that the way to love the neighbour is to love him like yourself (2.39), which functions in the apparent rhetoric of sameness. But a closer reading determines that the neighbour is only like you: "'Like you,' and thus not 'you.' You remain You and you are to remain just that. But he is not to remain a He for you, and thus a mere It for your You. Rather he is like You, like your You, a You like You, an I - a soul" (240) - equal, we might say, as souls, not demanding an identity of personal selves. Rosenzweig pro-

159

Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Ethical Critique of Justice

vides a philosophical discourse describing ethics in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles which is helpful for understanding what is at stake in Stowe and which functions in and amongst her words as both a hermeneutical undertaking and a political argument. It is through a biblical presentation of ethics that one can articulate how a recognition of the equality of persons as creatures of God does not mean that all persons are the same. Through the Bible, Stowe is able to argue for justice as an equality of process that would render the same unto the one as to the other, without having to say that which would offend most of her audience - that cultured white people are no better than impoverished, uneducated black slaves. Rather, a theory of justice that grounds itself in the priority of the biblically ethical can say that we are all equal as creatures, but are fundamentally different, distinct persons - hence, the Declaration of Independence: that all men are created equal. The lack of hierarchizing rhetoric affords distinct individuals their differences, to which ethics can respond. It grants the different situations of others and functions from a position of non-in-difference in justice. There is "no kind o' critter" who is not a neighbour. Anyone can be loved as a neighbour simply because of her proximity. The proximity of Topsy to Eva is perhaps the most memorable depiction of this formulation. Topsy addresses the perverse desire that is inculcated in persons when a system of justice is structured in hierarchy and demands the identity of persons, rather than their equality as persons in difference. When Eva implores Topsy to be good, Topsy relates the inculcated belief that any sort of goodness she could achieve would never be good enough because it would not be white enough. She would only be able to be good as a black slave, a different goodness devalued because of its difference. When difference is not recognized as equal, there is no incentive to strive for goodness. Why bother? It will never be good enough. "If I could be skinned, and come white, I'd try then" (409). Eva responds, "But people can love you, if you are black, Topsy" (409), and I feel that readers should not understand Eva's retort as patronizing. Rather, and quite literally, she is saying that colour is not the issue. Her position is that goodness is goodness, always good enough. It is what all people can achieve and is the product of a system that loves all neighbours in the form of an ethics of non-in-difference. One loves the other in-differently and responds: "O, Topsy, poor child, I love you!" (409). She loves all equally, but responds to the differences of personal situations in which people find themselves. Eva loves Topsy because Topsy is an orphan, poor, and abused (409), but to the person, she sees herself as equal. As Augustine says, "Eva somehow always seems to put herself on an equality with every creature that comes near her" (265); as such, she is the "only true democrat" (2.73).

160 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

Her democracy is subsequently egalitarian as well, first in terms of religion. Unlike itinerant preachers speaking the Word to the slaves, Eva argues that everyone should be able to read the Book. Illiteracy positions one to hear only that which in the Bible can be construed to promote servitude to white people, and the position of hearing what is disseminated by others reflects a hierarchy of values mapped on to human difference. The church, with its foundation in the Pauline letters, structures a hierarchy that demands total honesty from those disseminating the Word. Such honesty for Stowe is always in question. It is not that the church in itself, in its structure, is dishonest; rather, the men preaching within it have employed selection and interpretation of the Bible so as to form a system of belief that justifies our earthly ways of existing, no matter how unethical they may be.16 According to Harriet's scholarly minister husband, Calvin Ellis Stowe, co-opting interpreters intentionally misread the Bible by motivating the language to suit their particular needs. In The Origin and History of the Books of the Bible, he argues that if the Bible had been written by God in God's language, it would be perfect. Were we able to understand God's language perfectly, the Bible would be impossible to misunderstand. But according to Stowe, the Bible was not written by God but by men, not written in God's language but in humanity's imperfect language. Genesis, for example, was not even narrated to Moses. He saw the events in an ecstatic vision and wrote what he saw (C.E. Stowe, Origin 3i).17 And even this "inspiration is not omniscience" (32., emphasis in original). It is revelation as imagination, tied to the particularity of the visionary, human, partial, and in no way able to account for all of God.18 Furthermore, when one comes to represent this inspiration, to translate the vision into language, there is no single and direct correlation. Language's imperfection is that a single word can afford many meanings, and many words are needed to designate a single idea (Origin 15-16). Translators of visions and readers of translations are presented with a multiplicity of spaces into which their task can fall. Translation makes choices when it moves into language. It interprets. Reading employs interpretation to bridge the gaps that have come to be in the representation as language. Writing and reading ultimately partake of the same process, then. The inspired writer must read the inspiration as visual prophesy. But prophecy, says C.E. Stowe, is symbolic (Origin 493). "A symbol is the same as a signal. From its own nature it can express only a general idea, never a specific one. You see a ship at sea with the flag at half mast. This gives you the general idea that there is distress on board, but what the distress is, the signal (or symbol) does not inform you" (Origin 49^). What Stowe derives from this conclu-

161

Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Ethical Critique of Justice

sion is that in reading, one never makes it to the ship, never knows completely what the symbol signals until the Final Judgment. As John Marker suggests, even though the Bible was written to address particular issues that concerned the people writing it, the passage of time allows the Bible to speak to us only generally, or symbolically, and can only signal the issue today (206-7). The temporality of the Bible, that it was written over centuries, indicates that inspiration came to address the particular issues of the times of each writer. Thus the Bible is a patchwork of cases, and the terms of these cases do not cohere into any "systematic discourses, either on theology, or on morals, or on history, or on any other topic" (C.E. Stowe, Origin 22). Because of this "absence of systematic and philosophical structure and arrangement" (22-3), the Bible lends itself to universal adaptation. However, though this patchwork of particularity may lack an external unity because of its temporality and because it is the union of diverse representations of divine inspiration, that is not to say that it lacks an internal unity, or what Stowe calls " a spiritual unity, the unity of one grand idea running through the whole, the idea of reuniting the human soul to God from whom it has been so sadly broken off by sin" (Origin 13). Therefore, though reading the Bible demands interpretation, and its language will support multiple interpretations, it will not support all interpretations; it will not support those that take a particular case and extrapolate it as the general. It will not support those that take a historical and particular case and employ it as a decisive for particular contemporary cases, as many preachers and southern authors were doing.19 Though biblical interpretation is necessarily open, interpretation cannot contravene the purpose of the Bible, the bringing of the soul of man to God, its spiritual unity. "Man" who wrote the Bible and to whom it is addressed is all of humanity. All humanity must return to God, and Stowe is explicit when he declares that the spiritual unity of the Bible speaks to the whole race of humanity and not just a particular part (Origin 24). Used to particular biblical interpretations of partiality, for example, Augustine St. Clare argues that this sort of religion and its hermeneutics of partiality is simply the cover for the greed of money and power. "Religion! Is what you hear at church, religion? Is that which can bend and turn, and descend and ascend, to fit every crooked phase of selfish, worldly society, religion? Is that religion which is less scrupulous, less generous, less just, less considerate for man, than even my own ungodly, worldly, blinded nature? No! When I look for a religion, I must look for something above me, and not something beneath" (H.B. Stowe, Uncle 280). Religion as defined in this way is part of a tripartite system of power that constructs and justifies slavery. "Planters, who

162. The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

have money to make by it, - clergymen, who have planters to please, politicians, who want to rule by it, - may warp and bend language and ethics to a degree that shall astonish the world at their ingenuity; they can press nature and the Bible, and nobody knows what else, into the service" (331). In this sense, religion is the opiate of the people holding slaves in the South. It interprets the Bible for the pleasure of the planters, as a salve for conscience and a mystification of consciousness. Mary H. Eastman, for example, epitomizes what Augustine criticizes. Regarding the relationship between Jesus and slavery, she exclaims, "Did he condemn the institution which he had made? Did he establish universal freedom? Oh! no; he came to redeem the world from the power of sin; his was no earthly mission; he did not interfere with the organization of society" (Eastman 18). Redemption of the world from the power of sin without earthly interference is certainly a miraculous project, and it positions Jesus as an archetypal libertarian messiah aptly suited for America. The system of religion employs the Bible as a justification for the economics of slavery, but the Bible is not a consistent justification. It holds Genesis 9:2,5 - "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be" (H.B. Stowe, Uncle zoo) - beside Matthew 7:12: "All things whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them" (Uncle 201). Interpretation as found in the religion of which Augustine St. Clare speaks mediates the two with "He hath made everything beautiful in its season" (Uncle 279; Eccles. 3:1-8), showing how "all the orders and distinctions in society came from God; and that it was so appropriate, you know, and beautiful, that some should be high and some low, and that some were born to rule and some to serve, and all that, you know" (Uncle 279), as Marie St. Claire interprets it. These sorts of mediations and interpretations can be effective, provided that people accept this word as the truth, accept particularity presented as the general, and simply listen and do not read. This view, I would suggest, positions white southern ignorance on a par with slave illiteracy. Both are required for the use of the Bible as an effective tool of mass social control. Ignorance and illiteracy enable the economic system to function as if it were a biblically sanctioned socio-political and legal system. The efficacy of the biblical pretext requires the economic investment to be presented as a "spiritual" investment. Eminently aware of the biblical cover for the economic, Augustine reverses the thrust of the relation and asserts that the consequences of this economic system will come to a head with all the force of a biblically infused cataclysm. "One thing is certain, - that there is a mustering among the masses, the world over; and there is a dies irae coming on, sooner or later" (H.B. Stowe, Uncle 344). In the language of Reve-

163

Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Ethical Critique of Justice

lation, what is "revealed with the strength of divine law ... is that the masses are to rise, and the under class become the upper one" (Uncle 392). We who have built the system of slavery and have maintained it, even if in a "humane" or moderate form, will be "condemned for not doing positive good, as if that included every possible harm" (450). The economic translation of this condemnation is slaughter, like that which took place in the slave rebellion in Haiti in i8oi-z (392.).20 This sounds, of course, like the harshest of religious, economic, and social critiques, and in the mouth of Augustine, it certainly is. Harriet Beecher Stowe, however, has the detached ability to present such a critique in all its angry and justifiable pith, but her own belief in the value of the Bible seems to limit her view to the corrupted structure of religion and the dishonest preachers who decorate it. What is counterpoised to the lack of spiritual investment, illiteracy, and the speaking of the word is the egalitarian discourse of education and reading promoted by Eva. "The Bible is for every one to read themselves" (385), and to read as promoting the spiritual bringing together of humanity with God through love. In this understanding are Harriet Beecher and Calvin Ellis Stowe united. PROXIMITY, CALVIN ELLIS STOWE, AND HEGELIAN THEOLOGY

As an engaged reader of German theological studies, C.E. Stowe spent a good deal of his critical writings trying to refute and otherwise discredit the work of Hegelian theologians, which he felt contaminated the Gospels with a hermeneutics motivated by "a godless philosophy" (Origin 257).2-1 Devoting a section of his book on the origin of the Bible to Hegelianism, Stowe says with force, "It stands before me, in its bulk and its unintelligibleness, as a huge, shapeless, threatening spectre, most fitly described in the words of Virgil: 'Monstrum borrendum, infore, ingens, cut lumen ademptum.' (A monster, horrid, hideous, huge and blind)" (Origin 2.59). What the critical proponents of the monster do to theology is collapse God into being simply the subjective projection of humanity, or as Stowe articulates it, "the thing perceiving and the thing perceived are one and the same thing" (Origin 2,60). With its utter lack of belief in God, Hegelian theology retains "the words and phrases of the most evangelical faith, [yet] it expels from them all their meaning, and leaves them the mere hieroglyphs of an atheistic mystery" (Origin 257). The interesting irony of C.E. Stowe's virulent critique of Hegelianist theology is that his idea of spiritual unity functions ever so similarly to that of EC. Baur, someone whom Stowe characterizes as leaning to the left of Hegel and whose theological critique assaults the Gospel (Origin 258).

164 The Letter and the Spirit of i^th-Century American Literature

Stowe's "spiritual unity" resembles what Baur calls the essential Sache, or subject matter, of the Bible. Explicating the sense of Baur, Peter Hodgson argues that "the Idea of Christianity is to be understood as the Idea of reconciliation or of divine-human unity and union, the Idea of God-manhood, as perceived originally and definitively in the person of Christ, in the fullest perfection conceivable for a single individual" (33). The Sache of the Bible is not present in any single text or particular representation within a text but, rather, exists behind it as the motivating sense. The Bible, then, is a constellation of representations of this essential Sache, which gains its represented organizational unity from a rough temporal chronology. Each representation is bound by its historical particularity, the socio-political disposition of its author, the way in which the literary account is a translation bound to the author's understanding of how such a translation of the Sache can speak in the particular discourse of the time. Reading the Bible now becomes a hermeneutical operation incorporating both historical understanding and reflection upon the present. Hermeneutics is the discovery of a set of relations: the here and now to a historical then; the text to its historical context, mediated by translation; one's own relationship to the present; one's understanding of the relation between the historical connections and the present connections. This entire constellation of relations is the Sache of the Bible in the form of its ability to be read. There is not an essential division into particularities in the Bib\e-as-Sache or even in the history of the church for Baur, but rather, the pragmatic division into particular representations for humanity's understanding. If the point of the Sache of the Bible is for humanity, and the Bible and the church are the forms that continually represent it, then this apparent particularity found in representation comes from the literary and durative mode fitted for human understanding. The essential unity of the Sache, which is God and the subject-matter message of the unity of humanity in God, is infinitely applicable to the different historical situations in which humanity finds itself. But one cannot take one representation of this application, found, for example, in a prophetic or apostolic account, and determine that this single representation stands as the general, as the Sache of God's will, in essence and in the absolute of all time. Representations are partial - part of the whole of temporality as a moment and part of the constellation of representations called the Bible. What seems, then, as a separation between Sache and its representations is in fact not a duality, but a necessary process of connection through a change of form that represents the unity as a constellation of particularities which are always to be read as a process of articulating

165

Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Ethical Critique of Justice

them together. The reader moves through the text to the Sache, according to Hodgson, " but at its climax it occasions a reversal in the flow of meaning such that the subject matter now unveils itself to the interpreter in its objective truth and meaning, and becomes the subject rather than the object in the act of knowing" (18). Thus one approaches the text thinking that it is the object of study, but it is in fact a representation of the Sache, the essential subject matter. What hermeneutics does is to articulate how it is a subject as the subject, not separated and apart as object. Whereas the church has tended to figure God as outside the world, as object, such that God intervenes in natural manifestations as if to complete and right them from the outside, Baur stresses the interiority of God as the subject of the world. Seemingly external and natural manifestations are in no way other than, different from, or against God. Rather, these manifestations that we have collected up as history and the events of history are, says Baur, " simply an element of the general process which is the life-process of God himself, in which the Idea of God explicates itself in the distinction of its moments" (Hodgson 13). What is important is that the sets of binaries constructed by the church between "God and Satan, light and darkness, truth and heresy, rationality and irrationality" (Hodgson 13), and the fundamental binary of exteriority and interiority mark the failure to understand the essential unity of God and the totalizing interiority of the world in the subject of God.zl Binaries that construct exteriority misread the Idea of God and misunderstand the relationship between God and the Bible, or the Idea and its manifestations. As Hodgson suggests, this relationship for Baur was one of " distinction-within-unity" (33). The within-unity maintains the interiority that does not enable any outside, yet distinction-within enables the Idea or God to be that which is constructed in difference. Baur does articulate a certain version of Hegelianized theology, and it was something to which C.E. Stowe was decidedly opposed. But Stowe, I would argue, was a biased reader of Baur, letting his fear and limited knowledge of Hegelian philosophy overcome his otherwise careful theological criticism. The "unintelligibleness" of Hegel blinds Stowe to the recognition of his own similarities to Baur. Stowe also advocates the necessity of historicized biblical interpretation, and he is not opposed to the idea of a fundamental unity in God (see Harker 2,06). He does, however, oppose any collapse of the objectivity of God to interior subjectivity. Faith, for Stowe, is one's interior relationship to God, but as such, it is that which mediates temporal subject and transcendental object. Faith may manifestly represent God as an interiorized subject, but God is not reduced to thinking subjects as their product or projection.

166 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

Because of the idea of God as a total unity of all difference, one is able, like Paul, like the Stowes, like Baur, to accept the Hebrew Bible as a different representation of God not external to Christianity. Christian faith, for Baur, "is the essential principle by which the subject frees himself from that outward objectivity which never lets him come to himself, and by which he raises himself to free, self-conscious subjecthood" (Hodgson 31). It is precisely Christian faith that enables good Christians to understand that the Hebrew Bible is not external to them as Christians, just as it is not external to God. As a representation of God, it marks a distinction within the unity. However, the traditional interpretation has been that through the theophany at Sinai, the Hebrew Bible represents God as something exterior. One makes covenants with God, fears the appearance of the wrath of God; the delivery of laws through the external, representative medium of writing on the tablets is opposed to the non-externality of the Word; Mosaic laws are to be obeyed as if with a pressure external to the self. Connected here is that the Hebrew Bible reads like a discourse of action without interior faith. It is the doing of the law that the Hebrew Bible represents, not the fulfillment of the law through faith. With the Word in Jesus, faith is what frees the Christian from the outward objectivity of the Hebrew laws. Baur, however, is opposed to this traditional interpretation because it bases itself on a binary of externality and internality, with the Hebrew Bible functioning as the sign of externality. Rather, the Hebrew Bible is of God, representative of God's unity, but distinct from the New Testament. As such, it is a fundamental representation of the distinction-within-unity that enables us to understand God. Certainly, the rhetoric of the Hebrew Bible runs throughout Uncle Tom's Cabin and is present in connection with Harriet Beecher Stowe's reading of Jesus's teaching through the characters of Eva, Tom, and the whole woman. And over the course of his life, Calvin Ellis Stowe turned increasingly to the study of Jewish texts, even producing, as Edmund Wilson notes, "a study of the Talmud, which Harriet attempted without success to have published in the Atlantic Monthly" (63). Indeed, Calvin increasingly came to look like a rabbi, which Wilson suggests is how both Harriet and George Eliot saw him, with Harriet referring to him as " 'my poor rabbi,' or simply 'my old Rab' " (qtd. in Wilson 63). The rabbinical look perhaps came about because of C.E. Stowe's demonstrative protest to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. He refused to shave his beard until the law was repealed (Harker 51). DOING BEFORE HEARING

As an interpreter of the Bible in her own right, however, Harriet Beecher Stowe stands as an important figure in America. The thrust of

167

Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Ethical Critique of Justice

her political and legal critique of unionist-republican justice is propelled by a feminist and Judaizing account of Jesus's teachings and the relationship between humanity, the political world, and God. In crucial discussions of slavery, the possibility of emancipation, and the sociopolitical consequences of such a move, Uncle Tom's Cabin becomes religiously philosophical in truly brilliant and innovative ways. When the two brothers, Augustine and Alfred St. Clare, discuss their different understandings of the actual functions and reasons for the system of slavery, Alfred takes Augustine to task for his humanitarian views and suggests, "Why, elevate your own servants, for a specimen," to which Augustine replies, "You might as well set Mount yEtna on them flat, and tell them to stand up under it, as tell me to elevate my servants under all the superincumbent mass of society upon them. One man can do nothing, against the whole action of a community. Education, to do anything, must be a state education" (H.B. Stowe, Uncle 394). The argument indicates the similarity between the crushing force of Mount JEtna (Etna) and that of social hatred, as if it were self-evident that emancipatory elevation would be an impossibility for the slaves and an irresponsibility on the part of the master. Elevation, education, emancipation by one man on one plantation, inflicts more harm on the slaves themselves than efficacy in the destruction of a system. However, I would argue that what this passage in particular says, and how it says it, contains a reference to the success of such a project. This reference comes by way of the Judaic. In Tractate Shabbath (8a-8b) of the Talmud, the rabbis discuss the meaning and the workings of Exodus 19:17: "And they stopped at the foot of the mountain." Rav Abdimi bar Hama bar Hasa says, "This teaches us that the Holy One, Blessed be He, inclined the mountain over them like a tilted tub and that He said: If you accept the Torah, all is well, if not here will be your grave" (Levinas, "Temptation" 31). The image figured in Uncle Tom's Cabin is certainly similar, as is, I will argue, the significance. The Jews are chosen by God - chosen, one might say, as a specimen. The giving of the law is an experiment in order to see whether they have the commitment to live according to a code that will work for the repair of the world, which in turn will establish the conditions for the possible coming of the Messiah. And Horeb is a test, situated in the midst of the trial of the wilderness, associated with the test of Abraham before the initial covenant. As with the Akedah (Gen. 22), the test is whether the people will do before they hear, before they understand the content and the sorts of continual trials it will put them through. In "The Temptation of Temptation," Emmanuel Levinas argues that to do before hearing, to act before understanding, seems, on the surface, to suggest the naivete associated with childhood, which can assent to that which it does not understand

168

The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

because it does not even understand that doing before hearing is a risk (35). The naivete of childhood can face temptation, even the temptation of understanding before doing, because it does not even understand that it is already in a relationship with temptation. Childhood is naive, blind and deaf to the temptation of understanding, the temptation of temptation itself. However, the situation in which childhood is to give its assent and the situation into which childhood will ascend are not naive. The situation is all about temptation. Childhood and its naivete do not, however, know it. As Levinas defines it, "naivete is an unawareness of reason in a world dominated by reason" ("Temptation" 38). But the assent of the Jews does not come from the naivete of childhood. They say that they will do before they hear, which appears as representing a conscious reversal of the order of reason - reason would be to hear or understand and then to do. The assent re-presents a movement away from assent as a judgment produced by cognition. I say "re-presents," because language as the representative medium of the Torah and the Talmud must convey in representation the action of the Jews, which is itself, as Exodus and the Talmud suggest, represented in language. However, by representing what the Jews are saying, these linguistic representations betray what they are performing. According to Levinas, they perform the ethical - ethics as the response to the call of the Other, as the assent of doing before hearing - which is represented as a linguistic response in these texts as if it were a reversal of the order of judgment. And for Levinas, this is perhaps the only way that ethical response can be conveyed and be spoken about. If one represents ethical response in language, one contains it by language as a representation and betrays its purity as response as an open-ended, unidirectional gift without return. In representing ethical response, even as if a reversal of the order of judgment, language betrays the purity by placing it, even oppositionally, within a relation to judgment, and it betrays the priority of the ethical response as that which conies even before consciousness. As the Other, otherwise than even the idea of absolute otherness or alterity, God is unknowable, and the purely ethical relationship between one and the Other involves both call and response as prior to cognition, prior to language, prior to the economy of reciprocity, and prior to the measuring of judgment. Ethical response for Levinas, in as much as he also must betray it in order to articulate it, is Saying prior to its representation as the Said. The Said of language betrays by representing the Saying of the ethical response, but at the same time, in such a scene described by the Torah, for example, the Said conveys at least a trace of Saying.2-3 At its best, language can do justice to ethics by re-presenting ethical response as prior to the terms of judgment in a move that, even though it partakes of judg-

169

Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Ethical Critique of Justice

ment itself, moves away from the traditional formulation of hearing, understanding, comparison, decision, and then action. The passage from Tractate Shabbath, for example, can be read as explicating the trace of the ethical in this just representation. The action of the Jews, as Levinas makes clear, following Rabbi Eleazar in the Talmud, "is a secret of angels" and "not the consciousness of children" ("Temptation" 31). "Rabbi Eleazar has said: When the Israelites committed to doing before hearing, a voice from heaven cried out: Who has revealed to my children this secret the angels make use of, for it is written (Psalm 103 :zo): 'Bless the Lord, Oh, His angels, you mighty ones, who do His word, hearkening to the voice of His word' " ("Temptation" 31). If the assent at Horeb to do before hearing justly represents the ethical response in as much as it can be represented, then why is this purity followed by a return to selfishness, a seeming lack of commitment and decided sullying of purity with the scene of the golden calf as the Jews wait for Moses and the law to descend? According to Levinas, The excellent choice that makes doing go before hearing does not prevent a fall. It arms not against temptation but against the temptation of temptation. Sin in itself does not destroy Temimut, the integrity which expresses itself in the "We will do" preceding the "We will hear." The sin here responds to temptation but is not tempted by temptation: it does not question the certainty of good and evil ... The adherence to the good of those who said "We will do and we will hear" is not the result of a choice between good and evil. It comes before it. Evil can undermine this unconditional adherence to the good without destroying it. ("Temptation" 43)

The priority of the ethical response, prior to conscious judgment and choice, can only be traced in the just representation of language, if not given full presence. The trace of the priority finds its representation in the temporality of the assent, which indicates its difference from choice based upon judgment. This is doing before hearing. The ethical response is not tempted by temptation itself, not tempted by consciousness and temptations in the order of consciousness. The response is prior. That priority does not guarantee that within consciousness one will not respond to temptation. This sort of temptation does come as the product of a judgment, of knowing but not thinking about the risks. There is no guarantee against the fallibility of judgment by the prior metaphysical and ethical response. In the world and in the world of judgment, we make mistakes; we succumb to temptation. But ethics is not even tempted by the temptation of consciousness. It is not of that order or time and cannot control it. Judgment and the justice of judging are related to ethics and its priority by the trace, but in justice one

170 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-Century American Literature

must make a now conscious choice to trace the ethical in one's judgments and to resist responding to what tempts one not to. To resist temptation and to make judgments just, one has to be responsible and re-present the prior response and responsibility of the ethical. Given this Judaic context, I would argue that Harriet Beecher Stowe's tilted tub of Mount JEtna over the slaves performs as if it is its own reading of this fundamental passage on responsibility, commitment, and its relationship to temptation, and it does so in order to bridge religious and socio-political understanding. Augustine figures that to choose his slaves for elevation would be to set himself and them in the scenario of the Jews at Horeb, the scenario that performs the ethical even before judgment. Ostensibly, he figures "y£tna" as "the superincumbent mass of society" (H.B. Stowe, Uncle 394), yet as read through Exodus and Horeb, "v^tna" also stands as a figure for conscious thought, philosophy, thinking, and measuring the issue within ontology, and all that the "Roman" figure stands for in relation to the "Hebrew." To decide the issue of emancipation or manumission philosophically is to risk the "weight" of the ontic realm - its multiple discourses, history, political angles, and so on - as crashing down on the self. While the description can be made philosophically, it is still a decision. The ethical "choice" would not be one as such. Structured biblically yet filled with the content of social politics, the scene in Uncle Tom's Cabin performs the fact that justice can trace the ethical, provided it resists the temptation of capitulating to only the ontological, here figured as the pressures of social politics. That would mean, given the context leading up to the Civil War, that justice can be tempted neither by abolitionist rhetoric nor by southern economic and political pressures; it must not be tempted to address the fluctuations of social opinion. In fact, it must resist judging according to the people and strive to re-present the pre-original goodness and sociality of humanity.24 In society, humanity succumbs to temptation. Justice in society should endeavour at all costs not even to be tempted by this temptation. Because justice in the world is a product of consciousness and judgment, it will be tempted, but it has the power not to capitulate. We know now what is right and wrong because we are creatures of God and have already been chosen. And we know immediately, from creation to the apple and from the assent of Horeb to the golden calf, the temptation of wrong. In this scene in Uncle Tom's Cabin of what would be justice and what would be its relationship to the ethical, Stowe represents as just that which reverses the direction of the conscious judgment of this passage. Augustine judges the risk of social pressure as too great. His "just" judgment retreats from tracing the ethical as he refuses his prox-

17i

Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Ethical Critique of Justice

imity to the other as his nighest neighbour. He presents the opposite of what Exodus and subsequently the Christian Bible present to be true that one man can do everything, even against the action of a whole stiff-necked community. In elevating slaves by bringing them to the mountain of social pressure, he would simultaneously be bringing all of the American community to the mountain of education. Truly here, as Augustine, Stowe, and Exodus would concur, this education, "to do anything, must be a state education" (394), as it is in the scene at Horeb when the law descends. Ethical justice would not mean that there would not be a fall, even an immediate and then successive falls, but it would at least place the trace of the ethical at the foundation of everything that would come to follow. The Talmud teaches that when the Jews assented, 600,000 angels descended with two crowns for each person, but when the Jews sinned, 1,200,000 destroying angels came to take the crowns away. However, "Resh Lakish said: The Holy One, Blessed be He, will give us back the crowns in the future, for it is written (Isaiah 35:10): 'Those redeemed by the Eternal One will come back thus and will reenter Zion singing, an eternal joy upon their head ...' Eternal joy - the joy from old" (Levinas, "Temptation" 31). Only with the ethical related to the representational discourse of justice and traced in the performance of justice can the injustices of justice provoked by the temptations of social pressures be revoked in the future. Since justice exists in actuality, partakes of judgment, and can only trace the ethical, the future revocation is bound to the temporality of the world. Justice is not a messianic discourse; it does not redeem. But if it is related to the ethical, it can repent and turn and repair.

5 Exodus Politics and the Redemption of Difference

When, in Uncle Tom's Cabin, George Harris escapes from his master and follows his wife, Eliza, and their son, Harry, to join them in freedom in Canada, he meets Mr Wilson, a previous employer. Wilson is sympathetic to George's plight, but disagrees with escape as the chosen course of action. He is sorry to see George setting himself up "in opposition" to the country, America, "your country." "'My country!' said George, with a strong and bitter emphasis; 'what country have I, but the grave[?]' " (H.B. Stowe, Uncle 183). The disavowal of America as a country of his own comes as a multivocal response articulating a critique of a broad understanding of paternality and patriality. Born of a white father "from one of the proudest families in Kentucky" (i8z) and an African mother, "slave of the passions of her possessor" (182,), George disavows America as patria in response to the white Kentucky pater's disavowal of George. This yoking together of father and country, paternality and citizenship, functions within the discourse of social-contract theory based upon an understanding of patriarchy and paternalism. The traditional role of the familial father as provider and protector grounded the archetypal metaphor for ensuing relations of power and authority within a society increasing in size and complexity. In America, history constructs the scene of the Fathers founding a country, confederating, and then constituting America in a creation scenario in which words as semes conceive, gestate, and deliver a body. The analogies range from Genesis to agriculture to a miraculous birth of homosociality, and the significance is that this socio-political contract articulates itself as a sec-

173 Exodus Politics and the Redemption of Difference

ular kind of Immaculate Conception. Even though the work of women in both the public and the private spheres of Puritan and colonial America is absolutely constitutive of the political founding of America, immaculately is this history subordinated. The result is the confederation and constitution of America as other than heterosexually procreative, as a creation in the absence of the maternal and the female body. The Founding Fathers by themselves produce the son, the state, and America, and paternal power within the family becomes the model for the state to govern its citizens. "Just as a father forbids his son to act in certain ways because he knows that the son will thereby harm himself, and the father has a duty to protect his son, so the state protects citizens through legal paternalism" (Pateman 32). With George's articulations in Uncle Tom's Cabin, however, Harriet Beecher Stowe's language skillfully criticizes the fact that the presence of racial mixture troubles the analogy of paternalism for the state. The white Kentuckian is the father of George, but though biological paternality is necessary for the definition of paternalism constructing the analogy, it is not sufficient. The male child must be re-cognized under the law as son. Or, in a more current discourse of gender, while the materiality of the body as a substance provides the site of possibility, materiality is not actually any thing until it is seen as such through our constructed categories regulating cognition. "In this sense," according to Judith Butler, "what constitutes the fixity of the body, its contours, its movements, will be fully material, but materiality will be rethought as the effect of power, as power's most productive effect" (Bodies 2). The type of conjugal "right" that produces the bastard male child does not confer patriarchal right upon the father unless the child is acknowledged, expressly constituted as son, not as bastard or, as is often the case, as nothing at all. If the mother is a white female, she is at least constructed as a person, if not self-representable under the male law, giving the possibility of producing a child recognizable as a son. The black female is constructed as property and, while female, not fully a person as such, not able to produce a child recognizable as a son to the white father. The materiality of the mixed-race male child does not make him a son, because the law will not confer filial status upon the body. He is a product of, yet immediately not part of, the relations of the father, unless the father expressly wishes to make him so. In the hands of Stowe and other female writers of the period, this position is not wholly powerless in and of itself. Even though the racially mixed son may not be recognized by the father or the patriarchal law as one to whom the right of the state will be hereditarily transferred, the son is also "free" in a sense by being placed outside of the temporality and law of primogenitor. The father is not his father; his fathers

174

The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-Century American Literature

are not "Our Fathers." The bastard position (child without pater) is a nomadic diasporic position (person excluded from patria). "Sir," George says to Mr Wilson, "I haven't any country, anymore than I have any father" (H.B. Stowe, Uncle 187). By disavowing the father as/ and country, George disavows any claim the state may try to construct in terms of the relations of paternality on his body. The traditional narrative of the social contract regarding paternalism is complex, as Carole Pateman notes, because "contractarians are the most consistent opponents of paternalism" (32). The social contract, as the name suggests, structures itself as the remedy to paternalism and classic patriarchy by reconstituting the state as representative of the people. This sociality, however, suggestive of all the people, is the justification for fraternity in that the sons of the father are those who represent the people. What is contentious within this structure of a numerical particularity representing the general whole is that a racial and gendered particularity (white sons) is also said to be representative. In order for the social contract for a just state to be constructed, the emancipation from paternalism is already defined in terms of an injustice of representation. The social contract perpetuates patriarchy by functioning within a paternalistically styled sense of representation. And this is the irony of the narrative, an irony with ethical stakes. The sons recognize that paternalism is a control on the exercise of liberty and the realization of the self. Paternalism limits, and thus in an emancipatory and redemptive move, as the narrative would have it, "the father is (metaphorically) killed by his sons who transform (the paternal dimension of) the father's patriarchal right into civil government. The sons alienate this aspect of political power into the hands of representatives, the state" (Pateman 32,). The fraternity of the sons, conceiving of themselves in equality, liberates the children from the father under the rhetoric of "justice for all." The state is still chauvinistic, in that it is founded by men who invest a masculine discourse of power curtailing women's political representation, but the supposed glory of the new state is that it overcomes the repression of paternalism by overcoming the pater. It does so, however, only to reconstitute patriarchy on the basis of fraternity, the relations of the male sons to each other. The alienation of power into the hands of representatives does not ameliorate the fact that civitas is still masculinized as the sons alienate their power into the hands of fraternity itself, that is, their brothers. This is a lateral movement. With this "emancipation," women in fact are now left at a further remove from paternalism, because in the homosocial realm of fraternity, the proclamation of words, the ejaculation of semes, is figured as necessary and sufficient to constitute the state in representation. Fraternity does not require a womb or a sense of the female. If paternal-

175 Exodus Politics and the Redemption of Difference istic patriarchal right is based on a prior conjugal right - the right to a woman with whom the man can become a father - which is subordinated within the narrative of state-of-nature to social-contract theories, then patriarchy produced by fraternity does not initially require conjugal right for the power to create the state. The possibility of fraternal patriarchy is produced by prior conjugal right, and fraternal patriarchy will require it for the production of more sons, who will enter the state as representable persons. From the moment of the state's creation, however, women disappear altogether. They are non-representable. Within this narrative of the social contract, then, the materiality of the biracial male child also places him in the position of overcoming the biological father. He can work to insert himself into the white socialcontract narrative by claiming his right to be recognized as a son, representable in fraternity, and therefore equal and rightfully deserving of freedom. Often this process begins with manumission, and the prior consent of the father predicates the response. To receive manumission as a gift or as a status that is bought is to move upon the recognition of the father's ownership of the self. It is to suggest a certain acceptance of the paternal/patriarchal system and demonstrates one's belief in its priority. Frederick Douglass, for example, recounts in his Life and Times that when he accepted the offer of Mrs Ellen Richardson and her sister-inlaw, Mrs Henry Richardson, to raise the money to purchase his freedom, some of his "uncompromising anti-slavery friends in this country failed to see the wisdom of this commercial transaction, and were not pleased that I consented to it, even by my silence. They thought it a violation of anti-slavery principles, conceding the right of property in man, and a wasteful expenditure of money. For myself, viewing it simply in the light of a ransom, or as money extorted by a robber, and my liberty of more value than one hundred and fifty pounds sterling, I could not see either a violation of the laws of morality or of economy" (259). For Douglass, there is value in the system. Even if some rob others and the system does not expressly say whether the action is just or unjust, the plaintive one must still be in the system to have it make a just pronouncement and to effect its lasting reconstruction. Far from demonstrating wasteful principles of economy, spending the "blood-money" (Douglass 259) is essentially conservative, as it is that which conserves a legal place for Douglass in order to do the moral work of reconstructing justice. Given the Fugitive Slave Laws of 1793 and 1850, if one had to employ economy pragmatically in order to acquire the legal status of freedman as a means to the moral end of campaigning for justice, so be it. It is no news to a slave that American democracy is motivated by economics, but for Douglass, the teleology of democracy is moral, and democracy must be worked (over) to reach this moral end.

176 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-Century American Literature

The Constitution of the United States of America was meant, certainly, to "establish Justice," to constitute it for the here and now. But this establishment was made within the rhetorical temporalities pushing it on into the future. Thus there is a dative or future perfect temporality in the Constitution, covertly signified by its desire for a "more Perfect" union, made "in Order to form," to "insure," to "provide for," to "promote," to "secure" for "our Posterity." By representing the self into the system, one seeks to make the gesture representative of the self in turn. In this way, American democracy treats persons as ends and thus proclaims itself into moral perfection. Douglass' response, of course, is not the only one available. One can respond by working within the tradition of the white social-contract narrative, if not within the system contracted by the father. To do so is to escape from slavery, to flout the law and the father, to reject that the self requires paternal sanction. This is the antipode of Douglass found in William Wells Brown, for example. The liberty of a person cannot be auctioned and bought, which is what the system of slavery attempts. Any such "purchase" is by definition an act of thievery, and one does not pay the thief for stolen goods that are rightfully one's own.1 The law invoked here is the constitution of humanity, which may or may not be from God but is certainly grounded in an originary position (for example, the primacy of rationality) and concretized through the legitimacy of history as human rights. Humans have rights, and even the Constitution of the United States accords African Americans status as humans. The irreducible property right in the self comes from one's status as human and not from any conferral by the Constitution. Persons are certainly within their human rights to take their liberty back from the thieves. If the thieves then wish to apologize with manumission papers freely given, so be it. Manumission is simply the sign that liberty had previously been stolen. I would argue, however, that while escaping to freedom breaks the chains of the father's hold, it remains bound to the structure of taking one's freedom that begins the traditional social-contract narrative. Even though this narrative expels the mulatto son from representability and fraternity, to achieve one's freedom over and against the father is to operate exactly like his son in opposition to the father, with the goal of paternal neutralization. The difference between the two responses is that in the first, the father is chastened but still represented in the new construction of the state. He is still a relative in relation to the now "non-paternal" state. In the second, the father is excluded. What is important, however, even if this second alternative falls within the narrative form of the social contract, is that there is space here for the new state to be constituted in difference, separated from

177 Exodus Politics and the Redemption of Difference

the father, moving to construct the state from the position of what it regards as its bastard. As a bastard and as the bastard of the social contract, the racially mixed son provides a leading way to think about how the social contract can be reconstituted in order to maintain the goal of overcoming patriarchy without its reinscription into fraternal chauvinism. To reconstitute the social contract from the position of the " bastard " is to think of this position as a confederation of these differences that the traditional contract subordinates. This is nothing more, I would argue, than to work a thick definition of sociality into the contract structure. In the American venue, this work begins with recognizing how the racially mixed figure gives a showing to all those sites of difference that are constituted by the dominant social, legal, political, racial, and sexual power which expels these products as other. The constitutive role of the white father signifies on the body of the racially mixed son, and yet the father's laws construct recognition of that body so that his constitutive role is erased. The materiality of the racially mixed body is recognized as black, not white or anything in between. This construction is at root a mathematical procedure in which fractions are redefined. Parts now equal wholes; blood equals race; race equals colour.2 Half a physical relation becomes nothing on the white male side; half a relation on the maternal side becomes all. This totality is effected because all the constructivist power exists on the side of the white male. Socio-legal construction is itself what essentializes the body as wholly black. The totalization of colour - a product of the eighteenth century's "new math" - is what is required in order to reconstitute the racially mixed body out of the realm of familial blood relations and into that of economic relations as property. However, the construction enforcing recognition of the racially mixed body as black must battle the contradictory construction of whiteness as Caucasian, a construction whose power is necessary for the system constructing mixture as other. The polemics of construction produce the problem in which materiality is thought to be independent and prior to social construction. Here is a racially mixed body in all its whiteness. How is one to know what one "sees"? The confusion in which materiality seems to predicate cognition is one that produces the possibility of passing and the closet of identity, in general. When the materiality of the body can fit into the dominant construction of visuality, when no signs of difference appear - which is not to say that alterity is not "there" - one can separate the error of essentialism and a transparency of signification from the need to halt the repressions caused by the "appropriate" socio-legal construction. "Look at my face, - look at my hands, - look at my body" (H.B. Stowe, Uncle 185), exclaims George to the kindly Mr Wilson,

178

The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

whose "downy, soft, benevolently fuzzy and confused" (185) mind cannot politically construct materiality "properly." As legally defined and politically representable, white male heterosexuality plays a constitutive role in the construction of the racially mixed male; it plays a similar role in the construction of the female. Because white heterosexual masculinity demands conjugal rights in order to perpetuate the male's system, the female must also be repositioned legally as subordinate, politically not self-representable, capable of being in the law only by way of masculine representation. The law functions as if to essentialize her body here too, translating the difference of physical power into the inability of self-representation. As in the marriage contract of the time, in which the status of the female is covered by that of the man, so too is she covered by the representability of men only.3 Feminine difference becomes essentialized as lack in the political arena in order to construct subordination as the compensation for the threat of her ability to reproduce more sons who may also wrestle power away. She is essential for the continuance of the social contract and the patriarchal transfer of the state, but it is precisely this ability that threatens to destabilize the system if women work against their subordination to achieve equality. In political terms, the female position is the site of revolutionary change and the possibility of deconstruction. Because both the female and the African American are necessary for, yet threatening to, the construction of masculinity, paternal/patriarchal power, and their propagation, it is not surprising that many women defined their own position in marriage and in the state in terms of slavery. Even though she advocates the enslavement of race, Mary H. Eastman, for example, is forced to articulate the institution in terms of care and beneficence because she recognizes the similarity of women's position of seemingly perpetual servitude. Harshness and cruelty to either the slave or the woman would predicate rebellion. At one remarkable moment in Eastman's Aunt Phillis's Cabin, her southern, pro-slavery response to Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, female anger wells up with such force as to trouble and almost to abolish Eastman's desire to justify slavery as a necessary evil that has to be made as good as it can: To you, generous and noble-minded men and women of the South, I appeal, (I quote the words of a late writer on Abolitionism, when I say,) "Is man ever a creature to be trusted with wholly irresponsible power? Can anybody fail to make the inference, what the practical result will be?" (Uncle Tom's Cabin). Although she is here speaking of slavery politically, can you not apply it to matrimony in this miserable country of ours? Can we not remodel our husbands, place them under our thumbs, and shut up the escape valves of their grumbling forever? To be sure, St. Paul exhorts "wives to be obedient to their own hus-

179 Exodus Politics and the Redemption of Difference ands," and "servants to be obedient to their own masters," but St. Paul was not an Abolitionist. He did not take into consideration the necessities of the free-soil party, and woman's rights. This is an era of mental and bodily emancipation. Take advantage of it, wives and negroes! But, alas for the former! there is no society formed for their benefit; their day of deliverance has not yet dawned, and until its first gleamings arise in the east, they must wear their chains, (in, emphases in original)

From this female perspective of Eastman's, the legal relations between men and women are similar to those between white and black Americans. As a southerner who is committed ideologically and economically to promoting slavery, and who recognizes the similar treatments of racial and gender difference under the law, Eastman cannot yet bring herself to Stowe's position, in which gendered differences are held together in equality. The best that Eastman can do is to argue for slavery as a caring institution in which slaves have a certain influence with the masters, because both operate in their respective positions with a high degree of civility and etiquette.4 But in those moments when the subordination of gender difference sufficiently galls, the repressed hope for the abolition of slavery shows itself in terms of the effects it might have for the liberation of women. The racist formulation of this hope that mines self-deprecation in an ironic way would go something like this: if slaves can be emancipated, then surely white women have an even more rightful claim. This important yoking together of the feminine and the African is embodied in Sojourner Truth, whose speeches often explicitly deal with the abolition of slavery and women's suffrage together, all under the rubric of a Christian ethic. She argues against the subordination of women in terms consonant with the social-contract narrative, in that she follows the extension of the family as the model for the state but reasserts the more realistic definition of the family. "As it requires both the male and female element to propagate and successfully rear a family, so the State, being only the larger family, demands both for its life and proper development" (Gilbert 198). With both women and men voting on the functional government of the state, both "the head and heart of the government" (198) could be reached and directed. Indeed, as the first "Rosa Parks," Sojourner Truth fought for her right as an African American to ride the trolleys in Washington, DC (184), and to be treated as a lady like any other. "Lady" for her is a status that is tied to one's sex and cannot be revoked because of one's colour (Gilbert 186-7). She fought against subjugations of her race and sex simultaneously because the two often functioned within the same instance of discrimination. Being an African American and a former slave removed

180 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

her from the conventions of so-called refined white femininity that denigrated physical labour. She worked and fought with a physicality that performed against the social-contract (Hobbesian) notion that women's political rights are relinquished because of their lack of physical strength. WAITING FOR THE VERDICT ON RACE, GENDER, AND

SEXUALITY

The most sustained and compelling formulation of the connection between the African American and the white woman comes in Rebecca Harding Da vis's Waiting for the Verdict, a text that thematizes the ways in which race, class, and gender get thrust together in the closet constructed by nineteenth-century socio-political relations. Davis's argument is that the definition of American democracy is one that must be both social and political. The rhetoric of political equality is hollow if it becomes that which allows the construction of social inequalities to fill the space created by laws structuring political equality. The figure of Ross Burly, an illegitimate child of her northern mother, Margaret Burly, and a southern wealthy plantation-owning father, James Strebling, whom she never knew, carries the argument about class through the text. She is introduced to us as a smart-mouthed nine-yearold fish-stand girl; as she conies of age, she rejects the overtures of her southern biological father, who comes to her in order to confess his paternity and to offer her an inheritance when she is a young woman. Ross's experiences of discrimination against the poor and of the sociopolitical limitations placed upon her as a woman enable her to have sympathy with African Americans in slavery and those free but enslaved by the prejudice of caste. As the interested Randolph notices of Ross, "These people about her, to the very servant that stood behind her chair, had property in her, he saw: there were a thousand ties between them of which he knew nothing; there were little kindnesses remembered; help given or received on one side or the other; some cheerful, friendly memory in every eye that looked on her" (R.H. Davis 101). What the socially and economically advantaged Randolph is describing with some astonishment is the ethical sociality of the disadvantaged. Granted there are differences in the socio-economic, racial, and gender positions that are all lumped into the category of disadvantage by Randolph, but the sociality seems not to thematize them as divisive. Each has a property right in the other, constructing a sociality of equality based upon the mutual servitude of one to the other. And this is ethical servitude - each bound by "a thousand ties" to the other - rather than the one-way structure of servitude perpetuated by the advantaged class on the wage labourer in one form and the slave in another.

181 Exodus Politics and the Redemption of Difference

In this type of society, Ross's economic and social class impedes the meeting of her female needs, here articulated as the rights of any woman. "But it was her own womanly life that was being stifled, her right to love and be loved, and if she held out her hands and soul to the Something which waited behind that solemn night, crying, 'Thou knowest I have need of these things,' who blames her?" (147). Praying to "the Something" to have her emotional needs met might be potentially blameworthy if the Something is God. But Davis renders that to which Ross prays as ambiguous. Not a naming of God as such or a figuring of the common masculine personification, it is a Something that is a Thou. In Christianity, since God is not one who guarantees human emotional fulfillment and happiness to persons through temporal social relations - happiness is guaranteed only through the love of Jesus then the some thing to which Davis refers may well have more to do with that thing called America, which does guarantee the right to happiness in terms of the right of every citizen to pursue her definition of the good. This is not to suggest that the Constitution guarantees every citizen a partner and emotional fulfillment through him or her, obviously, but rather that America is obligated not to impede the realization of the rights of persons to emotional fulfillment. However, structures of social class, caste, and slavery and the prejudices and discrimination that enforce them do impede the emotional rights of persons. This reading is furthered by the fact that Davis describes these rights economically as a type of property right that each one has in all others. The Constitution does guarantee the rights of property to persons, even at the time the property right in persons. It might seem ironic that the anti-slavery writer Davis makes her argument for equality in terms of the guarantee of slavery, yet her connection of property rights and slavery has a far different sense than that realized in America through the Constitution. Davis's enslavement of the one to the other may well be rigorous and constitutive of the definition of a sociality of persons, but it functions on the basis of the worth of persons. Worth here is a metaphysical term, thematized by Davis ontologically in terms of property rights. Worth is constitutive, designating that people are ends and not means. They are not cast in terms of value, as if able to circulate in a fluctuating economy or presentable on the auction block. Persons are of worth. They do not simply have it, in the sense of describing worth as an attribute. They must live up to it, which is how we get a discourse of being worthy. The worth of persons is universal, and being worthy does not depend upon social or financial status. Davis is trying to think about the politics of identity appropriate to the constitution of democracy in America, and she amplifies her concerns about gender and class with those of caste and race. Predominantly, these latter concerns are located in the character of Dr Broderip.

18 2, The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-Century American Literature

Unbeknownst to readers as the doctor they will come to know later, Broderip appears at the beginning of the novel as Sap, Jim Strebling's light-skinned slave boy, who kills his own dog rather than see him be given to the trashy white girl, Ross Burly. As the plot leaps through the years of Ross's development, Sap escapes to his freedom in the North, becomes educated, and passes as a white doctor named Broderip, who cares for the white patients of his Kentucky town. Since readers are not supposed to know that Broderip was Sap as they follow the plot, they are not supposed to attribute passing as white as the cause of his odd character traits and his description of being a "sickly, moody fellow" (in). What is given to us to think about, however, is how Broderip's difference is cast as a certain femininity. According to Mr Ottley, even though the doctor is moody, he is one whom Ottley "liked as he would a woman" (in). Or, as Garrick notices of Broderip, "He stopped to button his glove: his hand was delicate and shapely as a woman's" (105). "'He has no solid matter-of-fact opinions like other men' ... 'Never talks of politics or finance. He has only his profession, and outside of that he is a woman'" (2.36). Through the male perspectives, we are drawn to think about Broderip's difference as a gender difference. This feminization is constructed by the masculine gaze, that which in this text needs to thematize difference in order to contain its threat. And Broderip's difference is a threat because it cannot be seen or understood by anyone at a glance, troubling the security of the others in this text. Racial difference does not appear on his body. It only signifies nervously in his character, which is read as a gendered characteristic of the female - contained, domesticated, and susceptible to subordination. Though Broderip's difference is unreadable, it can still be ascribed by readers (including other characters in the novel) in ways productive of consciousness. The ascription of the feminine as the yoking of racial and gender difference is not arbitrary. It asks readers to think about the similarity of these as alterities constrained by the politics of white male domination of the public sphere. The conflict intensifies when Broderip and Margaret Conrad begin to fall in love, for on the levels of sex and race, this love is truly one that dare not speak its name. Broderip is thrown into a homosocial panic, becoming even more moody - indeed, downright bitchy - as the "feminine" and the female come into the proximity of love. Homosocial panic is the allegorical venue thematizing the stakes of either coming out of the closet as biracial or being outed eventually by "those who know" -James Strebling, for instance. Whether Mr Ottley knows or not is indeterminate, given the performance of his important conversation with Broderip that iterates what the doctor has done and must continue to do. Of a wife and a home, says Mr Ottley, " 'They are the

183

Exodus Politics and the Redemption of Difference

birthright of every man.' 'Of every man?' [says Broderip] looking up sharply. 'Yes,' something in the doctor's face made him answer, gravely, 'I think so; unless, like you, he voluntarily gives them up,' with an embarrassed Iaugh'"(ii2). The "birthright" and voluntary renunciation designate more than what Mr Ottley ascribes to them. The rights of Broderip's birth as a biracial slave are none; rather, he has had to renounce voluntarily this part of his identity in order to gain any sort of rights at all - education, an income, respect. And they are rights gained at the expense of being at home with oneself. The closeting of racial identity necessary to gain some rights produces the uncanny femininity read by the patriarchal community, which, in turn, produces the panic causing Broderip to renounce his love of Margaret. So the "voluntary" giving up of the birthright in Ottley's terms comes in relay through the "voluntary" giving up of the birthright of identity. The processes reveal how voluntary action on the surface level can be the symptom of political and social coercion. What resolves the conflict is determined by the onset of the Civil War, the conflict on the national level over the status of race of which Broderip's conflict is the allegory. The Civil War causes a crisis of conscience in him between his racial identities, and readers wait, as the title of the text indicates, for the verdict. According to Davis, one of the verdicts is that Broderip will renounce his passing as a white man. He will receive his birthright and come into a valued ownership of his racial identity, eventually deciding to lead an African American regiment to battle in Richmond, Virginia. The verdict, according to Broderip, is described as making a decision between the masculine and the feminine. "Broderip smiled. 'How to be a man - that's what we want to know'" (32,0). " 'To put ease and ambition and woman out of life, to give life itself for the salvation of a race - that was the highest manhood' "(295). It is not only the use of the Civil War as the ground of the figure of Broderip's internal battle that forces the verdict into a binary structure which apparently must decide in favour of only one term. Rather, the discourse constructing masculinity has long defined itself in binary terms, opposing the feminine, which it expels outside itself to the margin as alterity. Patriarchy constructs a certain femininity from itself and casts this inside out in order to define masculinity in contrast to the feminine of it.5 The feminine, in turn, is defined in terms of lack, with a variety of ascriptions given to her sexual organs as predicative of her gender.6 While it is irritating, it is not surprising that the verdict in Davis's text must seem to come in favour of one term at the expense of the other, performing an essentialist move in reverse. Broderip's verdict is that his identity is essentially African, essentially male. Whiteness and femininity help to define these former terms, but then must be cast off.

184

The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

At least, however, Da vis's text performs the constitutive relationship of the African and Caucasian races to the construction of each other, even if it does not ultimately come out in favour of a mutually imbricative definition that would argue against the essentialist verdict. Here I read the significance of the text differently from Don Dingledine, crediting Davis with somewhat more theoretical daring, though without disagreeing with the narrative point he makes. According to Dingledine, Davis "flirts with but ultimately backs away from the possibility of interracial love, as if she feared appearing to sanction miscegenation as one 'verdict' of emancipation" (1115). However, the constitutive intertwining of blackness and whiteness that Davis constructs is traced out through the biblical narrative that inscribes Broderip and forces the limits of his verdict. It stems from the rhetoric of the birthright when considered in terms of his identity as both white and black. Born a black slave, but escaping into freedom and acculturating himself as a white man, Broderip stands poised to be cast as a Moses figure, particularly when his destiny is to cast off his acculturation for, as he says, "the salvation of a race" (R.H. Davis 2,95). It comes explicitly when his brother, a slave who escapes north, says to him, " 'Dy calls M's Linkum Moses. Moses warn't a white man, an' a stranger' ... 'He wur a chie ob de slave woman, an' he went an' stole all de learnin ob his masters, an' den come back an' took his people cross de riber inter freedom. His own people, suh'" (314-15). With reference to binaries in which the two terms are constitutive of each other, even though they appear hierarchically ordered, Davis brings the elder, darker brother of the whiter, younger Broderip into the text to remind him of the responsibilities of the birthright and its link to the people. It is only through the presence of the elder brother that the younger lives up to his birthright. What I think is important to recognize in the various presentations to this point is that white, heterosexual masculinity creates the site of alterity into which all male products of threatening difference are thrust, so as to maintain his uncontaminated image and fiction of pure right. The law is written so as not to recognize alterity - the "mulatto" as son or the woman as equal - so that the legal responsibilities of paternality need not be extended, be they on the level of the actual father or of the state. In this context, then, it is not surprising that in Uncle Tom's Cabin, George's disavowal of the white male political world comes in terms of the relationship between law and representation: "What laws are there for us? We don't make them, - we don't consent to them, - we have nothing to do with them; all they do for us is to crush us, and keep us down. Haven't I heard your Fourth-of-July speeches? Don't you tell us all, once a year, that governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed? Can't a fellow

185

Exodus Politics and the Redemption of Difference

think, that hears such things? Can't he put this and that together, and see what it comes to?" (185, emphasis in original). It comes to racial mixture as that which performs the polemics of the material body and its socio-legal construction. Even though George is a representation of the white father, even though racial mixture in general is a product of white America's economy of slavery, he will not be represented as part of the pater or the father's patria. When the white father will own you but not own up to you, when the force of law will press upon you without your consent, then the response of this son is also that of the father - rejection. Through the mutual disavowals, the father, as land and law, can rob the racially mixed son. There is none of the calling out to the father for acceptance and legitimization of identity found, say, in Langston Hughes's poem "Mulatto," in which the question "what's the body of your mother?" is left "Blue black / Against black fences" near the turpentine woods (1719-2,0). As the father removes himself, mother and child are conflated and will remain so. Identity and lineage are matrilineal. "What's the body of your father?" is a question that is not asked because it is known simply as the force of law. For Stowe's George, ties to the father are severed the moment the father pulls out. Abandonment becomes owned and needs only to be put into action when the child achieves maturity. It is from slavery and its constructed legal mechanics and mathematics that the African American discourse of emancipation as separation is generated. This discourse is fulfillment as much as a reaction to the exclusionary practices of American justice. The father is overcome by being psychically negated: "I have no wish to pass for an American, or to identify myself with them" (H.B. Stowe, Uncle 608). Integration and an emancipation that comes with the recognition of the father in which filial rights are bestowed are rejected: "I want a people that shall have a tangible, separate existence of its own" (608). If the white social-contract narrative of freedom as defined by the sons contains the right to constitute the nation in self-representation out from under the hold of paternal rule, then the sons can do so because they already have a constructed self that can be representable. Liberty is to have a self that can be actualized, to break from the confines of nonproduction and to produce the nation from the self and as the self in representation. For the person of mixed race, however, liberty is first the product of constructing a self in and for itself, which can then be productive and constitute a nation. It is to mature from "bastard" to "man," to move from a definition of lack, "fatherless," which is constructed in relay through the dominant white, male, heterosexual socio-legal structure to a definition of totality. What neither Stowe nor other African American versions of this discourse can get outside of, however, is the

186 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

reinscription of maturity into the white male heterosexual social-contract narrative. If "freedom to George Harris ... is the right of a man to be a man" (H.B. Stowe, Uncle 544), then the definition of that state is constructed entirely in the terms of white paternalism, which demands conjugal right to construct and to further its power. To be a man is, in its first definition, "the right to call the wife of his bosom [h]is wife, and to protect her" (544). What begins in self-development and claims conjugal rights moves within the social-contract narrative to a culmination in the political state. "The desire and yearning of my soul is for an African nationality" (608, emphasis in original). "On the shores of Africa I see a republic, - a republic formed of picked men, who, by energy and selfeducating force, have, in many cases, individually, raised themselves above a condition of slavery" (609). O T H E R W I S E THAN E M A N C I P A T I O N

A number of questions arise which seem to tie the Gordian knot of materialist and constructivist claims and that of the relative possibility of articulating a discourse of emancipation and self-determination for an other differently from thematized versions of one's own tradition. To take the latter first, would it be possible for Stowe to write an emancipatory discourse for African Americans that is itself emancipated from the white, heterosexual, male discourse and to do so while not partaking of emancipation as its structure? How to emancipate otherwise than by emancipation, the white Western tradition dependent upon the hierarchy of self and other in which the self elevates the other by proclamation? Moreover, does this desire for such a possibility not reflect a romantic essentialization of the African American as a radical alterity for whom no one can speak? If so, if others can only speak for themselves, is that structure of a self-determined voice in liberty to speak for itself not already constructed in relay through white Western structures ? This is to question whether authority and authenticity of voice are conferred from within a Western sense of identity politics that is universalized and mapped onto, in this case, the African. This type of universalization comes with colonialism and is that into which the discourses of postcolonialism are roped in their efforts to articulate themselves in distinction to it. To wonder whether there is an Other of pure alterity who is human and living in the actual world is to try to make ontology leap out of itself. As ontology constructs the boundaries of conscious intelligibility, pure alterity cannot signify meaningfully within ontology's terms and do so equally meaningfully on its own simultaneously. The focus of actual socio-political relations cannot seek an Other to ontology, but only that other it has already constructed and

187 Exodus Politics and the Redemption of Difference

thus already judged and partitioned and expelled. For the African American, that one figure of two, there is no way of speaking about liberty in the nineteenth century other than in versions of the American discourse for those other Americans to hear and understand. The African is in America, enslaved in America, which is the heritage of the double nomination. The African American is not an alterity but, rather, the constructed other within the white American imagination. The attempt to write in to that whitened American public sphere so as to construct liberty from America and its discursive containments results in articulations of the very thing African Americans sought to escape. I would suggest, then, that one way to read the racially mixed figure, George, in Uncle Tom's Cabin is as the inseparability on a material level of the teleology of freedom from oppression. The freed figure will still speak a certain social-contract narrative, and freedom from American oppression cannot speak otherwise than in a discourse of freedom inscribed by Americans. That discourse, however, is more polyvalent than as it is usually represented. More often than not, historiography constructing American versions of liberty regards it as fashioned predominantly within a secular discourse of humanism, such that the Declaration of Independence tropes Locke and Paine. More recently, legal scholars have sought to show that when the Declaration, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution are taken together, the documents flesh out a way of thinking about liberty and the people that derives more from the early colonial constitutions, which predate Locke, for example.7 This work is important because it demonstrates that the American social contract - which I would like to think about as an extended period from the Declaration to the Constitution - is not simply the assemblage of European thinking about general rights of man; rather, it is a more particular process that is derived from, yet mediates, the different traditions of liberty and sociality that were materially tied to the "American" land and the experiences of living in it. But the work should not stop there, particularly when the colonial constitutions themselves have their own antecedents in earlier discourses. Southern constitutions hearken back to Greco-Roman concepts and the importance of virtu in regulating individuality and its relations to group polity.8 Northern constitutions were derived in large part from a Hebrew biblical understanding of the law's ethical governance of the socio-political order. Stowe, as I argued in the last chapter, is in this tradition and works hard to underscore the importance of what the biblical ground of secular law can provide for guiding the formation of laws that deal ethically with human difference while maintaining a strong sense of the national group. In so doing, she aligns herself with a similar discourse found in African American

18 8 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

writing that looks to Exodus in the Hebrew Bible as the narrative of emancipation and national formation. If to the Pilgrims, America was a new English Canaan, and to the Puritans it was a New Jerusalem, the promised land at the end of the journey of escape from servitude, then to slaves, America has become the Egypt of slavery, from which an emancipation as an exodus will enable them to free themselves from bondage and to form themselves into a nation. EXODUS POLITICS

That Stowe understands this similarity and irony is apparent in her description of George's "declaration of independence" (H.B. Stowe, Uncle 298) as made from "on the top of the rock": "as if appealing from man to the justice of God, he raised his hand to heaven as he spoke" (298-9). Since George is speaking about the particular individuals in his small familial group of escaping slaves, and since his discourse can be read as referring only to African Americans as free and equal persons in the community of God, one could argue that Stowe is figuring George within the Christian tradition of Jesus's Sermon on the Mount and the Pauline interpretation of it. Yet in as much as the Christian tradition already reads the Sermon on the Mount as troping Moses with the law at Horeb, Stowe in particular suggests that Jesus's sermon gives a representation of the content of the laws found in Exodus for the purpose of producing an ethical people. As a figure, then, the Sermon on the Mount already suggests a relation to Exodus. More importantly, since Stowe explicitly calls George's discourse a "declaration of independence," she is aligning it with that which began the foundation of America as a separate nation and people. This sermon on the mount in Uncle Tom's Cabin has political effects, in that the iteration of freedom for a particular group and race of individuals is made for the purposes of separate nation-building. Ultimately, over a passage of years and a sojourn in a foreign land, George and his family reach the promised land of Liberia and work to build that nation. The figurative similarity between African American slaves, the early Pilgrims, the Jews in Egyptian bondage, and a Christian discourse of redemption is employed often in northern abolitionist literature, with the stress on different aspects of the exodus narrative depending upon authors' explicit sympathies. Sarah J. Hale's colonizationist discourse in her 1853 novel Liberia; or, Mr. Peyton's Experiments stresses the Deuteronomic, in which Liberia becomes a type of Canaan, a land of freedom promised but developed into a nation by the former slaves themselves, who must battle the tribal peoples and clear the land. Figuring the early Liberian settlers as "the Pilgrims" (Hale 145) under-

189 Exodus Politics and the Redemption of Difference

scores the fact that by aligning them with America's own, Hale is giving a Christianized reading of exodus politics and resettlement as a liberation theology.9 Exodus from bondage and the establishment of a religious nation is seen as spiritually redemptive as well as politically and materially liberationist. The Liberian Declaration of Independence is made in the name of "humanity, and virtue, and religion - in the name of the Great God, our common Creator and our common Judge[;] we appeal to the nations of Christendom" (Hale 283). The preamble of the Constitution of Liberia describes the document as "the exponent and guaranty of true republican principles - harmonizing with the Gospel precepts of 'loving our neighbor as ourselves,' and doing to others as we would be done by - which, we trust, are, by the blessing of God, to be extended throughout Africa" (2.83). The constituting of Liberia is a Christian project that tropes the text of the U.S. Constitution, but interprets its secular political discourse through the supplement of Christian redemption. This new testament, so to speak, views itself as completing the old, the American Constitution, by invoking and reinterpreting what Liberian governors felt the Puritans and Pilgrims were trying to achieve - an ethical nation whose politics were religiously cast. Troping the Constitution by invoking Puritan and Pilgrim discourse is done by troping the ways in which Puritan and Pilgrim texts themselves trope Exodus. In the mid-i8oos, for African Americans making the exodus to Liberia to be like the Jews making the exodus to Canaan is to be like the Puritans and Pilgrims making the exodus to America being like the Jews. This multiple tropological relay has to be remembered whenever particular similarities are considered. For example, the particular similarity of African Americans and the Jews comes in the speech of Mr Roberts, the first president of Liberia: "Nor is there any reason to apprehend that the Divine Disposer of human events, after having separated us from the house of bondage, and led us safely through so many dangers toward the land of liberty and promise, will leave the work of our political redemption and consequent happiness unfinished" (Hale 288). Both Roberts's speech and Hale's plot then continue to stress the daily material work that this "finishing" will entail. In the South, Mary Eastman equivocates in her own figuration of African Americans as like the Jews: "The Jews ever turn their eyes and affections toward Jerusalem, as their home; so should the free colored people in America regard Liberia. Africa, once their mother country, should, in its run, be the country of their adoption" (271). Noticeably, Eastman has adopted a different Jewish narrative - not Exodus but a diasporic one from the Psalms: "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue

190 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

cleave to the roof of my mouth" (Psalm 137). A southerner and speaking from within the dominant socio-political position, she cannot accede to an Exodus tropology, which tells the tale of slaves being led out of bondage. In Exodus, repeated calls for release sanctioned by God and backed by destructive plagues work to bring about Pharaoh's consent. For the South to accept the Exodus analogy would be to suggest that abolitionist propaganda and the northern numerical majority and superior military power would eventually effect success. Consequently, by invoking a diasporic narrative, Eastman can logically suggest that returning to the Jerusalem of Monrovia, Liberia, should be an option for all free African Americans. Notice also that this discourse accords with the matrilineal and matriarchal discourse in which the South speaks about those whom they see as "black" people, while signalling that the constitution of these children in America has made them other to the mother while still being hers. Africa is their mother, but they must return and adopt her. In both discourses, political redemption is promoted by the unethical structure of American imperialism: what created slavery in America is also what will resolve and redeem it by creating Liberia. More imperialism to ameliorate the negative effects of imperialism is shored up with a religious form of colonization, missionary proselytism, inscribed as a goal in the Liberian Constitution itself. The " do unto others as you would have them do unto you" structure of Christian ethics is translated as a missionary project signifying a removal from the Judaic. This whole process - the initial Judaic structure employed for separation, which is used as the basis for its own overcoming and universalization into Christian proselytism - allegorizes the Christian interpretation of the relationship between the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, that of employment and subordination through incorporation. Postcolonial critics, particularly Edward Said and Paul Stevens, have argued that the Exodus narrative is a constitutive moment in, if not the ground of, the formation of Western colonialism, because God's promise of the land of Israel comes at the cost of Canaanite lives.10 "Exodus politics," to use Michael Walzer's phrase, in a postcolonial discourse becomes a politics of imperialism with a might-makes-right justification. Chosenness - of the land, of the people - in subsequent versions of imperialism becomes the figure for any sort of constructed ideological pretext justifying slaughter and persecution. Paul Stevens continues the critique to suggest that Christianity commits its own version of the imperialistic error when it translates early Israelite colonialism into its own theology and interpreted applications. "The early Hebrew books of the Bible, as they are remembered and repeated in an expansionist Christianity, contain many of the imperatives, the prescriptions, the

191 Exodus Politics and the Redemption of Difference

ways of thinking that do much to explain the peculiar shape of Western colonialism" (448). This way of thinking he terms "Leviticus thinking," "the tendency of universalizing Christianity to articulate its own sense of transcendent exceptionalism by re-embodying the exclusive, community-building rhetoric of Israel, especially as it is formulated in the Law" (458). Without acceding to the notion that God is just another constructed pretext for humans' material designs of power, I would agree with the argument that later Christian readers, our nineteenth-century white and African American northern and southern readers, often do employ the Hebrew Bible to justify renewed imperial colonialism as a solution for the domestic political effects of their prior religiously invested imperialistic economic actions. The appropriation is unjust to the Torah, just as the appropriation of others' land for human political purposes and material gain is unjust to them. The hermeneutical injustice is multifold. In the Talmudic tradition, while it is not unjust to derive political understanding from the Torah, one must do so only through rigorous interpretation, and not simply of a single passage but of its relationship to its context and of the way in which the passage is troped elsewhere in the Bible. One derives political discourses through interpretation of the text, and interpretation is not easy or clear. An interpretation that collapses the alterity of God into the material designs of persons deals its first injustice to the text, and through it to God. Hermeneutics is always in question because the Levitical "justification" of colonialism may itself be the result of an imperialism of interpretation. Stowe, for example, has George say, "I grant that this Liberia may have subserved all sorts of purposes, by being played off, in the hands of our oppressors, against us ... But the question to me is, Is there not a God above all man's schemes? May he not have over-ruled their designs, and founded for us a nation by them?" (H.B. Stowe, Uncle 609). My own hermeneutics of the "imperialistic" passages in Leviticus questions whether one is supposed to read the land's vomiting forth of the Canaanites and their carnal transgressions (Lev. 18:2,5) as a representation of material actuality. Is it clear that the Hebrew Bible tells a history and refers to acts of dominating colonialism? Is the vomiting land a description of humanity's imperialism or even a figure of it, or need one rather think about the possibility of the Hebrew Bible as a way of telling - even a human way of telling - that performs otherwise than within the confines of particular reference ? I am reminded here of Calvin Ellis Stowe, who understands the texts of the Bibles as written by divinely inspired persons addressing the socio-political issues of their day. The Hebrew and Christian Bibles in this sense are a patchwork of cases unified by their single source, divine inspiration, but

192. The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

distinct in the ways in which theology is written in connection with temporal social politics. "God's penmen," as Stowe calls them, translate inspiration into the imperfection of human language (C.E. Stowe, Origin 18); thus in its inscription there is already an aporia of reference. Not only are all the writers employing an imperfect language, but each, for all his or her humanity, is an idiosyncratic translator, expressing inspiration within the context of interpreting the specificities of temporal politics. Additionally, one needs to question whether divine inspiration is itself of a linguistic order like human language. From reading Genesis, itself in this context already a human interpretation, the most we can derive is that God speaks in what we would imperfectly call pure performatives, and it is even on this basis uncertain whether the performatives can justly be rendered constatively as descriptives.11 From Exodus, when God is said to speak to Moses, we have no clarity. " [I]t was never known if He spoke at great length, if He said all that is attributed to Him, if He did not limit Himself to the first sentence, to the first word or even to the first letter of the Decalogue, which, as if by chance, is the unpronounceable aleph!" according to Emmanuel Levinas ("Promised" 60-1). Since the translations are all heteronymous, the only thing holding them together is their single similarity - divine inspiration - of whose particular content we cannot know. All we can posit is that the project of interpreting these translations of pure alterity is the return to God (C.E. Stowe, Origin 13). This is a continuous project, according to Calvin Ellis Stowe, which cannot be completed by humanity but only by the Messiah. Humanity can only keep returning to the text as the return to God. Stowe suggests that because the words are life, any irreligious analysis is murder ("Right" 43). Thus only the atheistic interpretation of "Leviticus thinking" would have it refer to the priority of imperialism and the beginnings of colonialism. Postcolonial critics conflate the orders of sacred history and human history as if the former "can be perfectly explained by history itself, by political, economic, social history" (Levinas, "Promised" 57). If readers worry that this critique of postcolonial biblical reading is reactionary because it seems to prioritize only theistic hermeneutics over the atheistic, then I would argue that even from within the perspective of regarding the Bible as literature, this type of postcolonial interpretation is still tendentious. The text seeks to make absolute distinctions between the orders of the divine and the human. To collapse them is to conscript this textually constructed categorical difference. The reason I spend time on this issue is that the stakes relate to the nature of justice and a possible hierarchy of its definitions. Is there not a definition of justice that is divine - or, if you wish, universal - and

193 Exodus Politics and the Redemption of Difference

more just than particular nationalistic definitions of it? Particular nationalistic definitions that pretend to universality are those that produce imperialistic colonialism. But surely critics assume the existence of a legitimate universal and ethical justice by the very act of judging the pretensions of nationalistic definitions and their resulting aggressive actions. Should a divine and/or universal sense of justice not be employed to intrude into the domains of injustice? Abolitionist and African American discourses suggest that it must; hence the repeated invocation of Exodus as a theological discourse on the justice of liberation. Exodus is compelling because it is a narrative of divine sanction of intervention into the injustice of slavery. Even though it functions, as Walzer says, as "a paradigm of revolutionary politics" (7), Exodus performs beyond a nationalistic struggle or a treatise against colonialism or the subjugation of minorities. To forget its theological character is to lessen the weight of the divine and to subordinate the ways in which eternal morality has to make persons respond to injustice and to make people into a nation. Were the Jews in Egypt sufficiently galled, organized and strong, and already formed as a nation, they may well have reacted to the oppressions of Pharaoh and battled their way to liberty with their own secular declaration of independence. In this sense, African Americans would not need Exodus, but could fully employ the American Revolution, for example, as the instructive and analogical narrative, working a discourse of secular equality. However, the stakes of slavery invoke issues beyond the hierarchy of political or social equality, though they necessarily encompass those as well. African American identification with the Jews of Exodus situates white American slave-owners as morally deficient and America as an unethical land from which liberation confers the status of moral superiority on African American activists. The stakes of invoking Exodus involve definitional work - defining the people oppressed and judging the oppressor. As Walzer underscores, "the Exodus is not a lucky escape from misfortune. Rather, the misfortune has a moral character, and the escape has a world-historical meaning. Egypt is not just left behind; it is rejected; it is judged and condemned. The crucial terms of that judgment are oppression and corruption" (2.1). Both Exodus and the American revolutionary independence are narratives that involve the cohesion of the people into a nation, but the situation of African Americans as sojourners in a strange land, oppressed there because of their difference, was seen as having affinities far more to the Jews of Exodus than to the American colonists. As with African Americans, the Jews formed a definable group in the strange land, but not a people with political representability, one organized around shared and declared self-definitional principles and rights recognized as

194 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

generated from them. While there are similarities between the American colonists and the Jews in the general terms of both groups working for the gain of a government from which they were alienated, the situations of the colonists and the Jews differ radically in terms of the specificities of their oppressions: colonists were not slaves in perpetuity. And certainly, between African Americans and the Jews of the Exodus story there are significant differences. The individualistic chattel slavery of African Americans is not what Exodus speaks about. "Egyptian bondage was the bondage of a people to the arbitrary power of the state," according to Walzer (30). The state is the master of the Jews, whereas the individual owner is the master of African American slaves. Indeed, Jon Levenson goes so far as to say that "no interpretation of the exodus, then, can be faithful to the biblical text" (153). "Any interpretation that portrays the biblical message as liberation in the sense of manumission is doubly wrong - first, because it fails to reckon with God's ownership of Israel, which is at least akin to a master-slave relationship and is, in some formulations, identical with it; and second, because it overlooks the acceptance of slavery as a social institution in the Hebrew Bible (and in the New Testament)" (Levenson 153). I2 While I sympathize with the anxiety over careful and correct biblical interpretation, the result, in the context of African American usage, shifts the focus from considering why African Americans employed Exodus so heavily and what its uses might have been to that of saying, "Well, they were bad readers, co-opting the text for political purposes. Exodus can't ground the ethical calls for emancipation." And yet, historically, it did, and I think investigation of the Exodus narrative is worthy for what it can suggest about the possibilities of a broader, though perhaps looser, hermeneutics, on the one hand, and the effects of this hermeneutics in the domain of secular politics, on the other. Even though the types of slavery found in Egypt and America are different, what provides a certain ground for the analogical application of Exodus is the quality of the slavery, be-farech, with rigour, which is not just the physicality of strain and the materiality of punishment, but, as Maimonides will come to interpret it, "service without the limits of time or purpose" (qtd. in Walzer 27). I3 When there appears to be no end to slavery, there is appeal to divine intervention as that which is of the order of eternity and which can move within the temporality of eternity. In a very limited sense, Exodus is a messianic prototype geared to set out further the conditions of the possible messianic arrival. God interrupts the eternity of socio-political relations that have inscribed the servitude of one person or set of people to another in order to liberate the oppressed and to forge them into an ethical nation. With Israel, that status is bound to the acceptance of the covenant, which inscribes

195

Exodus Politics and the Redemption of Difference

both a necessary servitude to God and God's protection of Israel. In Liberia, the nation is constituted under God, with an interpretation of God's main ethical principle constituting the nature of the national sociality. The product of the covenant at Horeb, a code of actions to repair the world, functions as a condition of the coming of the Messiah. Within the context of white American immorality and its unethical structure of slavery, African American liberation discourse tropes Exodus as a way of affirming that the struggle of African Americans to be a free people follows the pattern of reinscribing ethics into the definition of justice, and that out of oppression comes an ethical people. One thing that needs to be underscored is that when Exodus is invoked by African American writers in the service of either purely secular or Christian ends, it is not done in any furtherance of Jewish ends. When a Judaic type of interpretation enters the discourse of liberation, as it does, for example, with Harriet Beecher Stowe, the significance is in terms of how this Christian sense of the Judaic amplifies and alters forms of Christianity in America itself. In this type of study, Sojourner Truth becomes a fundamental figure. On the singular and personal level, Exodus is reworked by her as a conversion narrative. During Whitsuntide, after Isabella (her name prior to conversion) has left her master and is residing freely at the Van Wageners', she "looked back into Egypt" (Gilbert 64) and yearned after the fleshpots. "Everything looked 'so pleasant there,' as she saw retrospectively ... and in her heart she longed to be with them" (64). The "fleshpots" of slavery were the bursts of joy and companionability experienced during holidays granted to the slaves by their masters, this "freedom for at least a little space, as well as their wonted convivialities" (64). Frederick Douglass, in contrast, explains why these holidays can be "fleshpots" and can feel so joyous as to lodge themselves in the mind as more free than freedom itself. Speaking particularly about the mandatory holiday between Christmas and New Year's, he reveals how masters encouraged cavorting and abandon, noting that "a slave who would work during the holidays was thought by his master undeserving of holidays" (143). "Not to be drunk during the holidays was disgraceful" (143). Given by the grace of the masters, the holidays inserted pleasure as reward into the system of slavery, and in so doing, they normalized slavery as a regular job. Work for the year and get a week off. Holidays, with their normalizing role, "were among the most effective means in the hands of slaveholders of keeping down the spirit of insurrection among the slaves ... [They] served the purpose of keeping the minds of the slaves occupied with prospective pleasure within the limits of slavery" (144). When the holidays came to a close and pleasure became memory, "they served to keep out thoughts and

196 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

wishes of a more dangerous character" (144). When out of slavery, the liberty of the day-to-day, according to Sojourner Truth, "seemed so dull and void of incident, [and] that the very contrast served but to heighten her desire to return" (Gilbert 64). She longs to the point of deciding to go back with her master, Dumont, when he appears at the Van Wageners'. Here she is decidedly in the wilderness, "psychologically incapable" of accepting liberty.14 What interrupts to stop her return is God, who "revealed himself to her, with all the suddenness of a flash of lightning, showing her, 'in the twinkling of an eye, that he was all over' - that he pervaded the universe - 'and that there was no place where God was not'" (Gilbert 65, emphasis in original). In Truth's Christian discourse, this appearance of God translates the effect of the Sinaitic theophany in the very limited sense that it initiates the process of giving her a new and ethical self: "When I left the house of bondage, I left everything behind" (164); thus Isabella becomes "Sojourner." The name is readable in a number of ways. In one sense, she is a sojourner in that she is still in the wilderness. There is no "promised land" in America as long as injustice is perpetrated against African Americans. She, they, are only sojourners in this land. But the name has a secular imperative if read as troping the religious text in a particular version of Psalm 119:19: "I am a stranger in the earth: hide not thy commandments from me." The stranger sojourning in the land is the one to whom ethical conduct must be given. It is precisely the stranger who longs for the law to be hers, to be written for and to pertain to her. One must be a Sojourner prior to having and in order to have the Truth. If this is Sojourner Truth's invocation of Exodus on the personal level - liberation from slavery, revelation of God, redemption of the self - then on the public level the commentary of her narrative reads the Emancipation Proclamation as the exodus, and the Reconstruction as the wilderness. "The imagination can scarcely conceive a more harrowing spectacle than the vast multitude, composed of both sexes, and all ages from helpless infancy to tremulous senility, roaming about, having no possessions but the bodies which had recently been given them by a dash of Abraham Lincoln's pen" (Gilbert 191-2,). Frederick Douglass takes the point further: "When the Hebrews were emancipated, they were told to take spoil from the Egyptians ... But not so when our slaves were emancipated. They were sent away empty-handed" (514). Manna comes in the form of the Freedman's Bureau, but whatever its temporary virtues of affording time and sustenance to the people, it cannot supplant the task established for the people in this wilderness - that of becoming defined and self-supporting. The wilderness is the time to mature, to become selves and thus a people ready to be a nation. This is to accept a

197 Exodus Politics and the Redemption of Difference

right code of conduct and to be responsible for one's decisions. If one were to misuse the wilderness and rely on the manna of the Freedman's Bureau, "would not this mode of life become productive of enormous evils, since the habits it fostered, having been engendered by the system of slavery, needed not such encouragement?" as Sojourner Truth asks (Gilbert 192). Freedom from the physical chains of slavery is one thing; overcoming the structures of dependency socialized into the self by slavery is quite another. Emancipation is the product of intervention by one figured as the outside within the system with the power to take the subordinated in hand and to elevate them. Freedom from slave mentality is one's own project. It may be aided by another, and material needs certainly play an important role in enabling one to tackle the initial psychological project, but fundamentally the work is one's own. Of the misery created by the Emancipation and the Reconstruction, Sojourner comments with a paraphrase of Psalm 137: "Languishing with homesickness, the worst of ailments, they were a striking counterpart of those sorrowing captives who, sitting by the rivers of Babylon, hung their harps upon the willows and wept for remembered joys" (Gilbert 193). Exodus and its supplement of Psalm 137 establish a tension between material and spiritual concerns. The issue of pining for fleshpots points to the ways in which separation (decathexis) from the material and theto journey through the wilderness of the non-material (poverty) enable the mind's reconstruction of material into fleshpots. It is the work of pining that makes material a fleshpot, and temporality, the making of material history, is fundamental to the process. The ultimate work of this journey, however, which is a divine test, is to be able to render fleshpots immaterial; then and only then are goods replaced by the possession of the law, and through that possession and its constitutive actions is fleshy material re-warded. The people are given the land of "milk and honey." The broader issue, with its psychological dimension, goes beyond the fact that humanity cannot eat liberty, or that spirituality can only be tended to after natural concerns are met. In Exodus, according to Michael Walzer's reading, the material and the spiritual are wound together, so that neither is articulated in absence of the other. Together they work as the effective marketing campaign under the rubric of reward. The people may be chosen to be an ethical nation, and for them this is very nice, but they are chosen to be this nation in the land promised to flow with milk and honey, without which the promise of chosenness may not have sufficient motivating appeal. This binding together of the material and the spiritual is motivated in Exodus by the presence of both Aaron and Moses. Everything sensual and material comes under the name of Aaron, while the spiritual is promoted by Moses (Walzer 38-43). The sensual and the material must

198

The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

be present in order to speak prosaically for the stuttering status of spirituality, which is articulated through uncircumcised lips, afraid of its possible impotence as a discourse (Exod. 4:10, 6:30). The tension is something that Zora Neale Hurston thematizes interpretively in Moses, Man of the Mountain, suggesting that in the African American context, materialism is perhaps the predominating motivational discourse. Aaron and Miriam are power-hungry materialists who fuel the grumbling of Israel to the point well beyond what the biblical calls stiff-necked to that of plain old greedy. Yahweh's irritability and Moses's frustrated exhaustion achieved clear definition in this presentation. However, Hurston steps beyond the text to have Moses grant Aaron's power-hungry wish to meet God, so that Moses can lead Aaron up the mountain and murder him (275). Materialism and imperialism, in the end, cannot be the motivation for the difficult entrance into the Promised Land. Israel must not be fighting for wealth but for its covenant with God. It is significant that in Hurston's text, when Moses kills Aaron, he says, "Is this my brother?" (2,75), which calls to mind the prodigal son elder brother pairings of Cain and Abel and Jacob and Esau and links Moses and Aaron in that line. The difference with Hurston's portrayal is that Moses is made to murder, not for self-aggrandizement primarily, but for the necessity of his task of forming a nation for God. "I have made a nation, but at a price ... Poor Aaron, he died so hard for God" (2,75). Jacob certainly creates the possibility of the nation by receiving the birthright and blessing from Isaac through deception, but whereas Hurston inscribes this similar action of Moses as a necessity, W.E.B. Du Bois reads the deceptions of Jacob as the origin of the entire project of Israelite nation-building in the Hebrew Bible, and predicated, therefore, upon unethical means. These originary and unethical means give rise to a legacy of nation-building constructed upon lies and conquest and the primacy of material gain which is ultimately transmitted through the various interpretations of Christianity into Europe, resulting in what we now call modern colonialism. Du Bois is not making the same argument as Said or Stevens, however, because he accepts that the intent of the Israelites was to follow God's command and to build the nation as the site in which people would live according to "the great standards of right and wrong" ("Jacob" 350). It is arguable that Du Bois does not really take issue with the overpowering of the Canaanites because he accepts that the intent was right. What he does take issue with are Jacob's deceptions and materialistic desires, which are introduced as seeds and which ultimately grow to choke out those "great standards of right and wrong." That is ultimately the heritage passed down to Europe and eventually America via the Pilgrims and the Puritans.

199 Exodus Politics and the Redemption of Difference

Where Hurston and Du Bois are aligned is in the interpretation that the Israelite nationality is not constituted in fraternity. One brother kills or excludes the other so that he can have sovereign leadership. In this sense, Israel is not a social contract at all, but is radically paternalistic and constituted in singularity from God through Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to Moses and Joshua. The possibility of fraternity and fraternal overcoming of the father is excluded at every turn. The social diversity that remains possible in fraternity (though restricted and not a plurality) and is explicitly figured as difference in the Bible - Esau, for example, as the opposite of Jacob in mind and body - is excluded with the manoeuvres against fraternity. Esau is left outside the people to be chosen, which results in a state that "looked upon all its neighbors, not simply with suspicion, but with the exclusiveness of a chosen people, who were going to be the leaders of the earth" ("Jacob" 349). And in Du Bois's mind, the corruption of the right grounding a nation should be read in terms of the Puritan origins of America as well. Ultimately, he reads the way that Israel was chosen to lead the earth as that of the unified state, which "depended upon organization, strict ethics, absolute devotion to the nation through a strongly integrated planned life" ("Jacob" 349). Israel achieves what in a more contemporary discourse is akin to the ideal of a national socialized state, in which the individual does not have the desire to promote himself at the expense of others, because his own self is overcome in working for the promotion of the unified ethical nation. Though Du Bois becomes unclear at this point, my sense is that the experiment of Israel fails not only because the means employed for this ethical end were themselves unethical but also because it is precisely Esau who is the brother of Jacob. Jacob's lack of ethics is the heritage that enables individuals to desire to promote their selves within the nation and at the expense of the others in it. The state resists, resulting in the dispersion of selves who cannot achieve their sense of profit within it. Hence the Diaspora. Yet Du Bois characterizes the Dispora as made of those who, "giving up all hope of profiting by the organized State, sold their birthrights for miserable messes of pottage" ("Jacob" 352). Their self-interest, which is unethical in terms of the state, takes the form of Esau's flaw, the promotion of short-term material gain at the expense of a long-term view of the future built upon right, birthright. Allegorically speaking, it is precisely this return of Esau within Jacob that Hurston is trying to write against in Moses, as she adapts Exodus for African American reading. For her, Moses does not just kill his brother Aaron as wholly embodying materialism and self-interest; he is attempting to render materially the overcoming of the materialism constitutive of his own self: "Is this pitiful old carcass blood of my blood? Maybe this is me myself

2oo The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

in other moods?" (2.75). At the end of the wandering in the Reconstruction, one may infer, African American freedmen must purge, expel, and kill the sort of self-interested materialism of the self if they want to constitute themselves as an ethical people. EXCLUSION AND COMMUNITY

There are problems that need to be articulated at this juncture in which self-interest must be radically subordinated to the interests of the community as the first step toward nation-building. The first problem concerns the suspicion of those who must be excluded in the shoring up of the chosen ethical community; the second concerns the ways in which the claim of chosenness and the ethics of chosenness lend themselves toward political millennialism. Of the first, I am drawn to Du Bois, who inflects gender into the structure of emancipation and Reconstruction. Speaking about the establishment of the Freedmen's Bureau, he says, "Here at a stroke of the pen was erected a government of millions of men, - and not ordinary men either, but black men emasculated by a peculiarly complete system of slavery, centuries old; and now, suddenly, violently, they come into a new birthright, at a time of war and passion, in the midst of the stricken and embittered population of their former masters" (Souls 2.0). Even though men, women, and children are emancipated, as indicated importantly in Sojourner Truth's discourse, Du Bois focuses on the men, rhetorically indicating that emancipation is a move from emasculation to masculinity. What the Reconstruction does is to reconstruct the masculinity of the male self, giving it the right of male birth as representability. But that reconstruction is also one of the people themselves and, particularly here, a reconstruction of gendered difference into the singularity of masculinity. Emancipation may take difference in hand, but reconstruction uses one hand to subordinate femininity while it furthers masculinity as representable. Given the context of Exodus and the reconstructive work of the wilderness, I question whether this promotion of masculinity as the representation of the people emancipated is not also one of the legacies of a secular interpretation of "chosenness." The Jews are liberated from enforced servitude in Egypt and move into a certain servitude to God (Lev. 25:55). This is the ethical "choice" of the covenant. It is an act of choice in which performance comes prior to choice proper - choice as a product of understanding. The result of the ethical act, servitude to God, is servitude with a difference because God is bound to Israel as well. This is servitude in and as justice, because it enables Israel to live its daily relations in absolute justice between one and another. Such is not the case with African American emancipation and reconstruction. Female servi-

zoi

Exodus Politics and the Redemption of Difference

tude to males does not partake of even a similar performative structure to the Jews at Sinai, and women's effacement under the law, their nonself-representability, cannot be construed as forming a just sociality. The Reconstruction functions in the absence of women's choice and chooses men as the representation of "the people." This choice, according to Michele Wallace, stems from a prior choice, that of deciding to figure slavery as a process of emasculation. Citing the works of male historians and literary critics - and I will add Du Bois to this list - Wallace demonstrates how slavery is rewritten from a male point of view, which sees even the rape of African women as one of the causal factors undermining African masculinity. Because men assume a property right in women, rape of the female body is not articulated in terms of its effects on her body and psyche. She is the object only - object of both the act perpetrated by white men and the African man's property. Women, rape, and its effects are subordinated and re-evaluated as offences to the construction of African masculinity. In the historical accounts it matters that women are raped by white men, but what matters more is how rape emasculates African men. Importantly, rape becomes an incident in male racial and sexual politics according to the narrative of slavery. It is cast as a power tool in the white man's subordination of the black man, which marks the prioritizing of the racial issue at the expense of the sex/gender issue in the narrative reconstruction. In this reconstruction, what rape "means" is that African men were denied patriarchal and paternal rights, not by white men alone but also necessarily by African women who submitted themselves to being raped. Their being raped encourages the interpretation of the act as just another of the means by which African women could use their femininity to maintain a certain security within slavery that was unavailable to the African male. She was able to use her sexuality; he, by and large, was not. Any attempt to offer himself to white female desire resulted in at least the whipping and beating of his body, if not his castration or death. "The picture drawn for us over and over again," says Wallace, "is of a man who is a child, who is the constant victim of an unholy alliance between his woman and the enemy, the white man" (34). When discourses dislocate the rape of African women by white men from being an offence against women and relocate it as a tool in the power play of racialized male conflict, they promote the goal of racial equality at the expense of African American gender equality. "[T]he myth of the black man's castration in slavery, or at least the joint participation of the white man and the black woman in a ruthless attempt to castrate him, has been nurtured over a century," as Wallace indicates (40). And it is through the misogynist turn of this myth that black men

2.O2 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

justify their angry exclusion of black women from a unified movement for and discourse of racial equality. Of the black man, says Wallace, "his actual gripe must be, at least in part, that the black woman, his woman, was not his slave, that his right to expect her complete service and devotion was usurped. She was, after all, the white man's slave" (40, emphasis in original). The idea, produced as a male historicgraphic construction, that the effect of the wrongs of slavery was emasculation set the agenda for the period of the wilderness from the Reconstruction to the present as that of coming in to the birthright of masculinity, which is at base the ownership of patriarchal right built upon paternalistic conjugal right. This is not simply the right to have a wife as a legal partner and a partner as legal and social equal. Rather, the sexualized and masculinized discourse of racial inequality promoted the idea that African American men fold themselves into the structure of white male domination. Racial equality as racial equality for men meant achieving the right - a "right," as it was conceived, predicated upon the specificity of birth - to subordinate women. It is significant that all these narratives are cast in a heterosexual frame of reference that works to shore them up. The binaries of man/woman and masculine/feminine are constructed to prioritize the first term over the second. Yet the spectre of the female and feminine perpetually haunts and torments this structure of domination/subordination, and she will not rest until this masculine priority is dismantled. In Wallace's argument, for example, there is the sense that justice would be rendered when racial equality and heterosexual gender equality are recognized as intertwined and themselves equalized in praxis. However, figuring heterosexuality as the totality does so at the expense of homosexuality, which also demands recognition of its constitutive role in this construction. When the African male body becomes the site of white male physical domination, often the acts of beating and certainly castrating that body become sexualized and homoeroticized. Frederick Douglass, for example, narrates that the slave-breaker, Mr Covey, always demanded that Douglass be naked when Covey whipped him. "He ordered me to take off my clothes. To this unreasonable order I made no reply ... After many threats, which made no impression upon me, he rushed at me with something of the savage fierceness of a wolf, tore of the few and thinly worn clothes I had on, and proceeded to wear out on my back the heavy goads which he had cut from the gum tree. This flogging was the first of a series of floggings" (116). If the whipping is confined to the back, then removing the slave's shirt makes the contact more direct and the pain more intense. When the whipping is confined to the back but the entire body is stripped, then this excess certainly works as a means of further degradation. Both of these interpretations function in the service of reading whipping as a disciplinary act that defines white,

203 Exodus Politics and the Redemption of Difference heterosexual masculine power.15 But the rushing with savage fierceness to tear off all the scant clothing suggests the possibility of thinking about the sexuality of the scene more widely. Certainly, one can claim that one of the reasons why white men opt for sadistic bondage scenes - the tying, stripping, whipping, and sometimes castrating of African males - is to reinforce the power of their masculinity over that which threatens them, thus reinscribing in the minds of white men, at any rate, their right to women of any sort. Physical power equals heterosexual power. And yet because the whipping scenes are sexualized, because they often do focus on the penis and perform homoerotic sadism, there is room to question the specificity of the "threat" located in the body of the African male; room enough to wonder whether homoerotic desire is performed, disciplined, and punished by the white man himself under the pretext of degrading and often destroying African masculinity. When the white masculine gender is troubled by envy of African male sexuality or, more explicitly, desire for the African male body, the blackness and the male sex of the African body combine to be posited as that which is sexually a part of white masculinity, but which must be rendered apart from it, exteriorized as other, enslaved, bound, stripped bare, and incised by a variety of prosthetics - the goad of the gum tree, the leather whip, the branding iron, the burning poker. In order to inscribe the discourses of racial and sexual equality as heterosexual, homoerotic performance must be forgotten or overdetermined by heterosexual interpretation, inscribing yet another of the choices of African American discourse in its representation of the people. MESSIANIC OR UNIVERSAL EQUALITY

For all its faults and exclusions, the fundamentally heterosexual male discourse of racial equality is still one that posits itself as teleologically linked with an absolute sense of universal equality. When the discourse inscribes itself in terms of exodus politics, it structures one of its possibilities as messianic. Here, "reaching the Promised Land" becomes the predicate of a universal justice. Once political equality is achieved, then can the sociality of loving the neighbour be practised and the failings of the world eventually be redeemed. This is not to suggest that the work of Israel brings the Messiah. It is not that the justice of loving the neighbour as the repairing of the world leads to a stage of near completion, which is then judged as passing the test, or some such thing, for the Messiah to come and take the final steps. According to Gershom Scholem, The paradoxical nature of this conception exists in the fact that the redemption which is born here is in no causal sense a result of previous history. It is

204 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature precisely the lack of transition between history and the redemption which is always stressed by the prophets and apocalyptists. The Bible and the apocalyptic writers know of no progress in history leading to the redemption ... It is rather transcendence breaking in upon history, an intrusion in which history itself perishes, transformed in its ruin because it is struck by a beam of light shining into it from an outside source. (10)

Kafka phrases it somewhat differently, though the temporality is similar: "The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last" (81). I am rather suggesting that the formation of the ethical nation, the acceptance of the covenant at Horeb, is necessary for propelling the messianic cessation into narrative being. Without the covenant, the nation, and ethical action, there would be nothing for the Messiah to cease. Furthermore, even when the sense of the messianic is Christian, as in the African American narrative under examination here, messianism still depends upon Exodus as that which conditions its possibility. One needs the being of the ethical nation first in order to have the Messiah come at all. There must be Exodus and the Sinaitic theophany in order to have Isaiah and Jeremiah, and these texts in order to have the sense of Jesus as the redeemer figured in them, his crucifixion as enabling the possibility of a Second Coming and the Judgment Day. Even when " Christian writers tended to spiritualize the Last Days and to describe redemption as a state of the soul, not of the world," as Walzer states (122-3), the possibility of the soul's redemption in the African American narrative comes only after a very temporal emancipation. Contra Stowe, and contra Paul's Philemon, there is very little sense in African American former-slave narratives of redemption in slavery. Emancipation as a certain exodus is, rather, that which enables spiritual redemption. Personal spiritual redemption as conversion in the here and now of African American narratives comes as typologically associated with the Final Judgment. Such is the case with Olaudah Equiano, who shapes his Interesting Narrative so that it will tell of his secular and physical emancipation as being an important moment in his more fundamental salvation. This is salvation by Jesus, and the trajectory of the narrative artistically represents much of the Pauline interpretation of the relationship between the Christian and Hebrew Bibles. As he is educated into Christianity by the English, Equiano is concerned throughout his narrative to show the ways in which the figure of election moves through the two Bibles, culminating in knowledge by faith. To this end, he initially works to structure the similarity between the Jews of the Hebrew Bible and his people and their customs in Africa. He terms it "the strong analogy" (22) be-

205

Exodus Politics and the Redemption of Difference

tween "the manners and customs of my countrymen and those of the Jews, before they reached the Land of Promise, and particularly the Patriarchs, while they were yet in that pastoral state which is described in Genesis - an analogy which alone would induce me to think that the one people had sprung from the other" (2.2). "Their religion appeared to have shed upon us a ray of its glory, though broken and spent in its passage, or eclipsed by the cloud with which time, tradition, and ignorance might have enveloped it. For we had our circumcision ... we also had our sacrifices and burnt-offerings, our washings and purifications, on the same occasions they had" (2,3). Of this similarity, Equiano says that he learned it while listening to Daniel Queen quote Scripture to him while aboard the small gunship Aetna. "I was wonderfully surprised to see the laws and rules of my own country written almost exactly here; a circumstance which, I believe, tended to impress our manners and customs more deeply on my memory" (64). The multiple relays going on here are intriguing. On the one hand, the narrative is the product of hindsight, such that all these comments, descriptions, and evaluations come through the perspective of Equiano's later self, and readers begin to notice how that perspective conditions the presentation. This conditioning is perhaps unavoidable in writing after the event, but it is also manipulable. In this instance of the analogy between the Jews and Equiano's countrymen, it is already a function of the Book to iterate to the self what and who he is. It is in relay through the Hebrew Bible that Equiano will impress the memory of his customs deeply. This impression, however, seems akin to repression, in that the distinctions of his country's customs are re-marked, impressed upon by the desired perception of similarities. Choosing to identify himself with the Jews, which he must do if he is to pass through into Christianity, comes after an attempt to identify himself and his customs with non-religious aspects of white culture. When he first sees a picture hanging on the wall, he says, "I thought it was something relative to magic; and not seeing it move, I thought it might be some way the whites had to keep their great men when they died, and offer them libations, as we used to do to our friendly spirits" (39). Magic and the libations to the friendly spirits disappear altogether and necessarily when identification is to be figured in terms of the Jews.16 Similarly, the choices of identification with the Hebrew Bible are impressed upon by Equiano's ultimate identification with Christianity. For instance, upon making his first stop at a Virginia plantation, he takes the name Jacob (39), which he does not wish to give up when he is renamed Gustavus by his master and captain of the ship sailing back to England (40). The aspect of Jacob with which Equiano wishes to identify is only the wrestling with God. And this is employed as

2.o6 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

wrestling decontextualized from the biblical narrative of Jacob, because Equiano needs it to function as a Christian allegory thematizing the process of conversion. Throughout, his narrative wrestles with the question of how one can be saved, of how one can know that he is chosen as one of the new Israel and thus redeemed. The question is amplified by Equiano's later writing himself as a certain Josef, in that he is ever underscoring his productive capacity for dreams that prognosticate his fate (io8). 17 The Josef figure also structures another link between the Jews and Africa, because it is from Josef that the plenitude of Jews in Egypt will come forth. In Equiano's Christian frame, Jacob wrestles with God and secures the possibility of election; he becomes Israel. He produces Josef, whose capacity to dream and to read those figures in the right way brings about the preconditions of Exodus. This emancipation becomes the precondition for salvation. To both Jacob and Josef, Equiano adds a third figure, Job, passages from whose text Equiano uses particularly to justify the importance of dreaming (Job 4:12-13, 33:14-1$, 2,9-30; Equiano 109, 136). But I would also argue that Job is here because he functions in the same context of anxiety and the questioning of one's worth in God's eyes. I think that ultimately Equiano identifies himself with Job in that Job's narrative affords him the possibility of reading slavery as the test through which he is put by Satan and God. By identifying his countrymen's customs with those of the Jews, he attempts to show how he was always "a perfect and upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil" (Job 1:8), in the sense of being one of the elect. The trial of slavery - the full trial of slavery, emancipation, and reconstruction as salvation - in which one loses everything, is a questioning of the identity and worth of the self in relation to God. If one can weather the trial and affirm his belief in God, then he will be rewarded with salvation, the knowledge that he is justified in God's judgment. In this sense, one becomes "prosperous again," with "twice as much as he had before" (Job 42:10), affirmative knowledge of election being the supplement. The ultimate identification is with Job also because this is the name produced by Jacob and Josef when their productive "faces" are elided. The initiative of the force that impresses and represses is the recognition of the self as already in the Bible via analogy. The recognition is made possible in the reconstructive telling of the narrative, because Equiano has already been saved. Figured as an enlightenment, salvation comes as "the Lord was pleased to break in upon my soul with his bright beams of heavenly light; and in an instant, as it were, removing the veil, and letting light into a dark place. (Isa. xxv. 7)" (Equiano 142). Equiano can see that he and his countrymen are there in the Bible

2.O7 Exodus Politics and the Redemption of Difference

because the light of God has illuminated both Equiano's own darkness, his being in the dark and unable to see, and that of the text, that which was previously hidden. What is troubling about the rhetoric is that the veil that is lifted from Equiano is precisely the tissue over the body, the differences between his countrymen and the Jews, as represented in the colour of darkness. According to Equiano's rhetoric, there are two ways to think about this difference. If, according to Paul, we are all one in Christ Jesus, then the circumcision of the heart necessary for Christian conversion is a figurative circumcision of the flesh. Colour and its differences are only skin deep, and thus conversion circumcises the skin of difference in order to construct similarity. The other way of imagining the process comes by way of the lightening of illumination such that the darkness of sin - of misunderstanding, of difference - is whitened away. This is to signal the ways in which Christianity inscribes itself as a white Western discourse under the pretext of universalism. Humanity may all be one in Christ Jesus, but that one figure is not black in the Christian narrative. It is to this ideological process that many African Americans have reacted negatively. Some reject Christianity altogether, choosing other religions or none at all. Others operate within Christianity to recuperate a sense of racial and ethnic particularity within the universality of humanity; hence the rhetoric of a black Jesus, argued by way of the easternness of Semites.18 The converted Equiano, writing his conversion-slave narrative, recuperates the Jews in order to argue for his similarity so as to, in turn, dissolve them and the similarity in the body of Christ. As converted, Equiano accepts the doctrine of predestination and God's universality (see chapter 10, I3Z-45), which enables his recognition of already being there and God's always being there. "Now every leading providential circumstance that had happened to me, from the day I was taken from my parents to the hour, was then, in my view, as if it had but just then occurred. I was sensible of the invisible hand of God, which guided and protected me, when in truth I knew it not: still the Lord pursued me, although I slighted and disregarded it; this mercy melted me down" (143) - predestination and the melting-pot universalism of Christianity. The acceptance is important in structuring the fundamental justification, that divine teleology must overcome the heathen and the Jews, bringing all through Jesus to the Judgment Day. Christian salvation is a reconstruction that incorporates but subordinates and thus overcomes that which has come before, be this the self articulated in indigenous culture and spirituality or the Jew, the slave, and so on. Not all slave and former-slave conversion narratives lay the same stress on incorporation as subordination as does Equiano's. Indeed, it is ironic that someone who had experienced slavery because of his ra-

2.o8 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-Century American Literature

cial difference and who gained freedom would be so anxious to be converted into a rhetoric of subordination, as if being subordinated was the fleshpot itself that was returned to in a reconstructed version. Certainly, the two are of radically different orders, and the subordination to God still operates within the achievement of material political freedom; however, the willingness to subordinate racial and ethnic particularity within Christianity is the product of how one interprets the specificity of conversion and, more loosely, the point of it. When racial and ethnic particularity is subordinated, conversion may still help the self as one becomes part of the community in Christ, but it comes at the expense of a material connection to the racial and ethnic community and its particularities. The Stowes, for example, reject the subordinating necessities of incorporation, and through a reading of Paul that recuperates the ethnic and nationalistic particularities of the Jews, they discover ways to have Christianity speak to and importantly work for difference. Sojourner Truth, I would argue, follows a similar route. Like Equiano, she follows a trajectory of physical emancipation, the wilderness of anxious soul-searching, and the promised land of conversion and salvation, but she turns within Christianity to the materiality of a working for the particularities of others, to the promotion of racial and ethnic differences within a distinct community, and to the literality of separation and the promised land. In her narrative, Sojourner Truth's particular conversion experience seems to set the terms for the general. When she is about to return to the Egypt of her former owner, Mr Dumont, God appears to her to "look" at her, and with this look "she became instantly conscious of her great sin ... All her unfulfilled promises arose before her, like a vexed sea whose waves run mountains high; and her soul, which seemed but one mass of lies, shrunk back aghast from the 'awful look' of Him ... Another such 'a look,' as she expressed it, and she felt that she must be extinguished forever ... A dire dread of annihilation now seized her, and she waited to see if, by 'another look,' she was to be stricken from existence, - swallowed up, even as the fire licketh up the oil with which it comes in contact" (Gilbert 65-6). The revelation that predicates her conversion is cast in terms of Revelation (1:8, 8:8; see also Dan. 3:2.5), yet she is saved by the intervention of Jesus, who appears "to stand between herself and an insulted Deity" (Gilbert 66). The presentation of this scene is suggestive of the way in which conversion is an ethical act that results in justice. The figure of the look of God suggests a face, but one that is not described in ontological terms as a human face. It is, rather, an alterity, the Alterity, which calls the being of the one into question. It destabilizes the ontological construction of the self such that one cannot even speak for herself. Answering the

zc>9

Exodus Politics and the Redemption of Difference

call of the one comes another, who will "stand between her and God!" (67), mediating the encounter. The third, who ushers in the possibility of mediation, brings the originary ethical encounter into the realm of justice. Whereas pure alterity is indescribable in the ethical encounter, the alterity of the third in justice enables the possibility of thematization in human terms. Jesus "seemed but human" (Gilbert 68). The alterity of the other in justice is still an alterity, thematizable if not wholly knowable. The trace of absolute alterity in the realm of justice, traced through the third, renders cognition in ontology undecideable. As Sojourner Truth phrases it, " T know you, and I don't know you.' Meaning, 'You seem perfectly familiar; I feel that you not only love me, but that you always have loved me - yet I know you not - I cannot call you by name'" (Gilbert 67). She is converted, I would argue, to justice through the ethical encounter with God by recognizing that the third is present in the encounter and enables it to " be." The being of the ethical, which is its existence in the ontological as justice, is marked by the feeling of eternal love, the being and having been loved by that which is but human. In conversion, one is present in this trivium, which is no less that which enables the possibility of judgment yet is less articulated within Christianity - the ethical trivium of two human terms and that which is Other. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are articulated as Man and Woman within Alterity. The conversion is both to God and to justice, which is to say that the latter is the recognition of the self, convertible as an other. Every one is emancipated from the slavery of unicity to that of being an other for someone else. One is emancipated from selfishness into an ethical being who lives according to the work of justice. It is in this sense that Sojourner Truth maps her own conversion onto the entire community of African Americans, bridging the secular reading of emancipation, traced through the Judaic, to that of Christian redemption and the resurrection of the self as a new self. "The angel of emancipation had rolled the stone away from the door of the sepulcher of slavery, and the resurrected millions, bound hand and foot in the graveclothes of ignorance, bewildered and uncertain, awaited guidance in this transition hour" (Gilbert 196). Emancipated but waiting in the wilderness, redemption as love does not yet come.19 Underscoring how in a Christian interpretation Jesus is typologically linked to Moses, Sojourner Truth's rhetoric figures a relay through the Hebrew Bible and the temporal human work of repair before the final redemption can come. "Would a Moses appear to remove the bands from wrist and ankle, and with uplifted finger pointing to the pillar of cloud and of promise, lead them forth from this sea of troubles and plant their weary feet upon the Canaan of their desires? Would manna descend

2io The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

from heaven to feed this multitude, who were morally, physically, and intellectually destitute? As neither man nor miracle appeared, Sojourner said, 'Lord, let me labor in this vineyard' " (Gilbert 196). The question that must propel that labour is one of justice: "how [to] begin the work of establishing right relations where chaos reigns?" (Gilbert 196). True to the discourse of Exodus, the way concerns the promise of land for an independent African American people; yet true to the discourse of American liberty, justice within this separation concerns a self-reliant following of right relations constituted by spirituality, independence, and economy. During the wilderness of the Reconstruction, the Freedmen's Bureau provided the manna of subsistence, but the goal of working toward self-sufficiency could best be promoted if Washington, DC, promised to African Americans "a portion of the public land in the West, and erect [ed] buildings thereon for the aged and infirm, and otherwise legislate[d] so as to secure the desired results "(Gilbert 199; see also 2,2,7). "With God's blessing, they might yet become an honor to the country which had so cruelly wronged them. This scheme presented itself to her mind as a divine revelation, and she made haste to lay her plan before the leading men of the government" (Gilbert 198). Freedom is difficult or, in Michael Walzer's terms, it is a "discipline" (53) that takes time and guidance, and self-reliance. If the Jews had been allowed to rely on manna from heaven, they would never have galvanized themselves into a people worthy of God and the Promised Land. For Sojourner Truth, if free African Americans are allowed to rely on the handouts of the government, they will never learn to be worthy of their freedom. If, however, they are promised land, then they will become ready, will enter, and will live as a people free from economic dependency.20 In contrast to Olaudah Equiano's divine revelation, however, Sojourner Truth saw no need for removal to Africa as the promised land; instead, she advocated for "a colony in the West[.] This is why I am contending so in my old age. It is to teach the people that this colony can just as well be in this country as in Liberia" (Gilbert 2,39-40). Separation and the selfconstitution of racial and ethnic difference can be incorporated in America without subordination. It is part of the justice of American liberty that it does not have to expel difference in order to secure itself. That is part of the legacy of emancipation in America. Slavery on the basis of racial difference was pronounced wrong. Enfranchisement of freedmen marks the recognition that difference constitutes liberty, and Truth is articulating here that difference needs the liberty of its own self-constitution, which can then be confederated with that of others. It is clear that Sojourner Truth was not out only to save the souls of African Americans but also to save their selves from being incorporated

2ii

Exodus Politics and the Redemption of Difference

into the American political machine and thus subordinated to the will of the white majority. She secularizes but also Judaizes the discourse of redemption by returning to the Exodus narrative and articulating it in terms of African Americans. In this sense, she works the politics of Exodus and stays within an Exodus politics that would wish to construct a just community of racial difference. Her difference from traditional Exodus politics is that she is a reformed Judaizer, so to speak. The Diaspora is here. Africans have been carried all over the world; and while one must not forget thee, O Jerusalem, and next year we may find ourselves in Jerusalem, there is no necessity to return once and for all in order to have a just sociality under God. Lincoln has done the divine thing in secular political form by enabling the possibility; now all African Americans need is the space. Even though she began her political work religiously in 1843, and even though redemption and emancipation were intertwined for her, Sojourner Truth never moved into a discourse of political messianism or became a messianic militant. Others, however, did make that move, particularly in the South, where rigorous oppression continued and seemed perpetual. Freedom in the North and slavery in the South probably contributed to a readiness to "welcome, even to initiate, the terrors that precede the Last Days," resulting in a willingness to employ "the strange politics of the worse, the better; and hence the will to sin, to risk any crime for the sake of the End," to use Walzer's phraseology (145). The "end" for African American messianic militants such as Denmark Vesey or Nat Turner was a political end spiritually inflected the end of slavery by means of a violence that would shake the foundations of America, enacting a damning judgment upon slave-owners. MESSIANIC MILITANCY: STOWE'S

DRED

It is certainly the threat of this type of militancy that Harriet Beecher Stowe employs in her second novel of slavery, Dred: A Tale of the Great Swamp. The character Dred, whose name indicates what he wishes to instill in the hearts of whites in the South, is the son of African American insurrectionary leader Denmark Vesey. Vesey, a freedman in Charleston, South Carolina, led a violent but unsuccessful "insurrection in which thousands of persons were supposed to have been implicated, [though] only thirty-six were convicted" in 182.9 (H.B. Stowe, Dred 1:260). His "great instrument of influence was a book that has always been prolific of insurrectionary movements, under all systems of despotism" (1:257) the Bible. "He likened his own position of comparative education, competence, and general esteem among the whites to that of Moses among the Egyptians; and nourished the idea that, like Moses, he was sent as a

2.12,

The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-Century American Literature

deliverer. During the process of the conspiracy, this son, though but ten years of age, was his father's confidant" (1:261), and he inherits, as Stowe says in an overdetermined way, Vesey's Bible (1:264, 2:78). Fourteen years of age at the time of Vesey's rebellion, trial, and hanging, Dred is not implicated by the authorities and is sold from plantation to plantation in the South. After killing an overseer, a Mosaic act in itself, he flees into the swamps carrying the Book, learning from it "the wrathful denunciations of ancient prophets against oppression and injustice ... of kingdoms convulsed by plagues; of tempest, and pestilence, and locusts; of the sea cleft in twain, that an army of slaves might pass through and of their pursuers whelmed in the returning waters" (1:263). He thus develops "a Hebraistic coloring to [his] habitual mode of expression" (1:264), based in Exodus, routed through Isaiah and Jeremiah, and amplified by Revelation. Because of the Pauline division between the letter and the spirit, carnal materiality and heartfelt spirituality, the Hebrew Bible in a Christian reading is a carnal discourse of justice that has been overcome by a spiritual discourse of love and mercy. Whenever secular, temporal, political issues concerning justice arise, ones that generate human emotions of wrath in the oppressed, it is in the Hebrew Bible that they find, according to Christianity, a sympathetic God, one whom they see as acting as they would act. The error of militants is that they take God's actions as justification for their own, rather than recognizing that they read God and the significance of God's actions in the image of their own, which is blasphemous. However, Christianity reinforces the literality of the Hebrew Bible and encourages the sense of its carnality. It is not surprising that fervent Christians, quite literally oppressed, find justification for performing carnal violence in support of justice in the Hebrew Bible as the enactment of what is most Christian. It is only through the performance of a fleshy justice that merciful redemption can be brought about as its overcoming. Certainly, Stowe presents this type of understanding as corrupt, and she attributes it, in the case of militant slave rebels, to being a product of the Christianity implanted in the soil of their Oriental tropicality (1:264). Their Orientalism suggests their predisposition to connection with the Jews of the Bible, who themselves became corrupt and require salvation, but Stowe also indicates the way in which African voodoo, magic, and mesmerism take hold of the visions and prophecies told in the Bible, claim them as their own, and use the perceived similarity to confer on African spiritualists the status of contemporary prophets. "The grandfather of Dred, on his mother's side, had been one of these reputed African sorcerers, and he had early discovered in the boy this peculiar species of temperament" (1:342). The prophetic temperament

zi3

Exodus Politics and the Redemption of Difference

gives Dred the authority among slaves to read the Bible as prophetic of African American slavery. He possessed "the secret of snake-charming" (i:34z), the voodoo shown by Moses, which links Dred typologically to Moses.21 Exodus becomes a prophecy of how slavery will be overcome; Revelation is read as the supplement prophetic of the just judgment to be rendered upon the slave-owning Egyptian (American) oppressors. "The Lamb yet beareth, and the opening of the second seal delayeth!" (2:85; reference to Rev. 6:3). Ultimately, this - for Stowe - corrupt reading must be overcome, and significantly, it is in the prevailing voice of the African American woman Milly. Though in the novel Milly is dealt harshly by white American justice - the materiality of the law comes down against her with the carnality of the master's whip - her belief in the Christian Bible is what enables her to realize that retribution is not hers, but that judgment against her oppressors and their "justice" will be rendered in God's name on the final Judgment Day of true justice. That day will come in God's time by God's volition, and not by hers. "If dere must come a day of vengeance, pray not to be in it! It's de Lord's strange work" (2:98). "Oh, brethren, pray de Lord to give 'em repentance! Leave de vengeance to him. Vengeance is mine - I will repay, saith de Lord. Like he loved us when we was enemies, love yer enemies!" (21:99) The voice of the woman saves - saves the men from committing sin, because she herself has been saved - which enables her to promote the divine temporality delay and the impossibility of knowing when the Judgment will come. "Oh, brethren, dere's a better way. I's been whar you be. I's been in de wilderness! ... But I's come to Jesus, de Mediator of de new covenant, and de blood of sprinkling, which speaketh better tings than dat of Abel" (2:99). As in Uncle Tom's Cabin., the female voice overcomes the male, representing the New Testament's overcoming of the Old. She is the bearer of the new covenant, the discourse of salvation, and the material work of love. Milly intervenes to bring Dred and the conspirators into the new covenant; however, the sprinklings of the blood remain in Stowe's discourse, sprinklings of the male, the carnal, and the value of the material. Even though she presents the connection between slaves and Jews, voodoo and prophecy, justice and rebellion, as corrupt, she does so not without some sympathy: "Who shall say that, in this world, where all things are symbolic, bound together by mystical resemblances, and where one event is the archetype of thousands, that there is not an eternal significance in these old prophecies? Do they not bring with them 'springing and germinant fulfillments' wherever there is a haughty and oppressive nation, and a 'flock of the slaughter'?" (2:84-5). Even though Dred does not culminate in rebellion and the sin of

114 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

murder, but folds itself back into an exodus narrative in which Canada is figured as the Promised Land, Stowe at least demonstrates a sympathetic acknowledgment of the claims justifying a material justice in the archetype of a carnal Israel. It would only be attribution to say so, but one wonders whether her sympathy does not come from her own position as a woman in the nineteenth century, a gender cast into a position of curtailment felt to be associated with slavery, with its very human desire to force off the chains of inequality. When Milly asks, "Oh, won't it suffice, brethren?" (2:99), I hear Stowe, like Dred, ambivalently assenting. Equiano's conversion results in a Christianity that works to save souls and intervenes in secular politics only to address its effects - to uplift the fallen and to heal the sick. The focus is on Africans and making them the most Christian of peoples. Because of the way in which they have lived through events similar to those in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, African Americans have the propensity and the best possibility of being like Jesus on earth. Sojourner Truth's conversion focuses on saving African Americans particularly for similar reasons, but she addresses the materiality of salvation in terms of an exodus politics. She intervenes in secular politics, advocating a literal separation of blacks and whites in this "Promised Land" called America, and here self-sufficiency has a moral and economic definition. The Christianity of Dred, Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, and other rebellion leaders employs a messianic militancy to bring about the Judgment by creating the Apocalypse. Wholly under the rubric of a fanatical Christianity, while ascribing his justification to the Hebrew Bible, this type of rebel leader intervenes in the politics of slavery outside the positive law of the land, but in the name of the Father and the Son. This is the tradition which twentieth-century discourses of civil rights for African Americans have inherited, and into which the civil religion of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the Christian active non-violent resistance of Martin Luther King Jr, and the Nation of Islam inserted themselves. Except for that of King and the rainbow coalition of the Reverend Jesse Jackson, most of the religious rhetoric promoting civil rights includes the idea of separation in some form or another, with varying degrees of apocalypsism and militancy. Marcus Garvey's rhetoric still rivals even that of Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan. In his political poem "The Tragedy of White Injustice," Garvey writes, At St. Domingo we struck a clear blow To show which way the wind may one day go.

2,15

Exodus Politics and the Redemption of Difference

Around the world they speak of being so just, Yet, in fact, no long white man can you trust. The proud white scientist thinks he is wise But the Black man's God comes in true disguise, God is sure in the rumbling earthquake, When He is ready, the whole world will shake. In their conceit they see not their ruin; You soldiers of trust, be up and doing! Remember Belshazzar's last joyous feast, "Weighed in the balances and found wanting" Is the Tekel to which they are pointing. This interpretation of the Prophet Black men shall never in their dreams forget. (8-2,2.) Even though Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan called for a double sense of separation - from the Christian religion into that of Islam and from any sort of economic dependence upon whites - they fit into the tradition of separation as it was developed by African American Christianity reading the Jews and the politics of Exodus, though pushing its extremity. Their point of departure is Psalm 68, which was invoked in the Reconstruction and often employed by Garvey's "clergy" in the 192,05. This text functions for the American political religious group Nation of Islam as Jeremiah and Isaiah do for Christianity. It is the point of departure interpreted to sanction the overcoming of what has come before, and it functions as the course for African Americans in a post-Exodus narrative: Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered: let them also that hate him flee before him. As smoke is driven away, so drive them away: as wax melteth before the fire, so let the wicked perish at the presence of God ... O God, when thou wentest forth before they people, when thou didst march through the wilderness; Selah: The earth shook, the heavens also dropped at the presence of God: even Sinai itself was moved at the presence of God, the God of Israel ... Thou hast ascended on high, thou has led captivity captive: thou hast received gifts for men; yea, for the rebellious also, that the LORD God might dwell among them ... The Lord said, I will bring again from Bashan, I will bring my people again from the depths of the sea: That thy foot may be dipped in the blood of thine enemies, and the tongue of the dogs in the same ...

zi 6 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God. (Psalm 68:1-31)

Verse 31 is what is most often invoked as the point of departure, but I include other verses from Psalm 68 in order to convey its militant, apocalyptic tone and its own invocation of Exodus. The futurity, the near futurity, of verse 31, indicating the coming of Ethiopia to God, is linked to the liberation of the Jews from Egypt, resulting in a sense of new chosenness: "Who knows but that some of the very characteristics of the Negro that are discounted by the present civilization, are the very thing needed for that higher and better [one] which is yet to come," writes Levi Coppin (qtd. in Raboteau 53). Certainly, the futurity can be read as messianic futurity, a temporality pushed seemingly ever onwards, but the African American discourses of liberation have always read it as also indicating futurity in the temporality of the here and now, as designated by the association with Exodus. God will send a liberator to lead them out of bondage. One could argue that each leader since the Emancipation Proclamation has been a type of Moses, with more and more African Americans seeking the promised land - an America of milk and honey redeemed.

6 Rendering Justice in The Grandissimes: Advocacy and Others' Voices

One of the difficulties of reading Harriet Beecher Stowe's novels is that while they argue carefully and intelligently against the injustice of slavery, they do so without necessarily rendering justice to the representation of African Americans as the objects of that injustice. Stowe, after all, is responsible for constructing Uncle Tom, who was transformed by readers into not only the image of the ideal slave prior to the Civil War but also the personification of the properly behaved freedman and his descendants after it. Indeed, the movement of Topsy from woollyhaired, mouthy urchin to loving, polite, and dependant adoptee to Africa-bound missionary can be argued as delineating the entire trajectory of Uncle Tom's Cabin in terms of what it advocates for the social behaviour of African Americans. Goodness, as far as white eyes can see it, is rewarded; adherence to this definition of goodness reflects dependence, not only upon the representation of appropriate behaviour given by white people but also upon the rewards of white people bestowed for displaying it. Yet the curiosity of Uncle Tom's Cabin is that while Stowe may unjustly represent African Americans, she also tends to get one sense of justice right - which is to say that she advocates for the legal rights of African Americans as constitutive members of the American democracy, and she does so in rhetorical ways similar to those promoted in African American discourse. Can justice be advocated for and received in the name of others when it is not even rendered to them in representation? The answer would seem to "no." In a compelling account of the problem, Gregg Crane argues that Stowe's particular conception of lit-

2i8 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature erary aesthetics is one of "resemblance," such that characters plotted within the matrix of colour, gender, and class resemble types found in both everyday society and romantic literature (65). Resemblance is necessary for the success of her manipulations of sentiment and sympathy. Sympathy does not happen if one cannot identify with the characters and translate their situations into versions of one's own. Furthermore, one cannot identify with a character and a situation if one cannot first identify either of these as recognizable. "Recognizable" here means resembling pre-existing categories of comprehension built by romantic literature for whites and by how white Americans focus their eyes to see African Americans in society. An aesthetics of resemblance within the white imagination may enable sympathy, but at the same time it curtails any possibility of representing identities, situations, and reactions that go beyond a presentation of "difference," where that term signifies a category of objects always already constructed and comprehended by the logic of similarity. For sympathy to work, which in Stowe's case is for sympathy to generate a (white) politics, African American "difference" must be aesthetically rendered in relation to (white) sameness. In the case of Eliza Harris, for instance, that "sameness" is constructed by her light skin and by her actions, which fit the white discursive image of the good mother. With George Harris, "sameness" becomes Stowe's presentation of him as "a kind of black Daniel Webster" (Crane 67) or "a black George Washington" (Crane 68) and even a "mulatto Duncan Heyward" of Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans (Crane 70). In the case of dark-skinned Uncle Tom, "sameness" comes in the form of the black Christ. Fundamentally grounding these differing aesthetic resemblances, however, is the constructed image of the moral agent, as conceived by the dominant white terms and demanded as the basis of citizenship. One way of conceiving of Stowe's project, then, is that she must render her aesthetics in such a way as to present African American characters as moral agents, insofar as white Americans and Anglo-American discourses of moral agency conceive of that category, which allows her readers sympathetically to conceive of African Americans as capable of American citizenship. Fine, what is wrong with that? Nothing, if readers want a white politics of justice, generated by sympathetic identification, to be motivated by, and in Stowe's case as constructed by, this white "romance." This kind of justice is formulated within a logic of the selfsame that is unable to negotiate with others who have their own unique terms of identity, life, and ultimately justice as well. The only "negotiation" the logic of the selfsame can perform is the immediate translation and representation of alterity or fundamental otherness into its own presumptions of difference. Importantly, Crane also argues that Stowe's aesthetics

zi9

Rendering Justice in The Grandissimes

limit her presen tion of white characters as well, such that, for instance, Mrs Bird's definition of justice comes only within the discourses conceivable as both practical and moral within the spheres of white female agency at the time, namely, religion, True Womanhood, sentiment, and domesticity. Thus, Stowe's images of the fugitive slave and the good Northerner risk framing slavery not as a matter of consensual ethics but of paternalistic ethics - the obligation of the powerful to care for the weak - calling to mind the famous antislavery image of the shackled slave on his knees in a posture of supplication, asking, "Am I not a brother?" While his query claims a kind of elemental civic membership, his posture suggests that what he needs is protection not partnership. (Crane 59)

Crane's charge is valid, particularly when justice is theorized under two conditions: that it be grounded by ethics, and that it be fundamentally democratic, the latter of which Crane terms "consensual." If the Declaration of Independence is held as the focusing lens through which the Constitution is read, then the idea that "all men are created equal," taken as a figure for the fundamental equality of all persons, governs the ethos that the Constitution translates into justice (or as I label it in chapter 3, the principles of Tightness). The ethical ground of justice, in this conception, springs from the idea that all persons are created as equal by God or Nature, even though in the reality of life, persons find themselves in radically different situations of physical ability, material wealth, intelligence, and so forth. As commonly conceived in philosophy and Christianity, ethics becomes "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" or "Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only," as in the Kantian practical imperative (Foundations 55). A major course implied for such treatment, in its strongest sense, is the rectification of life's arbitrary differences. In the model of "do unto others ...," justice is fundamentally redistributive: lift the fallen. If all people are theoretically equal, but life presents us all in difference - one does not choose his parents, her attributes, the conditions of life - then an ethical conception of justice would work to equalize the conditions within which any person can realize his or her own abilities to act. This does not mean trying to equalize all the arbitrary attributes of persons. As Stowe's democratic Eva tells Topsy, it is not about differences of skin colour or sex or economic situation, and so on. Rendering justice is about equalizing the conditions within which different persons try to realize their lives with all the potential of their different attributes. For such

2.2.O

The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

justice to be ethical, it must be democratic or consensual: all persons involved must consensually create the terms of what those conditions of equality must be. The problem with what, in more contemporary terms, is this essentially Rawlsian definition of justice is that it presumes the existence of the end it wishes to create in the very definition of how to create it: how can all participants come to the table to create and consent to the conditions of justice when they can only come as the people they are, complete with their different and limiting attributes ? r If, as Crane suggests, Stowe risks paternalism (or what is also partially maternalism) in her thematization of an ethical justice, then she does so because in 1850 slaves could not come to the table to negotiate the terms of justice; America was not an ethical democracy; the gendered language of the Declaration was more literal than figurative; and, perhaps most importantly, her understanding of ethics within Christianity is paternalistic, as taught by God the Father via the Son. As I will argue more fully in the conclusion of this study, ethics only arises as even a conceptual possibility if the one and the Other are not equal. Justice becomes a motivation for human action and interaction with differences because inequalities are registered conceptually and given different values. Even if one argues that while slaves could not come to the table, free African Americans such as Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, and Sojourner Truth could, one is still bound within a situation of "representative types speaking for" the "differences" of others, making claims on their behalf, and advocating for their attributes, which slips not just possibly but inevitably into a kind of "paternalism." If you speak for me, and speak to a community of differently empowered others who hold a majoritarian control over the discourses at the table, then justice suffers under a lie of consent.2 The aesthetics of representation (some African Americans at the table) is substituted for the radically plural political representation required for justice in the nation of the multi. Crane's response is that at the time, writers and politicians balked at the restrictions of the national law and the interpretation of the Constitution that upheld them. They sought to open a critical dialogue about the law and consequently the Constitution in order to produce "a plausibly universal moral consensus about the terms of justice and citizenship. The consensus becomes plausibly universal when it becomes hard to imagine any sentient being not agreeing to such basic values of coexistence" (Crane 6, emphasis in original). Representing others is inevitable if one is striving to theorize conditions in which "any sentient being" could plausibly agree with the terms generated, and all the various and inevitable pitfalls of representation are justified if, in one way or another, they contribute to the dialogue that produces those terms to

2,2.1

Rendering Justice in The Grandissimes

which "any sentient being" could plausibly agree. There may well be different kinds of injustices in representation which are real issues of justice in themselves; however, if they can contribute to a just end - an end justified by universal consent or here at least the supposition of universal consent (its plausibility) - then they do not affect the product of an ethical justice. In the 18503, and my sense is that Crane believes it for today as well, "we must be capable of translating perspectives, interests, beliefs, and inclinations if our political and legal order is to attain to anything better than the rule of the strong" (58). Ironically, of course, with the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation, "the rule of the strong" decided the question of slavery in high paternalism. The Reconstruction was a practical occupation for justice. Uncle Tom's Cabin is an influential antebellum text participating in this avowedly paternalistic model, working sympathy in white readers to meet their responsibility for rendering justice to African Americans. Stowe's aesthetic of resemblance is a pragmatic choice, given that sympathy is her mechanism of manipulating feelings of responsibility. If her representations did not resemble types comprehensible to the white imagination of 1850, then they would not have the kind of political efficacy she was after. In this chapter, I turn to a more complex example of the aesthetics of resemblance in literary representation which thematizes the issues of advocacy for others in the pursuit of justice, namely, George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes. Like Stowe, Cable works within the discourses of white politics and ultimately the same unionist-republican narrative. However, his attempt in The Grandissimes is to pursue ethical representation at the same time as he advocates justice for the oppressed - here African Americans and Spanish and French Creoles in Louisiana. His representations of slavery and the prejudice of caste are imbricated within an intricately rendered backdrop of socio-cultural and linguistic communities and relations. The geographical and historical setting, New Orleans in the iSoos, demands that Cable give voice to Spanish and French white Creoles, black slaves, free quadroons, white Americans who themselves speak as northerners, Confederate southerners, and northerners "acclimated" to a southern discourse, all in the attempt to employ aesthetics and representation to bring the various voices and claims for justice to the table. Cable strives for a socio-cultural reconstruction, which generates the claims of oppression in their varieties of discourse and particularity. He represents both the injustices and oppression, as seen through the eyes of the French and Spanish Creoles, generated by the cession of Louisiana, and the injustices and oppression of coloured slaves rendered both in their discourses and in that spoken by the northern freedom-philosophizing

zzz The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

protagonist. For French and Spanish Creoles, America is the dominator and oppressor, while for those black slaves and the quadroons enslaved by caste, it is the propagator of justice, the liberator.

"FICTION RESURRECTION OF TRUTH - S P I R I T U A L B O D Y " For Stowe, the higher law to which she had recourse in her politics and aesthetics was that of the Bible. Believing in Christianity and the Bible's account of God in paternal terms (the Father), she had little reason, within her own conceptions, to question the ethics of paternalism in either politics or aesthetics. Cable, however, was more ambivalent. By calling into question the Bible's supposed paternalistic justifications for the "necessity" of slavery, as he did early in his career, he came to treat the politics of paternalism with suspicion, especially politics with a religious underpinning. As he presents the changes in his life and views in "My Politics," he tells of his move from Confederate fighter to Unionist supporter, while rejecting the Bible as a discourse consistently for or against slavery. Reading Philemon to Onesimus, for instance, he states, "Now I could have no further confidence in like arguments from other parts of scripture. They all yielded to scrutiny, and betrayed a literalism combined, strangely enough, with a violence of inference that made them worthless" (Cable, "My Politics" 7). "So much for theory," he goes on to say, and biblical claims get reduced to "theory" for Cable (7). This is not to say that he rejects theology or the higher law as the ground of his own politics of citizens' responsibility. As collected in his unpublished miscellaneous papers, Cable penned "A Creed of Citizenship," a personal declaration of politics and justice, inasmuch as these two pertain to national citizenship, cast in the discourse of the higher law. His declaration begins with its own theological preamble, and in relay through political pronouncements, it ends with a theo-political rhetorical hybrid: I BELIEVE in one infinite eternal God pervading and ordering the universe in perfect wisdom and love. And in man's individual and collective accountability to Him in all motives and conduct. I believe in national integrity and order and in government by consent of the governd [sic], as the greatest human agency for the development of finite man in the likeness of the infinite God. I believe in complete allegiance of all men to law and government in all things essential to righteous peace. I believe in peace in all human affairs and that only in peace can the highest development of man be attaind [sic].

2.2,3

Rendering Justice in The Grandissimes

I believe in law as essential to peace, justice, order and freedom, and in governmental force of arms for the maintenance of law. I believe in the international democracy, under international law, of all nations as nations, all states as states, subject to the same moral law that works for equity, freedom and happiness between every man and his fellow. And I believe it is the will and desire of Almighty God that I love my country and the democracy of nations better than I love my own life: AMEN

(George W. Cable Papers)3

Democracy as government by the consent of the governed is, for Cable, the human agency for developing humanity in the image of God. Peace is righteous. Law and "complete allegiance" to law are part of the essence of peace. While consent of the governed is fundamental, law seems to be both the organ and the goal of government. It is what consent is sought for. Further away from a necessary link to consent is "governmental force," which should be used to protect the law. These are basic and commonly assumed principles of government; however, what interests me is that when Cable deals with representative democracy, consent and force seem to trade places. Consent is always pronounced as foundational, but as if only in an ideational way. Any link that it might have with consensus is posited only at the beginning, at the formation of government. After that, consent is a function of majoritarian politics. Force, however, is never spoken of in the foundation of government, but it gains priority in the exigencies of governing. The governed consent to a government, but the government must have the right to use force against the governed in protection of the law and, more specifically, against those who withdraw their consent from the government. This implies that government cannot rely on consent as a true foundation, but only on consent of the majority, with minorities living in the shadow of force. Government can only rely fully on consent-as-consensus if it first discovers how to invoke representation in such a way as to meet the plurality of the social wishing to be governed. As is clear from the discourse in his "Creed," Cable's invocation of the higher law is theo-political, focusing on law and force without

224 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

much admixture. He has little interest in promoting the higher law through sympathy and sentimentalism, as Harriet Beecher Stowe does. In an anecdote about Uncle Tom's Cabin, Cable notes that sentimentalism made no political mark on him at all. He was too young to make the connection. It left him only romantically involved in a junior version of the Cult of True Womanhood: "when barely nine years old I had read Uncle Tom's Cabin but had preserved no impressions from it except a tearful longing to marry any girl who resembled Eva and would promise not to die" ("My Politics" 6). Later on in his life, he becomes more forthright and condemning: "I have also learned that the mere feeling sincere is but an easy virtue; true sincerity is a condition, not a mere feeling" ("My Politics" 5, emphasis in original). And Cable's literature does not aim, I would argue, to tug on the heart strings in order to make readers open their eyes to political realities. Writing in the late iSoos, he still falls within the tradition of American realism, which sought to capture the truth of reality under examination with focused accuracy. If that truth makes readers cry and feel sympathetic and sympathy alters their politics in line with the truth, then all the better, but sentimentalism and sympathy are not part of the aim of resemblance itself for Cable. However, he does approach literature in other terms that are at least akin to those of Stowe. If he employs a version of the aesthetics of resemblance that aims for a more "scientific" approach, he also conceives of the task of literature's relation to the truth in theological terms. In aphoristic fashion and in a context dealing with the representation of other cultures - the back of an announcement of a lecture entitled "Through the Dark Continent!" by Henry M. Stanley, "The Great African Explorer," according to the advertisement - Cable jotted some notes for a speech entitled "Fiction as a Vehicle of Truth": "Fiction [is] Truth in Artistic Form. Truth with Art purpose ... History extracts Truth from Fact, Fiction Reembodies Truth in Story. Fiction Resurrection of Truth - Spiritual Body" (George W. Cable Papers).4 Fiction and truth are not antithetical. Indeed, the goal of fiction is to provide a new body for the truth, passing through the arbitrary letter to capture its spirit. However, where the "science" of representation and this religious rhetoric combine is in the technique of capturing and representing the truth. For Cable, the goal is the accurate representation of what the senses perceive. He expends great care in his fiction and protoethnographic writings in capturing exteriors: how places look, smell, and feel; how people appear; how accents sound; how discourses inflect different meanings. Of The Grandissimes, for instance, Stephanie Foote notes, "The text offers wild variations of French and English, some of which remain untranslated, untranslatable, while others are

Z2-5

Rendering Justice in The Grandissimes

rendered in historically precise detail. There is, for example, Parisian French, slave dialects, gumbo French, gutter French, Creole French, and delta French. The precision with which the narrator notes each of these adjectives is crucial, as is the transcription of each accent with exquisite care" (107). And certainly, throughout the productive period of his writing career, Cable listened actively in society, jotting down transcriptions of distinct phrasings in conversations made and overheard.5 His "exquisite care" for representation focuses on unique phonetic spellings of words, the right combination of letters in order to render various sounds accurately to readers. Shifting resonances to a theological discourse, the letter or how speech is transcribed is fundamental in an aesthetic sense to the conveyance of the spirit - the relationship between who diverse people are and the what and how of their sayings. The mechanics of conveying how people sound is crucial to presenting what people mean when they speak. As the resurrection of truth in a new body, fiction in Cable's hands has a unique and very earnest relation to the letter. The letters of dialect transcription are the tabulated results of the "science" of observing and listening to cultures. In Cable's mind, they are accurate, and so participate in redemptive work, when they render the aesthetics of resemblance perfect. The aesthetic goal is one of perfect mimesis, which sees itself as aesthetically ethical for capturing the truth of the other on paper. In turn, mimesis has an ethical politics: it gives voice to those who do not have one in the mainstream white American public sphere. But the miming character of this kind of mimesis threatens to obfuscate for the writer-ethnographer what is, in fact, being recorded and represented. The voice of the other is not recorded so much as the writer's ability to hear the other, and this distinction is important. Transcription of discourse and dialect, as in Cable's work, is not a pure and perfect moving (trans) of the other's discourse (script). The primary scene of resemblance is that of capturing on paper what the self hears. Whether this resemblance is like what the other hears him or herself saying is secondary. Any similarity between primary and secondary resemblance is something that the writing self alone cannot perfectly judge. There is a danger generated by writers who misrepresent to themselves what they are aiming "scientifically" to transcribe, and this danger is created by Cable quite chillingly. As a southerner, he grew up in the ideology of slavery, yet eventually he came to advocate the necessity of its abolition. That ethical political desire, however and perhaps ironically, does not mean that Cable sees African Americans in a fundamentally different way from how he used to as a pro-slavery Confederate. It did not necessarily alter his eyes and ears from how they were calibrated during his childhood and early career. This is to say that what-

Z2.6 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

ever his own change of political interest, which opened his eyes and ears to careful collections of the sights and sounds of New Orleans in order to write his fiction, his ears and eyes did not and could not capture the intricacies of others' particularly interior realities. Drawing on the work of Stephanie Foote, I argue further that the openness of Cable's senses to lived realities beyond the surface of sights and sounds fluctuates in direct relation to changes along the colour line. "Creole" is a hearable category for Cable because it is white, largely white, or white enough. As Foote argues, Creole "also comes to signify a cultural identity consonant (as race could not be) with the project of a politically homogeneous nation" (99). Because race could not fit with the homogeneous cultural identity that Cable was early on programmed to promote, the African American characters in his fiction can certainly be heard but never listened to. In one of his most controversial pieces specifically advocating legal equality, for instance, he says pointedly, " [I]n the practical daily experiences of life I saw the freedman in all his offensiveness; multitudinous, unclean, stupid, ugly, ignorant and insolent. Maybe it was not so bad as it looked to me; / am telling how it looked. If the much feared 'war of races' should come - no matter how - I was going to be in the ranks of the white race fighting for the subjugation of the blacks" ("My Politics" 7, emphasis added). In retrospect, sentimentalism and sympathy may not be negative on all fronts if they can open the eye and ear to others' lives beyond a desire for political equality. Sympathy, in this sense, would take on the definition of harmony, of working in a compatible frequency. A purely political interest in justice, while maintaining the "default setting" of political homogeneity, motivates Cable's desire to fashion an aesthetics of resemblance that is "scientific" in its representative capabilities; however, belief in such "science" without special social sympathy allows one to place too much emphasis and trust in the accuracy of "how it looks" and "how it sounds." Now here is the twist. On top of what seems like a rather negative presentation of Cable's project, I would also like to argue that he is aware of these problems specifically. This awareness is registered in the main plot line of The Grandissimes in terms of what the protagonist, Joseph Frowenfeld, does in New Orleans and in terms of how the Grandissime clan reacts to him. Cable's northern, Unionist protagonist is rather clear about the limitations of his own position as a perceiver and recorder of the diverse reality of New Orleans. Indeed, The Grandissimes articulates how, to those not in the protagonist's position and being perceived, Frowenfeld's representations of them are constantly being called into question. When he arrives in New Orleans, he documents the city, beginning "scientifically" with recordings of its climate:

zzy

Rendering Justice in The Grandissimes

"Morning observation; Cathedral clock, 7 A.M. Thermometer 70 degrees ... Hygrometer 15 ... Barometer 30.380 ... Sky cloudy, dark; wind, south, light ... River rising" (138). Agricole Fusilier, the eldest of the extended Grandissime clan and ardent sectional supporter, urges Frowenfeld to publish the book: "Then, sir, in the name of Louisiana," thundered the old man, clinging to the book ... "They shall be published! Ah! yes, dear Frowenfeld. The book, of course, will be in French, eh? You would not so affront the most sacred prejudices of the noble people to whom you owe everything as to publish it in English?" ... "I do not write French," said the apothecary. (138-9)

What is said between the characters about different languages relates also to the issue of dialects and discourses. Frowenfeld, the outside observer, records how a thing looks as what he sees, and what he sees is what the thing is for him. Fusilier, however, suggests that any observations of his Nouvelle Orleans and all that is "other" to Frowenfeld must be represented in the language of the other, not of the self. But in both literal and figurative terms, the self for Frowenfeld does not write the language of the other. The question, then, becomes whether the different languages of selves can be translated into each other, and if so, what then they say. Is Frowenfeld's English New Orleans readable by Fusilier as Nouvelle Orleans?

"LOUISIANA RIF-USING TO HANTER DE H-UNION": ALLEGORY AND TRANSLATION The text of The Grandissimes functions as an allegory of the translation work necessary for advocacy in the midst of a multi-discursive contact zone. The plot, in fact, is generated under the umbrella of translation - that of the "selling" of the French colony and its cession as Louisiana into the Union. The narrator makes the translational nature explicit: "The Cession had become an accomplished fact ... Nouvelle Orleans had become New Orleans, and Louisiane was Louisiana" (45). Because of the multiple translations demanded by the setting, readers of The Grandissimes would be wise to pay heed to the description of reading such a book that Joseph Frowenfeld is given: Resolved, in other words, without ceasing to be Frowenfeld the studious, to begin at once the perusal of this newly found book, the Community of New Orleans. True, he knew he should find it a difficult task - not only that much of it

2.2,8 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature was in a strange tongue, but that it was a volume whose displaced leaves would have to be lifted tenderly, blown free of much dust, re-arranged, some torn fragments laid together again with much painstaking, and even the purport of some pages guessed out. (103)

Some pages are torn; others are torn out. Frowenfeld approaches New Orleans as a representation, a text of language, and one doubly removed as a language, foreign and fragmented, whose reading will demand translation. Not only is the task of reading this representation one of rearranging fragments to be articulated together, but it must also rearticulate the rearrangement in a language comprehensible to the reader. Frowenfeld the studious is set to become Frowenfeld the student of culture par excellence, in that the study of the strange tongue - or tongues, for there are many languages and discourses in this text - of the community is performed in the service of translating that tongue back into the language of the studier. Translation will be constitutive of reading, a reading that attempts to do justice by representing the foreign communities in and to the dominant language of justice, which is what Frowenfeld and Cable will come to do. Just as Frowenfeld admits that he only writes in English, so Cable's narrator admits that any volume of New Orleans-Nouvelle Orleans is "unwriteable" (137). The problem, however, implicating ethics and representation, understanding and advocacy, is that the volume will still get written. Translation is not simply the process by which the projects of both the author and Frowenfeld become contaminated; it also enables the novel to speak doubly, allegorically, to indicate a discourse outside itself in the sense of its immediate narrative and historical setting. On the one hand, the text demands a temporal translation. Even though the novel is set in 1803, the years of its writing in the late 18705 are fused into The Grandissimes everywhere. By the election of 1876 and the end of the formal Reconstruction in the South, Louisiana was struggling with its new social and political situation. The question of succession and of the legality and activity of slavery had been settled by war, but social acceptance of the new organization was anything but settled. If slavery had been abolished by the proclamation of emancipation, the slavery of caste, which figures prominently in The Grandissimes, stepped up its force in order to supplement what had been removed. The temporal gap between 1803, the cession of Louisiana, and 1876, the end of the Reconstruction and the beginning of Louisiana's participation in the new Union, affords the space necessary for reading The Grandissimes as an allegory of the Reconstruction. The allegorical reading is not something imposed from the outside; rather, it finds its necessity inside the text. Honore Grandissime wistfully recounts, "There are

22,9

Rendering Justice in The Grandissimes

but two steps to civilization, the first easy, the second difficult; to construct - to reconstruct - ah! there it is! the tearing down! The tear -" (264). The sense of reconstruction and "the tear" or temporal split upon which the allegorical reading is predicated are coded into Cable's text. On the other hand, translation dovetails with the allegorical reading, in that it is most apparent by way of such a reading that the gap between the two main languages of English and French can also be read as the gap between northern and southern discourse. The two characters whose main language of thought and speech is English, Joseph Frowenfeld and Charlie Keene, are Americans who have come to Louisiana when it is still a colonial possession of France. Dr Keene has been in Louisiana for some time, long enough to be "acclimated," as the process is termed (n). The figure of climate gains in significance and suggestiveness as the novel progresses, because it becomes readable as something political, legal, and social. The sense is that for an American to be acclimated to New Orleans is to buy into the hegemonic political and social order of the French and Spanish Creoles (37). A most important part of that order in this book is the acceptance of slavery as both an economic necessity and a proper social correlative of the black man's evolutionary and mental development. Charlie Keene is acclimated in this political sense; however, Joseph Frowenfeld is not and refuses to be. For Frowenfeld, "the climate is too comfortable and the soil too rich" (142, emphasis in original); the climate plays a part in the "defective organization of society, which keeps this community, and will continue to keep it for an indefinite time to come, entirely unprepared and disinclined to follow the course of modern thought" (143). Frowenfeld does undergo a certain acclimation, however. The Grandissimes figures acclimation as a political trope, but one that is readable as concerning both the southern discourse of a social organization based upon slavery and the northern discourse of social organization with emancipation. To be acclimated in this northern sense is to have gone through the fever of the South and to be now immune. Upon his translation to the South by boat, Frowenfeld gets the fever - literally, yellow fever - and it takes the lives of his family. As he begins to come through the sickness, the captain warns, "Keep out of the sun and stay in after dark; you're not 'acclimated,' as they call it, you know, and the city is full of the fever" (n). One could catch it again, but this time it could do him in. We know that this southern fever is powerful, almost as powerful as Sherman in Atlanta: "the unsated fever was running through every vein and artery, like soldiery through the streets of a burning city" (n). But as the good northerner and apothecary Frowenfeld knows, to have battled this fever and to have won that war is to never have to fight it in the self again. He is acclimated to the fever of

2.3 o The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

the south, but in the opposite way from Dr Keene. Feeling himself the victim of translation, Frowenfeld cannot be at home in a city that operates on a basis of slavery and subjugation with an identity utterly resistant to its own recent translation into the United States. Not being at home in New Orleans is also, however, the impetus to study the city and to do so in what he feels is a detached, "scientific" manner. That "scientific" observation and recording, as we have seen, is performed in English, to which Fusilier objects. In a struggle over the book of recordings, performing the very struggle over different discourses and languages, Cable further figures the difference. Fusilier calls out: "... ah! have we torn it?" "I do not write French," said the apothecary, laying the torn edges together (138-9).

The political question as to which language the climate of this southern town will be rendered in is marked by a tear, a gap between languages. To read the passages allegorically, the English of the American Frowenfeld, the apothecary and thus prescriber, suggests the northern, unionist discourse, while the French of Agricole Fusilier, the farmer-fighter of the Old South, suggests that of the Confederate South. The book of the climate of the South is marked by the tear between these two discourses. Frowenfeld, the unionist American, will bring the two pieces together, but like the historical Reconstruction of the South after the Civil War, this book will be cast in a northern, unionist discourse. Frowenfeld is writing English, not French. Without interrogating his own resistance to translation, he does not learn French, which in this context would be to live in the understanding of the Grandissimes. Unilingually and in a singular discourse, he will translate the climate of the South into a unionist narrative. It is difficult at this point to keep Cable out of the discussion of translation into other discourses, because he too can be thought of as a recorder and translator of the climate of New Orleans.6 What is most prominently recorded and translated in The Grandissimes is the diversity of speech found in the city. Cable operates as if he were also undertaking a scientific project, paying careful attention to varieties of sound and inflection. The English of wealthy, educated French and Spanish Creoles reflects the phrasing of speakers for whom English is not their first language; the broken English of other Creoles is scripted phonetically, as it would sound, according to Cable, to the ear of first-language English readers. This phonetic representation is different from the English spoken by quadroons and African slaves, the latter involving large

2.31

Rendering Justice in The Grandissimes

elements of Afro-French Creole. Afro-French Creole, when spoken or sung by characters, is itself made readable as it would sound by way of a phoneticization of the French.7 Like Frowenfeld's, Cable's recordings of the diverse linguistic climate are fundamentally translations into English or phoneticized forms of that language readable by English speakers. In the project of recording the southern linguistic climate, Cable acclimates its diversity to English. At the same time, doing so diversifies the identity of English by "invading" its boundaries with hybrid sounds, "foreign" syntax, and altered semantics. The question, however, is whether and how much this diversification makes a difference. Does the ear of the American not naturalize the foreign - which is to say, fill in the blanks, "correct" the pronunciation and phrasing, and translate meanings - immediately and perhaps unconsciously in order to understand these others? If translation is irreducibly a part of the process of understanding, does understanding what the other is saying in English not by definition close difference and diversity out of this American English identity? To his credit, Cable tries hard to be as faithful as possible to the discourses of others. But as represented in the transcriptions, this fidelity is to phonetics, the sound of their translated tongues to his ear. The priority of rendering sound subordinates what they say in so far as it is heard by the English ear. The process is unable to represent the sorts of translations and infidelities undertaken by the speakers themselves in order to make themselves bearable to the English ear. Broken English, phonetically represented, does not do justice either to the language of the other or, therefore, to what the other is "saying." The thickness of signification goes beyond translatable linguistic rules. What results in The Grandissimes is a figurative and literal dissonance between the visual aesthetics of diverse dialects and the sounds they ask readers to make during reading, and the immediate cognitive process of translation for understanding what such others are saying to and in American English. Whatever alterity of being is traced in dialect's creative signification, understanding in and as translation seeks to colonize it or filter it out. But understanding may not fully win out in this process. The visual and aural/sonoral dissonance leaves a trace imprint in American English readers' retinas and tympana which, if nothing else, signifies alterity between how the ear hears the saying of the other and how the brain translates it into what is said. In a number of instances, Cable includes representations of Afro-French Creole songs and French phrases in their own tongues, which stand fully in the position of the foreign. Between them and the English writing, the dialect transcriptions are strung, performing for readers their divided constitution.

2,3 2. The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

While the French and Afro-French Creole songs and sayings do not develop the main thematic thrust of justice directly, they do further amplify the performance of the dialect transcriptions in this novel as presenting what is traditionally termed "local colour." Indeed, I feel that the untranslated foreign language transcriptions are the primary bases of the text's local colour. Often in terms of the American aesthetic sensibility concerning literature, but especially involving the popular appetite and publishers' marketing decisions, the descriptive category of local colour functioned in a positive way, as Americans craved to read artfully realistic accounts of the diverse regions of the expanding country. This positive function, thankfully, has not died away. But during and after the Reconstruction, as literature was regarded as a venue not exempt from the pull of the unionist-republican narrative, local colour began to become a negative term if the colour of the locale did not work to promote the anxious concerns of the development of a national literature - something of which Cable, for example, was a staunch proponent. Traditional local colourists not promoting the national literary agenda found themselves facing the term as a diminutive label, one that subordinated their work, casting it outside the realm of books that had something important to say. "Importance" either reaffirmed or challenged the hegemonic ideological perceptions according to the prearticulated terms. Either to challenge or to reaffirm in the ears of the receivers, the claims of books had to be received or bearable such that they could then be understood. According to this definition, The Grandissimes is colourful and of a locale, but overall it is not local colour in the diminutive sense because of its unionist-republican discourse. However, what is precisely local colour in a unionist, and thus diminutive, way of thinking are the Spanish and French Creole songs - quaint, unnecessary to the thrust of the narrative, and not understandable. For those reasons I feel that they are certainly of local colour and positively so because they are incomprehensible to readers who only function in English. The passages are therefore bearable, in a strict auditory definition, but not understandable per se to the English ear or readable in English as an ideological or argumentative challenge. While still translated phonetically, they may be the closest, most accurate representation of the other in this text, most representative of the locale because they are not translated and thus persecute American English perception. They can be sounded out, voiced, but are unreadable in that they are not susceptible to the American hegemonic comprehension, a compre hension which is by definition a function of its own referential terms. The problem with the translations elsewhere in the book, for both Frowenfeld and Cable, is articulated by Agricole Fusilier: "but this is not to-day's weather?" he says (138). Perhaps Frowenfeld is an inaccu-

2.3 3

Rendering Justice in The Grandissimes

rate weatherman? Perhaps Creoles and free quadroons do not sound as Cable has represented them? Certainly, but the greater issue concerns translation as a representative medium and the political stakes of translation's performance. Even if there could be such a thing as perfectly accurate translation, as if it were like recording the weather, accuracy cannot control the fact that translation renders its product unrecognizable to the original. In the context of speech and justice, unrecognizability holds important political consequences. How just is the representation of the demand for justice when the oppressed, in whose name one speaks, cannot recognize the demand? To the project of advocacy formulated as the giving of voice to the voiceless should be added the unfortunate irony indicated by Cable's work: rendering the demand for justice in the name of the oppressed cuts off the oppressed from the demand itself. Their demand is silenced by the translation the author-as-advocate. The irony of rendering unrecognizable demands finds presentation in The Grandissimes in the scene of Frowenfeld's interview at no. 19, rue Bienville, the home of the Nancanous. The topic of conversation passes from art to climate to the organization of the hegemonic society in New Orleans. It is Frowenfeld's chance to "philosophize" (142.), and he does so didactically. In terms of Creole art, readers relate his arguments to Raoul Innerarity's painting of "Louisiana rif-using to hanter de h-Union!" (114), which, to Frowenfeld's and our own conception of things, is "Allegorical" (114). Misunderstanding both the assumption and its English word, the artist replies, "Allegoricon? No, sir! Allegoricon never saw that pigshoe" (114). Climate then moves to its cognate of social organization, "so sadly in arrears to the civilized world" (142.). Frowenfeld's highly political lecture on this defective organization and the conclusion he reaches for southern society's inability to change are predicated on the South's unwillingness to listen to the arguments concerning human rights: "Human rights is, of all subjects, the one upon which this community is most violently determined to hear no discussion. It has pronounced that slavery and caste are right, and sealed up the whole subject. What, then, will they do with the world's literature? They will coldly decline to look at it, and will become, more and more as the world moves on, a comparatively illiterate people" (143). The arguments make sense in terms of Agricole, who refuses to listen, and of others, such as "M. Valentine Grandissime, of Tchoupitoulas, [who] could not read" (165). But Frowenfeld neglects to notice that it is also the language in which he renders the arguments that forces them to fail to be received by others in Creole society. Other representatives of "this community," the ladies Nancanou to whom he is

234 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

speaking, are graciously, willingly listening. But the difficulty is linguistic: "on their part, they would sit in deep attention, shielding their faces from the fire, and responding to enunciations directly contrary to their convictions with an occasional 'yes-seh,' or 'ceddenly,' or 'of coze,' or, - prettier affirmation still, - a solemn drooping of the eyelids, a slight compression of the lips, and a low, slow declination of the head" (141). The feminine South here may well be acting in that politeness demanded of women at the time in the presence of a man and political ideas, but what is also apparent is that Frowenfeld's language is an impenetrable barrier to comprehension and consequent participation. He renders the demand for justice, but because of the mode of rendering, the argument meets only with lip service. In other instances, however, it is the English language itself to which lip service is paid by Creoles. Agricole Fusilier speaks English, but the sense is rather that for him it has a restricted use-value. He employs it for speech and communication when necessary, but he never accepts the discourse of union, the discourse of Frowenfeld the American, which stands as the investment of English in this novel. Agricole emphatically states that to him, "English is not a language, sir; it is a jargon! ... I know men in this city who would rather eat a dog than speak English! I speak it, but I also speak Choctaw" (48). Jargon has the triple sense of being "an unintelligible or meaningless speech or writing"; the language of a specialized group, in the sense of a "lingo"; and in linguistics, "especially ... a hybrid speech arising from a mixture of languages" (OED). Though Agricole speaks many "languages," for him, only the French of Louisiana is legitimate. Thinking in terms of discourse and reconstruction, English, or the northern discourse of union, is unintelligible gibberish. And Cable, I would argue, is wise enough to know that to the Fusiliers of the reconstructed South in 1880, The Grandissimes itself is gibberish. But the Old South is not the whole South in this text. Certainly, the conclusion of Cable's text presents important elements of Creole society that do more than pay lip service to the jargon. Honore Grandissime and Raoul Innerarity are both greatly influenced by their association with Frowenfeld and his ideas. Honore, as the name suggests, is predisposed to do the honourable thing. Though he already knows the argument for human rights, and discussion with Frowenfeld is not something that substantively adds knowledge or understanding to his position, he accepts the northern prescriptions as a catalyst. Interestingly, it is the image of Frowenfeld, as if he were an Abraham Lincoln with his "grave, pale face," looming up in the mind that pushes Honore to do the right thing (245). Raoul Innerarity marks much more of a movement of position because of Frowenfeld's influence. The first

235

Rendering Justice in The Grandissimes

introduction to Raoul involves his art depicting Louisiana refusing to enter the Union, and it is significant at this point that Raoul and Frowenfeld tend to talk past each other because of the condition of Raoul's English. By the end of the novel, however, Raoul is flagged as the second Creole to have defected to Frowenfeld's position. He too has "gone over to the enemy" (303). It is Raoul's inner rarity, his loyalty and pride in Frowenfeld, his employer, that has enabled him to make the transfer from the position and discourse of the staunch South, and of Agricole Fusilier, and of Louisiana in terms of refusal, to those of Frowenfeld. When Raoul speaks to Aurora, "He told her in confidence that 'Profess-or Frowenfel" was the best man in the world" (303). His other crossover is made in terms of accepting the reparation made with the de Grapion family, the ladies Nancanou. Aurore, Clothilde, Raoul, and his wife "formed a group of their own; and it is not certain that this was not the very first specimen ever produced in the Crescent City of that social variety of New Orleans life now distinguished as Uptown Creoles" (303), a new hybrid of Creole that has moved "up" in the discourse of this novel. That upward trajectory signifies a move into modernity, a new sophistication of ideas, a new class; but since all of these gain their meaning in a northern, unionist discourse, the "upward" move here is also nationally, if figuratively, geographic. Raoul Innerarity is a young member of the extended Grandissime clan, while Agricole Fusilier is the eldest patriarch. Raoul's crossover is significant because of his youth and his function as a container of the future. Agricole's constant refusal to change has little long-term importance. The optimism of lodging the possibility of change in the youth of this novel is undercut, however, by the presentation of the character of this particular figure of youth. Raoul has not the intelligence of Honore Grandissime, for example. His admiration of Frowenfeld and his faith in the northerner's prescriptions and ethical sense figure him with unfortunate similarity to a befriended dog. Coupled with the Nancanous' uncomprehending lip service, the future of the cession or, in the allegorical sense, of the post-Reconstruction is still one characterized by subsumption. Louisiana is sold to the United States. The South is reconstructed into the terms of the North. The "happy ending" is undercut by the refusal to give the New South any real agency of self. This particular relationship between the Old and the New South, or the fiercely self-conscious subject who will not accept the reality versus the new subject whose agency and subjectivity are constructed by another's prescriptions, is itself a tear at the heart of the South. The mark of the generational tear between old and new is also made graphic by another of the younger Grandissime generation. Agricole

236 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

Fusilier's life is cut short by Honore Grandissime's brother, a free man of colour (f.m.c.) also named Honore, who stabs Agricole in the back. The doubling of the name Honore is useful here in that, regarding Agricole, Honore f.m.c. physically renders what Agricole feels the white Honore has already done. However, this incision also signifies performatively as the inscription of history and race into the Old South. More than a writing on the body, it marks how Africa is constitutive of the South - always already a part of the Grandissime clan, if repudiated. This incisive inscription as a making manifest of the constitution of the South is nothing positive, however, for Africans and those of mixed race. As a category of characters, both in the Old South and in The Grandissimes, slaves and free persons of colour are completely circumscribed by slavery and the Creole prejudice of caste. Socially and politically speaking, they are not heard by white southerners, and in the text there are few scenes in which they and white Creoles have any dialogue with each other. The discourse of racial mixture is both performed and performative. It is written with force and in the blood of an antiquated body, ma(r)king its death. The discourse of mixture also marks the impossibility of a place for African and mixed-race characters in the New South. The marchande de calas, Clemence, is shot in the back. Honore f.m.c. and Palmyre Philosophe, the other strong and racially mixed character, flee to France, where Honore f.m.c. kills himself. TRANSLATING CONVENTIONS: THE STORY OF B R A S - C O U P E

If we think of all these movements on a thematic level, The Grandissimes characterizes the carry-over from one discourse to another as defection. As the carry-over, as translation from one language (Louisiana French) to another (American English), the sentiment of defection is also appropriate from the point of view of the original language, here Louisiana French. Defection underscores that translation is a political act. To translate is to make a political gesture, which in The Grandissimes is by definition simultaneously an act of violence. The violence of translation is at the heart of this text, made explicit in the story and the name of Bras-Coupe. A Jaloff prince in Africa, Bras-Coupe was captured as a prisoner of war and sold into slavery. Survival of the perilous carry over the Atlantic "on board the good schooner Egalite" (169) results in his ownership by the Grandissime family. The irony of making passage in terms of equality (egalite) also affects this figure of translation: it strips what is human to a commodity form in order to make passage from the free-

2.37

Rendering Justice in The Grandissimes

dom of origin and the original to what will always be a language of enslavement. A less harsh but no less political way of saying the same is that, in making passage, the translation will always possess an element of saying what the original does not mean, because it does not possess the means to say what the original said. Irony is irreducible in the passage that tries to presume equality, and irony has, in this case, severe political consequences. In terms of the issue of justly giving voice to the voiceless, any such translation will by definition always include an element of its own mistranslation to which it will be wilfully deaf or blind. Translation's disability, according to Jean-Francois Lyotard, is "the blindness ... [of] putting yourself in the place of the other, in saying / in his or her place, [and thus] in neutralizing his or her transcendence" (Differend 109). I have described this injustice as a cutting off of the voice in whose name one is arguing. This conclusion is implicated by the story of BrasCoupe within The Grandissimes, through which Cable voices the oppression of Africans and subsequently African Americans. He does so, however, by placing it in the mouths of two white Creoles (Honore and Raoul) and the wealthy Honore f.m.c. as the source of the story, and then has the narrator of the novel tell it in "his" own words to readers. In so doing, Cable allows an African's private history and its significance to be appropriated by others, so that its significance becomes primarily their own. And this appropriation includes the presumably white, American narrator, the effect of whose telling to readers transforms the story into a comment on slavery in America. These voices articulate the story's significance as one of their own traumatization and "blackening" of their history. As Honore Grandissime says, impacting upon the narrator's telling, "I am ama-aze at the length, the blackness of that shadow! ... It is the Nemesis ..." (156). There is, at least on the level of textual performance, a double gesture here: the negative act of disallowing the oppressed to speak the oppression carries the "positive," if ironic, trace of underscoring that process narratologically. The theme of the story is African enslavement by white injustice, and the text performs the same to the enslaved African's story. So in this sense, it repeats the process, calling attention to the structure as well as the content: His name, he replied to an inquiry touching that subject, was , something in the Jaloff tongue, which he by and by condescended to render into Congo: Mioko-Koanga, in French, Bras-Coupe, the Arm Cut Off. Truly it would have been easy to admit, had this been his meaning, that his tribe, in losing him, had lost its strong right arm close off at the shoulder; not so easy for his highpaying purchaser to allow, if this other was his intent; that the arm which

23 8 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature might no longer shake the spear or swing the wooden sword, was no better than a useless stump never to be lifted for aught else. But whether easy to allow or not, that was his meaning. He made himself a type of all Slavery, turning into flesh and blood the truth that all Slavery is maiming. (170-1)

What can be read as simply the convention of removing the name of a supposedly real person gitimating the fiction as real by elision, also performs what is constitutive of speaking for others in translation: the silencing, the incision, the mark of the differend. "A differend is born from a wrong and is signaled by a silence, that the silence indicates that the phrases are in abeyance of their becoming event [en souffranee de leur evenement}, that the feeling is the suffering of this abeyance [cette souffrance]" (Lyotard, Differend 57). When translates his name, however, he remains faithful to what translation does: it cuts off; it replaces and substitutes and will always be something under (sub] established (stitutus). What The Grandissimes goes further to perform here is that the silencing is a violence, a suffering. Enslavement to another's language or discourse is maiming. While the capturing of Bras-Coupe is decidedly for the unjust purpose of slavery, the capture and presentation of his story attempts the representation as a call for justice. However, the structure of this representation, the translation of the story into The Grandissimes, underscores the injustice of attempting to render justice by translation. Significantly, it marks its own undoing by pointing to the freedom of origin with BrasCoupe's last words: "To - Africa" (193). His story is the narrative translation-as-substitution of a name. The substitution is rendered as the attribution of signfication to the name: , Mioko-Koanga, Bras-Coupe. It ends, however, with a quotation as an apostrophe. This cut of and to an ending provides the only translation of Bras-Coupe faithful to the manner of (non-) signification of names: the summation of a designation. "The proper name is a designator of reality, like a deictic; it does not, any more than the deictic, have a signification, it is not, any more than a deictic, the abridged equivalent of a definite description or of a bundle of descriptions. It is a pure mark of the designative function" (Lyotard, Differend 39). Whatever the name of this slave in the Jaloff tongue, its "designation" is Africa. It is not surprising, therefore, that in questions of justice concerning other characters as well, readers are continually reminded that the rendering of justice is contaminated by the violence of a cutting off from the original. When Palmyre Philosophe speaks of justice due to her as reparation for the actions of Agricole Fusilier, she cries out, "I would give this right hand off at the wrist" (75), and in two senses she does when she enlists the help of Clemence in her attempt. What Clemence

2-39

Rendering Justice in The Grandissimes

carries in order to enact the voodoo curse of vengeance upon Agricole is an "image, in myrtle-wax, moulded and painted with some rude skill, of a negro's bloody arm cut off near the shoulder - a bras-coupe, with a dirk grasped in its hand" (314). However, since Clemence is caught in the act, flees, and is shot, Palmyre loses her right-hand woman, the agent of death whom she sent. Most interestingly, the violence contaminating the rendering of justice increases with the stakes of justice. When Honore Grandissime discusses reinstating the ladies Nancanou with their hereditary property - the only just thing to do, according to Frowenfeld - Honore says, "A few months ago ... if I had acted then, my action would have been one of pure - even violent se/^-sacrifice" (222., emphasis in original). At that point, with the wealth of the Grandissime family secure in legitimate land titles, transferring the de Grapion property in an act of justice would have meant only an infliction of violence to the self. Since all the family titles have been called into question by the new American administration except the de Grapion plantation, the wealth of the entire family is at stake. "With matters changed in this way, I become the destroyer of my own flesh and blood," says Honore (2.2.2.}. Making restitution, as The Grandissimes says, will prove "so fatal" to the entire family. Not just an arm but the whole body will be lost. At this point, the terms of the novel register an interesting irony concerning the figure of slavery, Bras-Coupe, and slavery as a figure, as a trope of bondage, of debt, and the emancipation necessary to be released from slavery or the restitution of debt. Slavery in The Grandissimes is to be in the position of the arm cut off, to be bound by lack. According to this image, to be unbound, emancipated, is, so it would seem, to restore what was cut off. But how can such restoration take place when what has been removed is permanent? Emancipation, according to this figure, will always involve the substitution of a prosthesis and one that designates the state of lack in the restoration. Here it matters not, given this figure, whether emancipation is self-effected, taken, or rendered by the oppressor in an act of justice. There is no restoration of the state of lack possible; rather, there is only restitution, a payment of one's debt, not in kind but in substitution. The text does not accept that there is any pure paying of debt without cost or remainder, or that there is any taking of justice by the oppressed without the inscribed incision of injustice that constitutes its effects: Palmyre would give her hand at the wrist and loses her figurative right hand in the attempt; Honore's payment is the sacrifice of his family; Honore f.m.c. flees and commits suicide. Even when Honore speaks of redressing a certain popular and familial injustice in positive terms, that is, not as revenge or restitution, but in terms of repair, education, and the halt

24°

The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

of violence, he is willing to pay with a cutting violence and loss. " 'Mr. Frowenfeld, if you - if anyone - could teach my people - I mean my family - the value of peace ... I would give you, if that was your price' - he ran the edge of his left hand knife-wise around the wrist of his right - 'that' " (2x3). One thinks here also of the resonance of the term Reconstruction, in that what was being reconstructed after the Civil War was not just the political, legal, and social structure of the South, with its attempts at the mind of the southerner, but also the structure and venue of slavery itself after the Emancipation Proclamation. The proclaiming of emancipation functions as the restitution of the damage according to the terms of the oppressor. The slave is taken in hand by the discourse of the former oppressor and placed, still as the object of the discourse, in the status of the free. But the arm reconstructed at once points to the former slavery of the state of lack and stands as the emblem of its reconstruction, termed in the Reconstruction as the slavery of caste. As the product of mancipium, the slave is free in his new and reconstructed slavery.8 ADVOCACY AND

A S O C I E T Y OF THE MULTI

If it is all about lack and impossibility, what then is to be done? I think that what is not to be done is given a good showing in the actions of Joseph Frowenfeld: "The apothecary fell behind his defences, that is to say, his prescription desk" (112.). He is an American outsider in Louisiana, and his do-gooder prescriptions, made with the best of intentions, take the form of a mechanical diatribe on a society whose language he does not even understand. He is characterized as possessing a set of "door-yard ethics" (61). And from the point of view of the Creoles, "almost all the savagery that can justly be charged against Louisiana must - strange to say - be laid at the door of the Americain" (329-30). Because most contemporary readers tend to agree with Frowenfeld's positions on slavery and caste, they too are apt to neglect judging his argumental means in light of his ends. Cable's narrator, however, is less willing to do so. Of Frowenfeld, he muses, "Inexperience is apt to think that Truth will be knocked down and murdered unless she comes to the rescue" (46). If Frowenfeld is too distant, is that to say that only those closer inside are able to render the demand for justice appropriately? Honore Grandissime suggests not: "My-de'-seh, it never occurs to us that in this matter we are interested, and therefore disqualified, witnesses. We say we are not understood; that the jury (the civilized world) renders its decision without viewing the body; that we are judged from a distance.

2-4 ! Rendering Justice in T/?e Grandissimes

We forget that we ourselves are too close to see distinctly, and so continue, a spectacle to civilization, sitting in a horrible darkness, my-de'-seh!" (155-6). In the good and just terms of the desire to study sites of oppression, this passage articulates a problem that still resonates today. Honore Grandissime voices a concern over naive realism in advocacy and representation, articulated contemporarily, for instance, by Gayatri Spivak. To simply accept the discourse of the other or the oppressed as the real in an act of true justice is to overturn the current hierarchy while maintaining the same structure of power that demands hierarchy in order to function. It employs a naive positing of the other's discourse as authentic and best. The naivete concerns the possibility of making such a judgment based upon self-constructed terms without fully interrogating how one constructs and otherwise promotes the other, rather unproblematically, as a sovereign subject fitting Western philosophy's definitions. In Spivak's terms, generated within the context of a critique of Western philosophy and an examination of the field of subaltern studies, the problem is "the first-world intellectual masquerading as the absent nonrepresenter who lets the oppressed speak for themselves" ("Can" 292.). In "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Spivak spends some time tracing out "two senses of representation ... representation as speaking for, [vertreten] as in politics, and representation as re-presentation, as in art or philosophy [darstellen]" (2.75). Situated as a critique of the positivist empirical recourse to a certain naive realism in the work of contemporary French intellectuals on power and the subject, Spivak's argument underscores that representation as darstellung " dissimulates the choice of and need for heroes, paternal proxies, agents of power - Vertretung" (2,79). Re-presentation as practised by privileged critics always runs the risk of dissimulating their own ideological motivations and positions of power enabling them to represent. Darstellung, in the artistic sense of rhetoric as trope, emerges effortlessly as the justification for Vertretung, or rhetoric as persuasion (2,76). The situating sense of darstellen necessitates first the rendering of concepts by the self and then the adding on of intuition in the production of knowledge. This re-presentation will still partake of representation and translation in its initiation. The knowledge gained will be of the self and of the other as constructed by, through, and in terms of the self. Spivak argues that these "self" processes which construct the other as a subject must be interrogated in the process of representation and/as "speaking for," so as to foreground the critic's own position and agency in the process. This sort of self-interrogation has a certain utility for a type of ever ongoing, spiralling demystification process for the self and for systems of knowledge production; however, this utility is conditioned by whether one regards

2.42- The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-Century American Literature

the process as actually educative or whether the spiral becomes "a staircase going nowhere just for show." Spivak admits that this is a problem that will remain one: "It is not a solution, the idea of the disenfranchised speaking for themselves, or the radical critics speaking for them; this question of representation, self-representation, representing others, is a problem ... And there has to be a persistent critique of what one is up to, so that it doesn't get all bogged down in this homogenization" (Spivak and Gunew, "Questions" 198). My own very basic concern, however, is that even self-awareness of the entire process still operates fundamentally in relation to the self, in a regeneration and representation of those terms. Technically speaking, it cannot claim utility for the other in the terms of the other. In relation to this very problem of self-representation and the representation of the other, Cable's Honore Grandissime takes the middle ground. He argues that the discourse of the other is structurally no different from that of the one, though it is certainly different in content, because it is judged and validated by self-interest. The other is too close to himself. Interest itself blinds one to any construction of the reality as different from one's own perception. If the critical self's own interest in speaking for oppressed others motivates the blindness toward the political problems of advocacy in art and politics, and if the others' own interests blind them to their own realities, including how the task of the artist/critic intersects with them, then it seems logical that dialogue is the answer. Each must educate the other as to what he or she is doing. Following Stuart Hall's suggestion for cultural critics in the academy, one must aspire to the role of Antonio Gramsci's "organic intellectual," one who goes beyond "pure recognition ... to know deeply and profoundly" via an empathetic knowledge of the situation of the oppressed (2,81). The same should be true of those being studied. They too should be rigorously aware of how they are being regarded, approached, discursively constructed, positioned, and by definition appropriated by the terms of the critic. The critic has, then, a responsibility to transmit his or her knowledge to the oppressed others via "a mutually educative relationship" (S. Hall, "Cultural" 288), and the transmission should occur in a way, as Gayatri Spivak suggests, "that the masses will not regard as bullshit" (Post-Colonial 56). This model of intellectually aiding a self-emancipation seeks to fold discourses into each other in an attempt to escape a binary construction of the dominant and the oppressed. The new discourse would seem, however, to be effective only if the justice sought were to be rendered in the same as well. The oppressed and the cultural critics may well come to understand each other, at least in a pragmatic way and for practical ends, but if the dominant powers do not think about justice in

2,43

Rendering Justice in The Grandissimes

the same discourse, then the call for justice may not be heard. More to the point, until justice becomes restructured in terms of an equalized and non-hierarchical plurality of discourses, dialogic scenarios will not have much of an effect. Whatever the product of the mutually educative relationship, it would still have to be translated into the discourse of justice employed by those with the power to render justice to the oppressed. An ugly effect of "dialogue" could easily be the teaching of the oppressed to appropriate a new, if hybrid, discourse into which they too could mistranslate themselves. This scenario displaces what is being handed down into the realm of means. If it is not justice that is being rendered to the situation of the oppressed from the outside in the dialogue, it is still a sense of justice rendered to the discourse of the oppressed via translation, which is itself handed down. Critics, Professor Frowenfeld, and I myself may well have to learn how not to speak bullshit or, in Agricole Fusilier's terms, "jargon"; however, more difficult is to escape regarding the other's discourse as jargon, bullshit, or, given the power hierarchies that are so difficult to root out internally from the self's structure of consciousness, as just dumb, uncritical, unsophisticated, and ineffective. Whether justice is thought in terms of politics or aesthetics, authors and critics in their own self-invested seats of power usually appear malcontent with a justice formulation that may not be their own. The other problem with Honore Grandissime's formulation of things is that its discursive construction comes from within the hegemonic social and judicial discourse. It is the dominant system of justice itself that decrees interest as a disqualifier and constructs the fiction of a position that is too close. It accepts that reality is something other than, over and above, the person which only someone else can articulate and judge, without folding that articulation itself into the subject or the addresser in order to recognize its own self-centred construction. The selfpostulation of an outside denies the self's place in the constellation of all self-constructed and competing claims that structure reality in and of us. Readers may run the risk of believing Honore's articulation because it fits conveniently well with their own presuppositions, ones cast in a unionist-republican frame. The ability to translate the reader's self purely into a Creole position in order to be the oppressed is not possible without the trace of the reader's own political, often unconscious, and discursive construction of self contaminating the product of the translation. This type of contamination is made apparent when Frowenfeld translates his prescriptions for justice into specific terms. Concerning the Grandissimes' treatment of Clemence after she has been captured, he asks, "Will they treat her exactly as if she were a white, and had threatened the life of a slave?" (318). In his political writings,

244

The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

Cable articulates a version of the same: "every interest in the land demands that the freedman be free to become in all things, as far as his own personal gifts will lift and sustain him, the same sort of American citizen he would be if, with the same intellectual and moral caliber, be were white" ("Freedman's" 66-7, emphasis added). Justice for the oppressed is formulated in terms of a system of justice that oppresses. The "as if" postulate is the signal. In this formulation, justice is a translation of the African American into a figurative white American. The demand for justice merely translates or figures the oppressed into a hegemonic position, such that justice rendered would be the giving of power to oppress in return. Any hierarchical reversal is not, I believe, what either Cable or contemporary advocates consciously desire, but the dynamics of politics and of rendering justice seeks to channel the work of a cultural studies involving advocacy into their binary structures. The idea that advocating for the oppressed will work toward the rendering of justice still presumes a "justice" conceived in singular terms: either the situation of the oppressed other is translated into the terms of the powerful one and then this conception of justice is rendered back to the other, or one attempts to translate the self into the other in order to work for justice in the other's terms. The problem with this latter formulation, put boldly and reductively, concerns whether one can know what one is actually doing in the other's terms. Given the nature of translation, the response of ad vocare, or the response to the call, as a giving of voice functions under a kind of understanding that is akin to sympathy. Sympathy's politics may be effective in dominant terms, but it has a weak claim to any kind of knowledge. Cable's form of advocacy provides an aestheticized politics motivated by sympathy under the justification of "scientific" knowledge. Pragmatically speaking, sympathetic political advocacy is at least good enough to help stop actual oppression - bullets, starvation, silence, marginalization - and this is absolutely necessary work. But the work to come will be that of conceiving of justice and of a way to advocate for it within the realm of pragmatic possibility which can, regulate without hierarchically ordering the multiple claims for and terms of justice without mediation as reduction: loosely, then, a radical confederacy of equalized, if differently interested, claims and players. It would give all interested parties the opportunity to advocate for themselves while secure in the knowledge that others are and can do so equally. The confederated discourse of justice would be multi-discursive and not singular; not in a unionist sense that requires assimilation for participation but in a confederate sense of the positively contestatory plural.

Conclusion: Confederate Democracy and the Non-In-Different Constitution Interest^:] ... There is much that is obs e in the history of this word, first as to the adoption of L. interest as a s[u]b[stantive], and secondly as to the history of the O[ld] F[rench] sense "damage, loss." ED

In a world where investors await rate pronouncements from the chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board with devotion, the monetary sense of "interest" has increased in significance and common parlance. Interest on one's investment means a gain, potential abundance, even excess. Functioning importantly within capitalistic entrepreneurial economies, interest is a mainstay of the workings of progress. It enables reinvestment and accumulation. Both the logic and the rhetoric provide a compelling metaphor in a humanist discourse of character development. If, as Locke argues, people have property in their persons, then an important part of the definition of human progress is the continued development of that property (19). Indeed, the first definition of "interest" concerns property claims (OED). Invest in the self and develop one's interest. Pursue interest and gain a better life. Democratic, capitalist America largely still believes in and facilitates this possibility. Independence was declared in order to, in part, pursue life, liberty, and happiness. America was then constituted in 1789 to promote such welfare and to secure it within the blessing of liberty. Securing this pursuit and promotion as a right and developing a framework to facilitate it as rightful is part of the heritage of - indeed, impetus for - American democracy and freedom. These moves are symptomatic of a unionist philosophical impulse that creates an American humanist philosophy of political economy. What unites the category of the human - the modern human - and constitutes his1 being is the interested pursuit of self-development, for which he needs freedom. As the character Anne Clayton in Harriet Beecher Stowe's

2.46 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

Dred exclaims, "If a mind will grow and rise, make way and let it. Make room for it, and cut down everything that stands in the way!" (3:396). The Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, its amendments, and the competing understandings of unionism and confederacy can be seen as ways of gearing the structure of federalism for a best-fit relation of democracy and capitalism. Democracy is a political and governmental realization of humanist principles, and capitalism is its partnered economic realization in America. The two systems together honour and promote both senses of "interest." A unionist impulse gathers "the People" to secure free room for interest as free-enterprise capitalism and enlightenment under the banner of the democratic republic. A confederate impulse disperses "the People" to secure free room for self-interest, first, historically under the banner of states and then within them in classes and groups, with a further focus on the self as the "sovereign state" of interest. In expressly designating specific rights to the federal government and the states which limit the free pursuit of self-interest, the Constitution simultaneously draws the boundary beyond which lies its own rightful pursuit; for the limitation of rights "shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people" (Art. 9).2 Reduced to its bare bones, the principles of justice in such a constitution involve the non-transgression of boundaries: unless expressly stated, government is not allowed to impinge upon people's pursuit of their interests; the people are not allowed to pursue their interests in ways that transgress the rights of government; no person is allowed to pursue his or her interest if it transgresses another person's legal pursuit of self-interest. What rose to national attention in the 19805, with the Reagan and Bush administrations in the seat of the federal government and the marketing of the "Me Generation" for the people, was the increasing concern that individual pursuit of self-interest was gaining such preponderance that any unionist sense of "the People" as a ground of value for interest was dissipating. By no means did unionism and its centripetal pull disappear. Nationalism rose high among people's sense of identification. People were "proud to be American," but American became increasingly a kind of cultural identification that stood for individual pursuit of happiness and property as the criteria of the good life. Unionism, in its older sense of the forging of a single national people, dissipated, becoming mainly a mechanism for individual definitions of the good life. Justice as identification with a national shared sense of Tightness threatened to be transformed, so that what was right devolved only to what was good for me, with scorn for any kind of limitation of my freedom in favour of another -

247

Conclusion

be the other an actual other person, or "the People" as a whole, or the government as representative of this people. In Habits of the Heart, for instance, Robert N. Bellah and colleagues note, in their study of a particular slice of 19805 American society, how interviewees spoke in terms of "'values' and 'priorities' not justified by any wider framework of purpose or belief. What is good is what one finds rewarding. If one's preferences change, so does the nature of the good. Even the deepest ethical virtues are justified as matters of personal preference" (6). 3 In the authors' view, this sense of liberty has led to an individualism run rampant, in which all aspects of life, including any sense of morality, have become grounded in the person, personal preferences, and the ever-changing desires of acquisitive individuals. As no longer the positive ground of judgment of what is just, morality becomes as personal and as situationally applicable as individual desires: Now if selves are defined by their preferences, but those preferences are arbitrary, then each self constitutes its own moral universe, and there is finally no way to reconcile conflicting claims about what is good in itself. All we can do is refer to chains of consequences and ask if our actions prove useful or consistent in light of our own "value-systems." All we can appeal to in relationships with others is their self-interest, likewise enlightened, or their intuitive sympathies. (Bellah et al. 76)

This contemporary concern echoes nineteenth-century preoccupations, and in particular it sounds like a unionist-republican criticism of a confederate-democratic sociality that the unionist structure of government finds increasingly difficult to address, given the tools at its disposal. The contemporary social critics reflect an anxiety over pluralized morality - what they see as the fragmentation of adherence to a single, religiously informed moral code devolving to a world of secular and particularized interests. Pluralized morality results in behaviour that they regard as destructive of sociality. America has devolved into a procedural republic attending to these particularized interests. Justice, which is increasingly being articulated away from any recourse to morality as such, is in this sense a process: A just society seeks not to promote any particular ends, but enables its citizens to pursue their own ends, consistent with a similar liberty for all; it therefore must govern by principles that do not presuppose any particular conception of the good. What justifies these regulative principles above is not that the maximize the general welfare, or cultivate virtue, or otherwise promote the good, but rather that they conform to the concept of right. (Sandel 82.)

2,48 The Letter and the Spirit of i^th-Century American Literature

Many feel nostalgia for the promotion of a defined good for the people that would cultivate virtue and maximize at least their definition of the general welfare. And to give it the benefit of the doubt, this type of paternalism believes it has a good heart, knows what everyone needs, and desires to show them how best to realize what must be their fundamental interests as persons. Of late, and yet again, appeals are made to a religious sense of morality as a higher law governing persons, who in turn would represent their characters in the formation of ethical laws for the secular nation. Even Lincoln, who was generally careful to speak about the Founding Fathers and not God the Father as what legitimated the United States, began to appeal to something beyond the People as that to which they are held accountable. In his first inaugural address, he argues that the Constitution is also subject to "universal law," which is of the "Almighty Ruler of nations, with his eternal truth and justice" ("First" 217, 2,2,3). Whether then or now, people tend to look outside themselves to something other, to appeal to an essentialized Other as that which constitutes the sociality as persons and society as a people. What I hope the connection to Lincoln suggests is that these moves are at root unionist in character. They seek to relay people through a singularity so that sociality can be reaffirmed as constituted by human similarity. Theologically speaking, humanity and sociality are made "in the image." No one said that plurality was easy - easy to live with or to govern and a trace of the unionist-republican anxiety is healthy, because it keeps debate alive about how to govern plurality. In the purely procedural republic, in which there appears to be an absence of any unifying principle of sociality, America begins to look too much like Calhoun's confederacy, if now radically reconstructed on the level of the person. The problem, according to its critics, is that radical plurality begins to take on the character of essentializing each and every interest in difference and then granting to each an exclusive right of "interposition," as Calhoun would call it ("Disquisition" 2,8). This sense of a radically pluralized democracy of essentialized interests tends to use the philosophical problems of pure translation as additional ground for the right of interposition, such that politics becomes a gripe session of different interested persons claiming that each can never understand the other. Compromise is barely in the discourse; coalitions seem to recede as things of the past. In a radically pluralized democracy of the purely procedural republic, these procedures may well protect interests, but they often do so at the expense of their actual promotion through the general government. The risk in developing this reading of the social contract is the contracting of sociality so radically that it promotes xenophobia.

Z49

Conclusion

The problem, however, with trying to rectify this problem by attempting to constitute sociality on the basis of morality is that the pragmatic definitions and realizations of morality vary, sometimes widely, between religious and social groups. Appealing to God in an America with a secular Constitution and a plurality of religions and spiritual identifications in its society also raises the problem of "whose God or which god?" While it is hopeful to posit a common, religiously inflected "higher law," in the sense of saying, "Surely negotiation can reach an understanding of 'God' at least as a figure for a shared principle of ethical conduct," is it so easy to give up the idea of the JudeoChristian God as that figure to which the Constitution ostensibly hearkens ? Both the Bible and the Constitution demand interpretation in application to contemporary society, and such interpretation tries to render univocal what is written in the most polyvalent of media - language. I mean no irreverence when I say that the Bible does not help much as a clear judge of contemporary formulations of moral issues. The referential status of language and texts is at the heart of the problem. In attempting to ameliorate the divisive issues in the nineteenth century, Lincoln, for instance, argued strongly for the merits of careful, historicized reading in order to capture the understanding of the authors of the Constitution; yet in the end he could only conclude that one is left with marks in repetition. Concerning the moral issue of slavery, "as those fathers marked it, so let it be again marked, as an evil not to be extended" (Lincoln, "Address" 12.0). This act of marking a text is not in any way univocal reference; rather, if these marks can be called referential at all, they are so only in the sense of gesture. And this is not because Lincoln has any sense of deconstruction as we know it but, rather, because he knew full well that regarding slavery - which is not even called by name in the document - the Constitution does not expressly say. If the constitution of both persons and country are subject to the Almighty Ruler, then perhaps the inexpressability of writing marks this subjection. God is represented in the Torah, for instance, as a word that cannot be said. This is the yud, hay, vav, hay., rendered pronounceable as " Yahweh" for the sake of the human will to know, and in the absence of the possibility of knowing, we represent; we make/ mark it up. To say "Yahweh" is to betray yud, hay, vav, hay, which is itself only a mark in language gesturing to that which does not partake of human language, but only Its own. "Yud, hay, vav, hay," "Yahweh," "Elohim," "Adonai," "God" are all human linguistic signs more or less representing a human concept of what constituted humanity but cannot be met materially face-to-face. The Bible thematizes Yahweh in(to) language that signifies pure presence and

250

The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

self-referentiality - EHYEH AS HER EHYEH 11 will be-there howsoever I will be-there" (Exod. 3:14). But this kind of representation in human language is always already a betrayal of God's otherwisethan-being. According to the Bible, God's language is pure creation. The heavens and earth, land and sea, the animals and the human creature (the adam), are spoken into being by God's vocative breath (Gen. 1-2). Yet the adam is also created in the image of God (Gen. 1:26, 27), which initially offers up the possibility of a model of creative language that is pure reflection. However, the adam, or human creature, is fashioned from the material of the earth and given life through God's breath (Gen. 2:7). The adam is the first handmade manufacture from the products of God's language. Woman is subsequently and similarly fashioned, but from the adam's bone (Gen. 2:21-3). Humanity is "image," then, as representation, not reflection. Only life is directly God's breath (Gen. 2:7). This distinction between image as reflection and artistic representation marks the connection between God and humanity as a gap, a fundamental difference made between, which yet intimately relates. This gap and connection is "representation." The adam is then given a language, which can name the animals of the world, so that the name is the thing named (Gen. 2:19). While not purely creative, adamic language is not exactly representational either, for in the name there is no distinction between signifier and signified, as post-Saussurean linguistics would figure the sign. With the expulsion from the Garden, woman partakes of the fruit, and knowledge as such comes to be. Time as chronology begins, the sign splits into signifier and signified, and human being is born. Human language now becomes a structure of representation, and the image of the adam's originary existence is spoken back into being. In this language, God is posited as that which humanity represents (with its constitutive and unbridgeable gap), but which it cannot perfectly express. God is always inexpressible, but constituted through marking, figuring, gesturing to the radical priority of this Alterity. The lessons of the Torah's narrative of the constitution of humanity have significance for the state and its constitution. The relay of representation between God, humanity, "the People," the state, and the "blessings of liberty" are all cast in the double structure of gap and link. Representation as perfect image or mirroring is not part of either the constitution of the human or the state. Always, representation is figural or figurative in that it constitutes something that is of a different order which figures (signifies) sameness. Representation, like language, is metaphoric in structure. And so the question of justice in this regard becomes that of developing the right relation holding sameness and dif-

2.51

Conclusion

ference together, a relation that unites "objects" as the same in difference (different "look," different orders) which necessarily transgresses the thing-in-itself, but does so justly or rightly. The justice of representation is sameness-in-difference, not indifferent to difference. Representation has not just to admit but also to respect the difference that enables it to be. The justice of representation and justice in representation must be motivated by this respect. Justice will speak a meaning that cannot not be said, even as justice represents it. This is to question, as Derrida does, how not to speak. Justice is constituted by and as a kind of "saying" (a call from a constitutive alterity) beyond and prior to that which is being said. In the face of such alterity, what justice pronounces will always be a certain kind of betrayal; however, as representative, it must work to respect alterity as constitutive of the "sameness" it fashions. The idea of representing God provides an analogous theme: absolute alterity and an otherwise-than-being are generated figures that trace and admittedly circumlocute and, in so doing, honour the unrepresentability of God. Yud, hay, vav, hay is a linguistic construction that represents God's unrepresentability, and does so justly because it reduces to a minimum the necessary betrayal that is hard-wired into language, while providing a figure that both is workable and contains its own mystery: yud, hay, vav, hay is onomatopoeic of the breath exhaled into the adam. It does not have to be regarded as a loss that representation is not perfect image, but at its just best is only a representative tracing. Every "lack" is not negative. Rather, it indicates the limit, the constitutive limitation, of humanity's constitution as selves in language, and that within these limitations we gesture toward absolute alterity. The marks of this gesture are within the self, part of our constitution, as difference. Every self is constituted in difference to another. As a species, humanity may have a certain identity, but as selves, we are unique and dissimilar. There are rights, we say, extending from that: freedom to realize the uniqueness of the self but a limited freedom in justice to the recognition of uniqueness, the difference of selves as others. What concerns me, however, comes from an empirical observation. Over time, given a system that is constructed to regulate justice with laws as further and particular limitations, two things tend to happen: limitations increase, and the uniqueness of individuals tends to be pushed toward assimilation. And this is not just the phenomenon of national-cultural homogeneity, but rather, it is a contraction of sociality with instrumental limitations that squeeze the necessary space of our constitution in-difference to that of indifference. The other self is just another, like me as any other. Without any specific priority or honour to the other before my self, humanity allows the tendency for the

2. 5 2. The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-Century American Literature

other as any other to become less than me, to be pushed forever behind me. Is there any sort of bulwark against this reduction? I follow Emmanuel Levinas here, though adapt him slightly and suggest that the bulwark is the fact that humanity is thematized in a genealogy traceable ultimately to God as a figure of alterity beyond even philosophical conceptions of difference. God is the constitutive beyond of humanity that is posited.4 The alterity of God is good, and when God created humanity, the evaluation was that "it was exceedingly good!" (Gen. 1:31). Originally or originarily created from alterity and created in difference (sexual) and from all other things, humanity is exceedingly good. Our originary sociality is constituted in differences that are non-in-different to others. Hence the event of meeting is thematized as shalom/salem, the simultaneity of hello and peace.5 The prior peace of the constitution of humanity, the non-in-difference of meeting, must be remembered as what is also represented in the constitution of the state. The coming together in peaceful sociality is, as Levinas says, the "one facing the other. It is myself for the other ... in which the other 'regards' me, not in order to 'perceive' me but in 'concerning me,' in 'mattering to me as someone for whom I am answerable'" (Outside 124). This is a freedom, a freedom from the egotism of self-referential being that does not face the other. It is a freedom "to answer for the other, precisely to defend the rights of the other" (Outside 12.5, emphasis in original). Levinas asks whether we should not discern this prior non-indifference in the motto of the French republic: fraternity (Outside 12,5). Unfortunately, that word suggests to many an exclusion of women in political connections of humanity. America's rhetoric does not come off much better in the Declaration and the Constitution until the later amendments, with this exception: is it not now possible to discern nonindifference in the "We" of the "People," such that it extols the force of the goodness-of-alterity pushing the Constitution continually to represent the rights of the other/me? This "We" of "the People" and of the Constitution must be secure enough to promote a confederacy of difference, non-in-different to difference, as part of the "blessing of liberty." This is only to live up to what the definition of a confederacy itself can be, a federal structure in which the "co," the "with," the mutuality of sociality, a sociality of being with beings, has a priority. What I seek in this metaphysical discourse is a prelude to suggesting that the American Constitution and its debates over the most perfect structure of federalism contain significant terms for creating a just sociality and society, well adapted to America's ever-diversifying population. Rather than in opposition, it is important to hold unionism and confederacy together, though I think that they are most usefully

2.53

Conclusion

thought of in different discursive realms. The express desire for unionist federalism produces a strong patriotic nationalism that girds the "We the People" as "Americans." Yet that unionist pull also irks millions of Americans, when they perceive it as fashioning a strongly interventionist national government that tries to legislate the good life in America in the form, for example, of increased taxation to pay for redistributive economic and social programs. The confederate principle invokes its centrifugal force, resulting in reminders that the federal government is merely a mechanism for the organization of individual and state desires. On the pragmatic level of policy decisions and the day-today of governing, this push and pull may well never end, and it is perhaps a healthy, if agonistic, check on the manifestations of power. However, on the philosophical level, unionism and confederacy are ways of thematizing metaphysics as the relation between, as Levinas terms it, "the same and the other" (Totality 39). One way of thinking about the centripetal pull of unionism in America is that the desire, even the necessity, for uniting as a "people" traces in the "presence" of existence the prior unity of the self with the other, which constitutes the possibility of the coming to be of humanity in the interhuman relation. "The thou is posited in front of a we" (Levinas, Totality 213). Judeo-Christianity thematizes it as the constitutive connection in creation between God and humanity. Levinas terms it metaphysically as "hostage" and "persecution,"6 an unavoidable faceto-face relation of responsibility for the other, which in ontology, in being, in language, in the reality of the here and now, constitutes the possibility of sociality and justice. My responsibility for the other is not descriptive or prescriptive of conduct yesterday, today, or tomorrow. It is not saying that everyone must give everything of themselves over to someone who appears less privileged. As a metaphysical description, it indicates a condition radically prior to the actuality of being-in-theworld and speaks rather to the possibility of consciousness, cognition, and judgments, be them rational or irrational. To be responsible for the other and to respond to the face of the other is immediately to be an other for someone else. "[T]he epiphany of the face ... attests the presence of the third party, the whole of humanity, in the eyes that look at me" (Levinas, Totality 213). "The presence of the face, the infinity of the other, is a destituteness, a presence of the third party (that is, of the whole of humanity which looks at us)" (Levinas, Totality 2.13). In a relation that is not mediation, to respond to the other is the constitution of the human in (as) the interhuman relation; or, as I would term it, to respond to the face is to usher in being-in-the-world, in which the first actual demand is for justice as recognition. Ethics as metaphysics details the constitution of humanity as sociality. The first task of its

2,54 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-century American Literature

ontology, however, is to create justice. If being is ushered into - and as the world ("the whole of humanity"), it happens as always already plural. The first cognition is that of the other as the third, to use Levinas's term, and thus measurement, judgment, and decision are the core terms of the very definition of consciousness and cognition. This theme of unity - as one prior to, but wholly constitutive of, ontology and sociality, and then political theory, nation-states, and governments as realizations of them - affirms the necessity of a confederate principle, not as a prescriptive government, but as an organizational ethos representative of every individual's uniqueness. This uniqueness is not affirmed, but is enabled to come to be, by the vocative call of the face of the other to whom one is bound. I do not wish, here, to rehearse Levinas's major works; however, I flag his thought in concert with American thought and practices because they provide another way of approaching "radical democracy" or "radical pluralism." The concern over unionist rhetoric and logic is that they ultimately devolve to a hierarchical play of power: differences sublated into a Hegelian-styled All; religious, racial, ethnic, and/or cultural assimilation; poverty and disenfranchisement in a capitalist economics that dissembles its prejudices and riggings; a democracy that subtly creates the conditions of totalitarianism. The idea of a single human being as the centralized figure against which actual differences are defined and recognized simultaneously renders those differences marginal. Hence, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe argue that any kind of radical democracy has to begin with a cognitive shift from the hegemony of a unionist, assimilatory logic. In a radical and pluralized democracy, "There is no single underlying principle fixing - and hence constituting - the whole field of differences" (Laclau and Mouffe in). Rather than a binaristic structure, there is a plurality of nodal points at which subject-constructing discourses meet. Any sense of "difference" must now be conceived by way of a confederated plurality, as opposed to a conception through subordination to hegemonic unity and unicity. "As every subject position is a discursive position, it partakes of the open character of every discourse; consequently, the various positions cannot be totally fixed in a closed system of differences" (Laclau and Mouffe 115). There may well be momentary positions of subordination, but if they are discursively negotiated and accepted, then such subordination need not be oppressive: a relation of subordination establishes, simply, a set of differential positions between social agents, and we already know that a system of differences which constructs each social identity as positivity not only cannot be antagonistic, but would bring about the ideal conditions for the elimination of all antagonisms. (Laclau and Mouffe 154, emphasis in original)

255

Conclusion

Only if it is accepted that the subject positions cannot be led back to a positive and unitary founding principle - only then can pluralism be considered radical. Pluralism is radical only to the extent that each term of this plurality of identities finds within itself the principle of its own validity, without this having to be sought in a transcendent or underlying positive ground for the hierarchy of meaning of them all and the source and guarantee of their legitimacy. And this radical pluralism is democratic to the extent that the autoconstitutivity of each one of its terms is the result of displacements of the egalitarian imaginary. Hence, the project for a radical and plural democracy, in a primary sense, is nothing other than the struggle for a maximum autonomization of spheres on the basis of the generalization of the equivalential-egalitarian logic. (167, emphases in original)

What I argue, however, via Levinas, is that unionism itself must be radically conceived. Metaphysics will represent the relationship between the self and the other as not exactly hierarchical but as one of radical priority. The face of the other persecutes. One is hostage to the call of the face. "Priority" characterizes necessity, the irreducible pull. All these phrases are figures cast in the gap of language, which seeks to fashion a relation of service that is not subservient. The pull to sociality is immediate, fundamental, and necessary, and without such radical union, one is hard-pressed to theorize the coming to be of society. State-of-Nature theories, whether involving peace or war, presume sociality as an irreducible relation between one and another. They do not explain it or theorize its originary possibility. Indeed, the state of nature itself is seen as the originary possibility. Such theories only play out the effects of human social existence, presuming already its (rather unproblematic) constitution. The radical priority of union, the hostage state of one-for-the-other prior to any conception of desire or will, or even need as it is diversely thematized in psychology, biology, or sociology, establishes in radical anteriority the preconditions for cognition - that with the other are others, and that the human is conceived on the basis of difference prior to any cognition of similarity. Rather than jettisoning these preconditions, unity and unionism enable recognition of humanity as a confederacy non-in-different. The desire for, the necessity of, justice is simultaneous with cognition as the birth into presence of humanity, for immediately is everyone responsible for every other as every other is faced, seen, cognized. Indeed, not wanting to be responsible, disliking the burden, affirms its irreducibility, priority, and weight as well as the necessity of justice simultaneous with it. That logic hearkens to the renovated and redeemed concept of the concurrent voice, developed in chapter 3;

2,5 6 The Letter and the Spirit of 19th-Century American Literature

however, in a radical and plural democracy, such a voice would not have to be created as an additive and, in some sense, antidote to a unionist, majoritarian, hegemonic structure and process. "Concurrence" here would be reinterpreted as a voice of the discursively constructed self-in-relation "with currency" - one that cannot be devalued.

Notes

CHAPTER ONE

1 All quotations of the Christian and Hebrew Bibles are from the King James translation in the Comparative Study Bible edition, unless otherwise noted. All quotations specifically from from the Torah are from The Five Books of Moses, trans. Everett Fox. All emphases are in the original, unless otherwise noted. 2 Rather than any providence from God, Hutchinson and most of her family were killed in what appears to have been Native retribution in the wake of Willem Kieft's raids on the New Netherland Natives. See Lang 52.. 3 For a detailed account of the necessity of focusing on gender in the theological and political issues of the Antinomian Controversy, see Lang 1-51. 4 See, for instance, Ann Kibbey's The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism, in which she pursues the linkages between theology, language, gender, race, and their politics. Her work is certainly foundational for my thinking in this chapter. In The Making of an American Thinking Class, Darren Staloff recognizes the multiple and intertwined discursive structure, while highlighting effectively the tensions of class implicated in the development of intellectualism within the realms of biblical theology, Congregationalism, and governance of the Massachusetts Bay Company. 5 Louise Breen suggests that a petition to Governor Winthrop in March 1638 to establish an artillery company proved unsettling and potentially subversive to the government, since twenty-four members on the roster of the artillery company had aligned themselves with the Antinomians (4-5).

258 Notes to pages 34-6 6 Lynn Parks briefly discusses the tension between self-interested capitalism and the principles of ethical distribution held by the Puritans, while nodding to how capitalism or the idea of unbridled economic progress became a marketing principle in the letters of Puritan colonists back to England (11-2,0). 7 Lang comes close to such a conclusion, but she does not play it out: "In one sense, then, we may regard Hutchinson's antinomianism as representing a 'residual' aspect of the dominant culture, to use Raymond Williams's term. That is, her understanding of grace can be seen as an element of the culture 'formed in the past, but ... still active in the cultural process, not only and often not at all as an element of the past, but as an effective element of the present'" (49). 8 Erikson factors in how the structure of the Company creates its own political situation in the tension between stakeholders, positioned as if shareholders, and those taking on the executive "running" of the Company (54-64). 9 Ultimately, I agree with Thomas Scanlan when he says at the opening of his study of colonial writing and its effect on the discourse of nation in England, " Scholars working in the field of American Studies have attempted to account for the origins of what has come to be known as the American self. It is my contention that these conventional - American exceptionalist accounts are fundamentally anachronistic, insofar as they read back the later construction of an American national identity to its putative colonial 'beginnings' " (i). However, a distinction needs to be made between anachronistically characterizing Puritan Congregationalism as democratic, with all the contemporary overtones sounded, and noting structures that occurred during Puritanism which we now would term "democratic" or "individualistic" for discussion in contemporary theoretical and political discussions. In my study, which deals mainly with the "afterlife" of Puritanism, I am interested in how the effects of historical happenings were appropriated into the "now" of the nineteenth century and beyond. While Congregationalism was not "democratic" and Anne Hutchinson was not calling for some kind of contemporary understanding of "individualism," it certainly looks that way in the contemporary field of vision, and that " appearance" is not insignificant. 10 Louise Breen argues compellingly, however, for another angle on the protodemocratic structure of Massachusetts's congregational system and government. If, as I am arguing, antinomianism is proto-democratic on the level of speech and identity, Breen argues that the orthodox ministers and magistrates were proto-democratic on the level of what, in modern terms, would be called practical public policy. They offered "widespread access to freehold land tenure and economic 'independency,' rough egalitarianism among house-holding patriarchs, and a greater concern for the local 'tribe' of

259 Notes to pages 38-44

11

12

13

14

saints than the international community of faith [the community of the elect who cross all national and colonial boundaries in the temporal world]. If any one tradition in New England was protodemocratic, in the sense of being responsive to the needs of ordinary people, that tradition was orthodoxy and not antinomianism" (8). Lisa Gordis demonstrates how important the distinction between public and private voice was in the Company and why it flared up so during the Antinomian Controversy. As the ministers began to disagree, they tried hard to keep their differences of interpretation and the attempts at clarification private, in secluded conversations and letters. In public tracts, sermons, and teachings, their discourse was all one of appreciation, love, and similarity. Gordis suggests that one of the incidents that increased the stakes in the Controversy was Winthrop's public criticism of John Wheelwright's sermons (152). It is as if "going public" materialized the Controversy and inadvertently sanctioned the public right to vocal criticism. In Piety and Power, Leslie Lindenauer argues that "religious practice ... provided women with a platform from which to assert their authority, even as Reformed doctrine itself lauded their submissiveness" (xii), largely because a Puritan of any sex and class felt "secure in the thought that they needed no priest to intervene between them and God. A lay believer's voice would speak as clearly to God as a cleric's" (xvi). It was a Puritan's duty to speak out when any person's actions put the piety of the community in jeopardy. Laura Henigman's study of pastoral dialogues in eighteenthcentury New England focuses on how women's critical discourse, by working within the public image of submissiveness, was able to be incorporated into orthodoxy and to transform it without risking excommunication. It is important to recognize that Hutchinson's revelation is an annunciation. It is the "voice" of God's own spirit to her soul and not just a silent opening of the Word. The vocal and vocative condition of this revelation links Hutchinson to Abraham and Hagar and provides a theo-logic for her subsequent proof texts. Gordis, for instance, elides the vocative element: "Hutchinson turned to the biblical text in her perplexities - as she had been instructed to do by the preaching of the ministers - and felt the agency of the Spirit enabling her reading. This she called 'immediate revelation' " (170). Feeling the agency of the Spirit and hearing the voice of the Spirit are not the same and would not bring forth the same politics. Norman Pettit is succinct and clear in his analysis of what stands as the problem here: "the critical charge against the antinomians was not that they denied preparation as such, but that they denied it on the basis of immediate revelations. This meant that they scorned not only the necessity of the Word - the basis of Christianity, the foundation of the Christian community - but the necessity of the Law, by which man is made conscious of his sins" (151).

260 Notes to pages 44-50 15 One of the reasons why Egan's and Staloff's studies are useful is that each in its own way draws out a significant transformation of culture revealed in the Antinomian Controversy. As Egan demonstrates, Governor Winthrop's denial of Anne Hutchinson's experience does appear to be part of his desire to build experience as a legitimating realm of thought and governance. Staloff's description of Winthrop's participation in an elite "thinking class" fits with Egan's overall project. However, I need to underscore that this class is only a male thinking class, and this "experience" in its theological and political senses is only legitimating as long as it is gender-discriminating. See Egan 73, Staloff 45-7. 16 An ironic residue, however, that gets erased in the Christian reading of typology is that while the promise to Abraham is fulfilled through Sarah in Isaac, no revelation is made to Sarah herself. God tells Abraham that Sarah will bear a child (Gen. 17:16, 21), and she overhears the three travellers saying that they will return when she has borne a child (Gen. 18:10). God does speak with Hagar, however, via a direct messenger in the wilderness, by the spring on the way to Shur (Gen. 16:7-14). The words of that address (Gen. 16:10) trope those that God speaks to Abram metaphorically in Genesis 15:5 and more didactically in Genesis 17:2. For both Hagar and Abraham are told that their seed will be multiplied exceedingly. In the typological reading, of course, only the seed of the promise via Sarah will be justified as grace. 17 For a detailed account of the necessary assistance of the Holy Spirit in opening Scripture, see the section "Divine and Human Interpretive Assistance," in Gordis 23-31. 18 Here, for instance, I differ from Tobin's acute suggestion that Hutchinson exemplifies feminine language in trait or strategy, which undermines "conventional opinions, values, and interpretations, to argue against fixed meaning, to disrupt 'constructive' discourse" (264). As if following the claims of "French feminism," Hutchinson "playfs] with language, to invent multiple meanings" (2.64). As signified by her sarcasm, which indicates "a gap between her opinions and her words," she makes clear that "words and the concepts they signify are not identical" (2,65). Reading her in this way seems to discount fully the possibility of revelation and the divine and otherwise religious sources of this linguistic alterity, which goes far beyond sarcasm and play. 19 Transcription error seems quite possible, given that the prickly issue of the soul and the spirit itself implicates either a misquotation of i Thesalonians 5:23, (Maclear 89) or a mistranscription of the conversation, i Thesalonians 5:2.3 reads, "I pray God that your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." On the problems of Ezra Stiles's transcription of the trial record, made 133 years after the event and the only existing record, see Maclear 87-9.

261 Notes to pages 50-60 20 Working from the Latin and its concepts of the body, soul, and spirit, so as to inform the English translations, Charles Lloyd Cohen meticulously details the difference between sarx, the mortal, fleshly body of weakness, and soma, the body as outer and inner, the whole person, and then some. For soma is the godly creation that is raised, "a real corporal figure purged of sarx" (31-5). Emery Battis notes, "Her confusion had been in the varying uses of the word 'soul' to indicate either esse or animus according to the context" (2,38). 21 I agree with Michael Kaufmann's assertion that "Hutchinson does not claim actively to reveal anything about herself as an interpretive authority. Nor does she claim to be celebrating her own private inspiration; revelation for her did not mean some Romantic idea of imagination, creativity, or genius" (84). Any difference in her understanding and, I add, her language is caused by her experience of revelation and of God's annunciation opening the Word to her. Lang's argument concerning this "prophetic woman" refers to Hutchinson as having "self-trust" (3), "self-assertion and individual autonomy" (17), while also noting that she claims "to be nothing in herself but all in Christ" (42.) and that "[t]he denial of self is ... central to antinomian rhetoric" (35). This potential paradox is resolved by Lang by arguing that total self-denial results in radical empowerment, because one now has assurance of election. Lang's wording, however, suggests that she ultimately feels that Hutchinson drew at least as much if not more power from the assurance than from the annunciation and resultant union: " Claiming to be nothing in herself but all in Christ, Hutchinson reduced herself to a medium through which God spoke and, in this way, empowered herself more fully than the men in whom the community vested power" (42, emphasis added). Such wording leads Kaufmann to criticize Lang for trying to turn Hutchinson into a proponent of "individualism" in our contemporary sense, when that sense of individualism had yet to come about (i43n2_5). My problem is that Lang seems to discount the theological significance of Hutchinson's revelation and perhaps that it even occurred, as "claiming" would seem to suggest. 22 On the "plain style" of Puritan theological discourse, see Miller, Nature's Nation, especially 208-16. It is not that Puritan ministers had no ear for poetics or wholly feared its effusion. Robert Daly argues that the plain style did include the use of figuration, especially metaphor. While in God's Altar, Daly's argument is mainly fleshed out in a period later than that of the Antinomian Controversy - it functions best with the writings of Edward Taylor - he does demonstrate through Anne Bradstreet's writings that poetry was encouraged as a means of personal meditation. Miller and Daly are not entirely in disagreement. Excessive ornamentation for the sake of itself or as a sign of excessive enthusiasm was frowned upon by Puritan ministers, but all figuration was not considered ornamentation. Figuration was used

2.62 Notes to pages 63-8 specifically, to attempt precision in explanation. In The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism, Ann Kibbey details how the classical concept of figura, which initially had more to do with material shapes (figures), became understood as manifesting itself in language, a concept that assisted Puritans in understanding the relationship between materiality and spirituality. If ministers were the "'mere Conduit-pipes' for the Holy Ghost" (Kibbey 23), what came out of their mouths was the "Holy Ghost's manner of speech," which was highly figural, often mystical (24). Focusing at length on John Cotton's speech, Kibbey notes that in his "religious exhortations he is most dogmatic where he is most oblique" (30). CHAPTER TWO

1 Here I follow Carol Jacobs's translation. The German reads, "die Ubersetzung liebend vielmehr und bis ins Einzelne hinein dessen Art des Meinens in eigenen Sprache sich anbilden" (qtd. in Jacobs 84). Harry Zohn's translation can be found in Benjamin, Illuminations 78. 2 In Opening Scripture, Lisa Gordis suggests that "Hutchinson placed too much confidence in a system of 'free and open' discussion" (181) and that she just did not quite understand what was going on during her examination; for example, that it was not engaged in learning but was a trial with excommunication as its stakes. If she were to have figured out the stakes and the power dynamics in time, she might have been able to draw forth submissiveness or at least its compelling image, which was what the ministers and magistrates wanted or needed to see. 3 Technically, according to Jean-Franc.ois Lyotard, the differend is "the case where the plaintiff is divested of the means to argue and becomes for that reason a victim" (Differend 8). "The differend is the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be" (13). The structure of the conversion narrative positions the speaker as a certain defendant, but he or she is one who becomes an unrecognized plaintiff against the performance of communicative language when the congregation cannot recognize his or her language. The sense of the "certain" differend I mean here is that the social function of communicative language itself cannot recognize how it could (yet) translate the claim of the referent, the annunciation itself. 4 Kathryn Zabelle Derounian argues that the narrative was probably written "within several years of Rowlandson's release in May 1675" an