The Edinburgh Companion to Atlantic Literary Studies 9781474402958

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The Edinburgh Companion to Atlantic Literary Studies

Edited by Leslie Elizabeth Eckel and Clare Frances Elliott

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation Leslie Elizabeth Eckel and Clare Frances Elliott, 2016 © the chapters their several authors, 2016 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10 / 12 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 0294 1 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 0295 8 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 1828 7 (epub) The right of Leslie Elizabeth Eckel and Clare Frances Elliott to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

Foreword Leslie Elizabeth Eckel and Clare Frances Elliott

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Introduction: The New Atlantic Literary Studies Paul Giles

1

I. Atlantic Cultural Geographies 1. The Silkworm and the Bee: Georgia, Cognitive Mapping, and the Atlantic Labour System in Boltzius and Thomson Leonard von Morzé

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2. From Auburn to Upper Canada: Pastoral and Georgic Villages in the British Atlantic World Juliet Shields

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3. London’s Pan-Atlantic Public Sphere: Luso-Hispanic Journals, 1808–1830 Joselyn M. Almeida

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4. Emerson’s Atlantic States Christopher Hanlon

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II. Atlantic Mobilities 5. Shifting Cultures and Transatlantic Imitations: The Case of Burney, Bennett and Read Eve Tavor Bannet

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6. ‘We are where we are’: Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn, Mythologies of Return and the Post-Celtic Tiger Moment Sinéad Moynihan

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7. Contemporary Atlantic Literature and the Unhappiness of Travel Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson

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III. The Black Atlantic 8. Writing Race and Slavery in the Francophone Atlantic: Transatlantic Connections and Contradictions in Claire de Duras’s Ourika and Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal Susan Castillo Street 9. Crosscurrents of Black Utopianism: Martin R. Delany’s and Frederick Douglass’s Countercultural Atlantic Leslie Elizabeth Eckel 10. Black Diaspora Literature and the Question of Slavery Yogita Goyal

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131 146

IV. Atlantic Genders and Sexualities 11. The Early Modern Queer Atlantic: Narratives of Sex and Gender on New World Soil Jennifer Frangos

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12. ‘Local locas’: Trans-Antillean Queerness in Mayra Santos-Febres’s Sirena Selena Ivonne M. García

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13. Queer Atlantic Modernism and Masculinity in Claude McKay’s Banjo and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night Daniel Hannah

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V. Reform and Revolution 14. Urban Reform, Transatlantic Movements and US Writers: 1837–1861 Brigitte Bailey

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15. Early Feminism and the Circulation of Self-Reliance in the Atlantic World Clare Frances Elliott

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16. Suffragette Celebrity at Home from Abroad: Feminist Periodicals and Transatlantic Circulation Barbara Green

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VI. Atlantic Exchanges 17. An Atlantic Adam: Emerson and the Origins of United States Literature David Greenham

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18. Taming the American Shrew: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s New Woman and the Transatlantic Courtship Plot Sarah Wagner-McCoy

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19. Music, Language and (Latin) American Grains: William Carlos Williams’s Voyage to Pagany and ‘The Desert Music’ Daniel Katz

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VII. Atlantic Ecologies 20. ‘Calcutta still haunts my Fancy’, or the Confusion of Old and New World Ecologies in Early Caribbean Literature Louis Kirk McAuley

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21. ‘More Savage than Bears or Wolves’: Animals, Colonialism and the Aboriginal Atlantic Kevin Hutchings

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22. Reading the ‘Book of Nature’: Emerson, the Hunterian Museum and Transatlantic Science Samantha C. Harvey

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23. Transatlantic Magazines and the Rise of Environmental Journalism Susan Oliver

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VIII. Atlantic Events 24. Sputniks, Ice-Picks, G.P.U.: Nabokov’s Pale Fire Adam Piette 25. ‘O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag’: Bob Dylan, the Beatles and T. S. Eliot’s Transatlantic Encounters Christopher Gair

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26. Unbridgeable Gaps: Time, Space and Memory in the Post-9/11 Novel Catherine Morley

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Contributors Selected Bibliography Index

397 403 406

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Foreword Leslie Elizabeth Eckel and Clare Frances Elliott

I

n English Traits (1856), Ralph Waldo Emerson describes the Atlantic Ocean as ‘a galvanic battery’ distributing ‘acids at one pole and alkalies at the other’.1 It is a striking metaphor, both for its conscious modernity and for its scientific affectation, expressing what Emerson saw as the profound differences in the US and British national characters, something that English Traits goes on to explore in some detail. But the vehicle of the metaphor also subtly insists that the phenomenon of cultural polarisation relies upon the functional interactions of a greater system: Emerson’s Atlantic battery is an image of electrochemical conversion, or more simply of energy transfer and distribution, which stresses the generative supranational system out of which the two contrasting national identities appear to flow. Emerson uses this thought of an electrical charge to visualise the relationship between the US and Britain, as well as the Atlantic world that joins them, in a way that also gestures toward an imagined geography where social, cultural and political exchange dynamically occur. The Edinburgh Companion to Atlantic Literary Studies is interested in this energised space and its currents. The overarching aim is to examine the extent of the cultural and literary energy system that formed in the Atlantic world. Structured around eight sections, with chapters focusing on literature and culture from first contact to the present, it explores fruitful Atlantic connections across space and time, across national cultures, embracing literature, culture and society. It is in this expansive spirit that this volume seeks to stretch the critical framework applied to writing engaged with Atlantic identity more broadly by incorporating approaches normally considered cisatlantic, transatlantic, circumatlantic or global in their scope.2 As editors of this book, we have committed ourselves to geographical breadth by bringing together studies of literary works often isolated in different and ostensibly distinct national or regional traditions such as British, French, African, Caribbean, US and Canadian literatures. With roots in the sixteenth century, the Atlantic world that this book means to evoke also draws on the planetary awareness of ‘deep time’ theorised by Wai Chee Dimock in its faith that literature as an imaginative agent both crosses and dissolves arbitrary boundaries of physical space and delineated time.3 A growing awareness among literary scholars of the ecology of the world’s oceans in relation to its land masses also influences the shape of this book, as it calls attention to the flow patterns created by oceanic currents and to the interdependence of human culture and the natural world, which has no ‘Atlantic’ identity in particular.4

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Mapping and remapping animate the opening section of the book on ‘Atlantic Cultural Geographies’, where contributors create new conceptual affinities that redraw lines of influence across the Atlantic and situate the Atlantic within a global context. Leonard von Morzé writes of eighteenth-century Georgia’s self-conscious position as a society whose free labour system refuted Atlantic slavery, locating it, ‘economically speaking, both inside and outside the Atlantic system’. The collective created by Georgia’s German settlers ‘more closely resembled the system they perceived in the Indian Ocean’ than those of their counterparts in the Americas. In her chapter, Juliet Shields explores the ‘village as a form of social organisation’ mirrored by the Atlantic and refracted in poetry by English, US and Canadian writers. Outlining a linguistic and imaginative region that she calls the ‘Luso-Hispanic’, Joselyn Almeida investigates ‘the vitality of a multilingual, transnational network within London’ that shaped British Romanticism, allowing us to see how ‘Spanish and Portuguese also belonged to Romanticism’s living public sphere’. In a spirit kindred to these explorations of the localised roots and oceanic scope of Atlantic literature, Christopher Hanlon considers the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who is often seen in relation to England yet taken as a spokesperson of US interests. Hanlon believes ‘Emerson represents an ongoing opposition through which the local and the transnational subsist in generative tension’. As a group, these chapters help chart different points of the Companion’s Atlantic compass. The next section, ‘Atlantic Mobilities’, uses mobility as a topos to explore how texts, ideas and peoples have experienced the disruption and dislocation of migration. Its chapters consider the aesthetic and political implications of this migratory condition. Eve Tavor Bannet deals with textual remediations in her work on imitation in the long eighteenth century. She examines the value of imitation as a literary form and traces texts and their reimaginings around the Atlantic world from Scotland through France to the US. By focusing on the history of writing and the book, her work brings to light new readings of literary texts that were not mere copies but creative works in their own right. Sinéad Moynihan focuses on Irish historical novels in the post-Celtic Tiger moment with a particular focus on Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn (2009) and argues that emigration to the US, as it appears in this novel, is a metaphor for the free market economy of Celtic Tiger Ireland. Moynihan begins with Fintan O’Toole’s recent claim that ‘the great theme of the contemporary Irish novel is not Ireland but the US’ and she closes with thoughts on the émigré’s American dream gone wrong as the ‘Returned Yank narrative’: the story of perpetual leaving and returning and leaving again. But Moynihan argues that to understand Ireland in the post-Celtic Tiger moment one must move away from the simplistic opposition between ‘home’ and ‘elsewhere’. Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson examines, amongst other contemporary fictional texts, Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom (2010) and its interest in national criss-crossing. Macpherson expands on Carolyn Porter’s argument for a situated reading of borders as enriching transnational exchange, and argues that such a model of reading reveals the tensions around place and identity that works like Franzen’s imaginatively scrutinise. Macpherson argues that it is in these crossings that authors offer ‘avenues of exploration that are uncomfortable, “foreign” and ill-defined’. The section on ‘The Black Atlantic’ engages with influential work in this field. The publication of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993) represented a seminal moment in the developing field of Atlantic literary studies. Gilroy’s insistence on the Atlantic space as the site of modernity’s reckoning with, and acceptance of, the trafficking of

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enslaved peoples encouraged a more geographically expansive scope for what might have hitherto seemed an American problem. The chapters in this section take up the legacy of Gilroy’s book to explore the ongoing relevance and potential of his paradigm by reconceptualising the geometry of the Atlantic space. Susan Castillo Street examines attitudes toward race in the nineteenth-century Francophone Atlantic by giving an account of the life of Claire Lechat de Kersaint, Duchess of Duras, before turning to her short novel Ourika (1824). In her account of the novel, Castillo Street claims that ‘Ourika represents the ambivalence felt by the French ruling classes toward slaves and people of colour in the wake of the historical trauma of St Domingue’. Later she turns to Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal (1826), which, she writes, ‘sets the template for much subsequent writing about race and slavery in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world’, and her reading of these novels illuminates how racial tensions haunted the literature of the nineteenth-century Francophone Atlantic. Leslie Eckel reads Martin R. Delany and Frederick Douglass in an Atlantic world context and evaluates the implications of Douglass’s visit to Europe and what that meant for the African diaspora and utopian politics. Eckel argues for seeing Douglass and Delany as self-consciously controlling their ‘intellectual property’ (when land ownership for African Americans was out of reach). Yogita Goyal argues that important neo-slave narratives by Octavia Butler (Wild Seed, 1980) and Charles Johnson (Middle Passage, 1990) offer a theorisation of the figure of Africa that exceeds and challenges existing conceptions of diaspora and the black Atlantic, gesturing beyond the conception of time and history offered by Paul Gilroy’s notion of the slave sublime. ‘Atlantic Genders and Sexualities’ offers new readings of Atlantic world literature. The essays here address performative possibilities for gender and sexuality that the Atlantic space might help to imagine or even constitute. Jennifer Frangos takes up this challenge by developing an account of gender performance and sex changing in the New World. Frangos claims that ‘the early European contact with the New World and the transatlantic circulation of goods, people and ideas opened up new, decidedly queer possibilities for identity and subjectivity’. As she compellingly shows, the ‘circulation of representations of these queer identities in the (print) culture of the Old World . . . helped to publicise and popularise the transformative power and queer potential of the early modern Atlantic world’. Ivonne García reads Mayra Santos-Febres’s novel Sirena Selena (2000) in which she examines the power of the drag queen. Through her extended analysis of the text she demonstrates that ‘within the region-centred theorisations of an Atlantic world . . . Sirena Selena [is] an important subject of literary scrutiny’. Daniel Hannah turns our attentions to queer masculinities in the Atlantic world in his study of Claude McKay’s Banjo (1929) and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night (1934), where he argues that for these authors transatlantic displacement allows for experimentation with forms of white and black masculinity. Chapters in the ‘Reform and Revolution’ section perceive the literary Atlantic as a space of social invention and political activism, where ideas circulate and unsettle national norms. Brigitte Bailey focuses on the literature of the transatlantic city, in particular the extent to which writings by Margaret Fuller, William Wells Brown and Herman Melville demonstrate that ‘transatlantic discourses of urban representation and reform were entangled with other reform questions’, including issues of gender, race and economic inequality. The growth of Anglo-American feminism via discourses of self-reliance most concerns Clare Elliott, whose chapter concentrates

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foreword

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on intellectual cross-fertilisations among a group of writers that includes Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Peabody and Louisa May Alcott. Turning to periodical culture, Barbara Green investigates ‘[t]ransatlantic suffragette travel writing’ in the newspaper Votes for Women, which she argues ‘illuminates the distinct models of feminist celebrity made possible by periodicals, models that maintained local attachments while extending the reach of global activist networks in the modern period’. Together, these chapters envision the Atlantic Ocean as a conduit that electrifies thought and action on either side of its waters. Some of our contributors, in the ‘Atlantic Exchanges’ section particularly, are interested in an Anglo-American relationship much like the one Emerson sets out in English Traits. For example, David Greenham examines the origins of Transcendentalism and its complex relation to traditions in European thought, from which it is divorced when it is characterised as a US-born philosophy. Questioning the ‘either/or’ habit of intellectual history, which finds a need to root Transcendentalism on one side of the Atlantic or the other, Greenham provides an alternative reading of Emerson that develops into an extended case study of arguably the most canonical and long-standing of transatlantic literary debates: the origins of American literature. Sarah Wagner-McCoy looks at the New Woman and a transatlantic courtship plot in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s less well-known early novels. Although Hodgson Burnett is famous for her children’s classics such as The Secret Garden (1911), Wagner-McCoy focuses on her most ambitious novel of transatlantic courtship, The Shuttle (1907), and states that the title refers to ‘the shuttles that wove Europe and America together: transatlantic steamships that revolutionised nineteenth-century travel’. She asserts that the ‘image of the shuttle itself captures the paradox of transatlantic domesticity, a homecoming continually in motion across the thickening web of the Anglo-American world’. Daniel Katz considers William Carlos Williams’s European travel novel A Voyage to Pagany (1928) and the poem ‘The Desert Music’ (1954) and suggests that ‘Williams’s work demands an “Atlanticist” approach’ precisely because ‘his poetics attempt to work through a cultural geography which is insistently relational on every level’. ‘Atlantic Ecologies’ brings together chapters that focus on the immanence of natural phenomena and the pursuit of scientific knowledge in a space constituted by oceanic nature. Louis Kirk McAuley’s interest in ‘the confusing and sometimes devastating interactivity of organisms in the Atlantic world’ leads him to interpret James Grainger’s poem The Sugar Cane (1764) in a circumatlantic context that connects Scotland to the Caribbean in routes of ‘capitalist development’. In the literatures of Britain and Aboriginal Canada, Kevin Hutchings examines ‘the key role that the rhetoric of animality and the depiction of animals (both wild and domesticated) played in colonial and anti-colonial discourses’ in order to understand how ‘these discourses affected animals and ecosystems’. Samantha Harvey figures the Atlantic as a space of ‘wonder’ as she writes of Coleridge’s and Emerson’s visits to the Hunterian Museum in London, where they encountered specimens that suggested a totality, or ‘a dynamic vital principle that informed all natural forms’. As the nineteenth century progressed, Susan Oliver argues in her chapter, such distinct components of the natural world coalesced in journalism that promoted ‘the development of a transatlantic environmental imaginary’. The book’s final section on ‘Atlantic Events’ considers cultural phenomena that are amplified by Atlantic crosscurrents, from Cold War plots to musical innovation to

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the trauma of 9/11. Adam Piette reminds us of the Atlantic influence of supranational organisations such as NATO, reflecting transnational conflict and animating the background of Cold War fiction by Vladimir Nabokov. In his study of the echoes of T. S. Eliot’s high modernism in the music of the Beatles, the Beach Boys and Bob Dylan, Christopher Gair perceives a twentieth-century Atlantic world motivated by a ‘countercultural urge to unravel the master narratives of state, church and high culture’. Catherine Morley explores a more contemporary Atlantic literary landscape, where she finds in the fiction of Colum McCann and Jess Walter the shared ‘image of “the gap”, which for each is crucial to understanding the individual and collective traumas of 9/11’. With these events, the chapters bring us to the present moment, when flows of information, migrants, investments and creative opportunities chart an Atlantic world imaginatively united yet often frustratingly divided into its constituent parts. The rich and varied topoi outlined above are given their own distinctive mapping in the volume introduction written by Paul Giles, one of the leaders in this field. Giles’s introduction helpfully outlines the formation and development of Atlantic literary studies, which he suggests has its roots in the theoretical turn of the 1980s and 1990s and the emergence of literary-critical discourses centred on race, gender and class. These modes of critique opened up new perspectives on canon formation, which not only made a virtue of deconstructing the largely formalist foundations of aesthetic value and judgement that still dominated much academic criticism, but also confronted the essentialism of national literary traditions and the claims of national distinctiveness. Atlantic literary studies has moved on considerably from this early mood of critical dissent, which in any case mingled with the somewhat milder investigation of Anglo-American patterns of influence and then the wider comparative field of transatlantic studies, so that today it stands as an exciting area of interdisciplinary academic inquiry drawing together scholars (and students) of history, literature, cultural geography, political science, economics, music, African American studies, American studies, African studies, and Caribbean and Latin American studies. Although this volume focuses on Atlantic literatures, it is written to appeal to specialists in all of these fields since it takes account of the complex web of individuals and peoples who have shaped a dynamic and often shared cultural world in multiple ways beyond the narrowly literary. We could not conclude this foreword without thanking Andrew Taylor for his important work in the early stages of the project. For their fascinating perspectives on Atlantic cultural formations, their enthusiasm for the collective enterprise that this book represents, and their ongoing work in advocating the significance of Atlanticist perspectives in literary criticism, we are grateful to the many colleagues who have contributed their original work to this book. We are indebted to the models of creative enterprise, thoughtful response and professional acuity provided by the scholarly editors with whom we have worked, including Jana Argersinger, Phyllis Cole, Wai Chee Dimock, the late Susan Manning, Wesley Mott and Linda Smith Rhoads. We would like to extend our thanks to Jackie Jones at Edinburgh University Press for supporting the volume at its conception and to Michelle Houston, Adela Rauchova and James Dale at Edinburgh University Press as well as Cathy Falconer for their guidance and assistance in preparing the manuscript for press. Finally, we are grateful for the thoughtful support of our colleagues and students at Northumbria University and Suffolk University and for the joyful presence of our families at home.

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Notes 1. 2.

3. 4.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 10 vols (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971–2013), vol. 5, p. 28. For helpful definitions of these categories in relation to studies of the Atlantic world, see David Armitage, ‘Three Concepts of Atlantic History’, in David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (eds), The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 13–29. Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 4. For more on this ecocritical view of oceanic studies, see Patricia Yaeger, ‘Editor’s Column: Sea Trash, Dark Pools, and the Tragedy of the Commons’, PMLA 125.3 (2010): 523–45.

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To Cecile Agnes and to William, with love

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Introduction: The New Atlantic Literary Studies Paul Giles

T

he term ‘Atlantic literary studies’, although apparently neutral enough, in fact implies in itself various power imbalances. Such a term would, for example, rarely be applied to the plethora of studies emerging from the United States that have concerned themselves with European literature, from Maynard Mack on Alexander Pope to Stephen Greenblatt on Shakespeare. The United States has by default institutionalised itself as a normative centre for intellectual enterprises of this kind, so that the process of transatlantic exchange involved in, say, Mack’s work on Pope has effectively been glossed over. The US academy has, however, not always been so comfortable in accommodating overseas perspectives on its own national literature, and in recent times the term ‘Atlantic literary studies’ has taken on a more specific meaning, one foregrounding those aspects of literary study where the presence (or absence) of Atlantic crossing has itself become an important factor in the cultural understanding of particular works. In a de facto way, this has narrowed the focus of Atlantic literary studies from general consideration of how literary narratives circulate transatlantically to a more specific attention on the processes of canon formation and the ways in which they uphold, however problematically, the values and boundaries of any given host culture. There have always been scholars who have interrogated ways in which European languages and culture intersected with both the US national domain and a broader American culture: the work of Durand Echeverria in the 1950s on ‘the French Image of American Society’ and J. H. Elliott’s more recent examination of links between Spain and the Atlantic world come to mind.1 The ‘new’ Atlantic studies, however, is organised around not so much an area as a problem: the ways in which national formations have been institutionalised, sometimes under the pressure of local funding regimes, and the normative assumptions that have come to be associated with practices of this kind. Such embedded assumptions have often produced unforeseen consequences in relation to how any given academic curriculum is shaped. Oxford established its Honours school of English in 1891, and Cambridge in 1913, on the premise that the category of ‘English’ language and literature reached back to the Anglo-Saxon world of the eleventh century, which was thus duly installed retrospectively as a mythic point of origin. Within this lineage, the United States was marginalised as an aberrant relation, neither a constitutive part of the Empire nor a territory that could, like Ireland, be appropriated politically as part of the ‘United’ Kingdom. Indeed, Cambridge in 1866 rejected the offer of funding for a lectureship in the ‘History, Literature and Institutions of

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the United States’ on the grounds that such an innovation might be construed as an attack on British royalist principles.2 Goldwin Smith, who served as Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford from 1858 to 1866, moved to Cornell University and thence to Canada in protest against what he took to be the imperialistic assumptions of English academia, and though the Oxbridge academic curriculum in the nineteenth century always tried to present itself as a naturalised custom, something reaching back immemorially through the mists of time, it was in truth always a highly politicised and contested phenomenon.3 In his essay ‘Three Concepts of Atlantic History’ (2002), David Armitage distinguished three approaches to the field of Atlantic history: trans-Atlantic history, ‘the history of the Atlantic world through comparisons’; circum-Atlantic history, ‘the history of people who crossed the Atlantic, who lived on its shores and who participated in the communities it made possible’; and cis-Atlantic history, which ‘studies particular places as unique locations within an Atlantic world and seeks to define that uniqueness as the result of the interaction between a wider web of connections (and comparisons)’.4 In truth, it is difficult to differentiate such approaches in quite the manner that Armitage suggests, since any given scenario – the development of New England colonies in the seventeenth century, for example, or the narratives associated with slave cultures in Brazil – would seem inevitably to encompass each of these categories. It might perhaps be argued more plausibly that the key characteristic of Atlantic studies in any of its manifestations is simply an emphasis on discursive mobility rather than enclosed space, in either a geographical or an epistemological sense. Armitage’s comment that ‘[w]e are all Atlanticists now’ cannot be said to be true in any categorical sense, at a time when regionalism and other forms of environmental politics are choosing to emphasise instead the values of localism.5 Nevertheless, the transatlantic might usefully be understood as one of the earliest sites where more abstract theories of transnationalism have found specific embodiment, since the various power plays traversing Atlantic space in various directions can be related to very obvious material contexts, from the fifteenth century onwards, in the wake of the first European voyages of discovery. If transnationalism is the general theory, then, transatlanticism is one exemplification of its practice. Tensions between nationalistic assumptions and transnational horizons were replicated in Britain during the earlier part of the twentieth century even at high school level, with Frederick Wills remarking of his education in London before the First World War: ‘“History”, as taught by the board school, left us with a vague impression that up to the time of Queen Elizabeth this country had been occupied exclusively by kings and queens, good, bad and indifferent . . . The American War of Independence, indeed the existence of the United States of America, was hushed up.’6 When the study of English began to be consolidated as an integral part of the national school curriculum in the 1920s, the clear emphasis on ‘British’ values implied a proscription of anything American, with the Newbolt report into school education, produced in 1921, seeking to distance itself from intellectual traditions of Germanic philology in the wake of World War I and to shore up instead a sense of national unity.7 Writing of transatlantic culture in the nineteenth century, Robert Weisbuch has claimed that ‘[t]he Americans matter far less to their British contemporaries than the British do to the Americans’, and though this may not be entirely accurate – an awareness of the United States gaining ominously in power as the nineteenth century went on caused significant unease across many different sections of British society – there is nevertheless

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a sense in which American writers of this time were seeking explicitly to emancipate themselves from colonial models in a way that did not carry so much immediate purchase the other way around.8 Emerson’s assertion in his 1837 oration at Harvard that ‘We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe’ evoked a spirit of principled independence that was not matched by any corresponding rhetoric in Britain or other parts of Europe.9 Rather than seeking as a matter of principle to put the experimental, rebellious United States back into its box, the dominant reaction to America on the other side of the Atlantic was indifference, a kind of supercilious contempt for what were often taken to be the vulgarities of American democracy. Particularly towards the end of the nineteenth century, after the Civil War had reunited the United States, there was also an increasing wariness of the country’s burgeoning commercial power. The capacity of this newly strengthened nation to undercut local suppliers by flooding international markets with cheap products led to a reaction whereby US culture was frequently categorised as fundamentally inauthentic, a ‘plastic’ culture, in a term that became popular after the development of plastic in 1907 by Leo Hendrik Baekeland, a Belgian-born American living in New York State. This demonisation of America as an alien, predatory or artificial phenomenon came to have lasting resonances all through the twentieth century, and often the attribution of transatlantic influences can best be understood as a displacement of more amorphous anxieties affecting the protectionist circumference of local cultural economies more generally. America, in other words, became shorthand for what was construed as the unwelcome pressures of modernisation in any given domestic space, and in this sense the significance of Atlantic literary studies, as this field began to evolve in the twentieth century, often turned less on the discrete qualities of any given domain than on the more amorphous disruptive processes surrounding transnational displacement. The integration of pedagogy into a narrative of nationalism in Britain was mirrored in the evolution of American literature, which also developed as a subject in the aftermath of World War I. In the United States, there was a deliberate attempt at this time on the part of federal and state governments to restrict instruction to the English language, to consolidate national interests by relegating German and other native tongues to a secondary status. The specific redefinition of American literature in the 1920s as a national rather than a merely regional phenomenon – as the literature of the West, or of Florida, and so on – was driven by an attempt on the part of literary critics to achieve the kind of nationalistic focus that Frederick Jackson Turner had already given the American historical profession through his influential description in 1891 of the frontier as a formative influence on national life, not just in relation to the country’s Western extremities but also its collective psychology more broadly.10 Turner’s point was that a frontier, pioneering spirit affected Americans everywhere. Many of the most famous American novels of the 1920s – including F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, both from 1925 – testify to a new self-consciousness about what constitutes an ‘American’ mythology, and thus the struggle to identify particular forms of national consciousness can be seen to characterise cultural politics on both sides of the Atlantic during the interwar years.11 After World War II, the United States had a clear vested interest in promoting its own national culture as a beacon to the rest of the world, and many of the American studies programmes in Europe were established during this era, often with direct or indirect US government funding, to provide intellectual corroboration for the Cold War

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model of American cultural diplomacy. President Kennedy lent his name to the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies during his famous visit to Berlin in June 1963, and Kennedy’s injunction to the Free University of Berlin that it ‘must be interested in turning out citizens of the world, men [sic] who comprehend the difficult, sensitive tasks, that lie before us as free men and women, and men who are willing to commit their energies to the advancement of a free society’ sought explicitly to equate this state of ‘freedom’ with an internationalisation of liberal American values.12 During these halcyon, well-funded days of the 1960s and 1970s, American studies flourished in Europe through positioning the United States as a fabulous Other, an imaginative counterbalance to the impoverished, constricted horizons of a European continent still exhausted from the ravages of wartime. This is the world of Malcolm Bradbury’s Stepping Westward, published in 1965 but written mostly in the United States during the early 1960s, when, as Bradbury later recalled, ‘America was where, it seemed, everything that was best came from – the best jazz, the best novels, the best ice-cream, the best cars, the best films.’13 The provincial protagonist in this novel finds the American land of plenty seductive both sexually and financially, although this leads him to encounter existential crises about where his family loyalties and personal identity ultimately lie. During these post-war years, European Americanists tended to focus obsessively on the ‘cool’ aspects of US culture – the jazz, the beat novels, civil rights and other forms of progressive politics – and to hold these up as emblematic of the fabled American Dream. Historically, the United States had always tended to be scorned by European Marxists who found its voracious consumerism to be at odds with the principles of socialism – although Gramsci, in his essay ‘Americanism and Fordism’, did see some progressive aspects to Americanisation, which he associated with ‘new forms of production’ that involved a technological threat to established aristocratic orders.14 The United States was also widely disliked by European conservatives because of its general disregard and disdain for hierarchical custom, but US values were generally welcomed at this time by European liberals, who regarded the nation’s more iconoclastic qualities, particularly its engagement with civil rights, as a harbinger of modernity. However, these bien-pensant Europeans were never so attentive to the more fundamentalist beliefs in both religious and individual liberty that have been a consistent strain in American cultural politics since the days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s, and this is why many European Americanists came to feel particularly betrayed by the subsequent presidential eras of Ronald Reagan (1981–9), George H. W. Bush (1989–93) and George W. Bush (2001–9), when American political conservatism came once again to the fore. It was not just cuts to their academic programme funding that transatlantic Americanists complained about; it was a more profound sense that their professional investment in the United States as a source of civic emancipation and authentic promise had been compromised. For example, in The Myth of American Exceptionalism (2009), Godfrey Hodgson, a British journalist who was The Observer’s Washington correspondent in the 1960s, complained of how ‘what has been essentially a liberating set of beliefs has been corrupted over the past thirty years by hubris and self-interest into what is now a dangerous basis for national policy and for the international system’.15 In its Manichaean antithesis between liberation and corruption, and in its dehistoricised assumption that ‘hubris and self-interest’ are recent American phenomena, Hodgson’s work idealises a narrow, partial version of the United States, and, as Roger Cohen remarked in his New York Times review of

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the book, the author consequently writes about the country with ‘some of the feelings of a jilted lover’.16 From a more synoptic scholarly perspective, however, we can see clearly enough that there have always been powerful reactionary impulses within American culture, going back to the time when John Winthrop served as a magistrate in rural East Anglia before embarking on his famous transatlantic crossing on board the Arbella in 1630. One conceptual problem endemic to American studies, though, is that the rhetoric of a ‘new’ world evoked specifically by Winthrop in his sermon ‘A Model of Christian Charity’ – ‘every one that loveth is borne of God, so that this love is the fruit of the new birth, and none can have it but the new creature’ – tended systematically to obliterate the mixed conditions of the old world, with the Puritan leader’s apocalyptic invocation of an exemplary ‘city upon a hill’ where ‘the eyes of all people are upon us’ serving to obscure the material conditions of that city’s provenance.17 The rhetorical invocation of America as a state of promise, in other words, can be seen to be at odds with the ambiguities surrounding its formulation, and if the older style of American exceptionalism worked from the a priori conception of an apotheosised condition, Atlantic studies has tended rather to operate in an a posteriori manner, scrutinising the specific conditions under which particular tenets of belief were produced and recirculated. In his study Sea Changes, for instance, Stephen Fender points out that during the first decade of the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s history, 7,000 out of 21,000 emigrants actually returned home, and such a transatlantic perspective serves methodologically to demystify the mythological notion of a ‘new’ world, along with all of the patriotic emphasis that informed twentieth-century US history, by emphasising instead how American culture has always been involved in states of mutual reciprocity and interdependence.18 One consequence of transatlantic scholarship in general has been to show Atlantic worlds in a state of flux rather than as reified or regenerated conceptions, in a state of being made and unmade rather than appearing as constitutionally intact entities. This has inevitably lent transatlantic projections of national space a provisional, contingent quality that has been disconcerting to more traditional scholars invested in a particular ‘American’ paradigm that would transcend mere worldly constraints. For example, University of Chicago historian Daniel J. Boorstin, who also served as Librarian of the United States Congress between 1975 and 1987, was always hostile to any kind of transatlantic approach because he thought it undermined and undervalued the special qualities of American democracy, and such exceptionalist assumptions have of course been replicated frequently at a popular level. Nevertheless, scholarship in recent times has traced the reciprocal nature of transatlantic influences in a wide range of cultural exchanges across the centuries, from theories of the Enlightenment (Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were active in pre-revolutionary Paris) to arguments over the popular franchise in nineteenthcentury Britain (Conservative MPs blamed agitation for electoral reform in 1832 on pernicious American democratic ideas), through to the famous adventures of the ‘Lost Generation’ of American writers in Paris during the 1920s. In a 2014 review essay for American Literary History, Joseph Rezek suggested that transatlantic studies was ‘no longer a trend’ but ‘an institution’, and that the field had consolidated itself from what Lawrence Buell in 2003 described as its ‘boom times’ in the early years of the twentyfirst century to the more enduring sense of a scholarly paradigm that had achieved, in Rezek’s words, a ‘lasting impact’.19 Rezek outlined here three distinct areas in which he

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considered transatlantic studies had made its mark: ‘Atlantic Modernity’, characterised by the histories of capitalism, slavery and empire; ‘Literature in English’, focusing on the ‘shared aesthetic qualities, common ideological investments, and transatlantic reading practices’ through an expanded domain of ‘Anglo-American literature’; and ‘the Atlantic as Conduit and Context’, offering a resistance to ‘the insularity of cultural nationalism’, as for example in Kate Flint’s work on ‘the place of the Native American in the British cultural imagination’ over the course of the Victorian period.20 Again, Rezek’s classifications might be seen to overlap with one another in multifarious ways, but it is perhaps his last category that offers the steepest challenge to Atlantic literary studies within a more traditional academic setting, since it could be argued that Atlantic literary studies impinged only marginally during most of the twentieth century upon more established and entrenched national paradigms, particularly in the various subfields of English literature. Most scholars of British Romanticism, for instance, still chose to keep their eyes trained firmly on what happened within familiar national borders rather than also countenancing transatlantic horizons, and the same thing was true in relation to the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, or whatever academic field one might suggest. This discomfort with the prospect of broader horizons may have been due in part to the innate parochialism that scholarship always seems to foster, the sometimes paranoid sense on the part of academics of wanting to seize a particular piece of territory for their own careerist purposes and not be dislodged from it. More troublingly, though, it also speaks to an unwillingness on the part of most scholars to push their particular observations on specific sites of transatlantic encounter towards more wide-ranging inferences about the broader scope of cultural formations. There were exceptions to this, of course, and the outstanding example in political science has been the career of J. G. A. Pocock, a New Zealander by birth who made his career in the United States, and who extrapolated from his studies of reciprocal transatlantic influence across what he provocatively called ‘three British revolutions’ – 1641, 1688, 1776 – a more wideranging thesis about ways in which the world should be regarded ‘as an archipelago of histories rather than as a tectonic of continents’.21 For Pocock, world territories should be seen as constructed through a series of connecting channels rather than as landlocked or insular entities, and he coined the term ‘Atlantic archipelago’ as a replacement for what he took to be the discredited term ‘British Isles’.22 The challenge for Atlantic literary studies in the years ahead will be to trace similar correspondences across a cultural sphere, rewriting the hackneyed narratives of national literary history to illuminate how disparate paths have converged and diverged in a variety of meaningful ways. There is an amusing moment in William Gibson’s novel Virtual Light (1993), where the Japanese fictional protagonist has a yard sale to dispose of his antiquated artefacts such as compact discs, a china mug and a ‘damp-swollen copy of The Columbia Literary History of the United States’ – ‘It all went finally,’ reports the narrator, ‘except for the literary history, which was badly mildewed.’23 Gibson, as an explicitly transnational author, an American by birth now resident in Vancouver, Canada, writes frequently about transpacific trajectories, seeking specifically to hollow out exhausted narratives of national literary typology, and Atlantic literary studies similarly shares some of this kind of scabrous, desublimating momentum. The one area where transatlantic studies did successfully infiltrate the broader academic domain towards the end of the twentieth century was in relation to the study of

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slavery and, by extension, race. It was perhaps an advantage for Paul Gilroy to have come from a professional background in sociology rather than literature or American studies and thus to have avoided the stereotypical categories within which the American ‘Black Arts’ movement was framed during the second half of the twentieth century. Concomitantly, Gilroy’s experience of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies programme, then under the directorship of Stuart Hall, enabled him in The Black Atlantic (1993) to come at racial questions from a different conceptual angle, seeing them less as invested in traditional forms of solidarity or homogeneity than as formations always in transit. Gilroy’s skill was to correlate the forced mobility of the slave trade with the ontological displacements and metamorphic shapes of African American culture more generally, and this approach came strongly to influence subsequent descriptions of Atlantic culture.24 Gilroy’s work helped to shape the theories of dramatic signification developed by Joseph Roach in Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (1996), which won the Modern Language Association’s James Russell Lowell prize for the best scholarly book of that year, and Laura Doyle’s Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940 (2008). Doyle’s understanding of ‘Atlantic Modernity’ worked specifically to interrogate academic fields constructed on the enclosed basis of an area studies paradigm, and one of her study’s most challenging aspects lies in its use of transatlantic horizons to interrogate the ideology of ‘liberty’ that became naturalised in North America. Doyle thus uses a template of what she calls ‘Atlantic Gothic’ to analyse ways in which the narratives of Charles Brockden Brown take up the question of being ‘at liberty’s limits’, as this conundrum is refracted in the late eighteenth century through the European Gothic fictions of Horace Walpole and Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis.25 Roach likewise used his geographical conception of the ‘circum-Atlantic’ to bring the site of New Orleans into conceptual dialogue not only with Europe but also with the Caribbean and Latin America, and he thus represented cultural goods of all kinds as flowing in multiple directions, thereby linking questions of ‘performance’ to ‘memory’ and ‘substitution’ across a broad cultural range.26 The vastly increased awareness around the turn of the twenty-first century of how racial and ethnic dimensions frame all literary and cultural narratives helped to integrate Atlantic literary studies within more mainstream academic perspectives, and Roach’s book has been influential across a wider spectrum of performance and cultural studies. All of this discursive mobility, however, has had the cumulative effect of undermining the more stable forms of area studies that held sway during the Cold War years. Towards the end of the twentieth century, European departments of American studies were often nostalgic not only for the academic prosperity of the 1960s but also for the kind of interdisciplinary synthesis that had characterised constructions of the subject during that era. The utopian premise of such interdisciplinary enterprises was that a judicious combination of literature, history and politics, along with a principled attention equally to high and low cultures, might help students to bring into focus the parameters of a national culture as a ‘whole’. In this sense, the transatlantic turn was threatening to these more established interdisciplinary units, since it implied that no territorial formation could properly be bounded or understood of its own accord. If transatlantic methods operated as a threat to traditional scholars of English or American literature through the way they approached each of these fields as mutually implicated and intertwined, they also operated as a threat to American studies through their

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epistemological awareness of a radical incoherence and inherent lack of closure within the definition of each academic domain. In his preface to The Modern American Novel (1983), Malcolm Bradbury, who as professor at the University of East Anglia was one of the pioneers of American studies in the UK, sought specifically to move away from an area studies methodology by saying his book had been ‘written with the comparative perspective much in mind’ and that it involved a balance between different theoretical models: ‘to take, so to speak, an approach that comes from American Studies, which attempts to see literature in the context of American history and relate it to one that comes from comparative literature, which looks at the international relation of literary forms’.27 By locating his work in an oblique relation to the synthetic interdisciplinary style that would read literature as an epitome of its surrounding culture, Bradbury was moving here towards the kind of analytical distance that has subsequently characterised Atlantic literary studies, whose valence involves neither simply internalising nor patriotically upholding the values of any particular national culture, but, rather, positioning them more stringently and interrogatively within a wider theoretical circumference. It is not surprising, then, that what Shelley Fisher Fishkin characterised in 2004 as ‘the transnational turn’ in American studies became associated with post-structuralist theory, beholden as that critical intervention has been to the ontological absence of closure and deferral of final meaning.28 Indeed, the conceptual imbrication of postcolonialism within post-structuralism, exemplified perhaps most clearly in Homi K. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (1991) but also evident in many other academic works around the turn of the twenty-first century, became another significant formative influence on the development of transnational critical practice. The multiplicity of languages that were always integral to the development of US culture comprised another important dimension of transatlantic inquiry, being impelled in part by the work of Werner Sollors, himself a product of the JFK Institute in Berlin, whose earliest memories were of African American troops greeting the defeated German people in the wake of World War II. Sollors drew uncomfortable analogies between the ‘racially segregated’ organisation of the US Army and the Nazi ‘racist dictatorship’ from which it was liberating the German people, as if to undercut at source the traditional American claim to be a shining example of global liberty.29 Sollors’s book The Temptation of Despair (2014) does not present itself specifically as an Atlanticist study, but it incorporates various paradoxes commonly associated with Atlantic studies and so suggests ways in which the theoretical crossovers associated with this methodological approach disrupt received nationalistic assumptions, thus offering the opportunity to re-examine domestic scenes in creative ways. Sollors also founded with Marc Shell in 1994 the Longfellow Institute at Harvard, an organisation that sees its recuperative remit as to ‘reexamine the English-language tradition in the context of American multilingualism’.30 The claim of Sollors and Shell was that the institutionalisation of English as the default lingua franca for American literature had served not only to obscure the work in its original language of various immigrant communities – Ole Rølvaag, who wrote many novels in Norwegian after emigrating to South Dakota in 1896, is one example frequently cited – but also to marginalise the plethora of contemporary new work by American authors in languages other than English. In this sense, as Sollors argued in the introduction to the Multilingual Anthology of American Literature that he edited with Shell, the manifestation ‘of American literary texts of all genres in languages

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other than English . . . will complicate our understanding of what exactly “American literature” is’.31 Hence Whitman’s observation at the end of the nineteenth century of how the ‘sources of supply’ for American literature derived ‘not by any means of the British isles exclusively’, but also from ‘Italy, the German intellect’, from ‘witty and warlike France’ as well as ‘the great Spanish race’, has been taken up by latter-day transatlantic scholars, who have sought to rewrite the history of American literature within a multilingual framework.32 Non-English variants of American literature will surely continue to flourish in the twenty-first century, as the demographic shape of the nation changes. It is currently estimated that the English-speaking population in the United States will be supplanted by a majority for whom Spanish is their first language around the year 2043, and this will obviously have important implications for any future academic study of American literature and culture. From this perspective, the monolingualism that characterised the establishment of the field in the middle years of the twentieth century might be seen to have encumbered quite a limited historical span. There was actually quite a considerable focus on the subject as a multilingual phenomenon in the first Cambridge History of American Literature, edited by William Peterfield Trent and others and issued in four volumes between 1917 and 1921, an undertaking that included in its final volume two chapters dedicated specifically to ‘Non-English Writings’.33 As noted earlier, however, the contours of American literature as this academic field came to be understood during the middle years of the twentieth century were shaped by an explicit reaction against the teaching of foreign languages after World War I, with former president Theodore Roosevelt declaring in 1917: ‘We must . . . have but one language. That must be the language of the Declaration of Independence.’34 But throughout the twentieth century there were celebrated American authors whose first language was not English – Theodore Dreiser spoke German at home as a child, Jack Kerouac spoke French, while Vladimir Nabokov’s first language was of course Russian – and, besides championing the work of non-English writers, one of the virtues of Atlantic literary studies has been to restore such linguistic heterogeneity to a position of due prominence. It is arguable that in their mature works Dreiser, Kerouac and Nabokov (and many others) articulate a hybridised version of their American idiom, mixing an American vernacular with linguistic undercurrents that retain aspects of an unfamiliar tongue. Awareness of this kind of bilateral provenance, the blending of an alien grammar with an achieved American style, can lead to greater understanding on the part of readers of the rhetorical nuances and complexities informing these multidimensional narratives. The conception of American literature as a comparative phenomenon is also an old idea. When the first American Literature sectional meeting took place at the Modern Language Association convention in 1926, the delegates agreed that their field should be understood not primarily in nationalistic terms, but as one of the branches of literature in English. The arguments at this time turned on the enduring question of whether American literature should or should not have its own separatist identity, with the more traditionalist academic tendency to categorise works according to language and genre coming under pressure from the emergence of a more patriotic style of cultural nationalism, one promulgated in part by Van Wyck Brooks, Edmund Wilson and other journalists associated with New York radical circles. Indeed, by the time The Reinterpretation of American Literature was published in 1928 under the

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editorship of University of North Carolina professor Norman Foerster, the year before the journal American Literature was founded, a specifically nationalistic agenda for the subject was being developed within the university world in embryonic form. Nevertheless, when F. O. Matthiessen published American Renaissance in 1941, he based the title and organisation of the book upon an implicitly transnational premise, arguing that his five chosen American authors – Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville and Whitman – were as good as anything produced during the English Renaissance. As a scholar who did his own PhD at Harvard on Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, Matthiessen was always drawn to a transatlantic framework, and American Renaissance draws explicitly on the aesthetic conceptions of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and T. S. Eliot – on the latter of whom Matthiessen had published a separate book in 1935 – so as to correlate his understanding of American literature with wider comparative frameworks. But after World War II, when Cold War America shamelessly promulgated its superiority over the rest of the world, such transatlantic dimensions came to seem scholastically old-fashioned, even at times fustian. With critics such as R. W. B. Lewis boldly extolling in 1955 the idea of a metaphysical innocence, an ‘American Adam’ that categorically differentiated US culture from that of the corrupt Old World, the exploration of transatlantic themes in the work of Washington Irving or Henry James came increasingly to be associated with the more ‘retro’ perspectives of traditionalist scholars.35 This is one reason most twentieth-century criticism on Irving was so poor, because his work tended to attract scholars who regarded his work as a genteel, pastoral retreat from the world of American modernity, rather than attending to the multifaceted complexities of his romantic irony. It was also this kind of power imbalance that produced a sycophantic reverence among European Americanists after World War II for what Tony Tanner in 1965 called a ‘reign of wonder’, whereby the beatific qualities of American idealism were made to appear as a necessarily rejuvenating counterbalance to the dreary empiricism of the post-war European scene.36 There was, of course, much distinguished scholarship at this time, but it now seems as dated in its way as social critiques produced by Victorian moralists such as Walter Pater or John Ruskin, who conventionally compared the ‘Gothic’ north to what they took to be the classical qualities typical of Italy and other Mediterranean countries. There were also anomalous class dynamics at work in transatlantic formulations of the post-1945 era, since American popular culture appealed to many avant-garde European intellectuals for its brash, iconoclastic dimensions, while many non-Americans who were drawn to the study of US culture during the second half of the twentieth century were enthusiastic about it precisely because of what they perceived as its dissimilarity from, rather than its kinship to, conventional European hierarchies. This led also to an odd discrepancy whereby European scholars understood transatlantic engagement as a source of radical innovation, while in the United States such transatlanticism was often regarded as a traditionalist or even antiquarian critical method. While many US commentators acknowledged the influence of Immanuel Kant and other German philosophers on Emerson’s thought, for instance, they usually followed tautologically the polemical impulse of Emerson’s own patriotic stance by arguing that the most original aspect of this American author’s work lay in his capacity to reconstruct German Romanticism in his own national idiom. Within the domain of popular culture, Christopher Hitchens wrote of how William Buckley and other WASP types in the United States used the paraphernalia of ‘Brit Kitsch’, the

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kind of country-house dramas shown on PBS television in America, as a sign of their own good breeding, while Paul Fussell in his book Class commented that ‘[t]o acquire and display British goods shows how archaic you are, and so validates upper- and upper-middle-class standing’.37 When Bernard Bailyn was producing from Harvard his influential transatlantic studies of American history, he was sometimes accused of implicitly conflating the Anglo-American cultural sphere with that of the United States as a whole, thereby overlooking, through assumptions of innate WASP superiority, the regional diversity and more localised perspectives that characterised American life in other parts of the country. But such deference was in fact a commonplace phenomenon, not one just associated with Ivy League professors or the leisured classes. In her book Anglophilia (2008), Elisa Tamarkin traced the widespread circulation of this kind of discourse in nineteenth-century America, from the reverence of British monarchy that lingered among the American population as a whole to the obsequious attitudes towards Oxbridge academic culture among aesthetes at Harvard in the 1890s.38 Within such a context, it is not surprising that the transatlantic dynamic often came to be perceived within the modern American academy as a regressive rather than progressive phenomenon. But times have changed, and a key difference between what one might call the old Atlantic literary studies and the new Atlantic literary studies is that the latter has sought self-consciously to position itself in relation to wider planetary perspectives. Rather than merely considering US culture in relation to particular ‘contact zones’ – the impact of Scandinavian immigrant culture in Minnesota, for example, or Spanish influences in California – a more ambitious planetary scope typically seeks to trace not only the hybrid aspects informing US culture, but also ways in which it is always already immersed within global networks where many different nodal points function simultaneously.39 The older style of Atlantic studies tended to work primarily through forms of projection, imagining the other side of the Atlantic as a source of utopian fulfilment – as for instance in the case of European romanticisations of beat writing – or alternatively as a conservative antidote to the spread of liberal democracy, as we see in American partisans of Irving or James. However, one of the signal contributions of Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic was to triangulate both Europe and North America in relation to Africa, positioning this transatlantic passage not as an isolated corridor but as a crucial component within the global slave trade. Anna Brickhouse’s Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere (2004) similarly correlates the hemispheric relation of North to South America with systematic transatlantic exchanges between east and west, thereby suggesting ways in which US authors influenced by Spanish or Portuguese culture recalibrated transatlantic circuits within a more expansive American continental framework.40 There have also been significant contributions from Americanists who have sought to explore ways in which the transatlantic overlapped conceptually with the transpacific, with the United States, Britain and Germany in the nineteenth century often transposing their colonial encounters from the ocean physically separating them (the Atlantic) to the ocean on the other side of the world (the Pacific) where many of their territorial dependencies were actually situated. In Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2010), for example, Hsuan L. Hsu comments on how Herman Melville’s Typee (1846) refers explicitly not only to the conflicts between Britain and America over the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii) in the early 1840s, but also to the fallout in

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the Pacific after the War of 1812, when David Porter took possession of the Marquesan islands for the United States in 1813, thereby rendering them the new nation’s first colony. By conceptually superimposing the transatlantic upon the transpacific, Hsu effectively expanded the theoretical relevance of each discursive domain.41 This is an instance of transatlantic turbulence turned spatially and geographically on its head, but it also exemplifies how Atlantic literary studies now carries a wider global resonance. The new Atlantic literary studies, in other words, has characteristically been more attentive to where this Atlantic orbit situates itself in relation to a wider planetary sphere, and, rather than seeing transatlantic exchange as being in itself the hub and spoke of everything, the new Atlantic studies has decentred and dispersed this geographical circumference by considering the further ramifications of these particular zones as a formative component within world literature. Hence Atlantic literary studies in its wider, more abstract context implies an analytical method rather than a particular area studies practice. It is not so much a way of studying the Atlantic per se as an intellectual method of understanding how the world works through tropes of reciprocal exchange and reversal, one that has the effect of deconstructing and demystifying understandings of space as geographically or intellectually circumscribed. By recognising the mobility of these discursive frameworks, Atlantic literary studies retains a capacity to turn any given conceptual shape inside out, and its theoretical energy involves in part its way of intervening as a kind of intellectual agent provocateur, its potential to reconceive familiar categories from new positions.

Notes 1. Durand Echeverria, Mirage in the West: A History of the French Image of American Society to 1815 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957); J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 2. Robert Lawson-Peebles, ‘Dean Acheson and the Potato Head Blues; or, Some British Academic Attitudes to America and its Literature’, Prospects 15 (1990), p. 9. 3. On the politicisation of British national identity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 4. David Armitage, ‘Three Concepts of Atlantic History’, in David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (eds), The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 18, 16, 21. 5. Armitage, ‘Three Concepts of Atlantic History’, p. 11. 6. Frederick Wills, 101 Jubilee Road: A Book of London Yesterdays (London: Phoenix House, 1948), p. 76. 7. Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 365. 8. Robert Weisbuch, Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and British Influence in the Age of Emerson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 26. 9. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The American Scholar’ (1837), in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume I: Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, ed. Robert E. Spiller and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 69. 10. Frederick Jackson Turner, ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’ (1893), in George Rogers Taylor (ed.), The Turner Thesis: Concerning the Role of the Frontier in American History, 2nd edn (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1956), pp. 1–18.

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11. For the influence of academic anthropology on attempts to identify ‘American’ culture in the interwar period, see Susan Hegeman, Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 126–7. On the integration at this time of American literature into the high school curriculum, see Elizabeth Renker, The Origins of American Literature Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 30. 12. For a recording of John F. Kennedy’s speech at the Freie Universitӓt on 26 June 1963, see (last accessed 11 March 2016). 13. Malcolm Bradbury, Stepping Westward (London: Secker and Warburg, 1965). This quotation is taken from Bradbury’s unpublished afterword to the novel, available at (last accessed 11 March 2016). 14. Antonio Gramsci, ‘Americanism and Fordism’, in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (1971; rpt London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2005), pp. 277–320. 15. Godfrey Hodgson, The Myth of American Exceptionalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 175. 16. Roger Cohen, ‘America Unmasked’, New York Times Book Review, 26 April 2009, BR10. 17. John Winthrop, ‘A Model of Christian Charity’ (1630), in Alan Heimert and Andrew Delbanco (eds), The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 87, 91. 18. Stephen Fender, Sea Changes: British Emigration and American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 142. 19. Joseph Rezek, ‘What We Need from Transatlantic Studies’, American Literary History 26.4 (2014), p. 791; Lawrence Buell, ‘Rethinking Anglo-American Literary History’, CLIO 33.1 (2003), p. 66. 20. Rezek, ‘What We Need’, pp. 792–4; Kate Flint, The Transatlantic Indian, 1776–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). 21. J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Antipodean Perception’, in The Discovery of Islands: Essays in British History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 19. 22. J. G. A. Pocock, ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject’, Journal of Modern History 47.4 (1975), p. 606. Pocock claims here that ‘the term “British Isles” is one which Irishmen reject and Englishmen decline to take quite seriously’ (p. 606). 23. William Gibson, Virtual Light (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 292. 24. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993). 25. Laura Doyle, Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 213, 215. 26. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 2. 27. Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern American Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. vii. 28. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, ‘Crossroads of Culture: The Transnational Turn in American Studies – Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12, 2004’, American Quarterly 57.1 (2005), pp. 17–57. 29. Werner Sollors, The Temptation of Despair: Tales of the 1940s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 185. 30. For the mission statement of the Longfellow Institute, see (last accessed 11 March 2016). On the arguments around American literature in relation to multilingualism, see Lawrence Rosenwald, Multilingual America: Language and the Making of American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

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31. Werner Sollors, ‘Introduction’, in Werner Sollors and Marc Shell (eds), The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature (New York: New York University Press, 2000), p. 10. 32. Walt Whitman, ‘Notes Left Over’ (1892), in Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1982), p. 1,036. 33. Thomas M. Pearce, ‘American Traditions and our Histories of Literature’, American Literature 14.3 (1942), p. 280. 34. Marc Shell, American Babel: Literatures of the United States from Abnaki to Zuni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 8. 35. Norman Foerster (ed), The Reinterpretation of American Literature: Some Contributions toward the Understanding of its Historical Development (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1928); F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941) and The Achievement of T. S. Eliot: An Essay on the Nature of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1935); R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955). 36. Tony Tanner, The Reign of Wonder: Naivety and Reality in American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965). 37. Christopher Hitchens, Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), p. 38; Paul Fussell, Class (1983; rpt New York: Ballantine Books, 1984), p. 76. 38. Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Elisa Tamarkin, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 39. On the theory of ‘contact zones’, see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 18. 40. Anna Brickhouse, Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 41. Hsuan L. Hsu, Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 105.

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1 The Silkworm and the Bee: Georgia, Cognitive Mapping, and the Atlantic Labour System in Boltzius and Thomson Leonard von Morzé

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n or about 23 June 1740, somewhere near Abercorn Creek in New Ebenezer, Georgia, a pastor addressed a group of recalcitrant labourers from Salzburg whom he had asked to build a gristmill. Perhaps because war with Spain had taken ten of their number away to Florida, the labourers were feeling their power, and the carpenter in charge of the project, one Georg Kogler, had been telling the pastor that his fellow workers would not begin construction ‘unless a specific wage was agreed upon and promised’. Johann Martin Boltzius, the leader of the German-speaking community of 250, knew Kogler’s history of being an ‘instigator’ with regard to asking for a regular wage. Deciding that it was high time that he intervened, Boltzius composed a sermon in their shared language. As he reported to his correspondent in Germany, he then used the devotional hour to end the work stoppage, turning (with a pun on erbauen, a term his fellow Pietists would have understood to mean bringing a devotional goal to completion) the group’s daily ‘Erbauungs Stunde’ into an occasion for cajoling the men back to the Bau, or building project.1 I begin with Boltzius’s exhortation to illustrate Georgia’s ideology of work as it was formulated under the stress of being, from 1732 to 1750, the first and only British Atlantic colony expressly to prohibit slavery. That exceptional status, what one proponent called Georgia’s ‘Singularity’, weighed heavily on Boltzius’s mind, for he knew that the colony was, economically speaking, both inside and outside the Atlantic system.2 Despite being united in primary production, the community was, as Boltzius knew, not engaged in subsistence agriculture, but instead entangled with an Atlantic economy, as it sent its products abroad for bounty and relied on overseas donations. Maintaining this liminal position required an ideology of labour, an ethic of work, that rejected both slave and free labour, correctly perceiving them to be economically interdependent. The workers’ argument for a fixed wage, Boltzius contended, was a threat to the colony’s exceptionalism; for him, labour for Georgia was tribute offered to a just community. The reports that the workers had heard, Boltzius admitted, were accurate: labourers in America, freed from European status-based social relations, were indeed getting high wages. But precisely this ‘disproportion between wages and work’, Boltzius claimed, was ‘the ruin of this country’; employers were everywhere sinking into debt while the price

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of goods kept going up. If wages did not decline, men with capital in Georgia would begin clamouring for ‘Moorish slaves’, as they were currently doing in Savannah, and Georgia would go the way of all of the other British colonies. Georgia’s unique conditions called for work to be done by ‘loving and disinterested hearts’, and for an economic system that would stand as an exception to the prevailing tendencies of the Atlantic world. Preferring paternalism to quantification, Boltzius promised that the workers would not even need to handle specie; instead the colony’s elders, ‘loving and conscientious people’, would bring them clothing, shoes and other supplies from England and the other colonies. Boltzius, like Georgia’s Trustees, defined collective work as a moral enterprise, in stark opposition to a modern conception of labour as simply an aspect of the economy; the prosecuted Protestants expelled from Salzburg would become the leading model for the virtuous primitive diligence the Trustees sought to cultivate.3 Still, Boltzius was honest enough to admit that the ultimate measure of the moralisation of work was quantifiable: a system of production based on charity and tribute would have the effect of ‘decreasing the high wages which are the ruination of this country, hence of our place and of posterity’.4 Though Boltzius did not record the labourers’ response, he reported later that year that the gristmill (Georgia’s first) had been built, and part of the flour thereby produced was being sent to the colony’s Trustees in exchange for small bounties. Boltzius and his readers must have counted his exhortation as a success, for the mill became a subject of international interest after Boltzius sent his report to his sponsors in Halle, who in turn printed the accounts but left out – as they always did – distressing material, in this case about Kogler’s strike. The flow of Boltzius’s reports eastward across the Atlantic amounts to a massive textual archive. With its eighteen volumes now translated into English, including enormous passages of material deleted by pious Halle editors from the original German, these texts should be seen as the western hemisphere’s major contribution to the transatlantic literary phenomenon of the Georgia free-labour experiment. Too often literary historians have approached the Georgia experiment only in terms of the London press. No doubt much of the German material has remained uninteresting to the literary historian because its genre, the unadorned chronicle, is committed to a brute facticity that would seem to have little literary value. Yet, as Boltzius connects the Salzburgers’ labours with those of the other Halle missions in places such as India, his interminable empirical descriptions produce a felt relation between the local and the global. This relationality connects Boltzius’s writings with other imperiographic writings of the period, such as James Thomson’s survey poem The Seasons, to which this chapter turns in its final section. What Boltzius describes to his workers is a total map of the world as a series of holy cities, within which the work performed for Georgia has a sanctified place. Boltzius was only one perspectival node within a global system which included Pietist mission in Tranquebar and the SPCK offices in London with which Halle corresponded. From this perspective, Georgia was part of a ‘Protestant international’ network whose textual support was a self-reinforcing series of written reports eliciting charitable donations for the various colonies from a wide group of readers of different national backgrounds.5 What does the conceptualisation of work have to do with this problem of scale? I argue here that Georgia’s literature was formulated in response to the sense that

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labour in the Atlantic world had passed out of the intellectual control of the literary builders and surveyors of empire, and into the hands of the political economists, the latter having calculated that the work of Africans was precisely what kept the wages of free labour low.6 Political economists correctly recognised that chattel slavery was economically uncontainable, determining social relations even in places where there were few slaves. Georgia’s advocates did not want to give up the point. Though they recognised that the Atlantic economy depended on the work of thousands of slaves, they thought that small-scale primary production among free labourers could restore republican virtue to a growing empire. British imperial visionaries and Halle Pietists, fearing the growth of both slavery and free labour, saw primary production in Georgia, whether performed by the worthy English poor or by oppressed Austrian Protestants, as a model for the virtuous Protestant worker on a global scale. The economic relationships they described were not Atlantic, but more closely resembled the system they perceived in the Indian Ocean, where the economy was thought to remain under the cognitive control of political elites. I suggest that this was the first of the Atlantic’s ‘cognitive maps’: as the transatlantic economy seemed to have become unsurveyable, a genre of imperial writing emerged which suggested that virtuous labour could still be managed and overseen by benevolent gentlemen like General James Oglethorpe, founder of the Georgia colony.

Georgia’s Prospects Boltzius’s sermon cuts to the heart of the problem of Georgia, the final colony to be established by Britain in mainland North America. While the colony’s trusteeship, led by General Oglethorpe, wished both to deal with the problem of high wages and to confer dignity on labour, the two aims worked at cross-purposes. On the one hand, for Georgia’s proponents, the Middle Passage exemplified the dystopian vision of labour without settled coordinates. As the only British colony to bar slaves from its territory, Georgia was a sanctified literary topos, inspiring utopian visions of a colony of labourers united in primary production and in their resistance to both ruthless capital and rootless labour, while they enjoyed the protection of Oglethorpe and the wise Trustees, who would ensure that the land would be reserved for the sole benefit of the Protestant poor, the latter’s virtue secured through a prohibition on alcohol or the sale of land. Yet on the other hand, this utopian vision was defined in terms of its opposite; slave labour was the horror against which Georgia was to be defined, even as the absence of slaves was recognised as making the colony economically unsustainable. For, as Boltzius recognised in getting his labourers back to work on the mill, white labour discipline was difficult without the wage-depressing effects of African slavery, with whose introduction even this fervent abolitionist could threaten his workers. If the new science of political economy was to be trusted, then British imperialists would have to admit that slave and free labour were interdependent. Building on the calculations of political economy’s founding figure, Sir William Petty, the planners of empire would recognise that the high wages guaranteed by the ratio of land to labour could be redressed only by importing unfree labour.7 Even the fiercely abolitionist Boltzius must have felt the force of this conclusion, which allowed him to use the threat of introducing slaves to avert a wage-price spiral.

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Imperial motives for the colony’s founding further intensified this contradiction. Proposed as a way of avoiding the mistake of South Carolina, where the slave majority posed a perpetual threat of insurrection (as ultimately evidenced, for example, by the 1739 Stono Rebellion), Georgia’s urban, garrisoned model of colonisation defended South Carolina against Spanish Florida, which promised freedom to escaped slaves. Its promoters pointed out that black faces in Georgia could immediately be identified as those of runaways.8 In effect, the founding of slave-free Georgia helped to keep Carolina’s Africans in slavery. The founding of Georgia produced a literature which, more than an expression of boosterism, reflected the faltering attempt to produce a cognitive map of an Atlantic economy which had passed out of the control of the English landed interest. Dispirited by the lessons of the emergent discourse of political economy, which had shifted intellectual authority from the class of landed gentlemen to a new professional group of scientists, Georgia’s promoters leaned heavily on the concept of the ‘prospect’, so crucial to Thomson and other Augustan poets. Only the ‘disinterested’ gentleman observer free from labour and commercial interest, so it was thought, could discern the long view necessary to harmonise the competing interests in society.9 To a degree that historians have not properly recognised, this harmonisation of the prospect was particularly challenged in the case of the Atlantic world, where the ‘formal designs’ of empire rarely corresponded to ‘the informal actuality’ of a labour economy that regulated itself in ways inimical to imperial policymaking.10 Nowhere was the resistance of political economy to planned virtue more obvious, as I have suggested, than in the case of slavery, which could not be contained. In rejecting a black workforce and requiring all labourers to engage in the production of the same non-staple commodities, Georgia’s proponents articulated the privileged perspective of a paternalistic class of Trustees able to oversee the Atlantic economy in its totality. They protested against the reduction of work to calculated labour power, and resisted the extremes of slavery or free contract. Several interrelated, not entirely consistent topoi provided the imagined landscape within which these labourers were mapped: advocacy of sericulture (silk production) to serve a vision of a state-run (and defiantly unprofitable) silk industry, suggestively evocative of an Asiatic mode of production; emulation of the region’s Native Creek Indians for their imputed republican simplicity; and the idealisation of colonists as producers of value – sometimes figured in the imperial language of ‘tribute’ – rather than as economic subjects engaged in free exchange. The colony’s most widely circulated promotional poems comprised a diptych that combined an encomium on Creek chief Tomochichi with a poem of commerce that celebrated the colony’s potential for producing luxury goods (silk for damask, grapes for wine). The logic of the pairing was to combine two opposing literary modes, describing a pastoral economy that would serve the metropolitan destinations to which the era’s new ‘imperial georgic’, as Karen O’Brien characterises the form, directed the flow of agricultural products.11 After an opening that anticipates the themes of James Thomson’s ‘Rule Britannia’ (1740) in presenting British sea power as the guarantee of liberty and trade, ‘Georgia, a Poem’ (1736) turns to the colonial settlement. Here the silkworm’s indolent labours are improved by the busy bees of British imperial georgic: Georgia’s hardy men would turn the swampland into a city – ‘Not more intent their

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busy Labours ply / The swarming Bees beneath the vernal Sky’ – while also accommodating the pastoral labour of young women: Nor less the Care Of thy young Province to oblige the Fair: Here tend the Silkworm in the verdant Shade The frugal Matron, and the blooming Maid; Th’ expiring Insect’s curious Work resume, And wind Materials for the British Loom; Our Web to these shall all the Beauties owe, Which Asia boasts, and Eastern Pride can show; With skilful China’s richest Damasks vie, And emulate the Chint’s alluring Dye. When This shall lend its tributary Grace To each sweet Form, and each Angelick Face; When thus adorn’d our Nymphs shall shine compleat, What Eyes must dazzle, and what Hearts must beat!12 The praise of sericulture as a fitting labour for colonists (with, of course, no hint of the unbearable heat and nauseating smells of huts of moulting silkworms) is hardly new, as silk had been cultivated in seventeenth-century Virginia.13 What is novel is its association of women as producers in America and wearers in England, constituting a complete transatlantic system from pastoral production to metropolitan consumption. Imagined here not as a place of promiscuous commercial exchanges but simply as a source of valuable raw materials that would otherwise need to be acquired from China, Georgia sends its tribute to England to adorn the fetishised bodies of London women (culminating in the poem with Queen Caroline) whom silk makes whole or ‘compleat’. The logic of the fetish is clear enough here: the trade imbalance is seen as a wound that Englishwomen can heal by donning the Georgia-made silks. The tribute the poem pays to metropolitan power through the bodies of women is, in the end, both sexual and economic. Poems such as this diptych were a pervasive English genre for the literary promotion of Georgia. Indeed, from the perspective of one malcontented settler, Georgia was no more than poetry: ‘an hundred Hackney Muses’ extolling Georgia’s virtues had led thousands of dupes to agree to settle in the colony.14 The importance of poetry to this promotional literature becomes clear when we compare it to the more voluminous records of the Salzburgers, which, but for a few hymns, contain no verse. Both English and Germans incorporated Georgia into a textual network that included eastern colonies. But in another sense, the different generic qualities of British poetry about Georgia satisfied an entirely different set of concerns, in which poetry’s capacity for sensuous representation made immediate a complex imperial system otherwise accessible only to the mole’s-eye calculations of economists or the printers of the exhaustive written reports. As the sweeping eyes of British prospect-poets took in the globe, they returned to Georgia for confirmation of a virtuous system of production realised within an empire that, over the course of the eighteenth century, would become more reliant on slave labour than its Continental rivals.

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Cognitive Mapping and the Atlantic World The Georgia topos indexed many an English poet’s feelings about the growing British Empire.15 In this sense its literary representation provides an important window on to Atlantic studies, which is not defined only in relation to a mappable place or places, but as a concern with that feeling of system for which the work of mapping is both figure and metaphor.16 The problem of understanding just what the British were doing in the Atlantic (as they, in the famous quip, absent-mindedly stumbled into an empire) hit contemporary observers as more than just a problem of familiarising themselves with a new geography. Writers of georgic, concerned as they were with labour, struggled to produce what Fredric Jameson calls a ‘cognitive map’, a response to the invisible economic processes which determined Britons’ relationship to the unrepresentable totality of their historical moment. Jameson argues that when metropolitan elites recognised that their daily experience depended on the labour of people invisible to them, a crisis of perception emerged that questioned the claims of traditional literary genres to represent the social totality.17 Though Jameson seems to have Victorian and modernist texts in mind, the idea of cognitive mapping is clear enough already in John Barrell’s classic 1983 study of Augustan literature, despite its lack of engagement with the imperial dimension crucial to Jameson. For Barrell’s English Literature in History, the defining problem for Augustan literature is to produce a prospect-view of society as a harmonious totality that can still be overseen by a class of virtuous gentlemen.18 Poets such as Thomson achieve this cognitive map not through Boltzius’s appeal to scriptural authority but through an evolution of poetic form: through the grand survey of society, Thomson demonstrates that a perspective still exists from which the whole of society can be mapped, and that this perspective lies just where classical English republicans had placed it – firmly in the hands of the landed class whose disinterestedness is anchored in their possession of immobile property. The prospect-poem thus serves as a kind of cognitive map to its historical moment. Poems such as The Seasons articulate a viewpoint from which society can be viewed as a totality, giving the poet the vocation of producing (in Thomson’s words) an ‘equal, wide survey’ of the social whole.19 The same cognitive map informed both the prospect-view poem and the planning of Georgia. The Georgia plan gave a positive institutional shape to the reforms suggested by political critique; as David Shields concludes, the founding of Georgia was ‘a political counterpart to the great jeremiad the Augustan satirists directed against the decay of manners in Britain’.20 If the congruence between the otherwise dissimilar projects of writing a poem and planning a colony is surprising, this is perhaps because both projects defined themselves against the same opponent: Bernard Mandeville, his infamy exemplifying the new discipline of political economy. The proponents of this discipline had shown that the totality of human society could not be evaluated from an embodied perspective, but instead depended on an impersonal science of statistics whose claims to truth did not depend on the ethos of a particular observer. Mandeville went even further, arguing that society was liable to be destroyed by the paternalistic gentlemen overseeing the social order, because the application of human agency did nothing to produce public benefits. Faced with a society that was increasingly differentiated by profession, political economists suggested that the prosperity of society depended on amoral patterns of production and consumption.

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Mandeville denied that a cognitive map of the economy was possible. Pushing back against georgic’s blank verse, by now indelibly associated with Milton’s prelapsarian Eden, Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees was anti-epic rhyming doggerel which denied a foundational vision of social creation and argued that no such political scheme could make moral virtue compatible with the enjoyment of commercial prosperity. 21 Luxury, despite the moral censure directed against it, supported an economic system whose products were baubles only a labourer nursed in desperation and ignorance would consent to manufacture.22 No virtuous peasantry would freely produce silk and wine anywhere, much less in the heat of a Georgia summer. Published a decade before the first articulations of the Georgia project, The Fable so troubled Georgia’s Trustees that the modern historian could be forgiven for suggesting that Georgia was created principally to refute Mandeville. Thus J. E. Crowley implies, with good reason, that Mandeville was the unnamed antagonist against whom the Georgia Trustees directed their annual lay sermons about the state of the colony. Posing his scandalous dictum in the form of a question – ‘Are private vices public benefits?’ – the sermons repeatedly provided the answer in the form of a resounding negative.23 It is not difficult to see in Mandeville the source of the Trustees’ disturbance: not only was he suggesting the incompatibility of virtue and prosperity, but he was also questioning the possibility of the Trustees (or anyone) occupying a standpoint from which the British Empire could be managed. Mandeville unsettled the political tradition by denying that citizens could at one and the same time contribute to society and know what they were doing.24 While economic amoralism promised to produce a comprehensive account of society, it denied that this perspective could be inhabited by the social actors themselves. Thus poetry’s claim to see society as a totality was the defensive response to a real blindness. Barrell convincingly shows that the ‘retired’ or detached perspective of the country gentleman, thought to be a guarantee of republican disinterest, comes after Mandeville to be recoded as a symptom of his ‘paralysis’.25 By appealing to the problem of perspective, the Georgia Trustees made it their express aim to refute Mandeville by containing him within a larger structure, implicitly pointing to his failure to inhabit a point of view. Political economy’s amoralism was viewed as ceding reason to blind calculation or, rather, as failing to inhabit a point of view at all. By viewing colonialism from the mole’s-eye perspective of individual self-interest, Mandeville abdicated the attempt to see British society as a whole. Thus Georgia’s literature had cognitively to map the Atlantic world, to claim a point of view that was somehow free from the problem of individual self-interest. This standpoint was not that attained by a particular physical eye, since no single witness could grasp the complex interrelations of an Atlantic economy upon which everyday experience depended; rather, it was an Olympian eye of reason and imagination which saw a grand design in a new global society ruled by Britain.

The Silkworm and the Bee The classical poetic tradition provided an important source of authority for describing this perspective, so important to British imperial policy. Mandeville’s choice of the beehive may well have been a response to British poets’ use of Virgil’s Georgics as a model of managed labour: Virgil’s little Romans directed by a wise beekeeper. Annotating the section of the fourth georgic advising farmers on placing a beehive, Dryden in his

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translation of Virgil extrapolated the lesson to the British Empire, noting that when bees swarmed out to create new colonies, ‘a young prince’ first sought permission from the monarch; if this was not granted, the prince was invariably found dead.26 Readers surely would have been reminded that luring valuable English labourers to leave Britain was a capital offence, unless the emigration was managed and directed by the state in ways consonant with mercantilist theory.27 At stake in the image of the wandering bee, then, was a debate over managing the emigration of labourers. An Impartial Enquiry into the State and Utility of the Province of Georgia (1741), written by the colony’s chief literary proponent, invoked the bee image in order to demonstrate the validity of the idea of a planned social experiment. The figure on the title page appears to suggest that the beehive of labourers should be mapped within a larger network of relations which are overseen by a benevolent overseer, presumably the Trustees. If for Mandeville the self-interested bees inhabited the social totality of the hive, the text’s author stood in an Olympian position removed from and above the hive. Thus from a more distant point of view, Mandeville’s hive, which initially appears self-regulating, could be reconciled with the idea of a managed economy. Appropriately, the text indicts the colony’s discontented settlers for understanding only the limited prospect; the author will examine the ‘Objections . . . raised by different Sorts of People, from their different Views’, none of which comprehends ‘the true Interest either of Great Britain, or the Province itself’. None of these points of view is comprehensive enough to take the long view; all are ‘too narrow-sighted to be pleased with the Distance of the Prospect’.28

Benjamin Martyn, An Impartial Enquiry into the State and Utility of the Province of Georgia, US 20097.41.3, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

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To be sure, this appeal to a wider perspective sounds simply like a case of special pleading. Yet the introduction of silk production did effectively widen the imagined scale of Georgia from a location on the Atlantic rim to a system that now included the Indian Ocean. While imported silk, much of it actually from Italy, had been contributing to the British trade deficit, silk’s Asian origins, rather than calculations of profit, were decisive in making the case for its cultivation in Georgia, as Jim Egan has persuasively demonstrated.29 Yet poetry still remained, during the Augustan age, the dominant medium for the discussion of economic questions, so Georgia’s poets did not reject economics per se, but only a political economy which measured the world only in numbers and tables. Silk, I would suggest, evoked the era’s stylised notion of the economy of the Indian Ocean, which was seen as essentially different from that of the Atlantic: here, the network of ports remained under the control of companies chartered in England and the Netherlands, in contrast to the anarchy of the Atlantic’s mostly illegal, unsurveyable market, whose primary actors were not the virtuous yeoman or customs collector but the slave and the smuggler. It may be going too far to see in this idealisation of Georgia’s virtuous silk producers the origins of the notorious concept of Oriental despotism, an economic order prohibiting market exchange in favour of tribute, and private property in favour of state-run or monopolistic production. Yet creators and critics of Georgia alike described the colony in terms of the perceived benefits and flaws of an ‘Eastern’ economy and social structure.

Thomson and Georgia If James Thomson’s appointment to the lucrative post of Surveyor-General of several British Caribbean islands in 1744 seems to have struck his contemporaries as simultaneously fitting and ludicrous, then this was perhaps because he was well-known both for surveying the British colonial prospect (famously in his ‘Rule Britannia’) and for lacking physical stamina.30 Thomson’s The Seasons (1726–46) marks a key moment in British poetry, as a Scotsman becomes the leading writer of verse that celebrates the global prospects of a united Britain. Contrasting the merits of British Protestantism with its Catholic rival, he suggests that the British imperialist was ‘no ruffian’ widening ‘the purple tyranny of Rome’ but instead ‘like the harmless bee’, facilitating commercial exchange rather than despoiling the globe.31 But Thomson praised British imperialism at a moment when poetry’s claims to oversee the Atlantic world came to seem dubious at best. For all the reach of Thomson’s empirical eye, as exemplified by his language of objective description, The Seasons rarely turns the poet’s gaze to named locations outside the confines of England. It is the relationship of swain and gentleman which gives history and form to the country estates named for the figures in Thomson’s republican (or, in his terms, ‘Patriot’) pantheon, and the problem with Thomson’s always overly fertile colonial settings is that they seem to obviate the labour that makes the development of these class relations possible.32 What, then, happens to Georgia, the utopia of virtuous labourers on which Thomson’s fellow poets had staked so much? Though some of the most famous lines in The Seasons praise the philanthropic work in helping debtors which James Oglethorpe had done before founding Georgia, Thomson’s massive poem never actually mentions the colony, as Liberty does. In the latter poem’s final section, which appeared in February 1736, Thomson finally does turn to an explicit celebration of the founding of Georgia, having his Goddess of Liberty proclaim:

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leonard von morzé ‘Lo! swarming southward on rejoicing Suns, ‘Gay Colonies extend; the calm Retreat ‘Of undeserv’d Distress, the better Home ‘Of Those whom Bigots chase from foreign Lands. ‘Not built on Rapine, Servitude and Woe, ‘And, in their turn, some petty Tyrant’s Prey; ‘But, bound by social Freedom, firm they rise; ‘Such as, of late, an Oglethorpe has form’d, ‘And, crouding round, the charm’d Savannah sees.’33

The verse paragraph begins with a parataxis typical in Thomson’s poetry, before winding up with a concluding hypotaxis that centres colonial agency in the figure of Oglethorpe. This movement simulates for Georgia the idealised class relationship of plebeian to gentleman that Thomson praises in England. The opening lines imply a passive dynamic of colonisation, as the Goddess of Liberty witnesses a step by which the empire is ‘extend[ed]’ without an agentive force, in accordance with Britain’s self-serving logic of absent-minded imperialism. The ‘Suns’ passively illuminate a process of colonisation, as though in defiance of the more intuitive alternative by which ‘rejoicing Sons’ might actively swarm southward; but the hive that colonises Georgia is, after all, not just Britain’s sons but the Protestant international exemplified by Boltzius’s Salzburgers. The colonial bees’ paratactic lateral movement, which seems self-motivated by a spirit of liberty (inviting paradox, Thomson says they are ‘bound by social Freedom’), concludes with a vertical hypotaxis (‘firm they rise’) by which the colonists look upward, toward the imperial power of General Oglethorpe, who stands like a statue at the entrance to Savannah. Ultimately it is his Olympian vision of their ‘Retreat’ around which the Protestant bees are crowding. Thomson, as always, emphasises the liberties of British plebeians while also underlining their allegiance to their betters. As we have seen in Georgia’s other promotional literature, Thomson’s lines about Georgia fail to produce a coherent map of the colony precisely because he cannot escape the problem of racial slavery. Instead of chattel slavery, the poem posits a republican definition by which enslavement consists of financial and religious domination, rather than a system of racial exploitation which also indirectly oppressed wage labourers. Georgia’s defiance of the slave system might have provided leverage for a critique of the British Empire’s reliance on slave labour, but instead Thomson chooses to see Georgia as typical of the British Empire rather than exceptional so as to avoid indicting the rest of its Atlantic system, in keeping with his relegation of slavery to Africa, whose climate, rather than European policy, is responsible for slavery (Summer, ll. 884–8). So, too, does the indictment of ‘petty Tyrants’ who exercise sectarian domination evade the more obvious referent in the master-slave relationship. Enlisting Oglethorpe in the fight against such petty tyrannies would have seemed comical to readers, since even the Trustees had come to view the general as exercising despotic power over the colony.34 But Thomson had painted Oglethorpe in similar terms in The Seasons, where in the frequently anthologised lines from Winter Oglethorpe exposes creditors as ‘little tyrants’ making ruthless use of debtors’ prisons (367).35 A republican definition of liberty as not only negative but positive operates in both texts, where freeing debt-slaves from their oppressors also releases that active spirit of citizenship

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characterised by feeling love toward one’s fellow citizens. Not just stopping the hand of ‘Oppression’s iron rod’, the Jail Committee typifies ‘the land / Whose every street and public meeting glow / With open freedom’ (366–80).36 So self-motivated is this band of reformers that, like Georgia’s colonists, the agentive power of gentlemen does not detract from plebeian self-organisation. Traditional status-based relationships can thus be seen as compatible with British liberty. In republican or Patriot rhetoric, slavery referred to institutions that, by fostering dependency, facilitated political domination by the monied interest. This view usually overlooked chattel slavery, which fostered not only domination but exploitation; political economists had to calculate the latter, while republicans’ references to political slavery often read like an alibi for their failure to account for the racialisation of labour. The republican project of founding Georgia sometimes seems, in Thomson and elsewhere, to have failed to grasp the degree to which a labour system based in slavery could not be escaped by envisioning a slave-free landscape. Breaking the hold of a few alleged leaders of the monied interest over debtors or placemen was evidently easier than reducing the power of thousands of petty-tyrant slave owners. Even those who, like the Trustees, ended slavery within their dominions could not escape the total slave system. Georgic becomes harder to write when labour is subject to the calculations demanded by imperial writing. The fusion of such modes as pastoral and georgic with commercial imperialism makes Thomson’s verse politically important. He repeatedly positions virtuous, self-contained domestic agriculture as the nursery of Britain’s imperial prospects; the limited perspective of the timeless rustic prepares for, and implicitly supports, the latest projects of Britain’s imperial and commercial adventurers (for example, Summer, ll. 352–431).37 Yet Thomson cannot imagine Georgia as equal to English space; the timeless intergenerational continuity he finds in the English countryside cannot be transplanted to the colonial setting. There is nothing in Thomson which corresponds to Boltzius’s struggles to maintain his community of virtue on the other side of the Atlantic.

Conclusion After Georgia sanctioned the importation of slaves in 1750, Edmund Burke found it easy to explain the reversal of policy: Georgia’s labourers were not much inclined to continue their work when they saw their South Carolinian counterparts growing rich by subjecting their slaves to the same toil.38 Yet, as we have seen, this historical development would have been less obvious to Kogler, the carpenter with whom we began: the availability of slaves undercut the demands of wage labour. The historical patterns we now see in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world may thus seem to depend on our vantage point, but Georgia’s literary promoters were concerned to demonstrate that its totality did not elude their grasp, that English gentlemen-prospectors could both represent the economic world and act to direct it. Offering a set of heavily moralised tracts and poems, the colony’s promoters imagined Georgia in terms of a putatively Asiatic economy, based on tribute rather than contract. Unable to secure cooperation through the religious discipline of Boltzius’s community, English publicists represented Georgia through an Orientalised topos of tribute: the colony would supply the metropolis with luxury products in exchange for subsistence bounties. No mere Georgia of the mind, the colony would alleviate the early eighteenth-century

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landed aristocracy’s fear that society was too complex to be surveyed and managed any longer by their paternalistic oversight. The impossibility of such oversight had become, at this historical moment, obvious in the Atlantic world, involving a labour system now too morally comprised for poetry’s effort to bring it under the survey of an individual ethical observer. Perhaps scholars in Atlantic studies should now turn to figures like Boltzius in order to understand heterotopic spaces in the Atlantic world from the perspective of those who lived in them, putting the words of the surveyed into conversation with those of their surveyors.

Notes 1. Samuel Urlsperger (ed.), Detailed Reports on the Salzburger Emigrants Who Settled in America, trans. George Fenwick Jones et al., 18 vols (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1968–95), 7, pp. 178–81. For the pun, see Urlsperger (ed.), Siebente Continuation der Ausführlichen Nachricht (Halle: Verlegung des Wäysenhauses, 1741), p. 548. On Kogler as troublemaker, see Urlsperger, Reports 3, pp. 234–5. On erbauen, see August Langen (ed.), Der Wortschatz des Deutschen Pietismus, 2nd edn (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1968), p. 36. 2. ‘This Singularity’ was ‘that Negroes are . . . needless for the Produces which are to be raised there’, [Benjamin Martyn?], An Impartial Enquiry into the State and Utility of the Province of Georgia (London: W. Meadows, 1741), p. 25. The absence of slaves in early Georgia was, in effect, the colony’s ‘peculiar institution’. 3. John E. Crowley, This Sheba, Self: The Conceptualization of Economic Life in EighteenthCentury America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), pp. 14–49. 4. Urlsperger, Reports 7, p. 3; also George Fenwick Jones, ‘The Salzburger Mills: Georgia’s First Successful Enterprises’, Yearbook of German-American Studies 23 (1988), pp. 105–17. 5. Mark Peterson, ‘Theopolis Americana: The City-State of Boston, the Republic of Letters, and the Protestant International, 1689–1739’, in Bernard Bailyn and Patricia Denault (eds), Soundings in Atlantic History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 366–8. Tranquebar was a Danish colony in India where Germans had begun a Lutheran mission in 1706; Boltzius read his Indian counterpart’s reports and imitated them (Urlsperger, Reports 18, p. 42). 6. Elite control of free labour was on the minds of Georgia’s planners from the beginning; for an example, see its first promotional pamphlet (1717) in Trevor Reese (ed.), The Most Delightful Country of the Universe: Promotional Literature of the Colony of Georgia, 1717–1734 (Savannah: Beehive Press, 1972), p. 10. 7. A brief intellectual genealogy of this point is Appendix B to Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, vol. 1 (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 203–5. On Boltzius’s reluctant recognition of the wage problem, see Renate Wilson, ‘Land, Population, and Labour’, in Hartmut Lehmann and Hermann Wellenreuther (eds), In Search of Peace and Prosperity: New German Settlements in Eighteenth-Century Europe and America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), pp. 217–45. 8. An Impartial Enquiry, p. 36. 9. Tim Fulford, Landscape, Liberty and Authority: Poetry, Criticism and Politics from Thomson to Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 4. 10. Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 60–1. 11. Karen O’Brien, ‘Imperial Georgic, 1660–1789’, in Gerald MacLean et al. (eds), The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 160.

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12. ‘Georgia, a Poem’, in John Calhoun Stephens Jr (ed.), Georgia, and Two Other Occasional Poems of the Founding of the Colony, 1736 (Atlanta: Emory University Library, 1950), p. 10. Stephens disputes the attribution of the poems to Samuel Wesley. The fullest analysis is David S. Shields, Oracles of Empire: Poetry, Politics, and Commerce in British America, 1690–1750 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 45–55. 13. Charles E. Hatch Jr, ‘Mulberry Trees and Silkworms: Sericulture in Early Virginia’, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 65.1 (January 1957), pp. 3–61. 14. Patrick Tailfer, A True and Historical Narrative of the Colony of Georgia in America (1741), in Trevor R. Reese (ed.), The Clamorous Malcontents: Criticisms and Defenses of the Colony of Georgia, 1741–1743 (Savannah: Beehive Press, 1973), p. 32. 15. Michael Griffin, Enlightenment in Ruins: The Geographies of Oliver Goldsmith (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2013), p. 131. 16. See Ed White’s The Backcountry and the City: Colonization and Conflict in Early America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), p. 56, for imperiography (a term I borrow from White) as the construction of transatlantic ‘relational links’. 17. Fredric Jameson, ‘Cognitive Mapping’, in Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), p. 349. Jameson is concerned with the aesthetic fallout of the historical moment when metropolitan subjects’ urban experience comes to depend on distant productive forces no longer perceptible to them. An extraordinary study that complicates my conclusions is Kevis Goodman’s Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), which argues that the ‘noise’ within georgic registers this fallout. 18. John Barrell, English Literature in History 1730–1780: An Equal, Wide Survey (London: Hutchinson and St. Martin’s, 1983). 19. Summer, l. 1,617. My text is James Thomson, The Seasons and The Castle of Indolence, ed. James Sambrook (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). 20. Shields, Oracles of Empire, p. 49. 21. O’Brien, ‘Imperial Georgic, 1660–1789’, p. 168. 22. Bernard Mandeville, ‘An Essay on Charity and Charity-Schools’, in E. J. Hundert (ed.), The Fable of the Bees, and Other Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), pp. 121–2. 23. Crowley, This Sheba, Self, p. 14. 24. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 465–6. 25. Barrell, English Literature in History, pp. 65–7. 26. O’Brien, ‘Imperial Georgic, 1660–1789’, p. 166. 27. Trevor Reese, Colonial Georgia: A Study in British Imperial Policy in the Eighteenth Century (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1963), p. 10. 28. An Impartial Enquiry, pp. 3, 38. 29. Jim Egan, Oriental Shadows: The Presence of the East in Early American Literature (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013), p. 41. Within the space of a single paragraph, Egan thrice insists that Georgia’s promotional poetry should be understood as motivated by reasons beyond the ‘strictly’ or ‘specifically’ or ‘purely’ ‘economic’. The notion that the poems about Georgia must be more than ‘economic’ in order to warrant our attention points to a divide between a twenty-first-century sense of the economic and that of eighteenth-century gentleman observers: for the latter, the prospect-poem’s ability to achieve aesthetic form was evidence of the truth of its economic claims. 30. Writing from Barbados, a colonial governor ridiculed Thomson’s appointment: ‘being fat, & gross of Constitution [he] cou’d not, or wou’d not Venture into this part of the World.’ See S. D. Smith, Slavery, Family, and Gentry Capitalism in the British Atlantic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 109 n. 49. The attribution of Thomson’s (hardly

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31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

36.

37.

38.

leonard von morzé imperial?) slothfulness to his obesity is a prevailing motif in the contemporary reception of his poetry. The Castle of Indolence is, in part, self-satire. Summer, ll. 753–64. See Shaun Irlam, ‘Gerrymandered Geographies: Exoticism in Thomson and Chateaubriand’, MLN 108.5 (December 1993), pp. 891–912. Georgia’s planners turned to classical political theory to debate related questions, such as whether or not Georgia was naturally abundant, and whether or not abundance could be conducive to temperate labour. See for example Reese, Most Delightful Country, pp. 86–7. James Thomson, Liberty, The Castle of Indolence, and Other Poems, ed. James Sambrook (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), ll. 638–46 (quotation marks in original). Reese, Clamorous Malcontents, p. xiii. Given that Thomson made two rounds of additions to Winter in 1744 and 1746 which increased the poem’s length by over one third, an account of Georgia might have seemed fitting, but it could not have followed the Jail Committee passage of 1731, since Georgia’s warm setting would obviously not have been compatible with Winter. It is also possible that Thomson may have felt some rivalry with one of the colony’s leading boosters, Benjamin Martyn, over their authorship of competing Drury Lane tragedies in 1729–30. Brett D. Wilson, ‘Hannah More’s Slavery and James Thomson’s Liberty: Fond Links, Mad Liberty and Unfeeling Bondage’, in Srividhya Swaminathan and Adam R. Beach (eds), Invoking Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Imagination (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 93–111. Suvir Kaul rightly attributes the renown of Thomson to his ability to reconcile the competing interest groups of mobile and landed property. One might, then, read the emergent promotional literature in favour of Georgia as an attempt to synthesise the two interests within a single topos, claiming as it did that the colony would produce both commercial benefits and the pastoral peace evoked by the image of vines streaming wine, rather than of colonists streaming blood – precisely the transformation of landscape Thomson had described in Britannia (1729), esp. lines 113–21. See Kaul, Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), p. 138. Reese, Colonial Georgia, p. 40.

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2 From Auburn to Upper Canada: Pastoral and Georgic Villages in the British Atlantic World Juliet Shields

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pon arriving in Upper Canada, the eponymous protagonist of John Galt’s Bogle Corbet; or, The Emigrants (1831) remarks that the landscape between Quebec and Montreal ‘is solitary, and to say the truth, is to the emigrant a little saddening. It lacks the social cheerfulness of villages.’1 For Corbet, the presence of villages distinguishes the countryside – a domesticated landscape – from the wilderness. Although Bogle Corbet takes the village as a symbol of English sociability, writers had been debating the disappearance of villages from the English countryside for several decades, at least since the publication of Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village in 1770. This poem famously describes the demise of the ‘sweet smiling village’ of Auburn at the hands of an unfeeling ‘man of wealth and pride’ who turns the farmland around his estate into an elaborately landscaped private park, forcing his tenants from their homes.2 Goldsmith implies that population, rather than goods, constitutes the true wealth of a nation, warning readers that ‘a bold peasantry, their country’s pride, / When once destroyed, can never be supplied’ (ll. 55–6). Goldsmith anticipated that The Deserted Village would elicit ‘the shout of modern politicians against me’, given that ‘For twenty or thirty years past, it has been the fashion to consider luxury as one of the greatest national advantages’ (p. 675). His prediction was correct. A reviewer for Town and Country Magazine questioned the truthfulness of the poem’s representation of rural depopulation, declaring, ‘we cannot believe, that this country is depopulating, or that commerce is destructive of the real strength and greatness of a nation’.3 Some suggested that The Deserted Village did not go far enough in describing the oppression of England’s peasantry under the sway of wealthy landowners, while others accused Goldsmith of constructing an idealised past when, according to the poem, ‘every rood of ground maintained its man’ and happy peasants enjoyed ‘light labour’ relieved by ‘healthful sports’ (ll. 59, 58, 71). Goldsmith could not have predicted that readers on the other side of the Atlantic would be even more interested in his poem’s political and economic concerns than those in England. Even as English writers debated the viability of their nation’s villages and the accuracy of Goldsmith’s poem, American, and later Canadian, writers began to populate their poems with small settlements. Often, these American and Canadian villages were depicted as literal and literary heirs to Goldsmith’s, settled by the fictive villagers who left Auburn to seek their fortunes in the colonies. American and Canadian village poems

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provide sequels to The Deserted Village, imagining the hardships of transatlantic migration and settlement that Auburn’s villagers might have experienced when they arrived in Britain’s North American colonies. In these sequels, the village becomes an indication of translatio imperii, or the westward march of civilisation from the Old to the New World, even while it also symbolises the rejection of European manners and mores. This chapter examines English, American and Canadian responses to The Deserted Village, focusing specifically on those authors who, following Goldsmith, chose poetry as their medium for exploring the economic, political and moral resonances of the village as a form of social organisation. The origin of this Atlantic literary conversation lies in the forces that were changing the face of the English countryside in the eighteenth century. The enclosure of formerly common land, the rise of agrarian capitalism, and emparkation, or the consolidation of small plots of land into sweeping parklands, affected the livelihoods of labourers. When the inhabitants of Auburn are driven from their land by an unfeeling landlord who wants ‘Space for his lake, his park’s extended bounds, / Space for his horses, equipage and hounds’ (ll. 277–8), they must choose between migration to London or emigration to the American colonies. The city offers no escape from the economic disparities that have already driven the villagers from Auburn; so Goldsmith’s villagers emigrate ‘To distant climes, a dreary scene, / Where half the convex world intrudes between’, and where they encounter ‘blazing suns’, ‘poisonous fields’, ‘crouching tigers’ and ‘savage men’ (ll. 341–4).4 By following Auburn’s exiles no further than their trek through the American wilderness, The Deserted Village extended an implicit invitation to North American authors to imagine in verse the fate of these migrants and others like them. In fact, most of the English who settled in North America during the eighteenth century were not the impoverished victims of eviction, but rather prosperous farmers and artisans. However, such technicalities hardly mattered to the poets for whom The Deserted Village offered an opportunity to contrast the social ideals of their new settlements with Goldsmith’s portrayal of English economic disparity and moral corruption. For Goldsmith, the emigration of real, historical individuals from England was arguably less important than the loss of the ‘rural virtues’ and ‘sweet Poetry’ that these emigrants represented (ll. 398, 407). American and Canadian writers were quick to offer these mutually sustaining metaphysical exiles a new home across the Atlantic, claiming ‘rural virtues’ as both origin and endpoint of their own ‘sweet Poetry’. Similar to The Deserted Village, American and Canadian village poems incorporate elements of pastoral and georgic in order to explore the economic, political and moral resonances of the village.5 Although critics debate the similarities and differences between pastoral and georgic, most agree that the former represents a static world of rural ease and pleasure while the latter stresses the value of persistent labour in overcoming hardships and difficulties in a world that is always in flux.6 In their foundational discussions of pastoral in British and American literature, respectively, Raymond Williams and Leo Marx remind us of ‘the contrast within Virgilian pastoral . . . between the pleasures of rural settlement, and the threat of loss and eviction’.7 Marx and Williams show that pastoral and georgic always exist relationally, with each mode supplementing the other. Goldsmith’s representations of Auburn before and after its tenants’ exile epitomise this supplementary relationship. In what follows, I will trace village poetry from the earliest English responses to The Deserted Village to the American and Canadian verses that addressed Goldsmith

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from a distance of fifty years. I intend to show that village poetry constituted a distinctive Atlantic literary form in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Village poems, which like The Deserted Village are usually written in rhyming couplets, tend to include the following elements: a description of the village’s geography and institutions, among which the church and schoolhouse feature prominently; an account of the village’s origins and the inhabitants’ means of subsistence; one or more interpolated tales; and a conclusion that situates the village in a national or imperial context. Aesthetically, village poetry ranges from the mediocre to the excruciatingly bad, but it remains valuable as a record of how North American writers incorporated a quintessential symbol of Englishness into new geographical and political landscapes. Through its Atlantic crossing, village poetry turned from pastoral to georgic and acquired a new historical consciousness, one that is arguably excluded from The Deserted Village. In responding to what many saw as Goldsmith’s nostalgia for an imaginary rural golden age, American and Canadian poets celebrated the georgic virtues that protected their villages against the economic disparities that led in The Deserted Village to Auburn’s demise – fortitude, industry and self-restraint. Yet the georgic’s historical consciousness also posed problems for American and Canadian poets. Their representations of the moral economy of village life became increasingly self-contradictory as they attempted to account in the United States for the growth of a commercial empire sustained by slavery, and in colonial Canada for continued economic dependence on a corrupt mother country.

English Village Poetry and the Problems of Pastoral Most eighteenth-century English responses to The Deserted Village foreshadowed Raymond Williams’s claim two centuries later that pastoral enables the ‘idealisation of actual English country life and its social and economic relations’.8 Only one of these responses, Anthony King’s The Frequented Village (1771), implied that Goldsmith did not do full justice to the perfection of ‘village morals’.9 In The Frequented Village, King imaginatively resurrects Goldsmith’s village, comparing Auburn’s ‘pensive ruins’ to a ‘speaking monument’ that allows him to tell the story of the village before it was ‘lost, forlorn, forgot’.10 King’s village is a ‘mimic Eden’: an assemblage of saccharine images of piety, charity, industriousness and innocence. The portrait is overdrawn not only because King’s poetic skills were limited, but also because he hoped to provide a moving argument against enclosure and depopulation. King, who identifies himself as ‘a gentleman of the Middle Temple’, urges his fellow city-dwellers to let us emulation catch, And from the peasant, full perfection snatch; From city tumults, turn our greedy eye, And learn to live, as we would wish to die.11 Much more so than The Deserted Village, The Frequented Village approaches what Williams describes as the exhaustion of pastoral in its idealised representation of village life. For King, the peasantry is essential to the nation’s moral health because it provides opportunities for the wealthy – ‘by pity fir’d, / By bounty led, and charity inspired’ – to perform good deeds and secure their own heavenly rewards.12

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The Frequented Village was unique in its intensification of the pastoral aspects of The Deserted Village. Most English commentators seem to have found Goldsmith’s depictions of rural life already too idealised. But rather than turning to georgic to revise the poem’s pastoralism, as would Goldsmith’s American respondents, English poets instead resorted to anti-pastoral, which David Fairer explains as the fulfilment of pastoral’s ironic potential, or the self-conscious dramatisation of pastoral’s artifice.13 John Robinson’s The Village Oppress’d (1771) implies that The Deserted Village does not go far enough in exposing the degradation of the English peasantry. Robinson reminds readers that, unlike Goldsmith’s villagers, some of England’s labourers lack the means to escape ‘Rustic Oppression’ through emigration: ‘Slaves to one master, to one spot confin’d, / Chearless despondence overspreads their mind.’14 In contrast, Auburn’s emigrants were ‘Blest but in this; where’er their lot was thrown, / No land could make them poorer than their own.’15 For Robinson, the peasantry’s inability to leave England renders them slaves in fact, if not in name. He emphasises this point by situating their labour within Britain’s imperial system of slavery. The peasantry enjoy no part of Britain’s growing wealth; instead surplus goods To foreign climes . . . quickly [are] conveyed, Aiding the schemes of luxury and trade. There other busy slaves, by Britain fed, Find not even leisure to produce their bread.16 Agricultural labourers, for Robinson, are simply Britain’s ‘other slaves’: theoretically they are free to live on the products of their labour or to find a more generous master, but in practice they have little more agency or independence than the slaves labouring on West Indian plantations. Robinson’s villagers are worn down by ‘anxious care’ and ‘unmitigated woe’, but if their virtues are lessened by their suffering, we don’t hear of it. Resigned to endless toil without reward, they apparently do not envy the wealthy ‘their pomp and shew’, and their resignation only renders them more worthy of readers’ admiration.17 In contrast, George Crabbe asks in The Village (1783) how anyone could remain virtuous under such conditions. Crabbe doesn’t deny that landowners occasionally mistreat their tenants (although we can assume he exonerates Lord Robert Manners, with whose poetic beatification The Village ends, from this charge). But he does object to Goldsmith’s romanticisation in The Deserted Village of both the peasantry’s virtues and the state of rural harmony that agricultural labourers enjoyed in a mythical time ‘ere England’s griefs began’ (Deserted Village, l. 57). In The Village Crabbe draws on his experiences as an apothecary in the fishing village of Aldeburgh in Suffolk to provide a ‘real picture of the poor’ divested of the ‘tinsel trappings’ in which pastoral poetry disguises the harsh conditions of the peasantry’s existence.18 He firmly declares his intention to ‘paint the Cot, / As Truth will paint it, and as Bards will not’.19 Whereas Goldsmith’s villagers end a day of ‘light labour’ (Deserted Village, l. 59) with dancing and sports, Crabbe’s turn from a day of arduous toil in the fields to a night spent smuggling contraband goods into the country, or pillaging vessels that have been wrecked on the coast. Clearly, they are by no means ‘estrang’d from crime’, as Robinson described one of his villagers.20 Crabbe’s peasants are inured to crime through hardship, and their parson, unlike Goldsmith’s beatific clergyman, is more interested in hunting and gambling than in tending to the morals of his flock.

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Although Crabbe acknowledges that the peasantry might not be entirely to blame for their moral shortcomings, he refuses to glorify their suffering. He is particularly scathing towards poets who romanticise the unadorned lives of the poor: Oh! Trifle not with wants you cannot feel, Nor mock the misery of a stinted meal; Homely, not wholesome, plain, not plenteous, such As you who praise would never deign to touch.21 Here Crabbe indicts the sentimental diction of eighteenth-century pastoral, which transforms an unappetising and insufficient meal into a symbol of rural contentment that feeds readers’ appetites for stories of virtuous swains. It seems unlikely that Crabbe intended his portrayal of the peasantry’s poverty and degradation to endorse the practices of enclosure and clearance that The Deserted Village laments. Rather, he questions whether it is necessary to embrace pastoral’s resistance to history and to represent the peasantry as paragons in order to justify the condemnation of these practices.

American Georgic and the Discomforts of History Whereas The Deserted Village lamented the passing of an irrevocable rural golden age, American village poetry celebrated the relatively recent founding of the nation’s first white settlements. Georgic was central to this endeavour because, as David Shields has shown, Virgil’s Georgics represented agriculture as ‘the quintessential imperial act’, a way of imposing order and control on newly conquered or colonised lands.22 Following Virgil’s example, early American poets suggested that the cultivation of the land would also cultivate among settlers the virtues of self-sufficiency, fortitude and contentment. In Timothy Dwight’s Greenfield Hill (1794), a seven-part work that arguably constitutes the apotheosis of American village poetry, New England’s sublime geography demands these georgic virtues of its inhabitants. The land’s surface, rocky, rough, and rude, Scoop’d into vales, or heav’d in lofty hills, Or cloud-embosom’d mountains, dares the plough, And threatens toil intense to every swain.23 To transform this landscape into the ‘unnumbered farms’ that ‘salute the cheerful eye’ of the poem’s speaker as he gazes across the landscape in Book I of Greenfield Hill requires ‘exertion strong’ (ll. 23, 99). The inhabitants of Dwight’s Connecticut village are in little danger of sinking into sloth, nor are his readers as they slog through Greenfield Hill. For Dwight, georgic labour includes not only agricultural work but also the cultural work of writing poetry. In the preface to Greenfield Hill, Dwight describes poetry as a ‘probable means’ of ‘contribut[ing] to the innocent amusement of his countrymen, and to their improvement in manners, and in oeconomical, political, and moral sentiments’ (p. 6). He aims to cultivate citizens rather than crops, but his work is as essential as the farmer’s labour to the moral character of the new United States. Both forms of cultivation are ongoing – indeed, never-ending – thanks to the inevitability of historical change, the source of which, for Dwight, lies in human nature as much as extrinsic factors. Unlike pastoral, which is suspended temporally

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and spatially from the forces of change, georgic is embedded in history. Arguably, then, village poetry acquires a new historical consciousness, one that is absent in The Deserted Village, through its Atlantic crossing. This historical consciousness is already present in the earliest American response to Goldsmith, Philip Freneau’s The American Village (1772). In a passage frequently imitated in subsequent US and Canadian village poetry, Freneau describes his American village as a reincarnation of Auburn: Though Goldsmith weeps in melancholy strains, Deserted Auburn and forsaken plains, And mourns his village with a patriot sigh, And in that village sees Britannia die: Yet shall this land with rising pomp divine, In it’s [sic] own splendor and Britannia’s shine.24 Freneau understands that for Goldsmith, villages such as Auburn nurture the simple virtues that might counter the corrupting effects of imperial power and wealth. It is ironic, then, that he positions the humble village of Auburn as the origin of America’s future ‘splendor’ – a splendour to which Freneau, writing four years before the outbreak of war between Britain and the American colonies, allows ‘Britannia’ to retain a partial claim. Freneau’s depiction of an American village provides a pretext for juxtaposing a series of loosely related poetic interludes that, together, stage the distinctions between pastoral and georgic. The first of these interludes occurs when, after describing the clearing of the wilderness, the speaker abruptly shifts the scene to ‘a lovely island’ that ‘once adorn’d the sea / Between New-Albion and the Mexic’ Bay’ (p. 215). On this deserted island, Had fate but smil’d, some village might have stood Secluded from the world, and all it’s [sic] own, Of other lands unknowing and unknown. (p. 216) This island village, secure from contact with other peoples and thus from corruption by luxury or vice, would have been a site of pure pastoral had not ‘envious time, conspiring with the sea, / Wash’d all it’s [sic] landscapes and it’s [sic] groves away’ (p. 217). Even a pastoral paradise is not immune to the ravages of time and nature. Bemoaning his ‘fav’rite isle to ruin gone’, the speaker returns to the ‘wide land’ spread out before him, hoping that its ‘landscapes, hills and grassy mountains high’ the island’s ‘place can well supply’ (p. 217). Unlike the island, however, the American colonies are not protected from the effects of historical change, but are instead peopled by those who have ‘from Britain fled’, and who bring the past with them (p. 218). Indeed, the poem’s next interlude reminds readers that America is already fallen, thanks to earlier generations of settlers and explorers who ‘conspir’d to rob’ the Indians ‘of their native soil’ (p. 219). The tale of Colma and Caffraro, which the poet recites as one among many ‘deeds ever glorious to the Indian name’ (p. 219), further distances The American Village from pastoral by providing its landscape with a history. Caffraro is sailing with his wife Colma and their infant son to deliver furs to

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British traders at Port Nelson when their boat springs a leak. A passing boat ‘could save but two’ and Colma drowns in order to save Caffraro’s ‘dearer life’ (p. 221). She haunts the land until, many years later, Caffraro joins her in death. The story of Colma and Caffraro, conventional and even trite though it is, endows a supposedly new world not simply with a history but with a history in which Europeans are the villains, bringing ‘bloody wars’ to a land governed by ‘wholesome laws’ (p. 219). Even through Freneau’s American village never was a pastoral paradise, it nonetheless must be protected against further corruption because ‘No other regions latent yet remain, / This spacious globe has been research’d in vain’ (p. 219). In the westward journey of civilisation, colonial America is, for Freneau at least, the last stop and the final refuge from the luxury and vice to which Britain has succumbed. Dwight’s Greenfield Hill provides its village with an even more extensive history, devoting the third of its seven books to an account of the British army’s plundering and burning of Fairfield, Connecticut, in 1779, and the fourth to seventeenth-century English settlers’ attack on the Pequod Indians. Even the poem’s first book, ‘The Prospect’, represents the village as a temporally situated entity by comparing it to Europe. Whereas Freneau, writing prior to American independence, generously permitted Britain to bask in the reflected glory of his American village’s virtues, Dwight draws a stark opposition between late eighteenth-century Britain and the newly formed United States. Similar to Goldsmith, Dwight describes late eighteenth-century England as a place of extremes: ‘Of wealth enormous, and enormous want / Of lazy sinecures and suffering toil’ (Book I, ll. 243–4). In contrast to the extremes of rich and poor characterising British society, the denizens of Greenfield Hill enjoy ‘that pure, golden mean, so oft of yore / By sages wish’d, and prais’d’ (Book I, ll. 222–3). Book II, ‘The Flourishing Village’, describes this golden mean as ‘Competence’, a word that the opening 150 lines of the book are devoted to exploring. Competence for Dwight is simply economic sufficiency; it is allied to ‘humble joys’ and promotes the virtues of ‘industry’, ‘Kind Hospitality’ and ‘Sweet Chastity’ (Book II, ll. 50, 7, 111, 113). Britain’s fallen state, in which general competence has given way to the extremes of rich and poor, is a warning to the United States. Aware that Greenfield Hill is not impervious to change, Dwight urges its villagers not to turn to Britain for moral or political guidance in case they should acquire its vices: Change, but change alone, By wise improvement of thy blessings rare; And copy not from others. (Book I, ll. 300–2) Dwight’s anxiety about the moral vulnerability of the newly formed United States was far from unique, but his warning against copying English mores and manners sits rather uneasily with his own conscious imitation of the voices of British poets from Dryden and Pope to Goldsmith and Cowper.25 Despite Dwight’s efforts to impose a poetic order on Greenfield Hill that would sustain its georgic virtues for perpetuity, ‘The Flourishing Village’ contains contradictions that Dwight evidently cannot resolve. Writing about British georgic, Kevis Goodman describes such contradictions as ‘the ground, as it were, out of which georgic can plow a sensation of history as affective discomfort’ that undermines – or in the terms of Goodman’s metaphor churns up – ideologies of progress and reconciliation.26

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English village poetry, with its tendency towards pastoral, often obscures or excises these contradictions. Greenfield Hill’s opaque explanation of social mobility in the village, and by implication in the early American republic, offers one example of the ‘affective discomfort’ Goodman describes. Dwight’s diction becomes fraught when he addresses social class: Here every class (if classes those we call, Where one extended class embraces all, All mingling, as the rainbow’s beauty blends, Unknown where every hue begins or ends) Each following, each, with uninvidious strife, Wears each feature of improving life. (Book II, ll. 171–6) Setting aside the parenthesis, we might infer that each class of the village’s inhabitants strives non-competitively for upward mobility by emulating its superiors. But the parenthesis hastens to assure us that the distinctions between classes in Greenfield Hill are blurred to an extent that surely renders such striving unnecessary. The village’s embodiment of a ‘golden mean’ becomes even more problematic when it transpires that settlers keep slaves. Dwight assures us that in Greenfield Hill ‘the slave’ is ‘kindly fed, and clad, and treated’ (Book II, l. 203). He ‘toils, ’tis true; but shares his master’s toil’ (Book II, l. 209); and in return for his labour he ‘takes his portion of the common good’ (Book II, l. 212), although it is unclear whether that portion is as large as his master’s. Greenfield Hill turns to the West Indies to illustrate the comparative virtue of its village’s use of slavery in one of the disruptive changes of scene that, according to Goodman, are symptomatic of georgic’s accommodation of ideological contradictions.27 Rather than portraying slavery as a betrayal of the poem’s ideal of ‘competence’ or self-sufficiency, the poem describes it as a ‘Supreme memorial of the world’s dread fall’ (Book II, l. 258), a reminder that all societies are imperfect to some degree. The natural disasters that plague the Caribbean are, for Dwight, a form of divine judgement. God’s displeasure with West Indian slaveholding practices explains ‘why earthquakes rock that fateful land; / Fires waste the city; ocean whelms the strand’ (Book II, ll. 329–30). That Greenfield Hill is free from such scourges is a divine endorsement of its citizens’ comparatively mild treatment of slaves. ‘Lost liberty’, the speaker remarks nonchalantly, is the Connecticut slave’s ‘sole, peculiar ill’ (Book II, l. 213). In another instance of Goodman’s ‘affective discomfort’, Dwight struggles to incorporate slaveholding into a georgic society in which labour and competence, for white settlers at least, are inseparable. Slavery is absent from the concluding lines of ‘The Flourishing Village’, in which Greenfield Hill becomes a prototype for the villages that will spring up across the continent as the United States expands westward. The speaker watches in imagination as, across the land, ‘The village springs; the humble school aspires; / And the church brightens in the morning fires’ (Book II, ll. 699–700). He prophesies that these colonial replications of Greenfield Hill will gradually ‘renovate mankind’ as Americans ‘across the mainland roam; / And claim, on far Pacific shores, their home’ (Book II, ll. 708–10). Whereas Freneau represented North America as the only unsettled land remaining on the face of the globe, and thus as the endpoint of the westward movement of georgic

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virtues, Dwight envisions these virtues circling the globe until west becomes east and they waken ‘startled China’ from a ‘long torpor’ (Book II, l. 739). By representing this process of global enlightenment as the planting of one village after another, Dwight downplays any suggestion that the United States might harbour imperial ambitions to rival Britain’s. Each village, as a more or less autonomous social unit, might continue to foster a ‘golden mean’ of competence while also disseminating through westward migration all of the virtues that competence enables. The publication of Greenfield Hill by no means signalled the end of American village poetry, but the georgic emphasis of this poetry waned in the early nineteenth century, and subsequent village poems were notably less concerned with the cultivation of virtue through labour than Dwight’s. By the time Samuel Deane published The Populous Village in 1826, material wealth was no longer regarded solely with suspicion as a source of moral corruption, but also with pride as a sign of national strength. While Freneau and Dwight had followed Goldsmith in giving precedence to church and school in their accounts of village institutions, Deane begins with the populous village’s inn. Here we find ‘no sooty bar-room’ or ‘broken chairs’, but rather ‘splendid drawing rooms, with carpet strown, / And seats and sofas like the softest down’.28 Guests are treated to ‘rich repasts’ and ‘spacious halls’ that smack of the very luxuriousness Goldsmith had criticised as the cause of depopulation (p. 9). Deane assures readers that despite these displays of wealth, the village is free from ‘those vices foul that crowded cities fret’ (p. 15). The villagers’ ‘petit village pride’ (p. 15) is a minor foible compared to the ‘high ambition’ and ‘rank luxury’ that have undone European societies (p. 17). Even while the poet recounts the village’s riches, he implies that it is what the United States lacks that secures the ‘peace and plenty’ of the settlement (p. 7): See here no want, to stint the human frame, Nor toils excessive, to impair the same; No straitened bounds, no stifled city’s breath To breed contagion, and engender death; No feudal lords, to act the tyrant’s part Nor cringing vassalage, to blight the heart. (p. 7) It is not surprising, then, that among the village’s inhabitants, there are also ‘no yearnings for the countries left behind’ (p. 8). Alluding to the deserted village of Auburn, the speaker asks rhetorically, ‘who returns, or wishes to return?’ to a land from which ‘rural pleasure fled’ and where ‘villages, once bright’ are now ‘decay’d and dead’ (pp. 17–18). Even at a distance of over fifty years, Deane positions his poem explicitly as a response to The Deserted Village rather than to more recent village poems, demonstrating the influential position Goldsmith’s poem held in an Atlantic literary imagination. Deane distinguishes the prosperous United States from a Britain blighted by feudal decay and urban corruption; but he seems unaware of the irony of his celebration of material luxuries, and does not share Freneau’s and Dwight’s fears concerning the early republic’s vulnerability to European vice. Even poetry, the spirit of which, according to Goldsmith, departed from England when the villagers were driven from Auburn, is transformed by American prosperity in The Populous Village. Deane’s speaker addresses Goldsmith: ‘Hail, happy bard! thrice happy in your theme; / For

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lamentations well the song beseem’ (p. 18). Goldsmith was fortunate in his subject matter, the speaker implies, as nostalgia for an irrevocable past is a fitting theme for poetry. By contrast, Deane is an ‘ill-fated bard’ who ‘must toil, and sing / Such themes as thriving trade and business bring’ (p. 18). Topics like ‘wealth’ and ‘high repletion’, accompanied as they are by ‘smooth brow’d content, and laughter’s loudest peals’, ‘scarce to poesy belong’ (p. 18). While Freneau and Dwight figured poetry as part of the labour that would cultivate georgic virtue, Deane humorously but nonetheless definitively suggests that there is no place for poetry in the United States’ commercial economy.

The Canadian Goldsmith and the Colonial Village Taken together, Freneau’s, Dwight’s and Deane’s village poems chart the impact of US independence as well as the country’s economic growth and territorial expansion on georgic ideals. Although all three poets envisioned their villages as a refuge for those suffering from the effects of economic disparity in Britain, Dwight’s and Deane’s poems reveal symptoms of similar disparity in the United States. Canadian village poetry manifests different tensions, primarily stemming from nineteenth-century Canada’s colonial status, which precluded the overt critiques of British society that we find in Greenfield Hill and The Populous Village. Thus The Rising Village (1825), the best-known of Canadian responses to The Deserted Village, begins and ends with panegyrics on ‘Britannia’, ‘The land of heroes, generous, free, and brave, / The noblest conqu’rors of the field and wave’.29 The Rising Village was written by Oliver Goldsmith, greatnephew of the author of The Deserted Village, to celebrate the settlement of Canada’s mainland Maritime regions. The Rising Village was initially published in London, and the knowledge that his primary readership was English may have encouraged Goldsmith to assume a position of colonial deference that somewhat compromises the logic of his response to The Deserted Village. For instance, The Rising Village celebrates rather than condemns Britain’s ‘wealth and splendor’, describing its commercial empire as ‘the merchant’s glory, and the farmer’s pride’ (ll. 32–3). As Gerald Lynch observes, the younger Goldsmith apparently had ‘not discerned in his great-uncle’s poem the message that “the merchant’s glory” and “the farmer’s pride” are incompatible’.30 The younger Goldsmith’s claim that ‘peace and freedom, mark the peasant’s lot’ in Britain also sits uneasily with his great-uncle’s depiction of the eviction of the villagers of Auburn in The Deserted Village (l. 36). Readers are left wondering whether the depopulation of Auburn was an isolated incident, or whether Britain’s supposedly happy peasants frequently choose to go ‘in search of wealth, of freedom, and of ease’ among the ‘dark and drear’ ‘desert woods and wilds’ of Nova Scotia (ll. 52, 43, 44). Despite Goldsmith’s position as a British colonial subject, The Rising Village shares unexpected similarities with Dwight’s post-independence Greenfield Hill in addition to more predictable ones with Freneau’s colonial-era The American Village. Perhaps the most significant of the resemblances is Goldsmith’s representation of georgic labour as the foundation of social harmony. Scholars have noted that one of the foremost concerns of The Rising Village is the colonial struggle to control nature: both the natural world and human nature.31 The first section of the poem describes the ‘pain, the danger, and the toil, / Which mark the first culture of the soil’ (ll. 57–8) in the Canadian

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wilderness. But once ‘the arts of culture . . . extend their sway’, the settlers encounter a new threat to the village in their own ‘heedless passions’ which they now have the leisure and the means to indulge (ll. 121, 299). For Goldsmith, as for Dwight, the permanence of the village’s virtue cannot be taken for granted because the causes of its undoing lie in natural human tendencies that, if ‘repressed by no control, / . . . sink, debase, and overwhelm the soul’ (ll. 295–6). The village’s collective virtue thus stands to diminish as its collective wealth increases. Nonetheless, The Rising Village celebrates the growth of Nova Scotia’s agricultural and commercial interests because they signal the settlement’s successful emulation of British society. We learn that after less than ‘fifty Summers’ of cultivation, the region’s ‘fruitful field with Britain’s soil now vies’ and ‘Bright commerce wide expands her swelling sail’ (ll. 505, 537, 544). Goldsmith suggests that these accomplishments belong to Britain more than to Canada, as the ‘noble courage’ and ‘patient firmness’ that have enabled settlers to improve the land are a British inheritance (ll. 47, 104). Similar to Freneau, who consigns his somewhat more modest American village to Britain’s care, Goldsmith invites Britons to claim his village’s virtue and prosperity as their own, at the same time reminding Canadians that For wealth, for freedom, happiness, and ease, Thy grateful thanks to Britain’s cares are due; Her pow’r protects, her smiles past hopes renew; Her valour guards thee, and her councils guide; Then may thy parent ever be thy pride. (ll. 549–53) Although Goldsmith’s Canadian village aspires to its ‘parent’ country’s merits, The Rising Village is uneasy about the concept of translatio imperii, a concept that American responses to The Deserted Village were quick to embrace. Even though the final lines of the poem compare the rising glory of the village to that of the westward moving sun, there is no suggestion in the 1825 version of the poem, published in London, that Nova Scotia might ever become more prosperous and powerful than its parent, or replace Britain as the centre of imperial power. The last line of this version declares that the village, a metonym for Canada, will thrive ‘till sun, and moon, and stars shall be no more’ (l. 582). But the 1834 version of the poem, which was published in Saint John, New Brunswick, and from which Goldsmith excised the earlier edition’s sycophantic allusions to the Earl of Dalhousie, former Governor General of Canada, concludes by embracing more emphatically the doctrine of translatio imperii. The last line of this later edition asserts boldly that the village’s merits will shine ‘Till empires rise and sink, on earth, no more’ (l. 560). Here, then, Goldsmith quietly suggests that, despite early nineteenth-century Britain’s undisputed dominion, Canada might one day be the terminus of the westward transfer of empire, the last outpost of imperial power.

From Village Poetry to Village Prose By the time Goldsmith the younger published The Rising Village, village poetry was as extinct in Britain as the village of Auburn itself. Of course this is not to say that villages no longer featured in British poems at all, but rather that poems embodying the

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conventions I have discussed here were no longer being written even though enclosure and depopulation continued in certain parts of the country. Indeed, The Deserted Village was gradually emptied of its political and economic import, as its sentimental lament for a pastoral past was itself sentimentalised. Anna Letitia Barbauld’s ‘On the Deserted Village’ (1825), a tribute to Goldsmith’s poem, suggests rather crassly that the depopulation of Auburn was an event to be celebrated, since it inspired Goldsmith to write The Deserted Village. Addressing Auburn, Barbauld points out that ‘had thy swains, in ease and plenty slept, / Thy poet had not sung, nor Britain wept’.32 Auburn’s ruin offers an opportunity for readers to indulge in the pleasures of sensibility, expressing their pity for the village’s imaginary exiles in tears that would do nothing to relieve the plight of real labourers cleared from their land. Critics perpetuate this evacuation of the poem’s political import when they find the source of the changes that The Deserted Village describes ‘not in the land and its inhabitants, but in the subjective history of the poet himself’, so that ‘the crucial “depopulation” is his own personal and irreversible removal – from the physical “seat” of his youth, but more fundamentally, from his youth itself’.33 Whereas Barbauld renders pastoral an opportunity for all readers to exercise their capacity for refined feeling, Michael McKeon here construes it as a mode for exploring Goldsmith’s highly individualised nostalgia for his past. Both interpretations suggest that village poetry may have died out in Britain because the poetic exploration of subjective states of feeling began to take precedence at the turn of the nineteenth century over political critique and moral didacticism. However, villages did continue to receive intense literary scrutiny in prose writing, with the most obvious example being Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village, a five-volume collection of literary sketches published between 1824 and 1832. Like late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century village poetry, early to mid-nineteenthcentury prose representations of village life were shaped by transatlantic literary exchange. Mitford acknowledged Washington Irving’s Sketch Book (1819–20) as her inspiration for Our Village, which in turn influenced US writers, including Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Sarah Josepha Hale, Lydia Sigourney and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Unlike village poetry, however, Our Village was ethnographic and antiquarian in intent. Mitford aimed to record in detail village scenes and customs that were in danger of disappearing, and that therefore might be unfamiliar even to Mitford’s contemporary readers. The short literary sketches of which Our Village is composed are particularly well suited to this aim. They are neither entirely fictional nor completely factual, and they are driven by the narrator’s observations as she strolls through the village rather than by plot development. Mitford’s narrator sees the landscape she describes through the lens of earlier poetry. For instance, she declares of the village common, ‘Cowper has described it for me. How perpetually, as we walk in the country, his vivid pictures recur to the memory! Here is his common and mine!’34 In recalling poetic descriptions of rural life, Mitford’s narrator elegises both village poetry as a literary form and the ways of life such poetry described, whether accurately or not. The shift from poetry to prose thus increased the affective and aesthetic distance between literary representations of villages and the real entities they claimed to represent. The moment when village poetry becomes village prose marks the consignment of villages in the Atlantic literary imagination to the ideal realms of the past and of pastoral.

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Notes 1. John Galt, Bogle Corbet; or, The Emigrants (London: Henry Colburn, 1831), vol. 3, p. 45. 2. Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village, in The Poems of Gray, Collins, and Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longman, 1969), pp. 669–94, ll. 35, 275. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 3. Quoted in The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, and Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (New York: Longman, 1976), p. 672. 4. David S. Shields conjectures that Goldsmith’s dire depiction of the colonies was informed by conversations with General Oglethorpe, the founder of Georgia, whom the poet met through Samuel Johnson. See Oracles of Empire: Poetry, Politics, and Commerce in British America, 1690–1750 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 54. 5. The earliest responses to The Deserted Village demonstrate that its readers were vexed by its intermingling of pastoral and georgic, and critics still debate to which tradition, if either, the poem belongs. See, for instance, Alfred Lutz, ‘ “The Deserted Village” and the Politics of Genre’, MLQ 55 (1994), p. 167, and David Fairer, English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 1700–1789 (London: Longman, 2003), p. 99. 6. On the distinctions, or lack thereof, between pastoral and georgic, see Fairer, English Poetry, pp. 79–101, Richard Feingold, Nature and Society: Later Eighteenth-Century Uses of Pastoral and Georgic (Brighton: Hassocks, 1978), and Michael McKeon, ‘Surveying the Frontier of Culture: Pastoralism in Eighteenth-Century England’, Studies in EighteenthCentury Culture 26 (1998), pp. 7–28. 7. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 17. See also Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 20–1. 8. Williams, The Country and the City, p. 26. 9. Anthony King, The Frequented Village (London: J. Godwin, 1771), p. 24. 10. King, The Frequented Village, p. 28. 11. King, The Frequented Village, p. 24. 12. King, The Frequented Village, p. 16. 13. Fairer, English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, p. 84. 14. John Robinson, The Village Oppress’d: A Poem (London: J. Robson, 1771), p. v and ll. 211–12. 15. Robinson, The Village Oppress’d, ll. 199–200. 16. Robinson, The Village Oppress’d, ll. 227–30. 17. Robinson, The Village Oppress’d, ll. 18, 94, 135. 18. George Crabbe, ‘The Village’, in Poems, ed. Adolphus William Ward (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1905), pp. 119–36. See Book I, ll. 5, 48. 19. Crabbe, ‘The Village’, Book I, ll. 53–4. 20. Robinson, The Village Oppress’d, l. 59. 21. Crabbe, ‘The Village’, Book I, ll. 168–71. 22. Shields, Oracles of Empire, p. 71. See also Timothy Sweet’s American Georgics: Economy and Environment in Early American Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), which takes a broader view of georgic than does Shields. 23. Timothy Dwight, The Major Poems of Timothy Dwight, introduced by William J. McTaggart and Willam K. Bottorff (Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles, 1969), Book I, ll. 1–4. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 24. Philip Freneau, ‘The American Village’, in Poems of Freneau, ed. Harry Hayden Clark (New York: Hafner, 1929), p. 213. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 25. Dwight explains in the preface to Greenfield Hill that he had originally ‘designed to imitate, in the several parts [of the poem], the manner of as many British Poets’ (p. 8). Paul Giles

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26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

juliet shields discusses Dwight’s relationship to British Augustan poets in The Global Remapping of American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), pp. 62–5. Kevis Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 10. Goodman, Georgic Modernity, pp. 9–11. Samuel Deane, The Populous Village; A Poem (Providence, RI: Philermenian Society of Brown University, 1826), p. 9. Hereafter cited parenthetically. Oliver Goldsmith, The Rising Village, ed. Gerald Lynch (London, ON: Canadian Poetry Press, 1989), ll. 559–60. Lynch’s edition includes both the 1825 and 1834 versions of The Rising Village; subsequent parenthetical references are to the 1825 version. Other Canadian poems that allude to The Deserted Village include Thomas Cary’s Abrams Plains (1789), J. Mackay’s Quebec Hill; or, Canadian Scenery (1797), Adam Hood Burwell’s Talbot Road (1818) and Adam Kidd’s The Huron Chief (1830). See D. M. R. Bentley, ‘Oliver Goldsmith and The Rising Village’, Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne 15.1 (1990), (last accessed 14 March 2016). Gerald Lynch, ‘Introduction’, in Goldsmith, The Rising Village, p. xv. Lynch, ‘Introduction’, p. xiv; see also Bentley, ‘Oliver Goldsmith and The Rising Village’. The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), p. 33, ll. 9–10. McKeon, ‘Surveying the Frontier of Culture’, p. 18. Mary Russell Mitford, Our Village (London: Macmillan, 1910), pp. 215–16. On the literary topography of Our Village, see Deidre Lynch, ‘Homes and Haunts: Austen’s and Mitford’s English Idylls’, in Evan Gottlieb and Juliet Shields (eds), Representing Place in British Literature and Culture, 1660–1830 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 173–84.

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3 London’s Pan-Atlantic Public Sphere: Luso-Hispanic Journals, 1808–1830 Joselyn M. Almeida

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uring his peregrinations through Europe and England, Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, a leading proponent of Mexican independence whose travels and literary activity paralleled those of the famed Francisco de Miranda, contributed to Britain’s lively vaccination debate in 1813. It is not clear how Fray Servando became a correspondent of Britain’s National Vaccine Establishment, which at the time collected testimonies from around the world about the efficacy of vaccination and forwarded them to the British press. But his report was considered important enough to be printed in full. He wrote: As soon as the inoculation for the natural small pox was introduced into Europe, the Archbishop of Mexico, Haro, ordered the Curates and Ecclesiastics to perform it through their several towns through their own hands; and although the prejudices and scruples of some hindered the practice becoming general, yet it is certain that to inoculation is to be attributed the diminished evil which the small pox occasioned fourteen years ago.

The article appeared under the ‘Transactions of Learned Societies’ in the Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure and the Scots Magazine and Edinburgh Literary Miscellany, where it was printed alongside the report by Andrés Bello about vaccination in Caracas.1 The byline for Bello’s report indicates it was ‘translated from the Spanish’, but the translator could be none other than Bello himself, who, because of his fluency in English, worked as Secretary to the fateful delegation that Simón Bolívar took to London in 1810 to meet the Marquis of Wellesley.2 By intervening in the debate over one of the most controversial scientific advances of the time, Fray Servando and Bello wrote against the then prevailing idea of Ibero-America as existing outside modernity.3 This attitude stemmed from the denial of coevalness that Europeans assigned to colonial populations, spaces and histories.4 The denial was extended to Spain and Portugal, as Diego Saglia writes; by the end of the eighteenth century, narratives about Iberia ‘served to confirm a general idea . . . as a place where ignorance and superstition were rife, a country refusing to fall into line with the forces of progress and modernization typical of Western Europe and Britain in particular’.5 Bello and Fray Servando mount an early and bold challenge to the perception of Ibero-American backwardness, anticipating the work of scholars such as Jorge

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Cañizares-Esguerra, José Ramón Jouvé Martin, Neil Safier and others who have recently challenged the figuration of the Ibero-American world as an obscurantist foil for the anglophone Atlantic.6 Significantly, Fray Servando and Bello speak as interpreters and producers of knowledge within the space of Britain’s public sphere – not as outsiders looking in, but as shapers of British public opinion. This chapter argues that if Luso-Hispanic intellectuals have something to tell us about the birth of the free press and literatures in their respective countries and the creative and material dimensions of the exiled intellectual, they have something equally significant to say about Britain’s public sphere in an age when enslavement and war caused massive displacements of people across the Atlantic world. The collective activity of Luso-Hispanic intellectuals expanded the vitality of a multilingual, transnational sphere within London that, after the 1770s, steadily grew with the involuntary migrations of diaspora Afro-British subjects, and later refugees from the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The work of Andrés Bello, Hipólito da Costa, Joseph Blanco White and collaborators such as Fray Servando reveals that in addition to the powerful influence the literary pasts of Iberia exerted on British Romanticism, Spanish and Portuguese also belonged to Romanticism’s living public sphere. Their names lead a list of Ibero-American intellectuals who lived and worked in London from 1800 to 1830, establishing a transnational creative network whose legacy can still be felt today. Luso-Hispanic intellectuals and writers would write, edit and publish periodicals such as the Correio Braziliense (1808–22), its competitor, the Investigador Portuguez em Inglaterra (1811–22), and the later Paquete de Portugal (1829–31); El Español (1810–14), El Español constitucional en Londres (1818–20; 1824–25); Variedades (1823–25), continued as Correo literario y político de Londres (1826); Ocios de españoles emigrados (1824–27); the Biblioteca Americana (1823) and Repertorio Americano (1826–27); and El Emigrado Observador (1828–29).7 Although to claim a multilingual public sphere for London may seem obvious given Romanticism’s long-standing engagement with the literatures of France and Germany, it is a claim that bears repeating. Despite stated commitments to ‘transnational’ literary histories within Atlantic studies, some scholars continue to uphold the anglophone Atlantic as paradigmatic. Joseph Rezek reminds critics that ‘taking the North Atlantic, the routes of the British Empire (including its slave trade), and the Anglophone world as a synecdoche for the Atlantic as a whole . . . falsely universalizes not just one perspective but often the most privileged’. However, rather than venture outside the routes/roots of English, he prescribes as a remedy that scholars ‘rein in the soaring rhetoric’, the product of monolingualism and ‘a scholar’s limited expertise in a single language or literary tradition’.8 Rezek’s salutary correction notwithstanding, his statement reveals how pervasively studies of the transatlantic continue to occlude the fact that ‘the routes of the British Empire’ included Iberia and the American South Atlantic, and that Britons from Lady Holland to Robert Southey spoke and read Spanish and Portuguese, not to mention Schlegel and Schiller, whose admiration of Calderón de la Barca and Spanish literature has been amply studied. The archive of Romanticism teases our thought out of its monolingual comfort zone. The publication of these journals in the London of the 1810s perhaps no longer appears as surprising as it did when Diego Saglia and Nanora Sweet reintroduced Joseph Blanco White as one of the leading figures of Anglo-Hispanic Romanticism in the wake of the pioneering work of Vicente Lloréns, Martin Murphy and André

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Pons.9 Yet the depth and breadth of the contributions of Luso-Hispanic intellectuals remains under-appreciated in accounts of Atlantic Romanticism.10 The bicentenaries of the Guerra de la Independencia / Peninsular War (1808–14) and the Latin American Wars of Independence (1810–24) have seen a renewed effort to recover these journals and their authors for the national literatures and histories of Spain, Portugal and Latin America.11 In the Anglo-American academy, historians have analysed these journals in terms of larger Atlantic events, but they have not related them to the narrative and print culture of British Romanticism.12 I situate the work of the Luso-Hispanic intellectuals in London in conversation with Jon P. Klancher’s discussion of the periodical press in the Romantic era, more recent globalised applications of Jürgen Habermas, and pan-Atlantic reconceptualisations of the Atlantic world. Such a methodology analyses the interrelations between North and South Atlantic systems rather than reiterate area studies or nation-based approaches.13 Da Costa, Blanco White, Bello and their journalistic and literary circles amplified the transnational and multilingual dimensions of Britain’s public sphere at the same time that they created a space for the political deliberation of their respective national traditions. Published between 1808 and 1830, their London-based journals rewrite the Luso-Hispanic Atlantic as not only a zone for the circulation of print but also the location of publics and counterpublics within future Ibero-American states and Britain, thereby constituting a pan-Atlantic public sphere. In so doing, they defy the narrative of Luso-Hispanic obscurantism at the same time that the journals imagine a readership ‘as that collective formation which has momentarily displaced its own social origins – a figure which either does not actually exist or does not yet exist in society as it is presently ordered’.14 The work of da Costa, Blanco White, Bello and their collaborators also reminds us that London’s public sphere was not only multilingual, but also a space of linguistic and cultural crossover. That is, Luso-Hispanic authors were published in English, and British and European writers were reviewed and translated in languages identified with the global South – Spanish and Portuguese.15 They expand our notion of what the ‘South’ meant for Romantic era writers beyond the borders of Italy and Greece.16 The vital importance of heteroglossia for understanding the creation of spaces of resistance – both imaginative and actual – during the Romantic period must not be understated. Such multilingualism leads us away from the ‘universalizing ideal of a single public and [attends] instead to the actual multiplicity of overlapping public spheres, and scenes of evaluation that already exist, but that the usual idealizations have hidden from view’.17 In positioning Luso-Hispanic journals and their writers and editors within Britain’s multilingual public sphere, this chapter contributes to bringing such ‘scenes of evaluation’, ‘multiple public spheres’ and diverse publics into view.

Enslavement, War and the Growth of London’s Multilingual Public Sphere The idea that the travel narrative indexed the insatiable curiosity of Britons about distant places and peoples during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has become commonplace. Whether fictional or scientific, Britain featured as the beginning and endpoint of the narrative of a journey to places as near as continental Europe, or as

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far as Africa, Asia, America or Australia. By contrast, circulating accounts of peoples from other places writing about Britain, such as Elizabeth Hamilton’s Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796) or Robert Southey’s Letters from England by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella (1807), were mostly experiments in fiction. When people from these distant places actually began arriving in London in the second half of the eighteenth century, they found themselves ‘swept up by the economic and social forces that drive coerced migration around the globe’.18 If Atlantic slavery was the prime economic cause of coerced displacement of people in the Atlantic world at the end of the eighteenth century, war was the other, as David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyan argue: European powers – the French, British, Spanish, and Dutch especially – had long possessed the capacity to project themselves politically, militarily, and commercially on a truly global scale. Since the opening decades of the eighteenth century, they had been doing so with increasing regularity and ferocity in a cycle of world wars that would continue almost unabated until 1815.19 The years between 1784 and 1830 saw a significant growth in London’s foreign-born population from places such as Africa, France, Spain and Latin America. As I have argued elsewhere, the cultural, geopolitical and material networks of interrelations between the North and the South Atlantic created a pan-Atlantic, multilingual cultural region.20 London was a central node in this region, and one would expect scholarship on Atlantic Romanticism to reflect the city’s multilingual character. But if languages other than English are considered in relation to the anglophone semiosphere of Romanticism, it is often in terms of Walter Scott’s antiquarian investigations of Scots, or James Macpherson’s Gaelic revival in Ossian. Beyond that, the focus remains on Northern European influences, notably Germany’s, the French Revolution and then Napoleon; or, at most, Byron’s struggles in Italy and Greece. Displaced peoples across the Atlantic littoral who resettled in London had an impact on the languages spoken, heard, read and written in an erstwhile monolingual world. Refugees from the French Revolution, ‘the nearest that the eighteenth century came to producing “boat people” ’, contributed significantly to the circulation and production of French texts within Britain.21 Decades before French citizens arrived, however, there were between 10,000 and 20,000 Afro-Britons living throughout England at the time of the Somerset ruling in 1772.22 London’s Afro-British community probably spoke West African languages like Igbo, Fulani and Yoruba.23 These polyglot inhabitants of London had profoundly changed the monolingual character of the city by 1807, when Napoleon’s invasion of Portugal (Spain in 1808) caused another group of civilian refugees to arrive in England. Among these came three editors who transformed not only London’s public sphere but also the configuration of empire in the Atlantic world through the creative, intellectual, journalistic and translation activities of the Luso-Hispanic community: Hipólito da Costa, Joseph Blanco White and Andrés Bello, whose names should be as familiar among Atlantic Romanticists as those of Francis Jeffrey, Henry Brougham and John Aiken. Helpful statistics from Barry Taylor and Eugenia Roldán Vera materialise the effort of these writers and their colleagues. Their work was significant and profitable enough to engage the work of twenty-five bilingual printers and publishers, most notably Rudolph Ackermann, who published over a hundred titles in Spanish, and also multilingual

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printers, as in the case of the French bookseller Dulau.24 The Spanish and Classical Library bookshop of Vicente Salvá on 124 Regent Street would probably have featured their publications, serving as a place to gather and create community.25 Taken together, their work challenges a monolingual narrative of Atlantic Romanticism. What follows is a very brief discussion of three London-based journals that have had a lasting significance in Ibero-America and the Atlantic world: Hipólito da Costa’s Correio Braziliense, Joseph Blanco White’s El Español, and Andrés Bello’s Biblioteca Americana.

Hipólito da Costa and the Correio Braziliense ou Armazém Literário When da Costa arrived in London in 1805, he found a vibrant pan-Atlantic public sphere created through the work of Afro-British and French writers. As Neil Safier shows, da Costa himself was a product of such networks across the North and South Atlantic. Born in Brazil in 1774, he was sent to Portugal to finish his education at the University of Coimbra, where he graduated from the faculty of natural sciences. In 1798, his former professor and minister of naval affairs, D. Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho, appointed him to go to Philadelphia on diplomatic business.26 Upon returning to Lisbon, he became the literary director of the Arco do Cego, the publisher charged with advancing Portugal’s socio-economic development. To that end, he translated books on medicine and political economy and also travelled to London to build the Arco’s library. After a book-buying trip in 1802, ‘a magistrate abruptly entered my apartments, and telling me who he was, informed me, likewise, that he had orders to seize all my papers, and to conduct me to prison, where I was to be rigorously kept aloof from all communication’.27 He spent the next three years in a dungeon of the Inquisition.28 Da Costa’s experiences with publishing in Philadelphia and Lisbon no doubt inspired and propelled the enterprise of beginning a journal that both ‘Vincolou a imprensa à nacionalidade [linked the press to nationalism]’ and ‘moved beyond nationalism to a broader imperial solution’.29 Yet he must also have been encouraged by London’s multilingual public sphere and the success of French journals. Moreover, as Paulo da Rocha Dias suggests, ‘at the dawn of the XIX century, the capital of the British Empire became the political centre of freedom and a diplomatic space that fomented the independence of Spain and Portugal’s colonies’.30 Da Costa, like Blanco White and Andrés Bello, became one of the principal brokers of ideas between Britain and Ibero-America. The first monthly issue of the Correio Braziliense appeared in June 1808, totalling eighty pages; the first volume from June to December was over 650 pages.31 The magnitude of da Costa’s effort comes into view when one considers that he singlehandedly researched, translated and wrote original content – roughly 1,200 pages a year – for the twenty-nine volumes of the journal until his death in 1822. Although official circulation statistics are hard to find, historians aver that it enjoyed ‘a wide and devoted readership on both sides of the Atlantic’.32 The section headings reflect the journal’s ambitious scope: ‘Politics’, which included news and primary source documents, such as proclamations of generals, kings and transcriptions of debates in Parliament; ‘Commerce and Art’, in which da Costa covered significant trade treaties as well as ‘do estado actual

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do Mercado em Londres, pelo diz respeito aos productos do Brazil’ (the actual state of the market in London, with respect to products from Brazil);33 ‘Literature and Science’, articles on scientific innovation and book reviews; and ‘Miscellanea’, where da Costa placed his op-eds, translations from journals and papers in Britain, France, Spain and Portugal, and covered happenings of the Portuguese community in London, such as the celebration of the birthday of João VI, where a patriotic hymn was sung to the British tune of ‘God Save the King’.34 As Safier notes, da Costa came into contact with Quaker abolitionists and African Americans in Philadelphia, yet his position with regard to abolition and emancipation was gradualist.35 This gradualism is reflected in the Correio Braziliense’s late coverage of the issue, which began in 1814, the same year Blanco White published his Bosquexo del comercio en esclavos, an adaptation of Wilberforce’s Letter on the Slave Trade (1807). Da Costa blasts the Correio’s rival publication, the Investigador Portuguez em Inglaterra, for translating and publishing the constitution of the Haitian Republic.36 His open debate with the Investigador and tacit response to El Español, a journal from which he had translated and reproduced content, reveal that Luso-Hispanic authors and intellectuals in London were a counterpublic to each other as much as to their British counterparts.37 Because of their activity, Britons themselves became aware of texts being written and published within London in languages other than English. The Anti-Jacobin Review, reviewing volumes 2–4 of the Correio, concluded after an enthusiastic and detailed article, ‘Senhor da C. has already done much for the general interest of his native and his adopted country . . . it is incumbent on both Portuguese and English to patronize his literary labors as the best means of effecting some general good, and at the same time acquiring individual advantage.’38

El Español en Londres: Joseph (José) Blanco White Canonical as they are across Ibero-America, the position of da Costa and Bello is regrettably marginal in critical accounts of British or Atlantic Romanticism. The same cannot be said of Joseph Blanco White. Since the work of Murphy, Saglia, Sweet and Pons in the 1980s and 1990s, he is enjoying a deserved renaissance through the work of writers and scholars such as Juan Goytisolo, Fernando Durán, Daniel Muñoz Sempere and Gregorio Alonso García in Spain and the United Kingdom; and Lisa Surwillo, Almeida, Juan Sánchez and the late and missed Christopher SchmidtNowara in the United States. The broad outlines of Blanco White’s ‘Life in England’, as he terms it in his autobiography, are now familiar to Romanticists: his flight from Cádiz in 1808 and arrival in London; friendships with Lord Holland, Robert Southey, Felicia Hemans and other British authors; his editorship of El Español, his conversion to Anglicanism in the 1810s, and time in the Holland House circle; the editorship of Variedades, life in Oxford and participation in the Catholic Emancipation Debate in the 1820s; his service as secretary to Richard Whately, Bishop of Dublin, in the early 1830s and his conversion to Unitarianism in 1835; and his final years in Liverpool, where he is still publicly remembered in the Roscoe Gardens Monument. Whereas da Costa and Bello published mostly in Portuguese and Spanish, Blanco, more than any other Luso-Hispanic writer of the period, successfully crossed over into publication in English as a naturalised Briton who embodied a transnational identity.

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El Español and Variedades represent the Spanish half of Blanco’s editorial legacy; a full analysis would also have to factor in his role as editor for the London Review (1829). In the context of the pan-Atlantic argument developed here, El Español is the most important of his Spanish journals. Variedades, with its more literary and pedagogical mission, focuses on culture rather than politics as a transnational field, and it is where Blanco redefines the word ‘Hispanos’ (‘Hispanic’) to ‘denote all the nations who speak Spanish, whether ruled by the Spanish crown, or whether they are separated from it’ (‘Incertidumbre’ 397), as well as ‘literatura anglo-hispánica’ (‘Anglo-Hispanic literature’) as a new category, one arising from London’s multilingual public sphere and which anticipates intersecting semiospheres of English and Spanish in the United States and the United Kingdom today. Although El Español had a comparatively short run, its pan-Atlantic reach and impact more than made up for the brevity of its publication. Despite Blanco’s patriotic and impartial intentions for the journal – ‘the improvement of my country by a means of a cordial co-operation with England’ – its initial reception was controversial.39 As Pons reveals in Blanco White y España (2002) and Blanco White y América (2006), the most exhaustive studies about El Español to date, British politicians and intellectuals such as Lord Holland and the British Foreign Office were in contact with Blanco, proffered content as well as suggestions, and promoted its circulation.40 These contacts, as well as Blanco’s consideration of ‘Hispano-Americans as my countrymen’ when he recommended pragmatic reforms for equal representation and a shared Hispanic polity across the Atlantic, resulted in ‘[t]he conviction that I had been engaged by the English Government for the purpose, as they imagined, of taking possession of Cadiz and the Spanish colonies’.41 Murphy discusses how ‘[t]he Regency was so worried about the adverse publicity they were receiving from El Español, and by the possible effect this might have on British public opinion that they sent an envoy to London with the specific task of writing counter-propaganda’.42 Beyond shaping the contemporary interpretation of key events during the years of the Peninsular War / Guerra de la Independencia and the beginning of the Latin American Wars of Independence, Blanco has had an indelible influence on their reception. ‘In the historiography of the crisis of the Hispanic world, in the Peninsula as well as in America, one finds a trace of El Español at every turn.’43 Blanco’s El Español is required reading for scholars and students seeking to understand the changing geopolitical configuration of the Atlantic world during the Napoleonic Wars. Scholars have amply discussed Blanco’s views on Spain and the Americas, but I would like to add Blanco’s preoccupation with how slavery, abolition and race relations would affect their geopolitical futures. This became a salient leitmotif throughout El Español, and the journal’s impact comes into relief when we consider that other Luso-Hispanic publications such as the Correio Braziliense, the Investigador Portuguez, the Español constitucional en Londres and the Observador en Londres only covered it after Blanco had. El Español’s article on the slave trade and race relations anticipates his ‘Spanishing’ of Wilberforce, as Schmidt-Nowara terms Blanco’s adaptation of Wilberforce’s Letter.44 But his concern about the problem of Atlantic slavery and its geopolitical effects on European and colonial society became an ongoing theme from the first volume onwards. In El Español, slavery and resistance function as mobile referents that move between metaphorical and material registers, denoting both the

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reality of the Atlantic slavery and the oppression of Afro-Hispanic subjects, as well as the political condition of Ibero-America. While there are examples of how the signifier ‘slavery’ establishes a kind of antiphonal dialogue between these fields of meaning throughout the six volumes of the journal, space limitations allow for one.45 At the end of the first article of ‘Número 1ero’, Blanco deploys slavery as a metaphor to argue for a complete change in the system of government in Spain and for freedom of association and the press: ‘Let all citizens think, speak, and write . . . Banish everything that resembles your old government. If the ardour of a revolution frightens you, if worries make you afraid of the idea of liberty itself, then know you are destined to be slaves in perpetuity.’46 In his final reflection on the same issue, he deepens the resonance of the political metaphor of slavery by referring to the lack of news from the continent as ‘las quexas que murmuran en secreto los esclavos’ (‘the complaints that slaves secretly murmur to each other’).47 The unmistakable allusion to the organisation of slave revolts in plantations and to his earlier political use of ‘esclavos’ destabilises the directionality of tenor and vehicle, so that the comparison results in the conclusion that the situation in Spain and its colonies, and plantation slavery are equally untenable. The translation of Henry Brougham’s review of Essai Politique sur le Royaume de la Nouvelle Espagne, par Alexandre de Humboldt (Paris, 1808–9) in the fourth issue of El Español grounded the metaphoric use of slavery in the reality of the Atlantic slave trade and the deleterious effects of racialism in the Americas. Blanco’s translation of the review stages a scene of reading in which European and hispanophone audiences become counterpublics to one another linked through a multilingual, panAtlantic sphere. Brougham’s review in English highlights how Humboldt’s work in French draws on El Mercurio Peruano, a Peruvian newspaper, for political, mining and population information.48 The act of translation therefore is not simply a rendition of Brougham’s review, but a reassertion and amplification of the rhetorical space that the Mercurio Peruano establishes with Spanish as a language of knowledge in Humboldt’s work and within London. By stressing Spanish as an epistemic and political language of the transnational public sphere, Blanco is also aligning it with one of the first successful internationalist socio-political movements, whose ramifications are encoded today in the concept of human rights and laws against human trafficking.49 Following Brougham in naming the deregulation of the slave trade in the Hispanic world in 1788 as ‘una de las primeras disposiciones del desastrado e indecoroso reino de Carlos IV’ (‘one of the first acts of the ruinous and disgraceful reign of Charles IV’), Blanco also narratively links abolition to the cause of Spain’s political regeneration.50 Although Blanco may have been writing about abolition in comparative isolation, publications such as the Disertación sobre el origen de la esclavitud de los negros (Essay on the Origins of African Slavery) (1811) by Isidoro de Antillón, and the heated debate over the abolition of the slave trade and slavery during the Constitutional Convention of the Cortes in Cádiz, which El Español covered in detail, index how hispanophone readers were awakening to abolitionist ideas. In the pages of El Español, Blanco called upon his readers to imagine not only their own political freedom but also that of others across ethnicities throughout the pan-Atlantic. Despite his general espousal of Burke and pragmatic approach to political freedom, an idea that according to Blanco cannot be considered in the abstract, he approximates Rousseau’s Contrat Social, arguing that ‘each one of the citizens contribute to the formation of laws, in his own way, according

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to the role he plays in society’.51 A free press is essential in creating the kind of citizen that can ‘contribute to the formation of laws’, and the definition of what constitutes freedom. Blanco’s public exchange with Fray Servando in later issues of El Español, an exchange that Hipólito da Costa also reported in the Correio Braziliense, enacted the interconnection between London’s multilingual public sphere and its counterpublics in creating a print space of democratic assembly.

Conclusion: Learning and Liberty: Andrés Bello An editorial assumption of da Costa and Blanco in their first-generation journals held out the hope that despite the upheavals of the time, the Ibero-American Atlantic would remain under the governments of Portugal and Spain should their monarchies institute political reforms, and that negotiation could preserve the union between old and new worlds. Events proved otherwise. The underhanded arrest and betrayal of Miranda to the Spanish army by Bolívar in 1811 together with the restoration of Ferdinand VII in 1814 and his policy of total war to address the problem of secession extinguished any hope of negotiation. Vicious fighting in Mexico and Venezuela by both Spanish and criollo forces throughout the decade, the foiled revolt in 1823 of Rafael de Riego in Spain, and the subsequent victories of independence forces across Spanish America, ironically buoyed by an influx of British veterans from the Peninsular War, led to the collapse of Spain’s Atlantic empire.52 Meanwhile, Portugal could not cope with the inversion of the structure of Atlantic governance after the court of João VI moved to Brazil in 1807, leading to a constitutional crisis in 1822 and the creation of an independent empire in Brazil. Regardless of these political fractures, the pan-Atlantic public sphere that da Costa, Blanco White, Fray Servando and others opened in London for the circulation of knowledge and culture gave rise to several publications after 1815, and continued to be a place of encounter for their readers. While some were more nationalistic in character and concerns, like the Ocios de españoles emigrados (1823–27), which Vicente Lloréns locates at the centre of the community of the second wave of London émigrés from Spain during the 1820s, others like Blanco’s own Variedades had hispanophone readers in mind, whether in Spain or the Americas. Still others, like the Biblioteca Americana (1823) and the Repertorio Americano (1826–27), founded and edited by Andrés Bello, who perhaps more than any other Hispanic author in London embodied the Shelleyan ideal of the poet as legislator, incorporated both national and transnational approaches even as he used the journals for nation building. As the work of Pedro Grases, Antonio Cussen, Ivan Jakšić and, most recently, Nadia Altschul demonstrates, Bello’s formidable activity in London shaped the history and literature of Latin America and Chile, which in addition to journalism included a scholarly edition of the Poema de Mio Cid and major works on grammar and literature. In his post-London period after 1829, Bello founded and served as chancellor of the University of Chile (1842–64) and wrote and edited Chile’s Código Civil, the constitution and laws of the country. Although Bello undertook this work at the request of the Chilean government, ‘his interest in legal issues had been awakened by his research on medieval Spain at the British Museum Library, and then developed in their international dimensions when he served as representative of Chile and Gran Colombia in London’, as Jakšić notes.53

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London’s pan-Atlantic public sphere was instrumental in shaping Bello’s sage internationalism, which he elaborated as Principios de Derecho Internacional (‘Principles of International Law’) (1832). The first issue of the Biblioteca Americana (470 pp.) reveals how Bello imagined the nation as part of a global community and strove to balance the demands of local governance with an astute awareness of an interdependent world system in its editorial project. This model of interdependence is shown in Bello’s choices for collaboration; he enlisted the talents of hispanophone writers in London, whether Spanish or American, including his co-editor for the Biblioteca, Juan García del Río (Colombia), and José Joaquín de Mora (Spain), whose translation of Ivanhoe (1825) and Meditaciones Poéticas (1826) initiated the circulation of the work of Walter Scott and William Blake in Latin America.54 As with da Costa’s and Blanco’s journals, the Biblioteca (and the later Repertorio) includes a mix of original pieces and translated articles. While circulation statistics are hard to come by, the first issue reached the editors of The Literary Chronicle, who translated the Biblioteca’s article on the ‘State of the Prisons in South America’, adding its support for the new republics: ‘We rejoice that the fetters of a feeble, but galling despotism, are forever broken.’55 Bello scholars and critics such as Cussen and Mary Louise Pratt have long considered the ‘Alocución a la poesía’, together with the georgic published in the later Repertorio, ‘La Agricultura de la Zona Tórrida’, as the aesthetic expressions of Bello’s political and social vision for the new republics in America. Yet the placement of the ‘Alocución’ in relation to the prose articles before and after the poem also reveals Bello’s attentiveness to the heteroglossia that surrounded London’s Luso-Hispanic community from 1810 to 1830, and the multiplicity of subjectivities that such a dynamic opens for a truly democratic civic and international order. In the introduction to the journal, the editors stress the fact that they write, ‘Amando la libertad, escribiendo en la tierra clásica de ella, y en el foco de la cultura intelectual, no nos sentimos dispuestos a adular el poder’ (‘As lovers of liberty writing from the nation that has been its native land, and is the centre of intellectual culture, we do not feel bound to flatter power’).56 Immediately after the ‘Alocución’, Bello places a review and translations of extracts from Madame de Staël’s De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (1800). Of all the Luso-Hispanic journals in London, the Biblioteca Americana is perhaps the first to place a woman at the centre of the scene of reading and writing, as a counterpublic of political discourse, and shaper of the transnational public sphere in her own right: No es menos sublime Madama de Stael cuando trata de la influencia de las luces sobre la libertad; de la necesidad absoluta que ellas hay para distinguirla de la licencia; de lo que importa fomenter la educación, como único medio de propagar en un pueblo la cultura intellectual, de mejorarle y hacerle feliz. Madame de Stael is no less sublime when she speaks about the influence of learning on liberty; of urgently needing both to distinguish freedom from licence, and to foster education as the only means of improving and bringing happiness to a country through a culture of thought.57 Aligning himself with de Staël, who did not flatter and openly defied Napoleon, Bello imagines a national and transnational public sphere where women play an equally

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important role, confirmed in the issue’s later article on ‘Ilustres Americanas’ (‘Illustrious American Women’). One cannot help but feel that the arrival of Bello and García del Río at a new conception of who reads and who can write and speak in the polis is perhaps as great a legacy of London’s pan-Atlantic public sphere as the idea that liberty can speak more than one language.

Notes 1. See Dr Servando de Meir [sic] y Noriega, ‘National Vaccine Establishment’, Universal Magazine, August 1813, pp. 142–3, p. 142, and A. Bello, ‘Translation from the Spanish’, Scots Magazine and Edinburgh Literary Miscellany, August 1813, pp. 575–6. 2. As Lynch notes, this fateful meeting decisively launched the Wars of Independence in Latin America. John Lynch, Simón Bolívar: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 50–4. 3. The idea that in ‘the Spanish colony . . . cultural life was a void’ continued well into the late twentieth century from its beginnings in the eighteenth. See John Lynch, ‘Introduction’, in Lynch (ed.), Andrés Bello: The London Years (Richmond: The Richmond Publishing Co., 1982), pp. 1–6, p. 2. 4. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, 2nd edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 1–25, pp. 18–19. 5. Diego Saglia, ‘Iberian Translations: Writing Spain into Spanish Culture, 1780–1830’, in Joselyn M. Almeida (ed.), Romanticism and the Anglo-Hispanic Imaginary (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), pp. 25–52, p. 29. 6. Ibero-America is here used to denote Spain, Portugal and the Latin American countries who share a history with them. See Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write a History of the New World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); José Ramón Jouvé Martin, The Black Doctors of Colonial Lima: Science, Race, and Writing in Colonial and Early Republican Peru (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014); Neil Safier, Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 7. For titles in Spanish, see Vicente Lloréns, Liberales y románticos: una emigración española en Inglaterra (Mexico City: Colegio de México, 1952), pp. 284–340; see Gabriel Paquette, Imperial Portugal in the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 392–3, for Portuguese titles. 8. Joseph Rezek, ‘What We Need from Transatlantic Studies’, American Literary History 26.4 (2014): 791–803, p. 795. 9. Lloréns, Liberales y románticos; Martin Murphy, Blanco White: Self-Banished Spaniard (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); André Pons, Blanco White y España (Oviedo: Instituto Feijoó, 2002) and Blanco White y América (Oviedo: Instituto Feijoó, 2006); Nanora Sweet, ‘Hitherto Closed to the Spanish Enterprise: Trading and Writing the Hispanic World circa 1815’, European Romantic Review 8 (1997): 139–47; Diego Saglia, Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000). 10. This gap persists notwithstanding the growing bibliography of scholarship on Romanticism and Ibero-America. Besides Saglia, book-length studies include Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992); Simon Bainbridge, British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Rebecca Cole Heinowitz, Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826: Rewriting Conquest (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010); Joselyn M. Almeida, Reimagining the Transatlantic, 1780–1890 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011); Adriana Méndez Rodenas, Transatlantic Travels in Nineteenth-Century Latin America: European Women Pilgrims (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2013).

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11. For recent examples, see Daniel Muñoz Sempere and Gregorio Alonso García (eds), Londres y el liberalismo hispánico (Frankfurt: Iberoamericana, 2011), which also includes some essays in English, and Ana Regina Rêgo (ed.), Impresa: perfis e contextos (São Paulo: All Print, 2012), about the press and public sphere in Brazil. 12. See Henry Kamen, The Disinherited: Exile and the Making of Spanish Culture, 1492–1975 (New York: Harper, 2007), and Matthew Brown (ed.), Informal Empire in Latin America: Culture, Commerce and Capital (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008). 13. Bernard Bailyn, ‘Reflections on Some Major Themes’, in Bernard Bailyn and Patricia L. Denault (eds), Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 1–43; Almeida, Reimagining, pp. 7–19. 14. Jon P. Klancher, The Making of Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), p. 24. 15. See also Diego Saglia, ‘Hispanism in the New Monthly Magazine, 1821–1825’, Notes and Queries 247 (2002): 49–55, and Maria Eugenia Perojo Arronte, ‘Antonio Alcalá Galiano, Anglo-Hispanic Cultural Exchange, and the Idea of a Spanish “National Literature” ’, in Almeida (ed.), Romanticism, pp. 213–32. 16. Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background, 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). 17. B. Robbins, quoted in Michael Gardiner, ‘Wild Publics and Grotesque Symposiums: Habermas and Bakhtin on Dialogue, Every Day Life, and the Public Sphere’, in Nick Crossley and John Michael Roberts (eds), After Habermas: New Perspectives on the Public Sphere (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 28–48, pp. 43–4. 18. Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus and Marcus Rediker (eds), Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), p. 5. 19. David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (eds), The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1840 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. xii–xxxii, p. xxii. 20. Almeida, Reimagining, pp. 1–13. 21. Kirsty Carpenter, Refugees of the French Revolution: Émigrés in London, 1789–1802 (London: Macmillan Press, 1999), p. 29. 22. Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1984), p. 68. 23. Olaudah Equiano refers to his knowledge of Igbo when he proposes to the Bishop of London that he lead a programme like the governments of Portugal and Holland, ‘both governments encouraging the blacks, who, by their education are qualified to undertake the same, and are found more proper than European clergymen, unacquainted with the language and customs of the country’. See Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, ed. Vincent Carretta, 2nd edn (New York: Penguin, 2003), p. 222. 24. See Barry Taylor, ‘Los exiliados españoles y portugueses y los impresores londinenses, 1803–1833’, in Muñoz Sempere and Alonso García (eds), Londres y el liberalismo hispánico, pp. 275–9; Eugenia Roldán Vera, The British Book Trade and Spanish American Independence (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 238–59. 25. Taylor, ‘Los exiliados’, p. 276. 26. Neil Safier, ‘A Courier between Empires: Hipólito da Costa and the Atlantic World’, in Bailyn and Denault (eds), Soundings in Atlantic History, pp. 263–93, pp. 267–8. 27. Hipólito da Costa, A Narrative of the Persecution of Hippolyto Joseph Da Costa (London, 1811), p. 9. 28. Da Costa, A Narrative, p. 19. 29. Pedro Calmon, Hipólito José da Costa a Imprensa no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Biblioteca Nacional, 1974), p. 2; Safier, ‘A Courier’, p. 287.

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30. Paulo da Rocha Dias, ‘A Funçao Social do Correio Braziliense de Hipólito da Costa’, in Ouhydes João de Fonseca (ed.), Fênix do Jornalismo (Santos: Editora Universitária Lepoldianum, 2004), pp. 73–119, p. 75. 31. All twenty-nine volumes of the Correio Braziliense are available through the National Library of Brazil in digitised format: (last accessed 30 September 2015). 32. Roderick Barman, Brazil: The Forging of a Nation, 1798–1852 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), p. 50. 33. Hipólito da Costa, ‘Reflexaõ sobre os Generos’, Correio Braziliense, December 1808, pp. 588–92. 34. Da Costa, ‘Inglaterra’, Correio Braziliense, June 1808, pp. 78–9. 35. Safier, ‘A Courier’, p. 289. 36. Da Costa, ‘A escravatura foi sempre considerada como un grande mal’, in Barbosa Lima Sobrinho (ed.), Antologia do Correio Braziliense (Rio de Janeiro: Ministerio da Educaçao e Cultura, 1977), pp. 102–5, p. 104. 37. See da Costa (trans.), General Lardizabal, ‘Resposta á falsa e injuriosa idea, que o papel No. 12 entitutlado El Español da’, Correio Braziliense, May 1811, pp. 530–4; da Costa, ‘Review of Carta um Americano ao Español sobre o seu no. XIX, Londres’, Correio Braziliense, February 1812, pp. 161–4, on the debate between Blanco and Fray Servando. 38. ‘Brazilian Courier or Literary Magazine’, Anti-Jacobin Review, December 1811, pp. 489–93, pp. 492–3. 39. Joseph Blanco White, The Life of the Reverend Joseph Blanco White, Written by Himself: With Portions of his Correspondence, ed. John Hamilton Thom, 3 vols (London: John Chapman, 1845), vol. 1, p. 187. Original italics. 40. Besides what he could sell through bookshops, Blanco could count on standing orders of 100 numbers from the Foreign Office for distribution through Britain’s Atlantic Fleet and another 500 from the banker Juan Murphy, who also distributed them through his agents throughout Latin America. See Pons, Blanco White y América, p. 15. 41. Blanco White, Life, vol. 1, p. 188. 42. Murphy, Blanco White, p. 70. 43. Pons, Blanco White y América, p. 343. 44. Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, ‘Wilberforce Spanished: Joseph Blanco White and Spanish Anti-Slavery, 1808–1814’, in Josep M. Fradera and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara (eds), Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), pp. 158–75. 45. See also Blanco White, ‘A Un Papel Impreso en Londres con el Título de Carta de Un Americano [Fray Servando Teresa y Mier] al Español’ and ‘Tráfico de Esclavos Baxo Bandera Española’, El Español, 30 April 1810, pp. 407–25 and 426–30; ‘La Abolición de La Esclavitud’, El Español, 30 May 1811, pp. 149–54; ‘Extracto de una carta de Liverpool’ and ‘Cartas de Juan Sintierra’, El Español, 30 October 1811, pp. 2–25 and 65–79; and ‘Miserias de la Esclavitud de los Negros’, El Español, 30 November 1811, pp. 109–25, among others. 46. Blanco White, ‘Reflexiones Generales sobre la Revolución Española’, El Español, 30 April 1810, pp. 5–27, p. 27. 47. ‘Resumen’, El Español, 30 April 1810, p. 82. 48. Brougham, ‘Review of Essai Politique sur le Royaume de la Nouvelle Espagne’, Edinburgh Review, April 1810, pp. 62–102, p. 64; Blanco White, ‘Examen de la obra intitulada Essai Politique sur le Royaume de la Nouvelle Espagne’, El Español, 10 July 1810, pp. 245–310, p. 255. Blanco credits the Edinburgh Review as a source. 49. See Nick Nesbitt, Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008) for a discussion of the relationship between emancipation and the development of the notion of human rights.

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50. Blanco White, ‘Review of Constitución para la Nación Española [by] Don Alvaro Florez Estrada’, El Español, 30 October 1810, pp. 128–42, p. 139. 51. Blanco White, ‘Review’, p. 139. 52. See Ben Hughes, Conquer or Die: Wellington’s Veterans and the Liberation of the New World (London: Osprey Publishing, 2012). 53. Ivan Jakšić, Andrés Bello: Scholarship and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 181. 54. Bello himself would later translate Byron in Chile. 55. ‘State of the Prisons in South America’, The Literary Chronicle, 12 March 1825, p. 171. 56. Bello and García del Río, ‘Prospecto’, Biblioteca Americana, 1 (1823): v–viii, p. viii. 57. Bello, ‘Influencia de la literatura’, Biblioteca Americana, 1 (1823): 17–34, p. 28.

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4 Emerson’s Atlantic States Christopher Hanlon

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idening enclosures of region and section unto hemispheric scales of belonging – thus dilating the perimeters of his own locality – Emerson’s New England lecture series of 1843 and 1844 charts the concentric circles of US Atlantic consciousness during the antebellum period, when regional affiliation often circumscribed transnational impulse. Written for its first delivery in Baltimore in January of 1843, Emerson’s first lecture of the series ascribes to New Englanders a form of ‘character’ that ‘preserves a stern unity’ – that hangs together against other, perhaps equally distinctive temperaments.1 And yet according to him, New England character also comprises a personality type more broadly endemic to the Atlantic rim. ‘It cannot but happen that in what I have to say of that country,’ he remarks, ‘I may say many things equally true of other, especially Atlantic, states and of Maryland,’ and how could it be otherwise? After all, according to him, ‘the inhabitants of the United States, especially of the northern portion, are descended from the people of England, and have inherited the traits of their national character’. How distinct are Emerson’s remarks from what we have come to expect of a still-Whiggish 1840s Boston intelligentsia in the process of turning to abolition and, later, the Republican Party. In November of the same year he delivered the lecture series, he wrote to his brother William: ‘I have been trying my hand lately’, he explained, ‘at setting down notes with a view to some set of Lectures that I could call “New England,” that should be good enough to bring to the Southerner; but I am not yet perfect in it’.2 As early as 1834, George Bancroft’s History of the United States had valorised New England Puritans as the harbingers of US independence, driven by ‘a higher principle than that of the desire for gain’, while characterising southern colonists as mere profiteers.3 And by 1863 Emerson would refer to southerners as the enemies of civilisation itself, comprising a ‘piratic’ element ‘which makes it our enemy only as it is the enemy of the human race’.4 But prior to that wartime sabre-rattling, here was Emerson in 1843, subsuming sectional consciousness within larger Atlantic currents only to then imagine New England as the source of their original stirring. Perhaps the patterns that have taken shape in US literary historiography over the past ten years project an afterimage of the antebellum tendency Emerson represents. For even as the field has undergone its own transnational turns, literary-historiographical narratives that prioritise New England have remained powerful. I take up Emerson here for his rendition of what I describe as a pendular experience of Atlantic awareness – not only in the antebellum United States, but in contemporary Atlantic criticism, where the global and the local often vie. Emerson’s name is ubiquitous in transatlantic accounts of the nineteenth century, and for good reason. His celebrated friendship with Carlyle,

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consecrated in part by each author’s vulnerability within an Atlantic literary marketplace lacking international mechanism for asserting copyright; his multiple voyages to England, through which he built, extended and maintained networks of publishing connections and intellectual alliances; his continual focus on England in journals, lectures, essays, letters, a book – these have positioned Emerson, for all his association with a ‘revolution’ ‘to be wrought by the gradual domestication of the idea of Culture’ (CW 1: 65), as particularly uncongenial to cisatlantic containment. And yet, over the first century of his canonisation, Emerson was known precisely as an exponent of literary nationalism, the progenitor of a distinctly ‘American’ voice. Indeed, Emerson’s institutionalisation, simultaneous with the projection of ‘American Literature’ as an academic discipline, was formulated in terms that revered him for his resistance to European, and specifically British, forms of influence and prepossession. The sense that Emerson helped to overcome a British cultural dominance that pressed upon US writers generally came to a zenith in the work of Robert Weisbuch, who describes Emerson as having embodied a ‘self-conscious nationalism’ that had escaped prior writers such as Irving or Brown – indeed, authors we only study now, in this account, because of Emerson’s timely call for an American literature speaking to American sensibilities.5 Who, Weisbuch asks, reads an American book prior to Emerson? But if Emerson’s complaints in his 1837 ‘American Scholar’ address – according to which ‘The English dramatic poets have Shakespearized now for two hundred years’, and according to which American readers and writers ‘have listened for too long to the courtly muses of Europe’ (CW 1: 57, 69) – should be taken as axiomatic, the importance of such remarks escaped Emerson’s contemporaries. Indeed, the first generation of Emerson’s biographers often admired him precisely for his engagement with England in particular. Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing in his 1885 biography, recalled that ‘Emerson was fascinated by the charm of English society, [and] filled with admiration of the people’, even if ‘the reverence that is born with the British subject went up with the smoke of the gun that fired the long echoing shot at the little bridge which works its way along through the wide-awake town of Concord’.6 Hence Leslie Eckel addresses a fundamental dichotomy as she argues that the transnational Emerson should subsume the nationalist one (of which more below), but I want to suggest that Emerson represents an ongoing opposition through which the local and the transnational subsist in generative tension, both in nineteenthcentury American reckonings with England and in many contemporary efforts to chart Anglo-American cultural rapport. This tension is of interest not simply to scholars of Emerson, but to transatlantic studies itself. For if Emerson modelled a form of nineteenth-century Atlantic sentience that continues to draw scholarly focus, this is because his own dialectical arrangements of the local, the national and the transnational resonated more broadly within an antebellum scene in the United States characterised by unprecedentedly cosmopolitan experience tempered with a habit of withdrawal into local allegiance. Emerson is far from the only instance of such equivocation during the period, as I have argued elsewhere. But he offers such an attractive entrée into a US experience of Atlantic belonging not only because of his position as a North Atlantic citizen and exponent of New England values in his own day, but also by dint of much current interest both in his various sorts of Atlantic crossings and his position as a regional advocate whose sectional voice grew more forceful as the perimeters of his own nationality dissolved. After examining some of the ways recent scholars

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have characterised Emerson’s relationships with England, I want to place him within a broader Atlantic scene that was, like him, enjoined in a process of approach and withdrawal, internationalism and provinciality, fort and da, where England and the United States were concerned, especially for those who wrote about New England as a cultural or socio-political entity. Take for instance Lawrence Buell’s positioning of Emerson’s ‘Self-Reliance’ (1841) as a work that exhibits Emerson’s transnationalism even as it distinguishes Emerson as a ‘post-puritan New Englander’.7 For Buell, ‘Self-Reliance’ opposes almost diametrically John Stuart Mill’s defence of individualism in On Liberty (1859), where Mill argues the salutary effects of individualism upon an entire society. For Buell, the key point of Emersonian individualism in the 1841 essay is in its cultivation of an almost stylised indifference not only to institutional and social prudence but indeed to the potentially unsettling effects of such indifference. While the authors, as Buell points out, share an ‘aversion to mindless conformity’, only Emerson maintains ‘that social being is phantasmal compared with subjective being’ (100). For Buell, again, this crucial difference of emphasis stems from Emerson’s very American ‘faith in the power of the emerging middle class to fulfill the promise of . . . individuality’ along with a more particularly New England Protestant’s draw toward ‘philosophic intuitionism’ (100). And yet Buell is also careful to align Emerson and Matthew Arnold, not only in terms of a broad advocacy of individualism but even more specifically for their shared vision of organic and public intellectualism. For Buell, Arnold and Emerson should be read within shared intellectual genealogies in which Coleridge, Goethe and Wordsworth have long been understood to loom. So for Buell, reading Emerson, Mill and Arnold should remind us that Emerson’s self-reliant individualism – so often taken as the acme of US Romantic thought – was in fact the site of his fraught engagement with an English liberal tradition. It ‘was no more a uniquely American project than it was a complexly transatlantic one’, Buell explains (104).8 But Buell’s is one among several recent accounts of Emerson embroiled in Atlantic interplay configured by local priorities. Samantha Harvey, for another example, is meticulous in Transatlantic Transcendentalism (2013) as she explores the entwinements of Emerson and Coleridge, demonstrating that ‘Emerson did not think about Coleridge, he thought with Coleridge’ (3), and that Coleridge’s well-known influence upon Emerson in the 1820s and 1930s amounted to a spur for Emerson as he devised his own intellectual praxis.9 Like David Greenham, whose own subtle book on Emerson and Coleridge maps a similar territory (if focusing more exclusively on Emerson for Emerson’s sake than Harvey, who views Emerson as simply the most significant conduit of European Romantic thought into North America during the first half of the nineteenth century), Harvey’s account provides a tonic to cisatlantically focused accounts of Emerson that magnify his exhortations, early in his career, urging US intellectuals to eschew the influence of European discourses and traditions.10 But then equally pressing in Harvey’s treatment of Emerson’s Atlantic sensibility is her sense that, once transmitted across the water, the Coleridgean conceptual apparatus morphed into local diversities of thought in the United States – informing profoundly, for example, a school of Vermont Transcendentalism that entered into telling dialectic with the Boston Transcendentalism Emerson articulated. (The former, as formulated by James Marsh, emphasised a Coleridgean public intellectualism that shaped the curriculum of the University of Vermont over the course of the 1830s and, through its

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long run across the century, John Dewey.11) And so in a way that parallels Buell’s braiding of Emerson’s transnational and local sensibilities, Harvey’s Emerson marks a point of cultural entry wherein English Romantic thought is domesticated, to put it in an Emersonian way, to the priorities of US intellectual culture. Emerson’s indebtedness to Coleridge, as Harvey points out, was recognised and commented upon even early in Emerson’s career, probably yet another reason his name is ubiquitous in recent Atlantic criticism. But for other reasons as well, Emerson often seems to straddle a meridian separating domestic and international consciousness. In my own America’s England: Antebellum Literature and Atlantic Sectionalism (2013), Emerson becomes the most prominent and complicated example of a tendency among antebellum partisans to turn toward a conceptualised England whose history, landscape and biology offer compass within the developing sectional turmoil of the 1850s and 1860s.12 Like other northeastern commentators who initially revered England for its more illustrious (and then-recent) history with slavery and abolition, the undermining of US slavery through civil war unbounded Emerson from the burden of English example, allowing him to proclaim, in 1863, that English nationality is babyish, like the self-esteem of villages, like the nationality of Carolina, or of Cheraw, or of Hull, or the conceit and insolence of the shabby little kings on the Gambia River, who strut up to the traveller, ‘What do they say of me in America?’ (LL 2: 323) Leslie Eckel, writing in Atlantic Citizens: Nineteenth-Century American Writers at Work in the World (2013), suggests that Emerson’s early and apparent nationalism as a public intellectual obscures his deeper-running commitment to universalities that resist the ways nationalism can structure and distort self-experience. Arguing that Emerson’s English Traits puts on display his developing aversion to nationhood for its tendency to promote a lock-step conformity, Eckel reads the 1856 travelogue (Emerson’s only book-length study of any nationality, she points out) in light of Emerson’s disdain after the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 for ‘hollow’ nationality.13 Again, here Emerson appears as simultaneously ‘there’ and ‘here’, both cosmopolitan and rooted, English Traits in this instance calibrating his expansive Atlantic mindfulness for its native pertinence. A series of other studies provide variation on this manner of suspending Emerson between a sine and cosine of transnational and domestic interest. In The Postcolonial and Imperial Experience in American Transcendentalism (2012), Marek Paryz also focuses on English Traits, arguing that this ostensible travelogue is really about America, a submerged treatise on the fact that ‘the most important sign of the rising power of America is the decline of England’.14 Well prior even to Weisbuch, the most sustained study of English Traits, Philip Nicoloff’s Emerson on Race and History (1961), anticipated later Atlantic studies by positioning the book as ‘one of the significant services Emerson performed in his lifelong battle to promote America’s intellectual independence’.15 Though Nicoloff sees English Traits as ‘very much the product of a particular era of American national experience’, as part of a national moment of ‘passage’, for him this moment of passage grew out of ‘international controversy over America’s present achievements and future expectations’, and especially the question over ‘whether Americans could, in time, so free themselves from cultural bondage to England as to produce an independent flowering of their own’.16 And far

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less Manichaean than either Nicoloff or Paryz, Andrew Taylor’s Thinking America: New England Intellectuals and the Varieties of American Identity (2010) acknowledges that facet of Emerson’s agenda in English Traits while yet pointing out that in this book ‘the reassuring prophet of an American future does not quite subscribe to his own message’;17 English Traits, Taylor argues, crystallises Emerson’s impulses toward ‘affiliation and alienation’, reflecting on ‘the polarities of belonging and distance, of affiliation and reflection’ that for Taylor defines Emerson’s practice of intellectual life.18 All of which is to point out that Emerson’s name seems to have become preponderant in Atlantic literary studies not only because of his connection to Carlyle, nor for his having written a travelogue of England that theorises cultural and intellectual relations between the two countries, but rather in accordance with his complicated sense that the national and the transnational are conceptually interdependent, nearly inextricable arrangements of historical embeddedness, subjective experience and social possibility. Like Paul Giles, who describes ‘the emergence of autonomous and separate political identities’ as if ‘intertwined with a play of opposites, a series of reciprocal attractions, and repulsions between opposing national situations’, Emerson does not so much choose between the local and the global as he imagines them to subsist in constant tension and affinity.19 In what remains of this chapter I want to describe with closer attention the texture of that facet of Emerson’s transatlantic thought and to place it among other, related renditions of antebellum transatlanticism in the United States – especially other attempts to understand New England through reference to a broader North Atlantic civilisation that could either subsume or accentuate the meaning of locality. For if the past decade in literary historiography has borne witness to an ongoing proliferation of transatlantic investigation and insight, the recent history of the discipline has also produced significant work detailing the resonance of the local and the particular in literary and cultural production on both sides of the Atlantic. If Atlantic studies dissolves a once nationally focused mode of literary history into a welter of post-national possibility and boundary-crossing (highlighting, for instance, what Eckel calls Emerson’s engagement with the modern world by exerting ‘his own intellectual energy as a force that acts on the nation from above and beyond its borders’ (120)), how does that impulse toward geographically broadened spheres fit with the interests that continue to energise regional studies, nativist or indigenous approaches to literature, or other, more geographically bound conceptions of literary or cultural history? Emerson’s writings on New England help to broach such questions because they are so embedded within what was by the early 1840s an extant discourse on New England Yankeedom, an almost taxonomical interest in this regional type booming on both sides of the Atlantic. It is not simply that the idea of the Yankee became a resonant trope for northeasterners like Emerson, though it certainly was. More to the point, public discussion on New England’s cultural, historical and ideological specificity places the region in almost constant relation to England. The editor, commentator and novelist John Neal, promoted the association perhaps more than any other North Atlantic editor, and a case in point is in the first volume and number of Neal’s journal The Yankee, which he began publishing from Portland in 1828 before merging it with the New England Galaxy in 1835. During his three-year residence in London from 1824 to 1827, Neal had taken on the mission of elevating the standing of US writers among European, and especially English, readers and reviewers. Four years prior to

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Neal’s arrival in London, Sydney Smith had famously asked, in his Edinburgh Review response to Seybert’s Annals of the United States, ‘In the four corners of the world, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue?’ Writing within that context of a perceived British dismissal of US cultural output, Neal published essays on the US cultural and political scenes in Blackwoods and the Westminster Review – always working, he claimed, from the assumption that British unfamiliarity with US intellectual culture produced such misguided pronouncements as Smith’s. Even after his return to Portland, Neal launched The Yankee as part of a similar effort for ‘the encouragement of native literature, and . . . the diffusion of liberal knowledge’.20 And while the prospectus for The Yankee addressed a national audience (‘we prefer saying briefly, that our aim is to put forth such a paper as will be worth preserving, not only throughout New-England, but throughout our country,’ he wrote21), Neal also placed New England and The Yankee within a broader transatlantic dialectic: Our literature will be attended to, and watched over, as a manufacture of the first importance to the character of our country – we might say to its independence; and we shall not be sparing of our observations upon the progress of literature and the fine arts in Europe – and particularly the land of our Fathers, about which we have something to say, which was intended for a book, but which will now appear in a series of numbers in the YANKEE. Wonderful as it may seem, it is nevertheless true, that we know little or nothing of the character of the English people, or of their disposition toward us. Our ignorance of them, and of their social habits and peculiarities of every sort, is only equaled by their ignorance of us; and that is altogether astonishing, as we shall have to show in the progress of our work. But still, take them together, they are perhaps more kindly disposed, and more charitable toward us, than we are toward them.22 Neal’s sense that Englanders new and old had fallen out of some more venerable rapport, and that he and The Yankee could serve to restore connections, conditions the very first article of the journal, which Neal published directly beneath his prospectus. Titled ‘England’, and serving to project a series of articles on the subject, the commentary describes ‘a sort of established faith’ with ‘regard to England’ among American readers. ‘We believe what our fathers believed,’ Neal supposes. ‘We have inherited their prejudices and their partialities, and kept sturdily to both; qualifying their traditionary faith, now, by what we have gathered from time to time of those who, while they were in the mother country, were regarded by her people either as visitors, or strangers, or as the better sort of spies – the flying travellers of America . . .’23 Neal was in a way brokering the same sort of transnational reunion he had attempted in Britain, where in 1825 he had published through William Blackwood in Edinburgh and Thomas Cadell of London his three-volume novel Brother Jonathan: or, The New Englanders. Neal’s title character, Jonathan Peters, incarnates what Neal describes as archetypically New England characteristics, a ‘peaceable, stern, proud man’. And yet Peters is also an ‘incorrigible Yankee [who] like most of his countrymen, had a way of doing whatever he did, in the shape of dispute, so thoroughly . . .’24 Temperamentally contentious, Peters’ Puritanical lineage links him biologically to the disputatious line

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responsible (in Neal’s narrator’s view) for so much turmoil within England and her colonies. Descended from the Pilgrims of Massachusetts – ‘the formidable men, with whose children, every war had begun, for more than a century’ (18) – Peters is poised to act in accordance with that vexatious temperament, but upon a world stage, as Brother Jonathan takes place less than a year before the 1775 conflict at Lexington and Concord.25 Upon his return to Portland, Neal found many of his fellow Mainers irritated by the writing he had offered his British readership.26 His variously irreverent descriptions of New England Yankees in Brother Jonathan were probably less controversial, however, than his political writing about New England’s place in the American republic. Writing as ‘a Genuine Yankee’ in Blackwoods, Neal predicted the division of the United States. ‘The people of the United States are unsafe; the confederacy itself, in our opinion, is unsafe,’ he explained, because of a fragmenting regional affiliation driven by antipathy over slavery further energised by the acquisition of westward territory.27 The same congenital forces driving Brother Jonathan toward revolution would thus project the nation into fragments, and these forces Neal ultimately traced home to seventeenth-century Protestant England. ‘[T]he people of New England’, he contended, ‘are quite English in their habits and prejudices’ (365), and having brought across the Atlantic an essentially unyielding sense of right, New Englanders would prove themselves ultimately unwilling to accommodate slavery in the United States. It is important to note that such depictions of latter-day Puritanical virtue as the determining feature of New England sensibility competed with other stereotypes profiling New Englanders in completely different ways, by reason of which Neal could insist that the Londoners he came to know during his three years in England knew so little about northeasterners in the United States. The 1820s also saw the emergence of Yankee theatre in London, a burgeoning popularity of comedic depictions in which northeastern protagonists entertained English audiences with their dialects, their cunning determination to turn a profit, and their seemingly backward, downeastern ways. A form of proto-minstrelsy in which Yankee characters appear not as avatars of Puritan morality but as profiteers attempting to work angles (often against southern antagonists or even their hapless slaves), these plays seem to have served a British appetite for American local colour already stirred by the appearance in Britain of Washington Irving’s and James Fenimore Cooper’s fiction during the same decade.28 One of the best-reviewed of these, William Bayle Bernard’s The Yankee Pedlar, starred American actor George ‘Yankee’ Hill when it opened to enthusiastic audiences on Drury Lane (an earlier version had debuted in Boston on 9 June 1834, though Bernard’s version attempted to render its humour discernible to an English ear). In its review of the performance, the London Sunday Times imagined New England Yankees to be ‘somewhat synonymous with our Yorkshire country boys’. ‘As in England,’ the reviewer noted, ‘all rustics are not York; so in America. It is a distinct caste, peculiar to the State of Virginia [the confusion seems to have arisen from the fact that Bernard’s play takes place on a Virginia plantation], and like our Yorkshireman, is chiefly distinguished by shrewd cunning under the mask of simplicity.’29 Written for Hill’s debut in London, The Yankee Pedlar was such a success that it inspired a pirated script by the English dramatist Morris Barnard, whose version The Yankee Peddler; or, Old Times in Virginia enjoyed successful runs in St Louis, Louisville and Chicago in 1841, 1845 and 1853 respectively.30 These and many other risible depictions of Yankee types – Samuel

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Woodworth’s The Forest Rose; or, American Farmers (1825), Joseph S. Jones’s The Green Mountain Boy; or, Love and Learning (1833) and James Kirk Paulding’s The Kentuckian (1831) among them, delivered by Yankee interpreters including Hill and James Henry Hackett – produced a popular rendition of contemporaneous New England character wholly apart from that which Neal promoted and which many other New Englanders proliferated in narratives that connected Puritanical morality with contemporary New England reformism.31 So in some sense Emerson’s New England lectures of 1843 and 1844 buffeted an extant rendition of Yankee identity even as it seemed to enjoin an effort to root nineteenth-century northeastern sensibilities in a longer trajectory. In the New England lectures, he addresses transatlantic continuities that are in at least that way similar to those Neal constructs in his depiction of Brother Jonathan, or that others established as they connected Puritan malcontents with contemporaneous New England types. But though Emerson also considers the modern New Englander’s connection to the Puritans, he does so in a way that both honours and severs the lineage. The familiar terms of veneration are all here: for Emerson the Puritans represent an acme of industry, respect for education, all tempered with an uncompromising moral sense and eschewal of decadence. ‘Many wants, had they, but more satisfactions,’ Emerson writes. ‘The light struggled in through windows of oiled paper, but they read the word of God by it’ (LL 1: 13). And yet the purpose of Emerson’s long account of New England Puritanism is to put the genealogy aside, to locate in it a moment of breach: These Puritans, – however, in the last days they have declined into ritualists, – solemnized the hey-day of their strength by the planting and the liberating of America. Great grim, earnest men! I belong by natural affinity to other thoughts and schools than yours, but my affection hovers respectfully about your retiring footsteps, your unpainted churches, strict platforms and sad offices, the iron gray deacon and the wearisome prayer rich with the diction of ages. (LL 1: 12) If prior enshrinements of the New England Yankee emphasised a proud, even belligerent connection to Puritanical roots, Emerson’s rendition of New England credits a Puritanical influence upon regional sensibilities that he finds crucial, to be sure. But simultaneously he situates the Puritan past in fraught relation with a burgeoning modernity. He pictures New England ‘as a mother’ who has become ‘at once religious and skeptical – a most religious infidel’ (LL 1: 14): She holds on with both hands to the faith of the past generation, as to the palladium of all that was good in the physical and metaphysical worlds, and extolled and poetized in this beloved Calvinism. Yet all the time, she doubted and denied it, and could not tell whether to be more glad or sorry to find that her thousand sons were irremediably born to the adoption and furtherance of the new ideas. (LL 1: 14) ‘What is this abolition, non-resistance, and temperance’, Emerson asks earlier, ‘but the continuation of Puritanism, though it operate the destruction of the church in which it grew as the new is always making the old superfluous’ (LL 1: 12). This is not simply a recoiling into the present – Emerson is not here complaining, as in ‘Self-Reliance’

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(1841), of an overly preponderant historical past. Rather, the Puritan past thoroughly conditions the very modernity that supplants it, that makes it ‘superfluous’, but that yet realises a fulfilment that had remained unapprehendable – unimaginable, even – within that prior horizon. Similarly for him the modern Yankee incarnates an English genealogy offering its own broadsheet of temperaments and proclivities. And yet for Emerson that connection is always in the process of unknotting itself: a formulation that entails, logically, a just as continual retying as the ‘inhabitants of the United States, especially the northern portion’, hone and otherwise transform their inheritance of English traits. ‘It is sometimes said that the American character is only the English character exaggerated,’ he states. ‘Are they lovers of freedom? We more. Are they lovers of commerce? We more. Are they lovers of utility? We more’ (LL 1: 8). Emerson is insistent that while these English traits represent a global infusion – so that in a way Englishness expands with the Empire practically to a vanishing point – beyond a certain point that process of infusion subverted itself, eddying into pools that ultimately subsided from the general current. On the one hand, ‘[t]he British family is expanded but not altered’ as its ‘national traits are the same for centuries’, Emerson explains (LL 1: 9). And yet, ‘[p]recisely at this moment’ – as Puritan radicals were driven to either revolution or emigration toward the middle of the seventeenth century – ‘when this most energetic of all the mysterious impulses which agitate man, was in its activity, the colony was detached which planted America.’ And so, for Emerson, ‘[h]ence may proceed the more ideal character of the New England race. The people driven out of the country were precisely the idealists of England, the most religious in a religious era’ (LL 1: 11). New England character – that thing comprising such ‘stern unity’, he explains – is thus for Emerson the very site of a certain transatlantic affiliation and withdrawal, a diastole and systole whose pulse is America, in a way. The early years of Emerson’s relationship with Carlyle became occasion for Emerson to explore such ideas well before his delivery of the New England lectures. At the outset of a special relationship that would also be characterised by such approach and withdrawal, Emerson’s letters already cast his own readerly connection to Carlyle as a form of interhemispheric exchange: ‘When . . . I found myself in Europe,’ he wrote on 14 May 1834, ‘I went to your house only to say “Faint not, – the word you utter is heard, though in the ends of the earth and by humblest men; it works, prevails.” ’32 In the same letter he suggested that Carlyle would find a larger circle of readers in America, since ‘’t is good to have a new eye inspect our mouldy social forms, our politics, and schools, and religion. I say our for it cannot have escaped you that a lecture upon these topics written for England may be read to America.’33 For his part, Carlyle claimed to view the two nations as only nominally or officially separate. ‘And so here, looking over the water,’ he would write in August of that year: let me repeat once more what I believe is already dimly the sentiment of all Englishmen, Cisoceanic and Transoceanic, that we and you are not two countries, and cannot for the life of us be; but only two parishes of one country, with such wholesome parish hospitalities, and dirty temporary parish feuds, as we see; both of which brave parishes Vivant! vivant!34

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The two nations are as neighbouring parishes for Carlyle, who pursues the analogy further: And among the glories of both be Yankee-doodle-doo, and the felling of the Western Forest, proudly remembered; and for the rest, by way of parish constable, let each cheerfully take such George Washington or George Guelph as it can get, and bless Heaven! I am weary of hearing it said, ‘We love the Americans,’ ‘We wish well,’ &c., &c. What in God’s name should we do else?35 Like Neal, Emerson imagines the New England sensibilities he describes as a form of export, a benign influence upon the nation and the world. Attempting to broach the subject of New England’s distinction through a frame that nevertheless binds that regional culture to a national whole, Emerson imagines that New England could not but enter the flow of ‘hourly assimilation’ binding national character. ‘In a country like this,’ he admits, ‘where the locomotive and the steamboat, like enormous shuttles, shoot every day across the thousand various threads of national descent and employment and bind them fast into one web, an hourly assimilation is going on, and it is folly to exaggerate peculiarities’ (LL 1: 8). Folly, Emerson reminds us, to exaggerate peculiarities even as US sectionalism was (apparently, to him) on the wane – and in his revision of that lecture for delivery at the Massachusetts Mercantile Association in May of 1844, he accentuated the recklessness: ‘an hourly assimilation goes forward,’ he read on that occasion, ‘and there is no danger that local peculiarities and hostilities should be preserved’.36 The vehicle to Emerson’s metaphor, according to which New Englanders and New England attitudes ride shuttles that are in the process of weaving national fabrics, would appeal also to Thomas Wentworth Higginson as he wrote in the midst of reconstruction after the US Civil War. On lecture tour in 1868, Higginson similarly imagined himself weaving New England attitudes into a developing Midwest. ‘It is an exciting life’, he writes, ‘to find one’s self moving to and fro, a living shuttle, to weave together this new web of national civilization.’37 Yet again for Emerson in 1842, the warp and woof of New England’s influence was not simply a national but also a North Atlantic phenomenon. ‘English character & the relation of new to old England is a rich topic,’ he wrote to Charles Stearns Weaver in December of that year, even as he was delivering the first lecture series in Baltimore, ‘& not letting alone the West & the Future of both [of] which, we Yankees are so fond.’38 Even as much else about nineteenth-century US literary study has bridged an Atlantic divide, Emerson’s Atlantic sensibility calibrated itself to such interplays of the regional and the international. Such a dialectic had defined the emergence of Concord in US national memory, during the 1820s and 1830s, as the birthplace of US independence, the sleepy village whose citizen farmers had transacted the epochal turn toward modern republicanism.39 The lyceum movement that arose during Emerson’s lifetime and that provided him audiences on many occasions was another effort to enshrine New England history, custom and sensibility – and to extend its influence40 – and yet as it took place in Concord, for instance, it often served to splice New England traditions with old England forebears, with lectures on ‘Wild Apples’ or ‘The Concord Fight’ joined with Emerson’s lambasting of England in his 1863 delivery of ‘Fortune of the Republic’ or the Chartist leader Henry Vincent’s remarks on ‘The Late American Conflict’.41 For that matter, the warp and woof of Emerson’s imagined New England

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shuttles places all cisatlantic relations under a metaphor of textile production – the economic base and superstructure that lay behind so much that is insuperable of the antebellum period, after all, and that weaves North, South and Britain together into one fraught entanglement. Addressing itself to the industrial theme of Emerson’s second lecture, that metaphor figures the English-speaking Atlantic rim as if comprising some unthinkably expansive fabric even as it submerges the politically atomising effects the agricultural and industrial complex of textile production wreaked upon the United States in the 1840s. Nevertheless Emerson keeps using it, extolling ‘[m]oral considerations’ that ‘give currency every day to notes of hand’, a synthesis upon which ‘every great and durable fabric of trade has stood’ (LL 1: 29); or marvelling at the procession of imports through the streets of Concord, remarking that ‘the train goes forward at all hours bearing this cargo of inexhaustible comfort and luxury to every cabin in the hills, and thus everywhere is the country fastened to the town by threads incessantly spun’ (LL 1: 25). Contracting into local influences of landscape and climate only to then dilate to horizons compassing British and specifically English points of origin, Emerson’s New England is a collection of Atlantic states in multiple senses. On the one hand it comprises a group of geographical and political domains about which Emerson – indeed, by only the next year, with his 1845 address on emancipation in the British West Indies – would become less diplomatic as he asserted its rightful influence upon the national polity. ‘In every age of the world, there has been a leading nation, one of a more generous sentiment, whose eminent citizens were willing to stand for the interests of a general justice and humanity,’ Emerson would state in his February 1844 lecture ‘The Young American’, reprinted in The Dial. ‘Which should be that nation but these states? Which should lead that movement, if not New England?’42 And that collection of states is itself, for him, an aggregate of something larger and more abstruse, something drawn from the skein of a vaster North Atlantic civilisation. ‘Here we are,’ he writes in the same essay, men of English blood, planted now for five, six, or seven generations on this immense tract in the temperate zone, and so planted at such conjecture of time and events, that we have left behind us whatever old and odious establishments the minds of men have outgrown. The unsupportable burdens under which Europe staggers, and almost every month mutters ‘A Revolution! a Revolution!’ we have escaped from as by one bound.43 That sort of transatlantic schadenfreude would be more difficult for anyone to assert in less than two decades. Perhaps some intimation of that possible future prods Emerson toward one of the most singular moments of the New England lectures – where the sage of Concord so distils his subject matter as to be able to envision a New England without New Englanders. ‘The time will come’, he supposes, ‘when the looms of Lowell and the presses of Cambridge will stand still, when the masts of Boston and New York shall rot at their wharves, when great national or great natural changes will have made that region, already on the borders of the Arctic climate, uninhabitable’ (LL 1: 37). The shuttles now still, the Yankee descendants of Puritans now extinct, a changing climate having now enveloped New England nature itself, the New England of Emerson’s Atlantic imagination just might in the end exist nowhere at all.

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Notes 1. The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson, 2 vols (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2001), vol. 1, p. 8. Further references to this edition will appear parenthetically as LL and include volume and page number. 2. The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph L. Rusk and Eleanor M. Tilton, 10 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939–95), vol. 3, p. 100. 3. George Bancroft, History of the United States, from the Discovery of the American Continent, 10 vols (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1834–74), vol. 1, pp. 366, 367. 4. The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Joseph Slater et al., 10 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971–2012), vol. 10, p. 437. Further references to this edition will appear parenthetically as CW and include volume and page number. 5. Robert Weisbuch, Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and British Influence in the Age of Emerson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 6. 6. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1885), pp. 220, 221. 7. See Lawrence Buell, Emerson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 22, 100. 8. In this way Buell’s account is much indebted to Sacvan Bercovitch’s treatment of Emersonian individuality (as opposed to Jacksonian individualism) in The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 307–52. While Jacksonian individualism, in Bercovitch’s account, arose in reaction to European socialism in its enshrinement of the rough individual who had no need of community – indeed, whose basic American freedoms were eroded by the very prioritisation of society over solitude that energised phalanxes and other utopian ventures – Emersonian individuality articulated very different prerogatives. For Bercovitch, these prerogatives spring from European sources including John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx, and they position the self in an aversive relationship with all institutions and associations – not to deny the possibility of association, Bercovitch points out, but to make a new sort of association possible (pp. 314–19). 9. Samantha C. Harvey, Transatlantic Transcendentalism: Coleridge, Emerson, and Nature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), p. 125. 10. David Greenham, Emerson’s Transatlantic Romanticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 11. Harvey, Transatlantic Transcendentalism, pp. 141–60. 12. Christopher Hanlon, America’s England: Antebellum Literature and Atlantic Sectionalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 13. See Leslie Eckel, Atlantic Citizens: Nineteenth-Century American Writers at Work in the World (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), pp. 99–126. 14. Marek Paryz, The Postcolonial and Imperial Experience in American Transcendentalism (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 70. 15. Philip Nicoloff, Emerson on Race and History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), pp. 11–12. 16. Nicoloff, Emerson on Race and History, p. 11. 17. Andrew Taylor, Thinking America: New England Intellectuals and the Varieties of American Identity (Lebanon: University of New Hampshire Press, 2010), p. 54. 18. Taylor, Thinking America, p. 25. 19. Paul Giles, Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730–1860 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), p. 1. 20. ‘Prospectus’, The Yankee 1.1 (1 January 1828), p. 1.

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26.

27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

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‘Prospectus’, p. 1. ‘Prospectus’, p. 1. ‘Prospectus’, p. 2. John Neal, Brother Jonathan: or, The New Englanders, 3 vols (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, and London: T. Cadell, 1825), pp. 1, 9. For a more detailed treatment of Neal’s depiction of Yankee character in Brother Jonathan alongside Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s Sam Slick, the Clockmaker (1836–40), see Stefani Schäfer, ‘(Un)Settling North America: The Yankee in the Writings of John Neal and Thomas Chandler Haliburton’, in Erik Redling (ed.), Traveling Traditions: NineteenthCentury Cultural Concepts and Transatlantic Intellectual Networks (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), pp. 231–46. For Schäfer, Neal’s depictions of Yankees articulate a new form of white, male subjectivity and nationalism proper to British North America, but its appeal and implications wound across the Atlantic world (p. 231). In a note to the prospectus for The Yankee, Neal complained of having ‘been charged with having been hired in England to attack this country; with having turned his hand against her, wantonly and treacherously in the Journals of England; and with having abused her with untruth’. See ‘Prospectus’, p. 1. John Neal, ‘North American Politics. By a Genuine Yankee’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 18.104 (September 1825), pp. 359, 360. Indeed, the Morning Chronicle noted in its review, ‘We have been enabled to form some notion of the Yankee character from the pages of COOPER and WASHINGTON IRVING, and especially from the graphic and entertaining Life of Colonel Crockett; but the actual sight of a real live Yankee is something of a novelty, and Mr. Hill makes it as amusing as it is new.’ Review quoted in ‘Yankee Hill in London’, Spirit of the Times 6.46 (31 December 1836), p. 46. Review quoted in ‘Yankee Hill in London’, p. 46. Morris Barnard, The Yankee Peddler; or, Old Times in Virginia (New York: Harold Roorbach, 1854), p. iii. For more on the advent of Yankee theatre in London, see Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and their World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 20–5; Francis Hodge, Yankee Theatre: The Image of America on Stage, 1825– 1850 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), especially chapter 11; and Rosemarie K. Bank, Theatre Culture in America, 1825–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 70–2. The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Charles Eliot Norton, 2 vols (Cambridge: John Wilson and Son, 1883), vol. 1, p. 12. Correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson, vol. 1, p. 13. Correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson, vol. 1, p. 19. Correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson, vol. 1, pp. 19–20. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The Young American’, The Dial 4.4 (April 1844), p. 485. Similarly, Emerson remarks in that revised lecture that ‘the rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics and trade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch’ (p. 485). Thomas Wentworth Higginson, ‘The American Lecture-System’, MacMillan’s Magazine 18.103 (May 1868), p. 49. The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 7, p. 518. For more on Concord’s consecration as the cradle of independence, see Robert A. Gross, ‘Commemorating Concord’, Common-Place 4.1 (October 2003), (last accessed 16 March 2016).

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40. On the lyceum movement and its function as a vehicle of ‘dominant New England values’, see Angela Ray, The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2005), pp. 14, 21, 63. 41. These records are stored at the Free Library in Concord, Massachusetts: Lyceum Record, 1828–1928. Vault A75 CON.LYC. UNIT 1 Series I, Vol. A2. 42. Emerson, ‘The Young American’, p. 501. 43. Emerson, ‘The Young American’, pp. 504–5.

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5 Shifting Cultures and Transatlantic Imitations: The Case of Burney, Bennett and Read Eve Tavor Bannet

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n Britain and America during the long eighteenth century, imitation was a nuanced and highly flexible method of writing which registered cultural shifts and helped to create them. Through their choices of models for imitation, writers and interpretative communities affirmed their descent from, or continuing links to, whatever peoples or past(s) they desired: the ancient Roman Republic, the Athenian polis, the primitive Anglo-Saxons, native Celtic bards, the Commonwealthsmen, or the Old Country. But they also inscribed their social and cultural differences. For contrary to what we often assume today, imitation was not mere copying; it required writers to vary and change whatever models they were using to speak to the different realities, culture and tastes of their own time and place. As Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary put it, imitation was ‘a method of translating looser than paraphrase, in which modern examples and illustrations are used for ancient, or domestick for foreign’.1 Similarity to the model(s) demonstrated continuity, affinity and relationship to other peoples, times or places; but this also highlighted the differences which a writer’s transformations and variations had introduced, to give contour and definition to the distinctive character of his or her contemporary cultural location. For those who ‘read double’ by reading writing alongside its model(s), imitations displayed both the similarities and the differences among cultural texts.2 One might say that imitation was analogy ‘methodiz’d’ in an age when, as Susan Manning has shown, the influential work of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers ensured that older, comparative, analogical modes of thinking gained a new lease of life in the transatlantic anglophone world.3 If we have forgotten this, it is because the key roles that imitation played in linking and distinguishing cultures and historical moments both within the British Isles and in the Atlantic world have been obscured by the twin myths of literary originality and political-cultural exceptionalism that were promoted in the nineteenth century to provide conceptual underpinnings for the supposedly autochthonous national literatures of supposedly self-contained nation-states. Originality and exceptionalism joined imagination on the ‘free’, ‘autonomous’ and ‘productive’ side of what Zsolt Komaromy calls Romanticism’s underlying ‘reproductive-productive dichotomy’.4 He argues that this binary denigrated imitation and memory by misrepresenting them as merely reproductive – servile copies of what had only been retained more or less unchanged. Native genius had to be autonomous, free and productive to make

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national literatures quintessentially separate, self-created and unique. If, as Komaromy contends, we are still projecting familiar but false post-Romantic binaries (production/reproduction, original/copy, creation/imitation, imagination/memory) back into the eighteenth century, we are losing a valuable, historically grounded instrument for transatlantic work. For what Quintilian said of writing in a telling image – that ‘a practice without models supplied by reading will be like a ship drifting aimlessly without a steersman’ – also holds for Atlantic historical and textual scholarship.5 Fortunately, pre-Romantic writings did not float on a nebulous sea of half-remembered influences. Writers used imitation to steer themselves self-consciously by the already written and already read; and having transmuted their texts into material commodities and made them objects of trade, printers and booksellers sent them in bound and unbound sheets from port to port, while reprinters transplanted them selectively in a different place. Each left traces, recuperated by the history of writing and the history of the book, with which Atlantic scholarship can productively work. To illustrate these points, I am going to discuss two imitations of Fanny Burney’s Evalina (1779), which was frequently shipped to America along with other imported books, but not reprinted there. The first imitation, which might be called Scottish, is Anna Maria Bennett’s popular Minerva Press novel The Beggar Girl and her Benefactors (London, 1797), which Joseph Conrad reprinted in Philadelphia in 1801.6 The second is Monima or The Beggar Girl by ‘A Lady of Philadelphia’, first published in New York and Philadelphia in 1802 and 1803 respectively, and now attributed to Martha Read.7 Both imitations redeployed Evalina’s principal narrative devices – such as the orphaned heroine, the benevolent adoptive guardian, the double foundling plot, the economic subtext, and the ‘Paradise Hall’ solution to the heroine’s fall in rank through discovery of her noble relations and marriage at the end – to address the penury of genteel, educated women in fin de siècle British and early republican societies where money had begun to determine every interaction, influence every personal decision, and corrupt every rank. But neither imitation was an obvious copy of Evalina. Bennett and Read both foregrounded the two-nations theme peripheral to Burney’s plot, and devoted a great deal more attention than Burney had to the commercial world of the Branghtons and to the lower orders. Poverty was a topical issue during the 1790s, when the indigence of large sectors of the population became a pressing problem on both sides of the Atlantic.8 Bennett and Read show that the plight of poorgenteel ladies had changed since Burney’s time, and that in Britain and Philadelphia it was not the same.

Female Somebodies and Female Nobodies Subtitled ‘The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World’, Evalina described the gaffes the country-bred heroine makes when sponsored for a London season by her clerical guardian’s high-born friends, Lady Howard and her daughter, Mrs Mirvan. This allowed Burney to satirise the manners of all those Evalina met: gentry and nobility at London balls, spa towns and country houses; vulgar middle-class ‘cits’ such as the shop-keeping Branghtons; and social climbers, such as Mme Duval, a tavern-wench who married up and affects French ways and a French cicisbeo. Macartney, the overlooked, starving and suicidal Scottish boarder Evalina encounters at the Branghtons, shows how heartless and money-driven English society is, while Evalina portrays the

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difficulties faced in this society by an orphaned girl without fortune or family credentials, who has been brought up to be a lady. Benevolent Reverend Villars adopted Evalina when her mother, who married clandestinely in France and was deserted by her aristocratic husband, died without being able to prove her marriage. Without him, Evalina’s situation would be as dire as Macartney’s. Analogies between the tragic suffering of Evalina’s mother, the comic sufferings of Mme Duval at Captain Mirvan’s hands, and the violence to which Evalina is repeatedly subjected by predatory males indicate ladies’ helpless dependence on the kindness and protection of benevolent patriarchs, such as Villars and Lord Orville, Evalina’s Prince Charming. The novel’s happy ending likewise highlights the importance of family and fortune to a young lady entering into the world, by reconstituting Evalina’s family of origin before marrying her to Orville. The revelation that Evalina had been switched by her wet-nurse for the latter’s child restores Evalina to her wealthy, aristocratic father and proper social position, along with Macartney, who turns out to be her mislaid brother. Much feminist criticism has been built on Evalina’s characterisation as a ‘Nobody’.9 But in the novel, only Lovel calls Evalina a Nobody, and he is characterised as a fashionable fool. For Villars, the Mirvans, Lady Howard, Mme Duval and others, Evalina is an orphaned and mislaid Somebody – they shelter her, maintain her, protect her, fight over her, and strive to restore her to her proper place in society as a result. Should that fail, Mr Villars has a ‘competence’ to leave her in his will. Bennett countered by demonstrating what really made a girl a ‘nobody’ through Rosa, her beggar girl, whom we first meet in rags begging for her putative mother. Rosa is informally adopted by Scottish Colonel Bohanun, the Villars character, who likewise raises his charge to be a lady. When he goes off to India to fight, Bohanun ensures that Rosa has a Villars-like ‘competence’ to sustain her in his absence. But the Englishman to whom he entrusts it purloins the money, leaving Rosa not only nameless and penniless but – unlike Evalina – ‘alone’, ‘friendless’, and forced to find work.10 Rosa shares Evalina’s anxiety about losing gentility by association with the ungenteel. But in Rosa’s case, this proceeds not from shame – fear that her suitors will find her among the Branghtons and think her beneath them – but rather from the knowledge that gentility constitutes her only remaining capital. Lacking the skills of a lady’s maid and the physique for rough work, her ladylike manners and genteel accomplishments are all that Rosa has to trade for her bed and board. However, as Mary Wollstonecraft complained in a chapter devoted to ‘The Unfortunate Situation of Females, Fashionably Educated and Left without a Fortune’, for ladies such as these, ‘few are the modes of earning a subsistence, and those very humiliating’.11 Rosa must ‘get her own bread’ (I, 276) as a teacher, governess or companion in other women’s households or lose caste. She tries and fails to obtain work as a teacher in a genteel girls’ school. And, seeking employment in women’s households, she becomes a wanderer: like the ubiquitous eighteenth-century strolling poor, Rosa is obliged to travel across England and Scotland to wherever she is promised work and ‘an eligible asylum’ (III, 24), or, failing that, to wherever she thinks she might find someone she knew in her more prosperous days who could recommend her to an employer. Belying a modern critical distinction between the novelistic treatment of female orphans and male ‘bastards’,12 Rosa is therefore a picaro who traverses different parts of Britain and different ranks. She is frequently down to her last penny, forced to sleep in a barn or to rely on the charity of chance-met strangers – the benefactors in the novel’s

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title – to avoid total disaster. Rosa’s beauty and ‘unprotected’ state ensure that, like Evalina, she is frequently exposed to the violence of sexually predatory gentlemen. But these threats are nothing compared to the treatment Rosa receives from ladies: her difficulties in avoiding beggary and finding a safe harbour derive principally from the jealousy, malice and intrigues of other women. This is significant because ladies were key actors in all forms of eighteenthcentury English philanthropy. Great ladies were charged with the charitable support and supervision of impoverished tenants and dependants. Ladies helped to finance and superintend the new hospitals and workhouses that sprang up at mid-century to quell food riots and mollify the ‘deserving’ poor, while training them to labour discipline for the expanding commercial economy. And since these forms of charitable giving were designed for the lower orders, ladies provided for poor-genteel women of their own class separately by finding them posts as companions or governesses in other women’s households, by inviting them to live in their own, by helping them financially when they inhabited what Owen Hufton called ‘spinster clusters’, or by patronising their literary works.13 But in Bennett’s England during the 1790s, great ladies such as the Duchess of Portland or Elizabeth Montagu, Queen of the Blues, who befriended poor-genteel ladies in these ways, were anomalous, not to say anachronistic. The old families were losing their estates to new moneyed men, such as Sir Solomon Mushroom, who was related to ‘the numerous family of Mushrooms in England, Ireland and Scotland’ (I, 10); and the newly minted ‘gentlewomen’ who rose with them no longer bothered to assist women who had the manners and education but not the means to sustain gentility. To demonstrate that the danger Rosa constantly faced of having to ‘return to her original trade of begging’ (I, 276) was heavily gendered, Bennett inverted and repurposed Evalina’s double foundling plot, where Macartney, the male bastard and poor Scot, faced indigence and despair. In Bennett’s novel, Horace Littleton, the male bastard, is brought up, exactly like Rosa, as an ‘object of charity’ who is given a genteel education, and then left without money or prospects. But everything changes for him once he finds a patron in Colonel Bohanun. Bohanun, once an impoverished Scot dismissed with contempt by his noble relations, has made his fortune in the British Empire, and is willing to help Horace to do the same. Horace is therefore able to go out to India under the Colonel’s ‘protection’ (I, 175) to make his fortune by trading there, and to return to England to discover his ‘real’ grandfather and act with him to regain the title and estates usurped by greedy and intriguing relations. Other characters in this novel have made colonial fortunes too. Sir Solomon Mushroom, whose money has bought him ‘interest and power over almost everything’ in the small village of Penry, twenty-seven miles from London (I, 5), began life as a poor low-born servant. He made his first fortune when his aristocratic patron sent him to the American colonies, and his second fortune when that same patron used his position at court to give him the highly profitable provisioning of the British army in wartime. The difference between female nobodies and male nobodies, then, lay in the difference between benefaction and patronage – in the distance between the charity that a benefactor might casually bestow upon a Rosa and the profitable colonial adventures, commercial opportunities and preferment that a patron might procure for a Horace or for any merely masculine Mushroom.

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The difference between Evalina, protected by Villars and Lady Howard, and Rosa, desperately seeking almost non-existent work, also marked a difference between two casts of poor-genteel ladies – the well-connected and the ‘friendless’ in the contemporary sense where ‘friend’ meant family, kin or patron. Burney herself belonged to the first cast. Living in a well-connected family, she was found employment at court as a lady-in-waiting, and patronised by established writers, artists and society folk. Burney was in no more danger of starvation and neglect than Evalina. Something similar may be said of other writers patronised during the 1760s and 1770s by the Bluestocking circle – women of scant fortune, often descended from the minor landed gentry or the clergy, such as Sarah Scott, Hester Chapone, Sarah Fielding, Elizabeth Carter and Hannah More, whose writings supported the traditional order which supported them. But Bennett, who characterised her novels as ‘a combination of fact and fiction’, described herself upon her arrival in London as ‘four hundred Miles distant from Home, Family and Friends, a Stranger in a Country where she was literally taken in . . . her little fortune sinking . . . her domestic peace destroyed’.14 She characterised Rosa in The Beggar Girl in similar terms, as a ‘wretched unique’ (II, 175) – one of those gently bred females who were ‘forlorn, unallied, poor and insulted’ because they were women without family or ‘friends’, and thus ‘outcasts from every tie that unites the happy relatives in society’ (I, 176). For Britain was still centred economically, politically and socially on what Naomi Tadmor calls ‘the household-family’,15 and even obtaining work required ‘friends’. Bennett’s novel demonstrated that genteel female ‘uniques’ like Rosa were unable to support themselves adequately in England, not from want of virtue or ability, but because they lacked family and friends, or, if one prefers, because they were the first ‘unencumbered individuals’. They were wretched, singular, poor, and frequently dependent for their very survival on the charity of chance-met strangers, precisely because they were unconnected to others by the traditional ‘ties that cement social intercourse’ (II, 175). Amy Froide has argued that, thanks to the help and financial support of their female kin, many middling and lower-class Englishwomen managed to earn an independent living for themselves outside the household-family.16 Rosa showed what might happen to ladies who lacked such support – friendless women like those who, by the 1790s, were advertising for genteel employment in the London newspapers. Rosa spoke for all those genteelly educated single ladies without family, fortune or friends who struggled to turn their accomplishments into bread, and who were nobody who mattered to anybody; and she helps us to understand why ‘radicals’ such as Mary Wollstonecraft or Emma Hays argued so stridently that ladies must be enabled to support themselves through work.

Outcast in England, Friendless in Philadelphia Bennett, whose novels were sometimes mistaken for Burney’s and who may have been Scottish-born,17 inverted the implicit two-nations theme that Burney had introduced through Macartney, the impecunious and suicidal Scot, and made it central to her narrative design. Not only is most of volume II in the five-volume 1799 edition devoted to an exemplary portrayal of Scottish society, complete with a rare and detailed depiction of eighteenth-century Edinburgh, but all the exemplary and charitable characters in the novel, including both foundlings, are Scots. Bad things are permitted to happen

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only in England, through the agency of the English, or where the Scots have been infected with characteristically English self-interest and greed for gain. The Beggar Girl presents itself as a safely conservative novel dedicated to Her Royal Highness the Duchess of York, which ‘inculcates morality without seeming to mention it’ (I, 1) by showing how upward social mobility due to wealth was permitting the ‘venality and corruption’ (I, 163) of the low-born to displace the virtuous aristocratic culture of the ancien régime. But it can also be read more radically as a warning to Scots to beware of their corrupting union with England, and as an exhortation to remain faithful to native Scottish virtue, beneficence and responsibility for clan and kin. Martha Read retained the centrality of the two-nations theme from Bennett, but reverted to Burney’s more explicit focus on relations between the English and the French. Read substituted French immigrants for Bennett’s Scots, and Americans in newly independent Philadelphia for Bennett’s England, and used her French immigrants to Philadelphia to demythologise what Bennett had retained of the promised benefits of union: the assurance that impecunious Scots would make their fortunes by going out to the colonies and participating in Britain’s commercial empire. Self-interest and greed for gain characterise Read’s Pennsylvania as they do Bennett’s England; and though there are good, beneficent characters among Americans as well as among the French, they are few and far between. Like Rosa begging for her mother at the beginning of Bennett’s Beggar Girl, Monima has ‘an aged father to maintain, and no resources, but which must flow from the mercy of merciless strangers’ (11). But the reasons for her poverty in Philadelphia are different: Monima Fontanbleu’s beggarly state proceeds from the fact that she and her father immigrated to America with the wave of French refugees fleeing the revolution in Santo Domingo. She is the daughter of a once-wealthy French colonial planter who, like most of the Domingan refugees in America, is now absolutely destitute. Read made the two-nations theme central both to Fontanbleu’s destitution and to Monima’s difficulties in earning a subsistence in Philadelphia through her exquisite needlework, by showing that, in ethnically diverse Philadelphia, ‘people lived chiefly among their own kind’.18 ‘Male exiles’ from France or her colonies re-established themselves there by ‘calling on their [erstwhile French] social networks to reclaim debts, to obtain personal loans, or to acquire investment funds for new business ventures’.19 But Fontanbleu is too old and ill to work, and too ashamed of his losses to make himself known to the local French community where individuals who knew him from better days might help him out. Consequently Monima has to work or beg in his stead. At the same time, in an American city where ‘close and dependable friendships were difficult to establish’,20 the Fontanbleus are strangers to the established American merchants who could give Monima work. In Philadelphia, Monima is ‘forlorn, unallied, poor and insulted’, not because she lacks family like Rosa, but because she is ‘a French bitch’ (29) and ‘a total stranger to the surrounding inhabitants’ (220) in a mercantile anglophone city where people worked with people they knew, and everything depended on being known. Thus Monima too is a beggar because she has no ‘friends’; but she has no friends because she is a Frenchwoman, a poor immigrant and a stranger to the United States. At the turn of the nineteenth century, then, before the myths of Romantic individualism and of the self-made man had taken hold, Read and Bennett both made it clear that no one in Britain or the United States, however capable, could make it entirely on their own, without the countenance or assistance of any human creature;21 and that

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for different reasons, America’s capital and Britain were both closed societies that were cruel, hostile or indifferent to strangers. Lacking friends, sixteen-year-old Monima has to walk around Philadelphia daily, ‘fasting and shivering’ in her ‘scanty mantel’ (11, 15) often in the snow, seeking whatever work she can get by knocking at the doors of the affluent and entering the shops of the merchants who, together, constitute the local gentry. In Philadelphia, where the textile trade was predominantly in female hands, Read showed that Monima’s greatest difficulties proceeded, like Rosa’s, from the jealousy, malice, ‘indifference or contempt’ (16) of other women. For instance, when she asks for work in a shop where there are evidently waistcoats waiting to be embroidered, Miss Jenny, standing behind the counter, tells her ‘she’s a pretty figure to embroider’ looking as she does – here ‘the rags in which she was wrapped . . . were the very means of debarring her from an honest support’ (240). Image was already all-important in the United States. When Monima does get temporary work, she is invariably exploited – for instance, the widowed Mrs Firming, who gives her sewing to do for her neighbours, helps herself in secret to half Monima’s earnings, and refuses to recommend her to anyone (426). As the narrator points out, if Mrs Firming had only ‘introduced her as an able seamstress to her neighbours, Monima would have become acquainted, and her industry might have been a never failing source of decent support to herself and her father’ (300). Whenever she fails to find temporary work, Monima is forced to beg, and to undergo all the humiliations and sufferings to which paupers in the lower orders were subject in Philadelphia, where hospitals and workhouses were being built on the English model, to contain and control the strolling poor. One day, Monima is sent to the workhouse, and beaten; another day, she is falsely accused of theft and brought before a magistrate; another day, she is locked up in a hospital for the insane; another day, the Fontanbleus’ few remaining possessions are sold by their landlord in lieu of rent. Like Rosa, Monima is constantly exposed to predatory men and to the danger of falling into prostitution; and though they are, like the strolling poor, willing to travel anywhere for work, she and her father are often left ‘roofless wanderers . . . without the necessary dependencies of life, and without friends to fly to for refuge’ (254). They almost ‘perish for want’. If they survive, it is thanks to the timely charity of two strangers: a poor working woman called Debbie, who finds Fontanbleu dying of exposure on her front steps and takes them in; and a wealthy and compassionate Frenchman, Soutine, who occasionally thrusts a few dollars into Monima’s begging hand. Soutine is the male orphan of the foundling plot: at sixteen, he was ‘an orphan . . . an outcast, and little short of a beggar’ thanks to ‘fraudulent and grasping guardians’ who purloined his inheritance; but once rescued from this situation by a patron in the New World, he managed to make good. Soutine repeatedly acts as what Monima calls her ‘benefactor’ because he knows from the Old World what it means to lack friends or relations to ‘succor [one’s] distress’ (211). Soutine would have adopted Monima, as Villars adopted Evalina and Bohanun Rosa, if his mean-spirited, jealous and low-born American wife had agreed. With these two exceptions, then, Read portrays Philadelphia during the early Republic as a city which was as money-driven as Bennett’s England and ancien régime France – here too everyone, including servants and the lower sort, will do anything, however wrong, for money.22 In addressing the difficulties ladies faced in earning a living during the 1790s, more familiar ‘radical’ novels, such as Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice (1799), Perdita

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Robinson’s Natural Daughter (1799), Eliza Inchbald’s Nature and Art (1796), or even Susanna Rowson’s Fille de Chambre (1794), connected the issue to a woman’s loss of virtue, whether real or falsely presumed. This made them susceptible to a conservative reading in which women were rightly ‘punished’ through the hardships they faced in the labour market for sexual misconduct, or for a carelessness of reputation, which banished them from the supposed shelter and security of the household-family. Bennett and Read, by contrast, not only separated genteel women’s difficulties in the labour market from sexual morality by ensuring that, like Evalina, their heroines did not ‘fall’; they also demonstrated that virtue had nothing to do with obtaining work, with gaining money, or with social status. In Bennett’s novel, the foundling plot created by mislaying babies farmed out to wet-nurses shows that Scottish aristocrats had begun to resemble corrupt English and European ones in their irresponsibility about filiation and carelessness of kin. By contrast, Sir Solomon Mushroom’s money enables him to get away with raising his two natural daughters as his wards, with having them educated as ladies, and with marrying them into the aristocracy. Mrs Bawsky lives in open adultery with Dr Croake, the Penry village physician, her 250 pounds a year ensuring that ‘the Doctor, with his virtuous friend, were allowed to be rich and respectable’ (I, 84) and were everywhere received. Having turned out his own son at the prompting of this ‘virtuous’ companion, Dr Croake in turn enriches himself by appropriating the money he is given to raise Mrs Bawsky’s supposed ‘niece’, Eleanor – another young woman of dubious origins who is educated to be a lady. Servants too are infected by the universal lust for lucre: Mrs Betty denies her marriage to a husband who has become poor in order to bigamously marry Tom, the butler with healthy savings and fairer prospects of advancement. Money everywhere trumps virtue as well as birth; and neither the new English marriage law nor the newer bastardy laws count for much, when money and well-heeled relations can contrive to make female bastards pass as legitimate, respectable gentry. Similarly, in Read’s Philadelphia, a prosperous and established married woman like Soutine’s wife can have an affair with a charming, aristocratic Frenchman and continue to be everywhere received; here, too, virtue had less to do with respectability and social acceptance than wealth. In societies such as these, to be virtuous was to be naive – Rosa’s and Monima’s virtue only made them the more vulnerable and helpless because the more easily taken in. Read’s nuanced portrayal of the French immigrant community in Philadelphia demonstrated her American republicanism, where Bennett had demonstrated an almost Jacobite attachment to an ancien régime governed by a Scottish aristocracy which has returned to its virtuous ancient ways. In Read’s novel, the exemplary characters among the French are squarely bourgeois, though representing different migrations. Soutine embodies the first wave of French immigrants to America – men who had arrived with funds, had successfully established themselves as merchants, and had integrated themselves into the American mercantile elite by marrying American wives. Fontanbleu, a once prosperous merchant who had fled France for the colonies, embodies the later wave of French refugees from the Santo Domingo revolution, whose key experience was their fall from their erstwhile ‘opulence to beggary’ (224). The novel’s principal villain, Pierre de Noix, represents a third group of French immigrants – aristocratic exiles from the French Revolution, who brought with them all the venality and corruption of France’s ancien régime. De Noix is a scoundrel whose adulterous libertinism corrupts Soutine’s American family, and whose intrigues, violence and sexual

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predation almost ruin Monima. Read used him to make Liancourt’s rueful point, that the ‘vices of the French survive any position in society and any misfortune’.23 For de Noix was also a key player in the backstory to Soutine’s and Fontanbleu’s emigration from France: this gives a graphic account of how, under the ancien régime, prosperous bourgeois families were murdered and bankrupted by the ‘artful machinations’ of aristocrats and by the arbitrary injustices of monarchical courts. Displaced to the ‘backstory’ in France, Soutine’s foundling plot re-marks the corruption of the ancien régime, where greed, injustices and abuses of power dismembered innocent families. Aristocratic refugees from the French Revolution such as de Noix brought with them the vices and social evils of ancien régime France, infecting Philadelphia with all that Soutine and Fontanbleu had fled France for the New World to escape. Thus where Bennett concluded her novel by restoring a chastened and corrected Scottish aristocracy to its traditional hierarchical place, Read banished aristocrats from Philadelphia, and left her readers with the vision of a restored and corrected mercantile elite, whose wealth and entrepreneurship were joined to virtue, charity and beneficence.24 One might say, by the same token, that Read chose Bennett’s novel as the object of her imitation to quietly make another, more contentious, republican point: that in what related to money, affectation and status, in rabid self-interest and greed for gain, in cruelty to poor strangers, in women’s jealousy, malice and indifference to the fate of other women, and in the miseries suffered by poor and ‘friendless’ girls, early national Philadelphia strongly resembled Bennett’s England. Philadelphia was still too English. After revolution and independence, the ‘New World’ and the ‘Old Country’ were still too much the same. Bennett and Read both ultimately redeemed their heroines from their ‘female difficulties’, as Burney had redeemed Evalina, by reconnecting them to what remained of their family of origin and marrying them to a prosperous and prestigious man. Where Evalina marries the wealthy and aristocratic Orville, Rosa marries Horace, now restored to his title and estates, and Monima marries the rich merchant Soutine, now conveniently widowed. But Read and Bennett both treated this conventional happy ending with scepticism. Both made it clear that their happy ending came about through what Bennett called ‘the up and down jumble of chance’ (I, 67) and Read ‘the chance of life’ (442), with Bennett positively parodying the excessive concatenation of improbable coincidences that powered and resolved traditional Romance’s aristocratic foundling plot. Both authors also undermined the supposition that marriage was a secure and reliable solution to female poverty by showing well-to-do wives rightly fearing that they would be left penniless in their husbands’ wills; husbands suddenly precipitated into poverty; and wives in the middling and lower ranks not knowing where to turn when suddenly stripped of a husband’s financial support by death or desertion. Bennett opened her novel with just such a tableau: that of a wife abandoned by her soldier husband, who is reduced to begging with her child. If, as Tim Hitchcock found, adult women with children in tow, the relics of soldiers away at war, were the kind of beggar that appeared most often in contemporary statistical and legal records, mothers with children in tow were the most familiar kind of beggars.25 In economic terms, then, even a happy marriage was not the end of the story; marriage, even to a man of means, might prove little more than a temporary financial fix. In detailing the difficulties women faced in escaping beggary in greedy and moneydriven anglicised cultures where everyone was pursuing their own self-interest, Bennett

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and Read both came down on the same side of debates about the poor which were being pursued on fairly parallel lines in Britain and the United States. Both castigated characters who dismissed poor women as lazy, idle, depraved and improvident hussies who had brought poverty upon themselves, and demonstrated where the greedy and hard-hearted rich were themselves guilty of causing the pauperism they despised and condemned. Read was particularly strident about the absurdities and paradoxes here: ‘Noone would trust the “mean-looking creature” [Monima] with work, and yet each one exclaimed against her indolence, in passing her prime engaged in claiming charity, when she looked able enough to work’ (240). Read also offered negative accounts of the public institutions – workhouses and hospitals – which were modelled on those in England and designated to cope with the rising tide of poor folk in Philadelphia.26 Both novelists demonstrated repeatedly that notwithstanding their willingness to work, poor women without ‘friends’ must ‘die of want in a plentiful country’ (Read 249) were it not for the personal charity and timely intervention of strangers. Read consequently stressed the need for men and women of means in the United States to act as benefactors to poor women. She used her narrative emplotment to fictionally ‘prove’ a contemporary dictum, that ‘benevolence would reap future rewards’, by demonstrating through Fontanbleu that charitable acts ‘gained [one] friends’ who would ‘recompense [one’s] kindness’ (284) in one’s own time of need. Warning wellto-do readers that what went around came around, and that they might suddenly find themselves in dire straits too, Read continued her novel after the happy ending in order to describe Monima as exemplary in her wifely duty of charity to the poor. Once married to the prosperous Soutine, Monima becomes ‘the soother of the afflicted, the mother of the orphan, the supporter of the oppressed’ and has ‘double compassion for the miseries of her fellow creatures’ for having experienced so many of them herself (457). Read was particularly emphatic on this point because, as she demonstrated through an earlier account of Monima’s visit to a bookseller’s shop, the other solution proposed by Bennett was as yet largely closed to educated women in America. Writing in London, where the book trade was more fully developed, and where many eighteenth-century women writers, including Fanny Burney d’Arblay and Bennett herself, supported themselves and their children by writing for the press, Bennett presented authorship as a viable economic alternative to domestic employments and marriage for women lacking the requisite ‘friends’. In a second dedication buried in the midst of volume I, Bennett dismissed the patronage of what she called ‘the higher order of society’ and told her readers that in The Beggar Girl she had been ‘content . . . to frame a story for her bookseller, herself, and those grand supporters of genius, novel readers’, many of whom were ‘little folks who have the presumption to breathe the same atmosphere with the greatest of the great’ (I, 67). Bennett’s alternative to female beggary, as well as to domestic employment and dependence on the favour or charity of the great, was to present The Beggar Girl and her Benefactors as a token of a different, new and more impersonal kind of economic relationship. Here unknown readers, including many in the lower ranks, patronised and supported Bennett, the woman without ‘friends’, through the mediation of her bookseller, William Lane at the Minerva Press. Bennett was suggesting that the important thing about the Minerva Press was that it offered genteelly educated women something that her novel showed was now largely unavailable to them elsewhere: that ‘eligible asylum’ from beggary and want which her heroine sought. As Edward Jacobs has pointed

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out, the Minerva Press differed from other contemporary presses by flouting the London book trade’s traditional pursuit of ‘high-profit but low-volume trading’,27 and by encouraging female readers of its novels to become novel writers themselves. About 95 per cent of the authors that the Minerva Press published in bulk were women, many of them publishing again and again. Writing in the midst of a long and prolific career as one of the Minerva Press’s most popular authors, Anna Maria Bennett did not foresee that penury and want would again overtake her in old age, or that, like so many of her peers, she would find herself begging for charity from the Literary Fund at the end of her life.28 Through their imitations of narrative elements from Evalina, Bennett and Read displayed the cultural affinities with England of the Scottish and early republican societies they described, as well as their own English literary lineage. But writing for the ‘Celtic fringe’ after Scotland’s union with England, and from Philadelphia after union with England had been dissolved, Bennett’s and Read’s novels foregrounded the twonations theme marginal in Burney, to show how much cultural affinities with England were to be deplored. This may explain why Conrad chose to reprint Bennett’s Beggar Girl in early national Philadelphia. Outcast in England or friendless in Philadelphia, their heroines are redeemed from penury and exclusion by reinsertion into their native communities. But where Bennett looked back to the virtues of Scotland’s traditional aristocracy, which had once ruled England and might again, Read looked forward to a future in the United States in which ethnic communities would live side by side. As I hope this analysis illustrates, grounding Atlantic studies in the history of writing and the history of the book can bring to light otherwise invisible dimensions of literary texts that bear directly on the ways in which literary topoi and cultural issues linked and distinguished the diverse anglophone societies within the Atlantic world. Imitations were not servile copies. At once old and new, native and foreign, they originated by revisioning and altering what they borrowed. We might describe them in postmodern terms as a form of intertextuality which ‘cited’ other texts to mock, ‘critique’ or adapt them to changed times and cultural locations; which depended for the legibility of their difference on readers’ recognition of the already written and already read; and which used that difference to carry narratives and ideas across temporal and cultural borders, often in unexpected ways. As long as imitation was the standard method of writing, texts derived significant meaning from the complex web of relationships they established to their models. Recovering these now-forgotten webs of relationships permits us to connect literary texts across the Atlantic, and perceive cultural shifts and cultural choices as they arose.

Notes 1. Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language (1755; Dublin, 1775), p. 1,292. Howard Weinbrot calls this ‘modernization’ but stresses issues of time, ignoring issues of place, in The Formal Strain: Studies in Augustan Imitation and Satire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 15ff. 2. For reading double, see Eve Tavor Bannet, ‘Quixotes, Imitations and Transatlantic Genres’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 40.4 (2007): 553–69. 3. Susan Manning, Poetics of Character: Transatlantic Encounters, 1700–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

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4. Zsolt Komaromy, Figure of Memory from the Muses to Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2011), p. 1. 5. Quintilian, The Institutio Oratoria, 4 vols (London: Loeb, 1979), vol. 4, p. 3. 6. Mrs Bennett, The Beggar Girl and her Benefactors, 5 vols, 2nd edn (London: Minerva Press, 1799). Volume and page numbers in the text of the chapter refer to this edition. 7. Monima or The Beggar Girl: A Novel in One Volume Founded on Fact. By A Lady from Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1803). References will be to this edition and in the text. 8. Sandra Sherman, Imagining Poverty: Quantification and the Decline of Paternalism (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001); Simon Newman, Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Tim Hitchcock, Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London (London: Hambledon, 2004); Sarah Lloyd, ‘Poverty’, in Iain McColman et al. (eds), An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Raymond A. Mohl, Poverty in New York, 1783–1825 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). 9. Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), esp. chapter 5. 10. Pamela Sharpe, Adapting to Capitalism: Working Women in the English Economy, 1700–1850 (London: Macmillan, 1996); Bridget Hill, Women Alone: Spinsters in England, 1660–1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Elizabeth C. Sanderson, Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century Edinburgh (London: Macmillan, 1996). 11. Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (London, 1787), p. 69. 12. Lisa Zunshine, Bastards and Foundlings: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005); Cheryl L. Nixon, The Orphan in EighteenthCentury Law and Literature (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). 13. Beth Fowkes Tobin, Superintending the Poor: Charitable Ladies and Paternal Landlords in British Fiction, 1770–1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); Dorice Williams Elliott, The Angel out of the House: Philanthropy and Gender in Nineteenth-Century England (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002); Patricia Comitini, Vocational Philanthropy and British Women’s Writing, 1790–1810 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Betty Rizzo, Companions without Vows (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990); Owen Hufton, ‘Women without Men: Widows and Spinsters in Great Britain and France during the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Family History 9 (1984): 355–76; Eve Tavor Bannet, ‘The Bluestocking Sisters: Women’s Patronage, Millenium Hall and “The Visible Providence of a Country” ’, Eighteenth-Century Life 30.1 (2005): 25–55. 14. Anna Maria Bennett, ‘Dedication to Col. Hunter’, Agnes de Courci: A Domestic Tale (Bath, 1789), p. 8, and ‘Apology’, Ellen, Countess of Castle Howel (London: Minerva Press, 1794), p. 5. 15. Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship and Patronage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 16. Amy M. Froide, Never Married: Single Women in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 17. A contemporary obituary described Bennett as Welsh-born, possibly on the basis of her first novel. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says she may have been born in Glamorgan. A London paper indicates that she was sojourning in Edinburgh in 1799: ‘Mrs. Esten, and her Mother, Mrs. Bennett, the Novelist, are passing their time at Edinburgh. When urged lately for a colour to a new carriage, a wag advised her to that of Brimstone.’ The Oracle and Public Advertiser (London, Thursday, 7 November 1799), issue 22,136, p. 1. 18. Laura L. Becker, ‘Diversity and its Significance in an Eighteenth-Century Pennsylvania Town’, in Michael Zuckerman, Friends and Neighbors: Group Life in America’s First Plural Society (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982), p. 197.

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19. R. Darrell Meadows, ‘Engineering Exile: Social Networks and the French Atlantic Community, 1789–1809’, French Historical Studies 23.1 (2000), p. 81. 20. Billy G. Smith, The ‘Lower Sort’: Philadelphia’s Laboring People, 1750–1800 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 183. 21. Karin Wulf shows that all single women in Philadelphia depended heavily on family, friends and neighbours to survive. See Not All Wives (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000). 22. This echoes the perceptions of contemporary French exiles such as Talleyrand and Liancourt. See Donna Pasca Harsanyi, Lessons from America: Liberal French Nobles in Exile, 1793–1798 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010). 23. Quoted in Harsanyi, Lessons from America, pp. 66–7. For the composition of the French community and the growing anti-French and anti-immigrant feeling, see Catherine A. Hebert, ‘The French Element in Pennsylvania in the 1790s: The Francophone Immigrants’ Impact’, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 108.4 (1984): 451–69. 24. For a different reading, see Joseph Fichtelberg, ‘Friendless in Philadelphia: The Feminist Critique of Martha Meredith Read’, Early American Literature 32.3 (1997): 205–22. 25. Hitchcock, Down and Out, p. 209. 26. John K. Alexander, Render them Submissive: Responses to Poverty in Philadelphia, 1760–1800 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980). 27. Edward H. Jacobs, Accidental Migrations (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2000), p. 169. 28. Jennie Batchelor, Women’s Work: Labour, Gender, Authorship, 1750–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), chapter 4; E. J. Clery et al. (eds), Authorship, Commerce and the Public: Scenes of Writing, 1750–1830 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Cheryl Turner, Living by the Pen (London: Routledge, 1994).

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6 ‘We are where we are’: Colm Tóibín’s BROOKLYN, Mythologies of Return and the Post-Celtic Tiger Moment Sinéad Moynihan

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n a 2011 article published in the Irish Times, Fintan O’Toole claimed that ‘the great theme of the contemporary Irish novel is not Ireland but the US’.1 Pointing to Joseph O’Connor’s Redemption Falls (2007), Colm Tóibín’s The Master (2004) and Brooklyn (2009), Colum McCann’s This Side of Brightness (1998) and Let the Great World Spin (2009), Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008), Roddy Doyle’s Oh, Play That Thing (2004) and Sebastian Barry’s On Canaan’s Side (2011), O’Toole observes that the phenomenon ‘makes little sociological sense’ because all of these writers came of age in an era ‘in which forced emigration from Ireland had all but ceased’.2 One explanation for the trend, O’Toole contends, is that contemporary Irish writers have responded to large-scale in-migration to Ireland, a phenomenon from which ‘native Irish writers were imaginatively excluded’, by reclaiming ‘the Irish experience of being an immigrant in a strange country’; hence, many of the above are examples of historical fiction, set in a range of moments, from the 1860s to the 1950s, during which emigration was a significant feature of Irish life. Echoing O’Toole, Elizabeth Butler Cullingford argues that Tóibín, for example, set his novel in the past not in order to evade contemporary reality . . . but to condemn by analogy the xenophobia of Celtic Tiger Ireland, whose frenetic energies, financial corruption, and nascent racism did not interest him as direct subject matter.3

The juxtaposition of historical emigration from and contemporary immigration to Ireland is a literary and cultural trend I have identified and discussed extensively elsewhere.4 What interests me here is the turn towards tropes of emigration and return in post-Celtic Tiger novels. Since September 2008, when it was announced officially that Ireland had entered recession, a series of novels has appeared, all of them set at an historical remove from the present day, in which emigration to the US and return to Ireland are the primary thematic preoccupations. To the post-2008 novels listed above, we might add John Butler’s The Tenderloin (2011), Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic (2013), Kate Kerrigan’s ‘Ellis Island’ trilogy (Ellis Island (2009), City of Hope (2011) and Land of Dreams (2013)), Mary Costello’s Academy Street (2014) and Nuala Ní Chonchúir’s Miss Emily (2015). In an era of high unemployment and renewed emigration, it is tempting to interpret these novels in a literal way: as recognition on the part

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of Irish writers that out-migration, having all but disappeared during the boom years, has now returned as a dominant feature of Irish cultural life. However, this chapter pursues a different line of analysis. Focusing particularly on Tóibín’s Brooklyn, this chapter contends that the novel must be read in the context of wider Irish discourses of self-analysis that accompanied the collapse of the Celtic Tiger economy, discourses which troubled the historical construction of the Irish/US transatlantic relationship in oppositional terms (Ireland as traditional, backward, feudal; the United States as modern, forward-thinking, (neo) liberal) by suggesting that boom-time Ireland had, in fact, become the US.5 In Brooklyn, emigration to the US serves as a metaphor for the protagonist’s entry into a free market, neoliberal economy that symbolises Celtic Tiger Ireland.6 Although Tóibín is apparently at pains to emphasise the vast disparities between these two worlds, a careful reading of the novel reveals that both spaces are, in fact, two sides of the same coin. The Ireland that Eilis Lacey leaves (symbolising the pre-Celtic Tiger moment) and to which she returns (post-Celtic Tiger) is not fundamentally dissimilar from Brooklyn. By drawing such parallels in time and space, Tóibín exhorts his readers to question the kinds of narratives that were constructed about both the boom years and their aftermath and indicts the form of nostalgia most pervasive in contemporary Ireland: a rather confused nostalgia for both the Celtic Tiger (pre-austerity) and the pre-Celtic Tiger moment (before Ireland was ‘corrupted’ by economic success). By deploying the motifs of emigration and return in radical new ways, the novel explores and trenchantly critiques the neoliberal economic model celebrated during the boom years and suggests new economic possibilities for the post-Celtic Tiger moment. The larger concern of this chapter is to assert the importance of Ireland within Atlantic literary studies scholarship. One of the ironies of such scholarship is that despite its assault on exceptionalist approaches to the study of the United States, it has been dominated historically by an exceptionalist idea of what the ‘transatlantic’ is: the Anglo-American relationship. As Christopher Cusack notes, despite the fact that Ireland, ‘an island in the Atlantic ocean, has been a conspicuous presence in the Atlantic world in various ways’, it constitutes a ‘lacuna’ in the field of Atlantic studies.7 Moreover, as Alison Garden and Muireann Crowley have observed recently, foundational work in Atlantic literary studies – by Robert Weisbuch, Paul Giles and Susan Manning, among others – undoubtedly has ‘a broader Atlantic application’. However, this work and the proliferation of monographs in series published by Edinburgh University Press and Ashgate ‘have primarily explored the dialogue between British, or more commonly English, and North American texts and topics’.8 For Garden and Crowley, the increasing turn to the term ‘Atlantic’ rather than ‘transatlantic’ is indicative of a broader scholarly willingness to expand the parameters of literary studies relating to the Atlantic world. Noting that the editors of Edinburgh University Press’s Studies in Transatlantic Literatures have recently retitled the series Edinburgh Critical Studies in Atlantic Literatures and Cultures, Garden and Crowley speculate that the shift in nomenclature ‘may be indicative of a turn towards a putatively more encompassing circum-Atlantic schema’.9 Before turning to the novel itself, then, I want to explicate the connection between Irish/American transatlantic relations and the (post-)Celtic Tiger moment as it has been discursively constructed in Ireland’s very recent history. First, it is necessary to provide a brief plot summary of Tóibín’s novel. Set in the years 1951 to 1953,

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Brooklyn is the story of Eilis Lacey who, at the beginning of the novel, is living at home in Enniscorthy with her widowed mother and older sister, Rose. The Lacey brothers have all emigrated to England. When it becomes clear how limited Eilis’s opportunities are in Enniscorthy (she can only get poorly paid part-time work as a shop assistant), her sister arranges for her to emigrate to New York, aided by a priest who sets her up with a room in a boarding house run by an Irishwoman, Mrs Kehoe, and a job in a Brooklyn department store. Initially profoundly homesick, Eilis begins to settle in her new home when she enrols in bookkeeping classes and embarks on a romance with an Italian-American plumber named Tony Fiorello. When Rose dies suddenly, Eilis rushes back to Ireland, but only after marrying Tony – who is fearful that she will not return to him – before her departure. Back in Enniscorthy, Eilis reconnects with old friends and is courted by Jim Farrell, who had previously snubbed her. Seduced by this new life, her letters from Tony go unread and unanswered. Having thought seriously about staying in Ireland, Eilis is forced to return when her former employer, Miss Kelly, summons her and intimates that she knows, and will publicise the fact, that Eilis is already married.

The Tiger, Modernity and the ‘Returned Yank’ For some time, the most familiar refrain of the current recession (2008–) in Ireland, reiterated by politicians and economists and satirised by Irish-American songwriter Paddy Cullivan, was ‘we are where we are’. Irish Times journalist Kevin Courtney even cited it, alongside ‘Gleeks’ and ‘Wikileaks’, as one of the most ‘enduring catchphrase[s]’ of 2010.10 The sound bite is striking for the extent to which it contains both spatial and temporal resonances. ‘We are where we are’ in both time (post-boom) and space (a small, relatively vulnerable and isolated, Atlantic-facing country). It also captures appropriately the dramatic scale of the reversal from boom to bust. For if ‘we are where we are’ implies stasis in both time and space, the Celtic Tiger years were characterised by vertiginous economic, social and cultural transformation resulting in what O’Toole terms ‘uncertainties of both space and time’ that made it hard for Irish people to be quite sure ‘where they were living, and when’.11 In his book analysing the causes of Ireland’s recession, Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger (2009), O’Toole argues that the pace of change during the Celtic Tiger years – ‘rapid urbanisation, multiculturalism, the need to make one’s way in a polyglot and physically unfamiliar society’ – led to ‘a recapitulation’ of the experiences of many Irish people’s own forebears ‘when they emigrated from rural farms to huge metropolitan centres in the US or Britain’. In other words, the ‘diasporic life was now lived at home’: the ‘sense of estrangement felt by generations of emigrants could now be felt without actually going anywhere’.12 During the boom years, ‘Ireland [was] not Ireland any more but someplace else. And it came up with a name for that place: America.’13 Up to this point, the relationship between Ireland and the US had historically been constructed in oppositional terms. The US provided jobs and the prospect of social mobility, frequently in urban centres, for countless Irish (often rural) migrants, while Ireland endured decades of economic retardation, heavy dependence on subsistence farming, poverty and unemployment. However, the dramatic shifts of Ireland’s boom years (full employment, rapid globalisation, unprecedented economic growth,

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sustained in-migration) overturned this connection, dissolving the differences between Ireland and its historical benefactor. What is at stake in this configuration of Ireland-as-America during the Celtic Tiger years is an ambivalence regarding modernity and the neoliberal economic policies employed in order to achieve it. Such policies were most succinctly, and famously, articulated in 2000 by then Tánaiste (Deputy Prime Minister) Mary Harney, who told a meeting of the American Bar Association in Dublin that though Ireland might be geographically closer to Berlin, ‘[s]piritually we are probably a lot closer to Boston than Berlin’.14 She went on to delineate two contrasting business models, a US one ‘that is heavily based on enterprise and incentive, on individual effort and with limited government intervention’ and a European one ‘built on a strong concern for social harmony and social inclusion, with governments being prepared to intervene strongly through the tax and regulatory systems to achieve their desired outcomes’. In the Celtic Tiger years, Ireland ‘sailed closer to the American shore than the European one’. Given this context, it is unsurprising that in the immediate post-boom moment, in which the Irish subjected themselves to endless and obsessive self-questioning regarding ‘how it all went wrong’ and ‘how we lost the run of ourselves’, the underlying preoccupation was with the acceleration of the modernisation process during the boom years and with versions of the following questions: ‘did we try to modernise too quickly?’ and ‘what did we lose through the process of modernisation?’15 In short, ‘did we try to become too like America?’ If the boom years were characterised by a perceived erosion of the distinction between the US and Ireland, a phenomenon alternately framed in celebratory or lamenting terms, Tóibín responds imaginatively to this situation by reworking a very long-established trope in the Irish cultural imagination: that of the ‘Returned Yank’. If Ireland is now effectively the US, what impact might this have on the trope of the Returned Yank, so often an index of difference between Ireland and the United States? The stereotypical Returned Yank, according to Philip O’Leary, is characterised by ‘flashy clothes, conspicuous wealth, ignorance, bombast, and a distressing accent’.16 In August 2007, Martina Devlin hinted at this confusion between Celtic Tiger Ireland and the US when she noted that in so far as the native Irish are ‘trying as hard as [they] can’ to emulate Returned Yanks such as Michael Flatley ‘[a]nd to spend . . . like him’, they’re ‘turning into a nation of Irish-Americans’.17 Despite comparatively low rates of actual return migration among the Irish in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the figure of the Returned Yank has featured significantly and disproportionately in Irish fiction, film and media.18 In the second half of the twentieth century, I would argue, (s)he emerges forcefully as ‘an appropriate site for tracking the ambiguities of the modern’, to borrow a phrase from Joe Cleary.19 In the 1960s, with Taoiseach Sean Lemass’s adoption of the recommendations of T. K. Whitaker’s White Paper, Economic Development (1958), Ireland began to embark on a systematic programme of modernisation. From the early 1950s on, countless cultural texts and artefacts emerged in which the Returned Yank is mobilised, variously and sometimes simultaneously, as an alibi for modernisation and progress, a nostalgic critic of it and the very embodiment of it. It is appropriate, therefore, that Brooklyn also deploys the figure of the returnee in order to interrogate updated questions regarding tradition and modernity that surfaced during the Celtic Tiger and post-Celtic Tiger years.

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In fact, such concerns often manifest themselves in two kinds of Returned Yank narrative: one, like The Quiet Man (dir. John Ford, 1952), in which the returnee comes to Ireland seeking escape from the demands of modern life, where rural Ireland is idealised as a pre-modern, bucolic haven; the other, like The Field (dir. Jim Sheridan, 1990), in which the returnee finds his homeplace backward and tries to ‘improve’ or ‘modernise’ it. As Luke Gibbons has argued persuasively, compared with Sean Thornton (John Wayne) in The Quiet Man, Tom Berenger’s character in The Field is ‘a more destructive, intrusive presence, subscribing to the industrial logic and profit motive rejected by Sean: instead of seeking to reconnect with the maternal past, his plan is to bury it forever under the concrete of a hydroelectric station’.20 Depending on whether rural Ireland is configured as idyllic or backward in this latter narrative, modernisation is alternately viewed as negative or positive. In Walter Macken’s Brown Lord of the Mountain (1967), for example, Donn Donnshleibhe returns to his West of Ireland home after many years living abroad and embarks on a campaign of modernisation. He convinces the locals to sign up for rural electrification; he raises money to build a reservoir so that the village can have running water; he campaigns to have a dance hall opened so that the young people can avail of local diversions and will, thus, be less likely to emigrate. As one villager tells him, ‘You’ll have this place like a suburb of New York one of these days.’21 However, the challenge that Donn faces is to encourage progress without bringing about the complete destruction of those positive aspects of the pre-modern past that are resistant to change, as embodied by his beautiful but ‘afflicted’ daughter, Nan. Nan suffers from a learning disability which no brain operation will rectify. She is symbolically ‘backward’ and cannot be made to ‘catch up’: the intelligence in her eyes is ‘not the intelligence of her age’.22 Nan’s rape at the hands of a returned emigrant from England, who decides to stay in Ireland after Donn invests in his tractor business, betrays Macken’s ambivalence regarding Donn’s programme of modernisation: some beautiful things (women/landscapes) cannot be brought up to date, and any attempt to achieve this by force constitutes a violation. Macken’s novel is explicit in its gender politics: transnational mobility is available only to Irish men, while Irish women are associated with the home(land), a trend that is perceptible across Returned Yank narratives – with a few exceptions – and which is at odds with the historical fact that there was disproportionate emigration by women from Ireland from the 1880s on.23 As Ellen McWilliams puts it, ‘if . . . the woman is typically designated as the one who stays at home – in spite of the fact that history contradicts such a claim – it might in part be explained by a larger cultural association between woman and the way in which ideas of “home” are imagined’.24 The fact that Tóibín’s novel features a female protagonist is entirely consistent with the peculiarly gendered inflections of the Celtic Tiger moment and its aftermath. Brooklyn dramatises and critiques what Diane Negra terms ‘a key tendency of Ireland’s representational environment since 2007’: to recast the Celtic Tiger period as ‘an era of feminised hyper-consumerism’.25 As Negra argues elsewhere, the ‘New Irishness’ (by which she means Celtic Tiger Irishness) is characterised by ‘makeover strategies in which both self and landscape are to be relentlessly improved upon and developed for profit maximization and efficiency’.26 O’Toole, for example, imagines the reversal in Ireland’s economic fortunes during the boom years as ‘a large-scale version of a TV makeover show, with the “before” pictures showing a slovenly, depressed wretch and the “after” images a smiling, blingbedecked beauty, who went on to start her own self-improvement course for similarly

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abject little countries’.27 (He also describes the ‘hyper-capitalist growth of the period between 2002 and 2008’ as ‘hysterical’.28) His feminisation of Ireland pre- and postCeltic Tiger, using a ‘makeover’ analogy, is striking, but not unique to either journalistic or popular culture commentaries. Configuring the now-departed Celtic Tiger as a beautiful woman who has jilted her lover (Ireland), Joseph O’Connor also draws upon makeover analogies in his humorous ‘Baby Come Back: Ode to the Celtic Tiger’, which he recited during his popular drivetime radio slot in August 2008: The Progressive Democrats, Fianna Fáil, They took their slogan from L’Oréal. They floated your boat but they just couldn’t berth it. ‘Free market economics! Because I’m worth it.’29 In perhaps the best-known work of Celtic Tiger popular non-fiction, economist David McWilliams’s The Pope’s Children: Ireland’s New Elite (2005), the author repeatedly feminises the Celtic Tiger moment. One of the transformations that took place during this time, according to McWilliams, was the growth of the middle class. The Irish have been ‘condensed into the middle class at a rapid rate’, a phenomenon that he terms the ‘Wonderbra effect’ (15). To those critics who claimed the Celtic Tiger years increased social inequality, McWilliams responds, ‘open your eyes to the Wonderbra effect, or as Eva Herzigova might question in her best Malahidealect – Hello Boys!’ (27). Meanwhile, property supplements, catering to Irish people’s infatuation with the housing market during the boom years, are configured by McWilliams as ‘Irish property porn’ (72) in which Every house . . . is a bricks-and-mortar version of a playboy bunny with perfect 34D breasts – waiting just for you. All you have to do is call now. The property narrative is a virtual chat-line and property-speak has its own soft, suggestive vocabulary, designed for maximum financial arousal. Each ‘for sale’ sign beckons you evocatively with the thrill of capital gain and the lure of immediate social gratification.30 Although McWilliams’s by-now infamous set of archetypes – the Kells Angels, DIY Declan, Breakfast Roll Man – are both male and female, women are certainly singled out for a kind of aspirational social mobility that can be seen to be synecdochic of a feminised Celtic Tiger. For example, Low GI Jane, ‘a rich yummymummy at the top of the Expectocracy’, is obsessed with the achievements (measured by the ‘Attainometer’) of her offspring, the equally feminised Destiny’s Child.31 If the Celtic Tiger was contemporaneously, and retroactively, constructed as a feminised phenomenon, it is not surprising, as Negra argues, that one dominant interpretation of the post-boom moment ‘characterizes the recession as a national moral reckoning where the “soft” feminine consumer culture is now appropriately in retreat’.32

We still are where we were: Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn In these discursive contexts, Tóibín’s Brooklyn made its appearance in April 2009. There are few scholarly commentaries on Tóibín’s novel to date, and those that do exist

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tend to situate it firmly in the context in which it is set, rather than that in which it was written. Ellen McWilliams, for example, analyses how the novel ‘responds to some of the most significant aspects of Irish emigrant culture in the period [the 1950s]’.33 Meanwhile, Eve Walsh Stoddard similarly notes Eilis ‘could be read as a manifestation of the complex causes for emigration’ noted by the Commission on Emigration and Other Population Problems (1948–54).34 By contrast, this reading of Brooklyn emphasises its relevance to contemporary Ireland, arguing that the novel is less a critique of Irish economic policies during the boom years than it is an indictment of the discursive power of Celtic Tiger mythologies more generally, a view shared by many sociologists and journalists. For Kieran Allen, writing as early as 2003, the growing dependence of the Irish economy on the United States and the underlying weakness of its boom ‘were simply bracketed out of most commentaries on the Celtic Tiger’.35 Similarly, according to O’Toole, a certain ‘narrative’ emerged during the boom years that ran something like this: Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats came to power in 1997, with the PDs . . . pulling the centre of gravity of Irish governance sharply to the right. Income taxes were cut, foreign companies were courted with massive tax breaks and the promise of light regulation. . . . The power of free-market globalisation was unleashed . . .36 Outside his fiction, Tóibín has commented numerous times on the fallacies and omissions of this narrative. As early as 2006, in a lecture given at the University of Connecticut (and subsequently published in Éire-Ireland in 2008), Tóibín observed that it should be easy to describe Ireland now, at the height of the Celtic Tiger’s roar: it is a small, rich, liberal country, mainly urban, with an open economy, many smart people with large bank accounts, a powerhouse of modern production with agriculture offering merely 8 percent of its export revenue, growing secular and materialistic and more productive each year and more open to outsiders.37 What this narrative occludes, however, is that ‘this change is not as radical as it seems and much more complex’.38 Tóibín goes on to identify several blind spots in the former analysis: poor infrastructure and information technology; economic prosperity founded on construction rather than trade, commerce or manufacturing; ballooning levels of personal debt. He concludes that ‘[t]he wealth is illusion and the wealth is real’.39 In an interview in 2009, interviewer Belinda McKeon paraphrased Tóibín as follows: Nothing changed during the boom . . . ; nothing except for credit-card limits. Urban planning was still as poor as it was in the 1970s; reports on building and prisons were still being ignored; primary schools were still neglected; two people with the same disease could still see ‘one dying prematurely from it while the other one was eating grapes in a private room’.40 And in late 2010, Tóibín lamented that ‘there is no blueprint in Ireland now, no agenda, for how [to defend the rights of those who are suffering as a result of the financial crisis]. The problem is also that it wasn’t there before the Celtic Tiger either, nor during its heady reign.’41

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Brooklyn emerges as an extended meditation on those same concerns. If, according to politicians and economists, ‘we are where we are’ in recession-stricken Ireland, for Tóibín this is not, ultimately, so very different from where we were during the boom years, or before them, despite the propagation of a narrative that led Irish subjects to believe otherwise. Although Eilis Lacey emigrates from Ireland to the US, and she experiences understandable feelings of displacement and homesickness, Brooklyn is ultimately not all that different from Enniscorthy. Indeed, as Father Flood tells Eilis’s wary mother, ‘Parts of Brooklyn . . . are just like Ireland.’42 Tóibín’s deliberate obfuscation of this more subtle narrative, of sameness rather than difference, reflects the author’s own sense that Irish people were too willing to believe the more seductive tale of Irish economic success at the expense of interrogating the less palatable realities of the boom years. Tóibín alludes obliquely to the seductions and omissions of narrative through his repeated references to the letters that pass between Eilis and her family after she emigrates to the US. In so doing, he draws liberally on the mythology of the ‘American Letter’, letters sent back to Ireland by emigrants, often containing money to support family at home. As I argue elsewhere, in both ‘real’ and fictionalised letters, what is unsaid is often as important as what is said.43 In Brooklyn, Tóibín capitalises on the imaginative power of what is omitted from letters. As Eilis tells her brother, Jack, with whom she reconnects in Liverpool prior to embarking on her transatlantic crossing, ‘Your letters are great but they never tell us anything we want to know.’44 After suffering a bout of homesickness in Brooklyn, Eilis is invited to take tea in her landlady’s ‘surprisingly beautiful’ sitting room. Eilis, impressed with the ‘old rugs and heavy, comfortable-looking furniture’, takes ‘note of all the details, thinking, for the first time in days, how she could include an account of them in a letter to her mother and Rose’. By contrast, she would ‘put nothing in about how she had spent the last two days’.45 After taking her first trip to Manhattan, Eilis is struck by how equally ‘broken down and dismal’ things are there when compared with Brooklyn. However, this is ‘something that she could not mention in a letter home as she did not want to worry them or send them news that might cause them to feel that she could not look after herself’. Nor did she want ‘to write them letters that might depress them’. By contrast, the law books she has to consult for her bookkeeping course would ‘be a good subject to write to Rose about since Rose played golf with one of the solicitors’ wives’.46 When she begins her romance with Tony, she ‘deliberately [leaves out]’ details of his occupation in a letter to her sister ‘because she knew that Rose would hope that she would go out with someone who had an office job, who worked in a bank or an insurance office’. When, in a subsequent letter, she does tell Rose that Tony is a plumber, she ‘burie[s] the information . . . in the middle of a paragraph, but she was aware that Rose would notice it and seize on it’.47 Shortly after learning of Rose’s sudden death, Eilis receives a letter from her brother, Jack, which repeatedly foregrounds the omissions of narrative: ‘Maybe I shouldn’t say this’; ‘Maybe I shouldn’t be telling you all this’; ‘She didn’t ask me to mention this’; ‘Mammy will want me to say that everyone was good and they were and she won’t want me to say that she’s crying all the time but she is, or most of the time anyway’; ‘I hope this letter isn’t all terrible but, as I said, I didn’t know what to put into it’.48 The most seductive narrative, of course, is that of the US/the Celtic Tiger itself, on which Eilis reflects before leaving Enniscorthy. While the boys and girls from the town

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who had gone to England ‘did ordinary work for ordinary money’, people who went to America ‘could become rich’. While those who left for England ‘missed Enniscorthy’, no one who went to America missed home: ‘Instead, they were happy there and proud.’49 America ‘might be further away and so utterly foreign in its systems and its manners, yet it had an almost compensating glamour attached to it’. Going to work in a shop in Birmingham or Liverpool or Coventry was ‘sheer dullness’ compared to going to Brooklyn.50 This apparent contrast between the US and England reflects Tóibín’s broader strategy of establishing oppositions between the two spaces that Eilis inhabits (Enniscorthy and Brooklyn) only to undercut them subsequently. Like the pervasive narrative of Celtic Tiger Ireland that Tóibín critiques in his journalism, it becomes clear that the differences between these two spaces are ‘not as radical’ as they may first seem.51 As Stoddard puts it, Tóibín deconstructs oppositions between homeplace and cosmopolitan experience, ‘tracing a dialectic of parochial sameness in difference’.52 For example, on the surface of it, the US represents the seductive and glamorous trappings of modernity whereas Ireland is austere, backward-looking and conservative. This is suggested through the juxtaposition of Eilis’s fellow lodgers at Mrs Kehoe’s. Miss McAdam and Sheila Heffernan are Irish, both ‘very prim’ and resistant to noise and frivolity. On the other hand, Diane and Patty, American-born girls of Irish descent, are fun-loving, fashionable and flirtatious. Every Friday and Saturday night, they dress up, ‘taking hours to do so’, and go out ‘to amusements or movies or dances, any place where there were men, as Miss McAdam sourly said’.53 When all five girls attend a dance together, Eilis reflects on the contrast between the two pairs in terms of their dress: Miss McAdam and Sheila Heffernan are ‘too formal and stiff in their attire’ whereas Diane and Patty are ‘too modern and loud’.54 Despite the apparent dichotomy constructed here, Tóibín ultimately undermines such simplistic oppositions. For instance, back in Enniscorthy, Eilis’s sister, Rose, is as fashion-conscious and sociable as Diane and Patty. Twice a year, she goes to Dublin for the sales, ‘coming back each January with a new coat and costume and each August with a new dress and new cardigans and skirts and blouses’.55 Meanwhile, Diane and Miss McAdam join forces in their snobbish disapproval of a new fellow lodger, Dolores Grace, whom Miss McAdam describes as ‘a scrubber from Cavan’.56 Equally, much like O’Toole, O’Connor and David McWilliams, Tóibín also invokes the makeover as a means of registering change from one context to another. However, he does so only to suggest that before (Ireland/before the Tiger) and after (the US/ during the Celtic Tiger) are not as radically different as they may first seem. On the surface of it, Eilis undergoes a makeover precisely at the moment at which she enters the US. Just before she disembarks the ship that takes her there, her cabin mate, an Englishwoman called Georgina, applies ‘a thin cake of make-up and then some rouge, with eye-liner and mascara’ to Eilis’s face, backcombs her hair and sends her into the bathroom to put on some lipstick, so that she will pass muster with immigration officials.57 When she returns to Enniscorthy from Brooklyn, she notices ‘a woman studying her dress and her stockings and her shoes and then her tanned skin’ and realises that ‘she must look glamorous in these streets’.58 As her friend, Nancy, tells her, in her ‘American clothes’ she looks ‘different’.59 However, a closer look at two mirror scenes reveals the kind of ‘parochial sameness in difference’ to which Stoddard refers. When Eilis goes to a local dance in Enniscorthy, she ‘[washes] her hair and [puts] on a summer dress’ but she still feels that she looks ‘dowdy’.60 In a direct echo of this passage,

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when Eilis agrees to go to a dance in Brooklyn with her fellow lodgers, she notices that they have ‘backcombed their hair and were wearing make-up and lipstick’ and fears that she will look ‘dowdy’ beside them.61 At a subsequent Brooklyn dance, Eilis thinks Dolores resembles ‘a horse-dealer’s wife in Enniscorthy on a fair day’, but Patty tells Eilis that she herself looks like she’s ‘just come in from milking the cows’.62 The most telling juxtaposition, in the context of Celtic Tiger Ireland, is that of Eilis’s places of work in Enniscorthy versus Brooklyn. In Ireland, Eilis is employed part time by Miss Kelly, whose fumbling in the greasy till positions her as an archetypal representative of Ireland’s petit bourgeoisie. Miss Kelly’s small-town operation is, apparently, a world apart from that of Bartocci’s, the department store in which Eilis subsequently works in Brooklyn. In Miss Kelly’s shop, the owner actively discriminates between less well-off and wealthier customers. For her ‘special customers’, she reserves the freshest bread and tomatoes; the day-old bread will ‘do fine for most people’.63 She greets customers differently depending on their social class, a passage that is worth quoting at length: As each customer came into the shop on the days when she was being trained, Eilis noticed that Miss Kelly had a different tone. Sometimes she said nothing at all, merely clenched her jaw and stood behind the counter in a pose that suggested deep disapproval of the customer’s presence in her shop and an impatience for the customer to go. For others she smiled drily and studied them with grim forbearance, taking the money as though offering an immense favour. And then there were customers whom she greeted warmly and by name; many of these had accounts with her and thus no cash changed hands, but amounts were noted in a ledger with inquiries about health and comments on the weather and remarks on the quality of the ham or the rashers or the variety of the bread on display from the batch loaves to the duck loaves to the current bread.64 She also serves ‘favoured customers’ before others, regardless of their place in the queue.65 In the hyper-capitalist environment of Bartocci’s, however, money is money, irrespective of its origin. As Eilis’s supervisor tells her on her first day: ‘We treat everyone the same. We welcome every single person who comes into this store. They all have money to spend. We keep our prices low and our manners high.’66 While she is working there, a ‘big change’ occurs: ‘coloured women’ are welcomed into the store as shoppers. Bartocci’s begins to stock hosiery designed for dark-complexioned women and Eilis is instructed ‘to be polite to anyone who comes into this store, coloured or white’.67 In these contrasting scenes, Enniscorthy appears as an outmoded economy while Brooklyn is a forward-thinking free market economy. On closer examination, however, the differences become slightly blurred. Although Eilis’s mother refuses to shop at Miss Kelly’s on the grounds that it is ‘too expensive’ and that the owner is ‘as bad as her mother and I heard from someone who worked there that that woman was evil incarnate’, many other customers do not have these scruples.68 One reason for this is that ‘there’s nothing else open’ on Sundays. Another is that Miss Kelly sells ‘the best ham in town and the best creamery butter and the freshest of everything including cream’.69 In other words, Miss Kelly establishes her competitiveness by opening when other stores do not and by stocking high-quality products that customers wish to buy.

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Just as in Bartocci’s, then, the market decides. Meanwhile, the idea that Miss Kelly’s shop is a somehow ‘pre-Celtic Tiger’ world is equally undermined by the unmistakeable echoes of Tóibín’s journalism in Brooklyn’s prose. Reminiscent of the three-tier system of service over which Miss Kelly presides in her shop, Tóibín claims that both before and after the Celtic Tiger, there are ‘two health systems’ in Ireland: One is for middle-class people who pay health insurance and the other for those who can’t afford to pay. There are short waiting lists for one, and long waiting lists for the other. Often, both see the same doctors, who treat the first group in private hospitals, or private rooms in public hospitals, and the second group in public hospitals.70 That Tóibín reproduces this scenario in Miss Kelly’s treatment of her customers is a subtle, though effective, critique of neoliberalism, in which the distinctions between public healthcare provision and private enterprise begin to dissolve. Equally, Tóibín evokes, but ultimately undercuts, a contrast between sleepy Enniscorthy and the commercial activity of Brooklyn. Bartocci’s is famous for its surprise nylon sales. When Eilis arrives at work one morning, she is greeted by a ‘frenzy’ of customers vying for bargains: Everyone’s voice was loud, and there were times when she thought in a flash of an early evening in October walking with her mother down by the prom in Enniscorthy, the Slaney River glassy and full, and the smell of leaves burning from somewhere close by, and the daylight going slowly and gently.71 The idealisation of Enniscorthy here is belied in an earlier scene in which Tóibín emphasises the similarities between ways of doing business in Enniscorthy and in Brooklyn. When Eilis is instructed as to how the system of cash and receipts works at Bartocci’s, she does not want to say that ‘they had exactly the same system in Bolger’s in Rafter Street at home’; instead, she allows Miss Fortini ‘to explain it to her carefully, as though she had never seen anything like it before’.72 The ultimate nearness of the two worlds is underscored by Tóibín in numerous other ways. In Brooklyn, Eilis feels like ‘a ghost’ in her bedroom. Things there are ‘false, empty’.73 But when she returns to Enniscorthy, she finds her room at home seems ‘empty of life’ and she is frightened by ‘how little it meant to her’.74 In Enniscorthy, the prospect of emigration presents itself as a rupture in her life’s expectations: ‘She had expected that she would find a job in the town, and then marry someone and give up the job and have children.’ Despite the anxiety associated with this prospect, it also makes her feel ‘fizzy with excitement’.75 However, when she returns to Enniscorthy, she has fulfilled precisely the destiny she thought she would escape by emigrating: She knew that once she and Tony were married she would stay at home, cleaning the house and preparing food and shopping and then having children and looking after them as well. She had never mentioned to Tony that she would like to keep working, even if just part time, maybe doing the accounts from home for someone who needed a bookkeeper.76

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Finally, and most importantly, Eilis emphatically realises the proximity of the two worlds when Miss Kelly summons her to insinuate that she has learned of Eilis’s marriage in Brooklyn through her cousin, Mrs Kehoe. As Miss Kelly tells Eilis, ‘The world . . . is a very small place’, a statement which resonates profoundly with the kind of globalisation discourse so uncritically celebrated during the boom years.77 Brooklyn, then, carefully disguises its contemporary concerns by invoking and revising historical mythologies of emigration and return. In other words, it engages with the form of nostalgia most pervasive in contemporary Ireland – a rather confused nostalgia for both the boom years (pre-austerity) and the pre-boom years (before Ireland was ‘corrupted’ by economic success) – by framing it in terms of a very long-established and conventional narrative of nostalgia: that of the Returned Yank. As Liam Harte configures it, ‘Having failed to realise the American dream, [Returned Yanks] seek sanctuary in a romanticised Ireland, only to be reminded of the real reasons why they first left, and must do so again.’78 Only the most whimsical of Returned Yank narratives position such nostalgia as anything but misplaced. What Brooklyn does most effectively is suggest that such nostalgia is misplaced because it relies on a too simplistic opposition between ‘home’ and ‘elsewhere’ (or ‘then’ and ‘now’), leading to a deeply flawed understanding of the reasons why ‘we are where we are’.

Notes 1. Fintan O’Toole, ‘Irish writers have yet to awake from the American Dream’, Irish Times, 30 July 2011, p. 8. 2. O’Toole, ‘Irish writers’, p. 9. 3. Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, ‘American Dreams: Emigration or Exile in Contemporary Irish Fiction?’, Eire-Ireland 49.3–4 (2014), p. 81. 4. See Sinéad Moynihan, ‘Other People’s Diasporas’: Negotiating Race in Contemporary Irish and Irish-American Culture (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2013). 5. In 2009 and 2010, a plethora of titles by media pundits and economists appeared: Shane Ross’s The Bankers: How the Banks Brought Ireland to its Knees (2009), Simon Carswell’s Anglo-Republic: Inside the Bank that Broke Ireland (2009), Frank McDonald and Kathy Sheridan’s The Builders: How a Small Group of Property Developers Fuelled the Building Boom and Transformed Ireland (2009), Cearbhall O’Dálaigh’s Celtic Meltdown: Why Ireland Is Broke and How We Can Fix It (2009), David McWilliams’s Follow the Money (2009) and Matt Cooper’s Who Really Runs Ireland? The Story of the Elite who Led Ireland from Bust to Boom . . . and Back Again (2010). 6. The trope of an Irish protagonist embarking on her American dream is entirely consistent with the discursive environment in which these works were composed. In May 2008, for example, an extensive article in Le Monde hailed Ireland as ‘un “american dream” à l’européenne’. Fintan O’Toole, Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), p. 12. 7. Christopher Cusack, ‘Beyond the Emerald Isle: Studying the Irish Atlantic’, Atlantic Studies 8.3 (2011), p. 381. 8. Alison Garden and Muireann Crowley, ‘Introduction: The Irish Atlantic and Transatlantic Literary Studies’, Symbiosis 19.2 (2015), p. 119. 9. Garden and Crowley, ‘Introduction’, p. 128. 10. Kevin Courtney, ‘From Gleeks to Wikileaks: The Buzzwords of 2010’, Irish Times, 28 December 2010, p. 13. 11. O’Toole, Ship of Fools, p. 170.

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12. O’Toole, Ship of Fools, pp. 179–80. 13. O’Toole, Ship of Fools, p. 190. 14. Remarks by Tánaiste Mary Harney at a meeting of the American Bar Association, Society of Ireland, Blackhall Place, Dublin, 21 July 2000. 15. In a review of Matt Cooper’s Who Really Runs Ireland?, the Sunday Business Post noted that ‘whole shelves are presumably being cleared for an entirely new category of publication called, “Where did it all go wrong?” ’ ‘Sorry Tale of the Celtic Tiger’s Rise and Fall’, Sunday Business Post, 8 November 2009. 16. Philip O’Leary, ‘Yank Outsiders: Irish Americans in Gaelic Fiction and Drama of the Irish Free State, 1922–1939’, in Charles Fanning (ed.), New Perspectives on the Irish Diaspora (Carbondale: University of Illinois Press, 2000), p. 259. 17. Martina Devlin, ‘Now we all want to be like the big spender himself, Flatley’, Irish Independent, 30 August 2007, (last accessed 12 May 2016). 18. One historian estimates that, between 1899 and 1924, only 9 per cent of Irish returned compared with 14 per cent of Germans, 15 per cent of Scandinavians, 33 per cent of Poles, 45 per cent of Italians, 53 per cent of Greeks and 87 per cent of Russians. See Mark Wyman, ‘Emigrants Returning: The Evolution of a Tradition’, in Marjory Harper (ed.), Emigrant Homecomings: The Return Movements of Emigrants, 1600–2000 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 16. 19. Joe Cleary, ‘Introduction: Ireland and Modernity’, in Joe Cleary and Claire Connolly (eds), Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 14. 20. Luke Gibbons, The Quiet Man (Cork: Cork University Press, 2006), p. 98. 21. Walter Macken, Brown Lord of the Mountain (London: Pan, 1979), p. 128. 22. Macken, Brown Lord of the Mountain, p. 24. 23. As Caitriona Clear observes, ‘In the years after the Famine, more single girls and women emigrated from Ireland to North America and Australia than from any other European country’ (p. 136). Caitriona Clear, ‘ “Too Fond of Going”: Female Emigration and Change for Women in Ireland, 1946–1961’, in Dermot Keogh, Finbarr O’Shea and Carmel Quinlan (eds), Ireland in the 1950s: The Lost Decade (Cork: Mercier, 2004), pp. 135–46. Meanwhile, Patrick Fitzgerald and Brian Lambkin confirm that ‘from 1871 to 1971 a greater rate of female than male emigration was the norm’ (p. 56). Patrick Fitzgerald and Brian Lambkin, Migration in Irish History, 1607–2007 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 24. Ellen McWilliams, Women and Exile in Contemporary Irish Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), p. 30. 25. Diane Negra, ‘On not watching Oprah on post-Celtic Tiger Ireland’, Celebrity Studies 3.1 (2012), pp. 113–14. 26. Negra, ‘Urban Space, Luxury Retailing and the New Irishness’, Cultural Studies 24.6 (2010), p. 850. 27. O’Toole, Ship of Fools, p. 15. 28. O’Toole, Ship of Fools, p. 224. 29. Joseph O’Connor, The Irish Male: His Greatest Hits (Dublin: New Island, 2009), p. 347. 30. David McWilliams, The Pope’s Children: Ireland’s New Elite (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2006), p. 72. 31. McWilliams, Pope’s Children, pp. 63–4. 32. Diane Negra, ‘Adjusting Men and Abiding Mammies: Gendering the Recession in Ireland’, Irish Review 46 (2013), p. 25. 33. McWilliams, Women and Exile, p. 177.

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34. Eve Walsh Stoddard, ‘Home and Belonging among Irish Migrants: Transnational versus Placed Identities in The Light of Evening and Brooklyn: A Novel’, Éire-Ireland 47.1–2 (2012), p. 154. 35. Kieran Allen, ‘Neither Boston Nor Berlin: Class Polarisation and Neo-Liberalism in the Irish Republic’, in Colin Coulter (ed.), The End of Irish History? Critical Reflections on the Celtic Tiger (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 59. 36. O’Toole, Ship of Fools, p. 15. 37. Colm Tóibín, ‘Selling Tara, Buying Florida’, Éire-Ireland 43.1–2 (2008), p. 16. 38. Tóibín, ‘Selling Tara’, p. 16. 39. Tóibín, ‘Selling Tara’, p. 24. 40. Belinda McKeon, ‘An Irishman in America’, Irish Times, 25 April 2009, Weekend Review, p. 7. 41. Colm Tóibín, ‘Looking at Ireland, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry’, The Guardian, 20 November 2010, (last accessed 22 March 2016). 42. Colm Tóibín, Brooklyn (London: Viking, 2009), p. 23. 43. See Sinéad Moynihan, ‘ “Pen and Ink and Page”: The “American Letter” in Irish Atlantic Literature’, Symbiosis 19.2 (2015): 171–91. For an analysis of actual letters written by Irish women emigrants to the US, see Ruth-Ann M. Harris, ‘ “Come You All Courageously”: Irish Women in America Write Home’, in Kevin Kenny (ed.), New Directions in Irish-American History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), pp. 209–26. Harris notes, ‘The information that such individuals chose to write home about may have been very selective, skewing the conclusions we can draw from their letters’ (p. 211). 44. Tóibín, Brooklyn, p. 35. 45. Tóibín, Brooklyn, p. 76. 46. Tóibín, Brooklyn, p. 118. 47. Tóibín, Brooklyn, p. 139. 48. Tóibín, Brooklyn, pp. 179–81, italics in original. 49. Tóibín, Brooklyn, p. 24. 50. Tóibín, Brooklyn, pp. 31–2. 51. Tóibín, ‘Selling Tara’, p. 16. 52. Stoddard, ‘Home and Belonging’, p. 154. 53. Tóibín, Brooklyn, p. 55. 54. Tóibín, Brooklyn, p. 106. 55. Tóibín, Brooklyn, p. 11. 56. Tóibín, Brooklyn, p. 122. 57. Tóibín, Brooklyn, p. 50. 58. Tóibín, Brooklyn, p. 208. 59. Tóibín, Brooklyn, p. 230. 60. Tóibín, Brooklyn, p. 16. 61. Tóibín, Brooklyn, p. 105. 62. Tóibín, Brooklyn, pp. 123, 125. 63. Tóibín, Brooklyn, p. 13. 64. Tóibín, Brooklyn, pp. 9–10. 65. Tóibín, Brooklyn, p. 14. 66. Tóibín, Brooklyn, p. 59. 67. Tóibín, Brooklyn, p. 110. 68. Tóibín, Brooklyn, pp. 4, 11. 69. Tóibín, Brooklyn, p. 5. 70. Tóibín, ‘Looking at Ireland’. 71. Tóibín, Brooklyn, p. 64.

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102 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

sinéad moynihan Tóibín, Brooklyn, p. 61. Tóibín, Brooklyn, p. 67. Tóibín, Brooklyn, p. 204. Tóibín, Brooklyn, p. 28. Tóibín, Brooklyn, p. 220. Tóibín, Brooklyn, p. 245. Liam Harte, ‘Variations of the returned Yank’, Irish Times, 8 April 2006, Weekend, p. 11.

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7 Contemporary Atlantic Literature and the Unhappiness of Travel Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson

Flow: the only word I can think of to describe it. Or what happens to it, what that pain becomes. Because time, space, the body moving simultaneous through them – that vessel that holds the pain, its privileged container – they all go away. They disappear. Till there’s nothing else. Till nothing else remains: only that pain. Till that pain becomes its own momentum, its own prime mover.1

C

ontemporary Atlantic fiction offers a narrative of loss, regret, pain and defeat that sits uneasily against a litany of triumphal travel narratives of progress and self-improvement. Such fiction looks at the issue of who or what the ‘prime mover’ of travel is, as Robert Antoni puts it so eloquently in As Flies to Whatless Boys, and how the journey depicted is often a complex and messy one, where escape and misdirection define the experience. Contemporary writers revisit the transatlantic space to reveal not simple forward movement but concurrent retreat, not a singular propulsion forward, but a wavelike narrative structure that encapsulates the contrary nature of travel. Atlantic fiction offers an enriching landscape of confusion and coexistence that articulates an uneasiness with movement that perfectly matches its very subject matter. In exploring what constitutes an Atlantic text, and how such texts explore their own subject matter, I first examine a range of fiction that hints at a transatlantic origin, before offering two longer analyses of literary space. In the first longer analysis, I set two fictionalisations of historical emigration alongside each other, exploring how they push at the boundaries of here and there. In the second, I offer a reading of Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin as a transatlantic novel that self-consciously pits various versions of ‘America’ against each other in order to explore how locations float unmoored despite a longing for fixity.2

Reading against the Grain: US Texts as Transatlantic Literature Carolyn Porter argues for a situated reading of borders, not as entities themselves, but in relation to an enriching transnational exchange.3 This kind of situated reading offers an opportunity to explore the tensions around place and identity that are the hallmark of a literature that crosses spaces rather than settles within them – and in so crossing offers avenues of exploration that are uncomfortable, ‘foreign’ and ill-defined. A situated reading of the transatlantic space also enables a reading against

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the grain, so that critics are able to investigate the insertion of narratives of otherness into novels or short stories that, for example, call out their self-conscious adherence to the US, novels such as Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, which focuses, amongst other things, on massive national criss-crossing. In Franzen’s epic novel, the character Walter traces his own position in Minnesota to his grandfather Einar’s repudiation of Sweden, a repudiation born not of a political ideology but of a personal disappointment. Einar sails across the ocean to punish his mother for her transference of affections to a late and unexpected baby, with the result that Einar ‘never saw his mother again, [and] proudly avowed that he’d forgotten every word of his mother tongue’.4 Travel is defined as punishment (of self and other, and explicitly gendered). The narrator offers this gloss: Einar ‘became another datapoint in the American experiment of selfgovernment, an experiment statistically skewed from the outset, because it wasn’t the people with sociable genes who fled the crowded Old World for the new continent; it was the people who didn’t get along well with others’.5 Freedom focuses on characters who uproot themselves from the East Coast to the Midwest and vice versa, or take huge car journeys across the country in aid, ironically, of a sustainability agenda. Yet even within this very American text (and it does appear to promote itself and be received in this way), there is a transatlantic undercurrent that identifies travel with its European beginnings. Clearly, the genesis of the Berglund family’s transatlantic crossing does not fit the narrative of self-improvement so often identified as motivation. Later, Walter himself uproots his life, leaving his wife and reinventing himself as an environmental campaigner. He falls in love with a young woman whose ethnic heritage is distinctly different from his own, but such connections do not offer relief: ‘Like a cold spring at the bottom of a warmer lake, old Swedish-gened depression was seeping up inside him: a feeling of not deserving a partner like Lalitha; of not being made for a life of freedom and outlaw heroics; of needing a more dully and enduringly discontented situation to struggle against and fashion an existence within.’6 Again, Freedom isn’t expressly transatlantic in its positioning, but it identifies a Scandinavian origin against which to contrast US myths of national identity, and in doing so it highlights a transatlantic narrative that it simultaneously undercuts. In a similar fashion, Lorrie Moore’s short story collection Birds of America, which articulates a connection to the US through its title, thrusts its characters off the North American continent through plots that combine humour and pathos. Here the birds (slang for women, but also suggesting a reference to Audubon’s illustrated book) are of America, the preposition suggesting alignment to place. Yet at the same time, the image of birds implicitly represents flight, which is a recurring motif. Adrienne in ‘Terrific Mother’ escapes to Italy after accidentally killing a child only to encounter a situated Minnesotan, and Abby, in ‘Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People’, runs from a failed marriage and a fear of public speaking to kiss the Blarney Stone in Ireland in a desperate act of self-improvement. The very absurdity of these transatlantic sojourns offers a counterpoint to travel as growth or progress (though a limited expansion of horizon is at least tentatively offered by Moore). Within the collection, the US itself is also negotiated, as in the story ‘Agnes of Iowa’, a title that seems designed to root the character rather than release her. A visiting South African author offers a transatlantic and oppositional counterpoint, and

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dismisses Agnes’s location: ‘ “The United States – how can you live in that country?” ’ he asks, mirroring a question she meant to ask him about South Africa. In response to his goading, Agnes simply replies, ‘ “A lot of my stuff is there,” ’ internally acknowledging ‘the dark love and shame that came from the pure accident of home, the deep and arbitrary place that happened to be yours’.7 Agnes’s flippant response indicates dismissal, but her interior debate acts as a counter message, if a silent one, and this tension – between ‘the pure accident of home’ and ‘the deep and arbitrary place that happened to be yours’ – is central to many discussions of transatlantic space. Indeed, I would go so far as to argue that the line between what might be considered transatlantic literature and US literature is not always easily definable, the shore an evermoving boundary. Place shapes identity but does not preordain it. When ‘Agnes of Iowa’ moves to New York, she pretends her name is pronounced ‘ON-Yez’; she wants to acquire an exoticism that her Midwestern heritage seems to preclude, but even here she is misidentified, with Iowa being pronounced ‘Ohio’ by her newfound acquaintances. The travelling pronunciation of her name and her state of origin do not signify real travel, something she only half understands. Even in Moore’s early work, the Midwest is figured as a place where foreignness is not allowed and where assumed transatlantic connections either do not exist or are fictional: Zoe Hendricks, in ‘You’re Ugly, Too’, is an American History professor stuck in Minnesota: ‘Everyone was so blond there that brunettes were often presumed to be from foreign countries. Just because Professor Hendricks is from Spain doesn’t give her the right to be so negative about our country.’8 If her students don’t understand her take on history, and assume a foreignness about her that is doubly inaccurate and quite literally misplaced, she, too, makes her students foreign to herself. According to Zoe, the only way to survive in Minnesota is to resort to storybook cheerfulness: ‘You were supposed to be Heidi. You were supposed to lug goat milk up the hills and not think twice. Heidi did not complain. Heidi did not do things like stand in front of the new IBM photocopier saying, “If this fucking Xerox machine breaks on me one more time, I’m going to slit my wrists.” ’9 The character Heidi’s European origin is obscured because of its endless repetition in the US, a story of childhood that is read as triumph over adversity and thus Americanised in recitation – even by Zoe herself. Rarely does Moore explore truly ‘foreign’ characters, but one such character is Olena in ‘Community Life’. Olena identifies herself as from Vermont, and when her would-be lover exclaims over Vermont’s exoticism, she feels ‘glad she hadn’t said something like Transylvania’.10 The phrasing here is key; ‘something like’ Transylvania might push the boundaries of exoticism too far, yet Transylvania was indeed her first home, and her parents were so eager for her to fit in in their new location in the US that they renamed her Nell. Olena admits, despite the fact that she had been instructed to use the new name in school, that she didn’t: ‘only her parents, in their throaty Romanian accents, ever called her Nell, her secret, jaunty American self existing only for them’.11 Here the transatlantic is embodied and voiced, while remaining a fragment of a larger narrative regarding women’s self-conscious sense of place. Audrey Niffenegger, known best for her first novel, The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003), expanded the sense of travel she first explored there by offering a transatlantic narrative in her second novel, Her Fearful Symmetry. Focusing on two generations of twins and their entwined lives, the novel links Lake Forest, Illinois, to London (and beyond).

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Displacement becomes central as the younger generation moves across the ocean to occupy the space of their twinned aunt. One twin notes: She and Julia had studiously prepared for the trip to London, reading Lonely Planet and Charles Dickens, making packing lists and trying to find their new flat on Google Earth. They had speculated endlessly about Aunt Elspeth . . . Now there was hardly anything left to do, which created an odd void, a feeling of restless dread. Valentina wanted to leave right this minute, or never.12 Their knowledge comes from travel guides and a long-dead author, the mixture unremarked upon. In London, they play at being tourists, living inauthentic and drifting lives. They are frequently referred to as ‘Americans’, most often in a derogatory manner, and eventually haunt the local cemetery, Highgate, only to discover paranormal (and human) forces that upend their story and ensure a permanent displacement. In what follows, I intend to explore in more depth emigration narratives of unhappy and unfortunate travellers who extend the boundaries of their imagined countries, crossing both above and below the US on their journeys, before returning to an exploration of an iconic US novel in order to reinforce the idea that what is – and is not – an Atlantic text depends entirely on perspective.

The Seduction of Emigration: North and South as Points of Entry and Containment ‘I wonder how you choose what you are going to remember,’ asks Lily Piper of Joan Thomas’s Reading by Lightning.13 Thomas’s novel, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book in 2009, explores familiar contemporary Canadian literary critical themes (transplantation and transatlanticity, bricolage, memory, loss, imagination) within the historical framework of the early part of the twentieth century, ending during World War II. Within this historical fiction, Thomas explores the unpreparedness of the real-life Barr Colonists, whose knowledge of Canada and farming was so minimal as to make survival itself more luck than design. Told with clarity and lyricism, Reading by Lightning dances around the topic of travel and rootedness, and is defined by desire (at multiple levels). It is a story of connections and disconnections across generations, with a real-life emigration at the heart of it. As narrator, Lily sweeps the reader along from a childhood marked by severe Christianity, to her confused and longing adolescence in Lancashire, to her agnostic return to Canada as a young woman, bound by family tradition. Lily narrates not only her own life, but also that of her father, whose story of emigration to Canada bisects her own, told with a level of detail and seeming truthfulness which is only later revealed as artifice. As Lily tells her father’s story, she revises it, though its bare details remain the same: he left for Canada and a better life with the Barr Colonists in 1903, led by a man with a flawed (perhaps even corrupt) plan for trying to ensure that Canada was anglicised, settled by Englishmen as the ‘best kind’ of new Canadians. While she tells her father’s story as a romance that never comes true, she misses out any mention of how her father and mother meet and fall in love, and she fails to consider her mother’s inner life at all. It comes as a surprise to learn late in the novel

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that the women share a name – an unexplored kernel of knowledge that suggests they might share much more than Lily the narrator is willing to admit. Lily traces her father’s emigration as her own story of origins, pitting her father against her mother in this story: ‘I wanted especially to imagine my dad leaving home, taking hold of his fate and getting on a ship. My mother scorned imagination, I went where she couldn’t go.’14 As David Jays argues, ‘Reading by Lightning is stretched between dreams of movement and a sense of being stuck’ and this movement back and forth is anchored to each of her parents.15 When she arrives in England as a teenager, she negotiates between real and makebelieve at several levels. Her cousin Madeleine tells her, ‘When I was little I used to play that I was you . . . We always made you the brave one! I’ll be Lily-in-Canada, I would always say.’16 Lily thus becomes a made-up version of her self, and she needs at some level to live up to this expectation of bravery, linked, though faultily, to place. Perhaps ironically, Lily spends her childhood longing for England, ‘where I could be someone else, although I didn’t know then who that would be’.17 Moreover, upon arrival, she finds herself an observer rather than a participant, as she has to negotiate her own space: ‘I stood by the window watching and longed for my real life in England to be revealed to me.’18 The sense of the real is one seen through another medium, and this is a good metaphor for Lily’s sense of distance from actual events. She observes a culture that is hidden from her, ‘people doing ordinary things with a secret intent I could not decipher’.19 A partner novel could well be Robert Antoni’s As Flies to Whatless Boys, which follows a similar narrative of hopeful emigration and disastrous consequences, though this time the travel from England leads further south, to the Caribbean, and delineates the fate of the similarly doomed and under-prepared emigrants of the Tropical Emigration Society. Antoni mines his own historical and biographical past in order to explore how his ancestors came to Trinidad, and the novel is peppered with references to the real-life J. A. Etzler, a German inventor whose utopian designs nearly cost the lives of all the emigrants (and certainly took several). Interspersed with fabricated letters and newspaper clippings, drawings and maps, the novel progresses in two directions, forwards to England and backwards from it, much as Reading by Lightning did above. The author inserts himself into the fiction, both under his own name and as Mr Robot, the Trinidadian derivation of his name offered by Miss Ramsol, director of the T&T National Archives, with whom he carries on an illicit affair (which may, or may not, be for the express purpose of making illegal photocopies of information he so keenly desires to uphold the story of ‘his’ family’s emigration). These insertions are unnumbered, in an effort to authenticate their existence, and there are even library stamps emblazoned on these pages to extend the artifice. His family is not remembered, at least not by the archivist, whose role it is to preserve history, and so he needs to piece together a story from scraps in order to form ‘his story’. Like Thomas’s novel, it is a novel of generations, one that similarly privileges the father’s voice, despite the fact that here at least the mother is herself a traveller, having twice left her homeland (first France and then England, though this first movement is barely remarked upon). Also like Thomas’s novel, it offers a tale told of one emigration while preparing for another transatlantic journey. The primary ‘now’ of the story (not counting Antoni’s authenticating metafictional construct and reconstruction)

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takes place on board ship, at the start of the transatlantic trip that returns William Sanger Tucker, now an adult, to London, in September 1881. The present is defined by the past, since the journey back to England cannot commence until after the narrator father tells the story of his first transatlantic voyage, in 1845, to his almost unwilling son, ‘on the back deck of this ship, reclining against some big coils of weathered rope’.20 It is as if the story cannot be told without the architecture of travel literally being present. The lens of the story moves between love and political intrigue, with infatuation perhaps being the metaphor that connects the plotlines together: the emigrants are infatuated with the idea of a new world, a new space to claim and a better future to behold. Similarly, William Sanger Tucker, also known as Willy, is a teenage boy during his first journey, and deeply infatuated with the mute Marguerite, a woman literally and metaphorically above his station; her class position translates into a better cabin on board ship, several storeys up. Their love story plays itself out on deck (and below deck) and is in many regards a synecdoche of the whole journey and the wider economic and class implications of the failed enterprise. As Willy acknowledges (in retrospect), ‘I soon came to realise this ship wasn’t nothing more than a miniature floating replica of the city we had left behind: everybody had they [sic] place.’21 By the time he tells his story, William has adopted the English of the islands, and speaks with a dialect that rubs against his other narrative patterns of standardised English: the only word to bleed through both narrations is Papee, for his father, and the fact that the word and the relationship signal some originating space is not accidental. It is, after all, Papee who first took him on the journey and it is Papee who coerces him to stay once they arrive. It is the first transatlantic journey that claims most interest in the novel, with Willy acting as our guide both physically and politically as he navigates the ship and its various corridors. He manages to secure keys that allow him to transgress spaces he should not be able to cross into, in order to find a liminal space for his relationship with Marguerite to move from fantasy to embodiment. He also discovers and gorges on all things upper class: champagne, caviar, and other delicacies meant for others: Son, I ate till I couldn’t eat again. Till I was satiated, gorged, bloated-out. I drank till I couldn’t drink no more. Till I’d filled five champagne bottles with my own weewee, and carefully corked them back. My stools ritually wrapped in ladies’ negligees of the finest silk, the packets tucked careful into a large spherical bottle with a clampdown lid – its contents long ago consumed . . .22 The unwrapping of privilege and the rewrapping of excrement, along with the bottling up of liquid waste, is an explicit transgression for which Willy is neither caught nor punished, and its recitation in this part of the book serves to remind the reader that travel is never innocent nor unsullied by wider social platforms that dictate appropriate behaviour. On board ship, while Willy does travel fairly freely (once in fact inhabiting a woman’s dress in order to ‘pass’ into places a young boy could not access), there is an underlying anxiety about capture and becoming fixed. There is also an unresolved tension around indentured or slave labour, free travel or bonded travel, as well as between male opportunity and female acquiescence. The women accompany the men on their journey, they do not determine it (though at the end of the novel, it is the women’s inventiveness that ends up sustaining the remaining voyagers).

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The tension around travel is embodied on deck, when the ship’s occupants play audience both to Etzler’s proselytising and also to his attempt at theatre. At one point, Etzler dons blackface in order to play a servant who outwits his boss, Lord Louse, in a satire directed at the very people who accompany him on his journey. In attempting (however inappropriately) to embody a ‘Hindu’ through blackface, his own ‘foreignness’ as a German appears to disappear: ‘the rural speech of Mr. Etzler’s character was so suited to his own broken English that his German infections [sic] seemed somehow to fade-way. Indeed – speaking in the language of he [sic] character, Savvy – Mr. Etzler was easier to understand than normal’.23 The bleeding of places through accent on a ship located at a point in the ocean most on board cannot pinpoint offers a further example of the tension between fixity and fluidity. Antoni ensures that Etzler’s artifice is available to the reader and the listener of the tale – indeed we have the introductory passages that show him to be a charlatan – but those who travel with him do not have the luxury of understanding this. At the same time, he is described as someone who acts ‘with the exaggerated flourish of a master magician’.24 Given that a magician is successful through a desire to focus attention elsewhere rather than here, it is not surprising even the ship’s inhabitants have scarcely imagined their new location. As Willy notes, ‘despite all of those interminable days and nights aboard ship – only dreaming about this very moment when we would, finally, set foot in Trinidad – none of us, not even Papee, had thought scarcely a moment beyond it’.25 It comes as no surprise, then, that Etzler disappears from the text not long after the ship finally arrives at its destination, since the destination is not paradise as promised, but Chaguabarriga, which loosely translates as ‘Belly-a-mud’.26 Etzler exists beyond the frame of the novel, however, since after fleeing the site of his potential downfall, leaving behind his precious Satellite, a machine which is supposed to miraculously cultivate the land without the use of human labour, Etzler carries on the ruse of his own fortune hunting, soliciting others to follow him to Venezuela, and ‘constitute with me a NEW society of BETTER men in a more hopeful and promising land’.27 It is only in the last quarter of the novel that we find that the Tuckers were sent to Trinidad to act as spies on Etzler, who was known to be a swindler, and that the Tuckers were able to escape their own potential political misfortune by doing so. The prime minister himself meets with them to say, ‘Indeed, an emotional treatise of not-inconsiderable length has just reached my desk, warning the world against the man! It was penned by an American gentleman of whom, frankly, I am ignorant. Though I’m told he’s somewhat renowned in literary circles – a certain Mr. Henry David Thoreau.’28 Antoni thus incorporates a narrative overlay of truth on this tale of disastrous emigration, and his website directs readers to a series of external links, some of which are real whilst others are offered as authenticating (though metafictional) extensions of the narrative.29 With Etzler gone, the unfortunate settlers attempt to settle in Chaguabarriga, with disastrous consequences. In his last illness, William Tucker extracts a promise from Willy that, should he die, Willy will stay in Trinidad along with the rest of the family: ‘Because we’ve come too bloody far to go back now!’30 It is a promise Willy almost breaks. Just as his father dies, Willy discovers that Marguerite is sailing back to England, given that her own male relative had also died and she does not have the agency to stay without his protection. Willy makes a pact with fate that if the ship is

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still in port, he will return to England with her: but he breaks his promise to himself and keeps the one to his father, sacrificing love for family, listening to his father’s voice in the absence of Marguerite’s. Born without vocal cords, Marguerite will never be able to voice her own desires, and Willy swallows his. Willy does indeed remain. Emigration thus results in place boundedness, his movement from one island – Great Britain – determining that further movement is unlikely, though his fascination with birds may suggest an interest in flight that is never quite realised. Indeed, he becomes an amateur taxidermist, fixing in place even those creatures meant to fly free. Yet it is his amateur ornithology that enables his (temporary) return to England, on a speaking tour of museums, where, unbeknownst to him, his beloved Marguerite is in the audience. They never connect: their transatlantic narratives cannot intersect again, with place boundedness (and some sadness) fixing them in circles that seem almost preordained, though clearly they are of human origin.

Shriver’s Narrative of Loss and Travel By definition almost, transatlantic narratives fail to maintain the boundaries of inside and out, despite attempts to control what leaks or slips between spaces. Paul Giles has argued that ‘national identity must be brought explicitly into the frame as an object of scrutiny in itself rather than being accepted uncritically’.31 The novel to which I will now turn, We Need to Talk about Kevin, does just that, working through and around national myths and blindnesses, locating within a very US-focused story a larger narrative regarding the meanings of home and away. It is perhaps not accidental that Lionel Shriver is herself a transplanted American, shuttling back and forth between London and New York, occupying that odd hybrid space which has been subject to much critical intervention.32 I first read We Need to Talk about Kevin, Shriver’s prize-winning book about a high-school marksman with a difference, as a contemporary text engaging in the law and literature debate. I initially analysed the novel as an indictment of women’s position in relation to the law, and as a novel about the failure of motherhood, as well as the judicial consequences of bad parenting or of raising a bad seed (with both readings held in explicit tension).33 However, within the novel is a ghostly second narrative, one that traces a transatlantic escape story, and it is the uncertainty of a transatlantic framework that calls me to revisit it. Whilst the question of who is to blame for Americanised tragedy in the form of mass murder is fundamental – and deferred – in the text, what intrigues me about this very US tale of violence and destruction is its continual movement away from that site, its desire for elsewhere, its focus abroad. Perhaps this desire is not surprising. After all, within the boundaries of the US, Eva Khatchadourian is public property, her story fodder for others: ‘It’s still difficult for me to venture into public. You would think, in a country that famously has “no sense of history,” as Europeans claim, that I might cash in on America’s famous amnesia. No such luck. No one in this “community” shows any signs of forgetting, after a year and eight months – to the day.’34 That Eva chooses to remain closely connected to her devastated community goes virtually unremarked. The only thing she says is that ‘I’d always make it a policy . . . to face what I feared,

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though this policy was conceived in days when my fears ran to losing my way in a foreign city – child’s play’.35 Eva has indeed lost her way, but within the confines of the US, not outside it. At the same time, she focuses closely on observing the US, both in reality and philosophically, a trait that she shares with her son Kevin, who takes his discomfiture with the country to an extreme. Eva is a small business owner of a travel company named A Wing and a Prayer, and spends much of her time outside the US, perfecting her role as travel writer. She prizes her Armenian heritage above her US citizenship and insists on naming her son with her surname so as to keep her Armenian lineage both visible and ongoing, and to avoid becoming a ‘crypto-ethnic’ in Linda Hutcheon’s terms.36 It becomes thus ironic that her surname contributes to the ways in which Kevin becomes reduced in the media to KK, and she becomes inexorably linked to his conception, both physically and in the mind of those who see her as responsible for his crimes. What suggests to me that this novel should be read transatlantically is its struggle to define the US and its leaking borders, and the way that this struggle is (like the others I have outlined here) a familial one. If Eva is cynical about the US, her husband Franklin Plaskett is stereotypically patriotic; Eva’s desire to be outside the US contrasts with Franklin’s focus on home. While Eva travels to her chosen locations, Franklin, a photographer, never accompanies her, insisting he could ‘find . . . the Rhone Valley in Pennsylvania’.37 Shriver’s depiction of Franklin seems to reference in reverse Jean Baudrillard’s travelogue America, which focuses on ‘Astral’ America, or the America of surfaces and empty spaces, and which offers the conceit that the US itself is simply an example of hyper-reality. Baudrillard suggests, ‘What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction.’38 Franklin enters Europe as fiction instead. The novel is peppered with references to elsewhere, and with how the members of the Plaskett-Khatchadourian family construct their own (competing) versions of the US. Eva understands that ‘no one wants to hear stories from abroad, really’, and that Franklin prefers ‘anecdotal trinkets from closer to home: an eccentric encounter with a toll collector on the George Washington Bridge, say. Marvels from the mundane helped to ratify [the] view that all my foreign travel was a kind of cheating’.39 The idea of transatlantic travel as cheating reinforces the idea of patriotism as fidelity, and underlines the notion that, as a woman, Eva should, really, stay put. For her part, Eva understands that Franklin also constructs his America, and asks her to accompany him within it, as she notes in long letters to him: ‘I was visiting your country. The one you had made for yourself, the way a child constructs a log cabin out of Popsicle sticks. It was a lovely reproduction, too.’40 For his part, Franklin understands, if Eva does not, that had she been born elsewhere, she would have wanted to include the US in her travels: whatever else I might think of it, [it was] the place that called the shots and pulled the strings, that made the movies and sold the Coca-Cola, and shipped Star Trek all the way to Java; the center of the action, a country that you needed a relationship with even if that relationship was hostile; a country that demanded if not acceptance at least rejection – anything but neglect. The country in every other country’s face, that would visit you whether you liked it or not almost anywhere on the planet.41

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It is her own rootedness, disavowed as it is, that prevents her from understanding her own relationship to the US. Before meeting Franklin, Eva notes, ‘Hitherto, I had always regarded the United States as a place to leave.’42 Once they become a couple, Eva and Franklin’s contrasting Americas become a kind of game. I would say – I did say – that you were enamored of an archaic version of the U.S., either an America that was long past or that never was; that you were enamored of an idea. And you would say – did say – that part of what America was was an idea, that was more than most countries could claim, which were mostly scrappy pasts and circumscriptions on a map.43 They are on opposite sides, as they end up being so much during their long marriage: at odds with each other’s parenting, as well as with each other’s worldviews and politics. It is only after what Eva calls Thursday occurs – the day that her son blows apart her railed-against US cocoon – that Eva concedes, ‘I seem to be learning what you were always trying to teach me, that my own country is as exotic and even as perilous as Algeria.’44 Space becomes differently configured through grief and disbelief. Eva mourns not only her current existence, separated from each member of her family, but her pre-Kevin existence, too, where she saw herself as her own creation: ‘From a dour, closeted childhood, I had molded a vibrant, expansive adult who commanded a smattering of a dozen languages and could pioneer through the unfamiliar streets of any foreign town.’45 Eva is forced to reread this view of herself: ‘This notion that you are your own work of art is an American one, as you would hasten to point out. Now my perspective is European: I am a bundle of other people’s histories, a creation of circumstance. It is Kevin who has taken on this aggressive, optimistic Yankee task of making himself up.’46 Partly generational, then, and partly in response to circumstances, the family circles around identity markers and points of contact, locating themselves in disparate spheres and failing to connect: they drift through their many versions of themselves without a solid reference point. Shriver’s ‘America’ – in its many contested versions – can be read transatlantically, not least because Shriver herself maintains a dual perspective and insists that her central character does the same. Although unsavvy interviewers have tried to suggest that Shriver’s expatriatism equates with a lack rather than a gain, she herself disagrees: ‘The upside is that I live in a larger world, emotionally, politically and intellectually. Events outside U.S. borders are real to me, especially those in countries I’ve lived in.’47 Shriver contends that ‘ironically, living outside the U.S. translates into being “an American” all the time in a way that when you live stateside you’re never “an American”. My nationality is self-conscious’.48 She becomes faced with her national identity every day, a not unfamiliar occurrence for expatriates, who in many cases vocalise their positions as outsiders every time they speak. Her transatlantic perspective infuses her fiction, which, as she argues, ‘has had too much to do with nationality for me to find it irrelevant. Globalized or not, we all still hail from countries, and think in countries; we still regard a person’s nationality as a crucial piece of information about them’.49 Certainly We Need to Talk about Kevin has been mostly read in an American frame. Rachel Cusk suggests that Franklin ‘throws himself more and more into the part of American Dad’ in order to make up for Eva’s disregard.50 Emily Jeremiah argues that Eva ‘is as much a product of America as her son is. Her nomadism . . . her

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endless quest for novelty, is as much symptomatic of American excess and boredom as are Kevin’s apathy and violence’.51 In an interview with Andrew Lawless, Shriver suggests that ‘one of the ironies of leaving a country behind is that it follows you’. Moreover, she argues that she used both Kevin and Eva ‘as a lens on [her] country’.52 We Need to Talk about Kevin takes dislocation to an extreme, and it is perhaps not accidental that having travelled to the foreign land of motherhood, a journey for which she is completely unprepared, Eva stops physically travelling almost entirely, except for an ill-fated trip to Vietnam with Franklin and Kevin when he is a young teenager, a trip that is taken in order to offer Eva a sort of reverse homecoming as well as pride in her profession. She chooses Vietnam for its political and cultural position in the US psyche, but her wish to introduce Kevin to her passion for travel fails. Back in the US, when Eva tries to engage her son in conversation in a rare day out for the two of them, Kevin revisits their trip in order to taunt his mother: ‘ “You’re always griping about this country and wishing you were in Malaysia or something. What’s your problem with the place. Really.” ’53 Enthused that he appears to be taking an interest in her conversation, Eva offloads and identifies a list of reasons she finds America and Americans grating. Kevin’s response is a masterful one. Having noted all her objections, he reads them back to her, with commentary: ‘Let’s see,’ he said and proceeded to check off successive elements of his list with his red crayon. ‘Spoiled. You’re rich. I’m not too sure what you think you’re doing without, but I bet you could afford it. Imperious. Pretty good description of that speech just now [. . .] Inarticulate? Lemme see. . .’ He searched the tablecloth and read aloud, ‘It’s not that easy, or maybe it is easy, I don’t know. I don’t call that Shakespeare myself. Also, it seems to me I’m sitting across from the lady who goes on these long rants about “reality TV” when she’s never watched a single show. And that – one of your favorite words, Mumsey – is ignorant. Next, boasting. [. . .] Like somebody who thinks she’s got it right and nobody else does. Trusting. . .with no idea other people can’t stand them. [. . .] Well. As far as I can tell, about the only thing that keeps you and the other dumb-ass Americans from being peas in a pod is that you’re not fat. And just because you’re skinny you act self-righteous – condescending – and superior. Maybe I’d rather have a big cow of a mother who at least didn’t think she was better than everybody else in the fucking country.’54 In this moment, it becomes apparent that it is Kevin rather than Franklin who becomes Eva’s mirror, who reflects back not what she wants to see, but the worst version of herself. Her fear of motherhood was not only one of repeating her own mother’s mistakes, but of having to become that woman, a ‘steadfast, stationary anchor who provides a jumping off place for another young adventurer whose travels I might envy and whose future is still unmoored and unmapped. I was afraid of being that archetypal figure in the doorway – frowzy, a little plump – who waves good-bye and blows kisses as a backpack is stashed in a trunk’.55 Post-Thursday, this becomes a future Eva will never encounter, yet bizarrely it is one she ends up coveting. Kevin’s incarceration becomes her own, and her only travel a circuitous route to Claverack Correctional Facility. In the present tense, Eva turns away from her excoriations on the US, and instead focuses on herself. She had hoped that motherhood would change her: ‘I wanted to be transformed; I wanted to be

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transported. I wanted a door to open and a whole new vista to expand before me that I had never known was out there.’56 Her motherhood is indeed a foreign land, but one that traps her after all. Her ‘imaginary homeland’, as Salman Rushdie so eloquently puts it, remains entirely out of reach.57 We Need to Talk about Kevin hasn’t, to my knowledge, been read as a transatlantic text before, but the transatlantic frame offers up a compelling way in which to approach it. Shriver’s follow-up novel, The Post Birthday World (2008), takes on a Sliding Doors narrative and is more explicitly transatlantic in its approach, with an expatriate couple at the centre of the narrative (or at the centre of one of the narratives), and her novel The New Republic (2012) takes on terrorism and transatlantic displacement in the figure of an American foreign correspondent in Portugal. Yet somehow, for me, We Need to Talk about Kevin remains more acutely aware of its transatlantic longings, its desire for elsewhere, and its uncomfortableness with the truly foreign – which, like Kevin himself, will always remain a mystery. The transatlantic urge regularly appears in contemporary literature, even in texts that call out a different focus. There is a noted self-consciousness about place in Atlantic texts, as well as an exploration of insider and outsider status. In the generational tales of travel and identity, it is rarely that the mother figure takes centre stage, except perhaps as a foil against which to define one’s self, as in Reading by Lightning or, more forcefully, We Need to Talk about Kevin. Nevertheless, the gender of travel continues to affect and shape the journey, whether, as in Antoni’s novel, a boy must pass for a girl, or in Moore’s stories, where women often choose stasis above movement, or move only temporarily, with return an ultimate goal. What all of these examples have in common is a disruptive approach to travel and perspective, a sense that what is expected is not what will be found. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake explore the ‘as-yet-unfigured horizon of contemporary cultural production by which national spaces/identities of political allegiance and economic regulation are being undone and imagined communities of modernity are being reshaped at the macropolitical (global) and micropolitical (cultural) levels of everyday existence’.58 Contemporary Atlantic texts participate structurally and figuratively in these negotiations, especially in their back and forth movement across narrative space.

Notes 1. Robert Antoni, As Flies to Whatless Boys (New York: Akashic Books, 2013), p. 285. 2. Despite the acknowledged difficulties of the term ‘American’, Shriver’s novel is explicit about its weddedness to the phrase. As early as page 2, Shriver references ‘America’s famous amnesia’, and later, when she is comparing Eva and Franklin’s versions of their country, she slips between phrases. Eva, writing to Franklin, notes, ‘I would say – I did say – that you were enamored of an archaic version of the U.S., either an America that was long past or that never was; that you were enamored of an idea’; Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk about Kevin (2003; London: Serpent’s Tail, 2005), p. 36. In other words, Shriver is self-conscious in her knowledge that the US is a place, and ‘America’ is an idea, and she travels across both designations in this complex and purposely difficult novel. 3. Carolyn Porter, ‘What We Know that We Don’t Know: Remapping American Literary Studies’, American Literary History 6.3 (1994): 467–526. 4. Jonathan Franzen, Freedom (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), p. 443.

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5. Franzen, Freedom, p. 444. 6. Franzen, Freedom, p. 497. 7. Lorrie Moore, ‘Agnes of Iowa’, in Birds of America (1998; London: Faber and Faber, 1999), pp. 78–95, p. 88. 8. Lorrie Moore, ‘You’re Ugly, Too’, in Like Life (1990; New York: Vintage, 2002), pp. 67–91, p. 70. 9. Moore, ‘You’re Ugly, Too’, p. 70. 10. Lorrie Moore, ‘Community Life’, in Birds of America, pp. 58–77, p. 62. 11. Moore, ‘Community Life’, p. 59. 12. Audrey Niffenegger, Her Fearful Symmetry (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009), pp. 71–2. 13. Joan Thomas, Reading by Lightning (Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane Editions, 2008), p. 13. 14. Thomas, Reading by Lightning, p. 63. 15. David Jays, ‘Looking for the Light’, Globe and Mail, 4 October 2008, (last accessed 11 April 2016). 16. Thomas, Reading by Lightning, pp. 137–8, italics in original. 17. Thomas, Reading by Lightning, p. 136. 18. Thomas, Reading by Lightning, p. 147. 19. Thomas, Reading by Lightning, p. 154. 20. Antoni, As Flies to Whatless Boys, p. 31. 21. Antoni, As Flies to Whatless Boys, p. 39. 22. Antoni, As Flies to Whatless Boys, p. 62. 23. Antoni, As Flies to Whatless Boys, p. 97. 24. Antoni, As Flies to Whatless Boys, p. 71. 25. Antoni, As Flies to Whatless Boys, p. 145. 26. Antoni, As Flies to Whatless Boys, p. 140. 27. Antoni, As Flies to Whatless Boys, p. 198. 28. Antoni, As Flies to Whatless Boys, p. 253, italics in original. 29. See (last accessed 11 April 2016). 30. Antoni, As Flies to Whatless Boys, p. 282. 31. Paul Giles, Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 256. 32. See, for example, Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (1994; London: Routledge, 2006); Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays (London: Granta, 2000); George Robertson et al. (eds), Travellers’ Tales: Narratives of Home and Displacement (London: Routledge, 1994); and Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). 33. See ‘Contemporary American Women’s Writing: Women and Violence’, in Dale Bauer (ed.), The Cambridge History of American Women’s Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 539–56. 34. Shriver, We Need to Talk about Kevin, p. 2. 35. Shriver, We Need to Talk about Kevin, p. 7. 36. Linda Hutcheon, ‘A Crypto-Ethnic Confession’, (last accessed 11 April 2016). 37. Shriver, We Need to Talk about Kevin, p. 37. 38. Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1998), p. 29. 39. Shriver, We Need to Talk about Kevin, p. 1. 40. Shriver, We Need to Talk about Kevin, p. 38, italics in original. 41. Shriver, We Need to Talk about Kevin, p. 37, italics in original. 42. Shriver, We Need to Talk about Kevin, p. 37. 43. Shriver, We Need to Talk about Kevin, p. 36.

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116 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51.

52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

heidi slettedahl macpherson Shriver, We Need to Talk about Kevin, p. 1. Shriver, We Need to Talk about Kevin, p. 167. Shriver, We Need to Talk about Kevin, p. 167. Jenefer Shute, ‘Lionel Shriver’, Bomb 93 (2005): 60–5, p. 62. Shute, ‘Lionel Shriver’, p. 62. Shute, ‘Lionel Shriver’, p. 62. Rachel Cusk, ‘Darkness at the Heart of the Family’, The Guardian, 3 October 2003, (last accessed 11 April 2016). Emily Jeremiah, ‘We Need to Talk about Gender: Mothering and Masculinity in Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin’, in Andrea O’Reilly and Elizabeth Podnieks (eds), Textual Mothers/Maternal Texts: Motherhood in Contemporary Women’s Literatures (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2010), pp. 169–84, p. 179. Andrew Lawless, Three Monkeys Online Magazine, May 2005, (last accessed 11 April 2016). Shriver, We Need to Talk about Kevin, p. 275. Shriver, We Need to Talk about Kevin, pp. 278, 279, italics in original. Shriver, We Need to Talk about Kevin, pp. 31–2. Shriver, We Need to Talk about Kevin, p. 80. Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta, 1992), p. 10. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, ‘Introduction: Tracking the Global/Local’, in Wilson and Dissanayake (eds), Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 6, italics in original.

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8 Writing Race and Slavery in the Francophone Atlantic: Transatlantic Connections and Contradictions in Claire de Duras’s OURIKA and Victor Hugo’s BUG-JARGAL Susan Castillo Street

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ttitudes toward race in the francophone Atlantic have always had a complex and contradictory character, particularly in the aftermath of the 1792 revolt in St Domingue. It is certainly the case that the first half of the nineteenth century ushered in major developments in the area of race relations in the Atlantic world, and literary fiction was one of the cultural sites in which debate on issues related to slavery and abolition was carried out. As scholars such as Heather Brady, Christopher Miller and David O’Connell have observed, several works with slave protagonists appeared in Restoration France, such as Alfred de Vigny’s More de Venise and Prosper Merimee’s Tamango in 1829. However, two works of this type, Claire de Duras’s Ourika, published in 1824, and Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal, published in 1826, illustrate in particularly vivid form many of the complexities involved in writing about race and slavery in the francophone Atlantic. While both Claire de Duras and Victor Hugo were products of French Enlightenment culture, and while both believed in the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity, it is also the case that the families of both had links with, and derived income from, Caribbean plantation culture and thus with slavery. Consequently, their novels Ourika and Bug-Jargal are characterised by ambivalence toward revolutionary ideals in France and in Haiti, with enslaved protagonists who are represented as heroic and noble, but with an underlying capability of violence. This chapter begins with an overview of race relations and legislation on race in the francophone world in the period of the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution and the Bourbon Restoration. I then discuss the life and Caribbean antecedents of Claire Lechat de Kersaint, Duchess of Duras, in order to contextualise the social and political background from which her short novel Ourika emerged. I go on to examine the novel itself in order to make a case for the idea that Ourika represents the ambivalence felt by the French ruling classes toward slaves and people of colour in the wake of the historical trauma of St Domingue. After this, I look at Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal, which is characterised by similar complexity and ambiguity, and arguably sets the template for much subsequent writing about race and slavery in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world.

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French Slavery and Colonial Abjection Historically, a certain ambivalence has existed in France regarding the institution of slavery, which clearly is in direct conflict with Enlightenment notions of liberty, justice and indeed rationality. It has often been stated that there were no slaves in France. Obviously, this was not the case. The highest estimates indicate that there were around 4,000–5,000 slaves entering and leaving the country in the eighteenth century.1 In the French Caribbean, however, there were more than a million enslaved people. Seemingly, what was difficult for the French to countenance was the notion of the presence of slaves on French soil, while their presence in the colonies was a different matter altogether. This is reflected in legislation of the period. However, in 1794, at the height of the French Revolution, the Constituent Assembly abolished slavery and declared that all former slaves were citizens. Ten years thereafter, Napoleon re-established slavery in the colonies in 1804. Later, responding in part to British abolitionist efforts, Napoleon issued a decree ending French participation in the slave trade in 1815, and in April 1848 all slaves in the French colonies were emancipated.2 As we have seen, then, French society dealt with the more abhorrent aspects of the slave trade by what might be called colonial abjection, in which slavery’s existence was denied in metropolitan France and geographically projected on to France’s colonies. Some situations arose, however, which brought such a discourse into question. In 1691, a decree issued by the Minister of the Marine Pontchartrain had stated that enslaved people of colour brought into France would be set free upon their arrival, but this was not rigidly enforced for various reasons. One of these was that slaves often accompanied their West Indian planter masters to France, and their manumission would have caused inconvenience and economic loss to their proprietors. Consequently, in 1716 an edict was introduced in which slave owners were allowed to bring their slaves to France, but were required to register them within eight days of their arrival; failure to do so was punished initially by fines and then by the loss of the slave in question. Moreover, owners had to state their reasons for wishing to bring the slave into France. One motive commonly invoked was to inculcate Catholic beliefs (a tactic widely used to justify slavery as a positive good for slaves). In 1738, the 1715 edict was tightened up, as the presence of slaves in France was seen as disruptive and potentially dangerous. Masters were thus required to provide a deposit of 1,000 livres, and the maximum period that slaves were allowed to remain in France was three years; they could not marry, even with their masters’ consent, because of fears of intermarriage with French individuals. As well, freed slaves were no longer allowed to live in France. Later, in 1777, legislation called the Déclaration pour la police des noirs prohibited the entry of all blacks, mulattoes or other people of colour into France; those already living there were forced to carry identification papers, and were forbidden to marry whites.3 In the eighteenth century, St Domingue was the richest colony in the West Indies. Large numbers of African slaves were imported to work on the sugar plantations that formed the backbone of the island’s economy. Conditions on the plantations were appalling in many instances and mortality rates were high. In August 1791, slaves in the northern part of the colony rose up against their masters, and the revolt spread rapidly throughout the colony.

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The leader of the rebels, Toussaint L’Ouverture, fought under the French flag against the Spanish forces controlling the eastern half of Hispaniola, and also helped the French repel a British invasion. Toussaint was an extraordinarily able general, and by 1797 he had consolidated his position as the most important political figure in St Domingue; in 1801, his troops controlled the Spanish part of the island as well. However, in revolutionary France, these developments were viewed with a certain ambivalence. In 1802 Toussaint was captured by the forces of General Leclerc and sent to prison in France, where he died. The Haitian forces were then reconstituted under the leadership of Dessalines, and in 1804 France acknowledged defeat and the nation of Haiti came into being. In order to put an end to French plans of renewed invasions and re-enslavement, the new Haitian government was compelled to agree to indemnify the French planters who had fled to the tune of 150 million francs.4 In 1814, upon the abdication of Napoleon, the Bourbon monarchy was restored to the throne of France. The political tumult in the francophone world was responsible for a mass migration of refugees from both France and St Domingue to the United States. According to R. Darrell Meadows, in the period from 1789 to 1804 around 45,000 refugees from revolutionary upheaval in France ‘crisscrossed the Atlantic ocean’, and many of them settled in the United States.

The Caribbean Connections of Claire de Duras The French Atlantic world into which Claire Lechat de Kersaint (Mme de Duras) was born on 22 March 1777 was thus one in which there was considerable unease about the status of people of colour, whose labour provided the basis of the wealth of West Indian plantation families. Claire de Duras’s mother belonged to one such family and was a rich Creole heiress from Martinique; her father, the Comte de Kersaint, was a liberal deputy later beheaded during the Terror. Critics have suggested that his execution was due to his expressed disapproval of the execution of Louis XVI.5 The young Claire de Duras and her mother then fled to Philadelphia in 1794. There were many such cases. This migratory movement coincided with a large wave of St Domingue exiles who had escaped in the summer of 1793 to southern ports in the United States in the aftermath of the lethal violence in St Domingue’s major port, Le Cap Français.6 There thus existed in Philadelphia and New York a large diasporic community of exiles from both St Domingue and France. In Philadelphia, Claire de Duras and her mother encountered members of their Caribbean family, Mme de Kersaint’s sister Madame de Rouvray. The correspondence of the Rouvray family provides a fascinating insight not only into diasporic ancien régime social networks but also into the ways in which these exiles deal with the traumatic memories of revolutionary violence.7 Claire de Duras’s uncle, Monsieur de Rouvray, epitomises some of the contradictions and internal conflicts experienced by French Creoles caught up in the whirlwinds of history. He led a group of 750 black and mulatto soldiers in the American Revolution, taking part in the siege of Savannah, treating them, as Heather Brady points out, with paternalistic kindness;8 his status as a supporter of the cause of US independence is a matter of historical record. The Haitian Revolution was, however, a different matter,

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since the possibility of the contagion of revolutionary ideas and actions threatened his own economic interests as a plantation owner in Martinique. In a letter to his daughter, he asks plaintively: How could I tell you that, from a situation of the greatest ease and comfort, you and your family were about to fall into the most frightful distress? That your father, your mother, your sister were under the threat of having their throats cut by their rebellious slaves; that our possessions would be burned and razed to the ground, and that the white race was on the brink of destruction?9 As Brady observes, this discourse of victimhood is characterised by the use of the passive voice, which displaces agency on to an unnamed colonised subject haunting the narrative.10 Interestingly, Madame de Rouvray attributes their losses to her husband’s leniency toward the slaves: I have always seen that that race would destroy us along with our property. The protection your father gave them would have dire consequences for St. Domingue . . . By raising them up, he lowered the whites, causing them outrage and placing them below the mulattoes, who are, as you know, a race of poltroons, cowards, murderers, thieves – in the end, the union of all vices with a single virtue. And these are your father’s heroes.11 The comments of Claire de Duras’s aunt are a brew of toxic bitterness, reflecting not only the sense of betrayal that would destroy her marriage but also a rigidly hierarchical racialised worldview as it conflates her family with their ‘property’, which of course included the slaves themselves. The worst of her vitriol is reserved for those of mixed race, perhaps because they could not be slotted easily into any of the racial categories which gave her world legitimacy. It is unclear whether Claire de Duras actually spent time on her family’s plantations in Martinique. After her sojourn in Philadelphia, she travelled to Switzerland and then to London in 1795, where she met and married the highly eligible Duc de Duras, returning to France with him in 1808. There she established herself, according to her biographer Gabriel Pailhès, ‘queen of a society; surrounded, solicited, admired, adored and envied for the brilliance of her salon,’12 whose members included Mme de Stael and Saint-Beuve. According to the latter, Duras had heard the true story of Ourika, a young Senegalese girl rescued by a French noble from slave traders and brought up in the home of her aunt, the Princesse de Beauvau, and Duras retold the story to her salon. At the prompting of her friends, she wrote it down. Saint-Beuve describes it thus: There was no trace until then in the life of Mme. de Duras of any literary attempts or any intention to write. It was by chance that she became an author. Only in 1820, after she had told one evening in some detail the real story of a young Negress brought up in the home of the maréchale de Beauvau, her friends, who were charmed by this tale (for she was an excellent raconteuse) told her: ‘Why don’t you write this story down?’ By noon the following day half of the novel had been written.13

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As we have seen, the attitudes of the French toward slaves in their midst was complicated to say the very least, and Ourika reflects this complexity. The novel begins on the eve of the French Revolution. Duras employs a narrative frame in the voice of a doctor who has been summoned to a convent to treat a young nun whose health is declining. In many ways, the use of the perspective of the unnamed doctor is peculiarly similar to that of the prefaces of abolitionists which preceded accounts of escaped slaves in order to vouch for their veracity; the voice of a white man from the professional classes is used to legitimise the account that will follow. The doctor describes the convent into which he is admitted to treat the young nun; he declares that he had never seen the inside of a convent (thus establishing his credentials as a rationalist and a sceptic), and he describes the tombstones broken in the Revolution. He is subsequently shocked to discover that his patient is a young woman of African descent who is dying of melancholy, although she tells the doctor that she has finally found contentment within the convent walls. When he replies that if she is happy now, it is the past that must be cured, Ourika assents and tells him her story. Ourika’s first-person account begins with a description of the events that led to her arrival in France: I was brought here from Senegal when I was two years old by the Chevalier de B., who was Governor there. One day he saw me being taken aboard a slaver that was soon to leave port. My mother had died, and in spite of my cries I was being carried to the ship. He took pity and bought me, and then, when he returned to France, gave me to his aunt, Mme. la Maréchale de B.14 Ourika characterises her mistress/owner as ‘one of the most attractive women of her time, combining a fine mind with a very genuine warmth of heart’. Ourika’s upbringing is a curious mixture of the education that would have been given to a young Frenchwoman of the privileged classes, with painting lessons and singing masters; her mistress is very fond of her, and encourages her to read widely and to take part in intellectual debates. At the same time, however, she is treated like an exoticised toy to be displayed for the amusement of her mistress’s friends. Mme de B. praises her natural grace and gives a masked ball where Ourika is told to play Africa in a quadrille representing the four corners of the globe. Dressed in African costume, she dances the comba; in a telling detail, her partner covers his face in a mask of black crêpe, which, according to Ourika, is ‘a disguise I did not need’.15 The dance is wildly applauded; Ourika is represented as somehow instinctively in touch with her emotions. She describes the dance in the following terms: It consisted of stately steps broken by various poses, describing love, grief, triumph, and despair. I was totally ignorant of such violent emotions, but some instinct taught me how to mimic their effects. In short, I triumphed.16 Christopher L. Miller, in his seminal book The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade, comments lucidly that Ourika has been transformed into the ultimate house slave, assimilated to France and French culture in every aspect save that of skin colour.17

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Obviously, such a situation can lead only to tragedy. Ourika lives happily enough until she overhears the comments of one of her mistress’s friends, described as ‘a bleakly practical woman’, which reveal to her that her dreams of a future with Charles, her mistress’s son, are impossible because of her race. The impact of these revelations is devastating. Ourika explains her reactions starkly: I could never describe the effect those few words had on me. Lightning does not strike more swiftly. I comprehended all. I was black. Dependent, despised, without fortune, without resource, without a single other being of my kind to help me through life. All I had been until then was a toy, an amusement for my mistress; and soon I would be cast out of a world that could never admit me. My face revolted me, I no longer dared to look in a mirror. My black hands seemed like monkey’s paws.18 This double consciousness – the fact that Ourika perceives her world and herself through the eyes of the French elites who have enslaved her – will ultimately destroy her. Her initial reaction, however, is one of rage. She withdraws emotionally from her mistress, but experiences severe guilt. Later, she says, the Revolution takes ‘a more serious turn’, and she experiences hope on hearing some of the debates in her mistress’s salon.19 Eventually, however, she becomes disillusioned, realising that many of those who espouse revolutionary ideas do so out of self-interest and that their commitment to the ideals of equality and fraternity does not apply to those of her colour. She observes sardonically, The moment the Revolution became more than a fine theory and touched the private interests of the individual, the debates degenerated into quarrels. A sharpness, a sourness, a personal animosity took the place of reason. In spite of my sadness, I had sometimes to smile at the violence with which people spoke. Their opinions were basically exaggerations, conceits, fears. But the amusement that comes from watching people make fools of themselves isn’t good. There’s too much malice in it to please a heart more in key with simple joys.20 Here a certain doubling, arising from Ourika’s divided consciousness, is evident. On the one hand, the acculturated intellectual who believes in Enlightenment rationality derives a rather unkind amusement at the logical inconsistencies of her interlocutors. But on the other, as an exoticised and objectified African whose heart is ‘more in key with simple joys’, she is riven with guilt at her own reactions. For obvious reasons, when the issue of emancipation for people of colour arises in her mistress’s salon, it is of direct interest to Ourika. But her own revolutionary hopes for those of her race are definitively dashed when she hears of the massacres in St Domingue: Of course this question passionately interested me. I still cherished the illusion that at least somewhere in the world there were others like myself. I knew they were not happy and I supposed them noble-hearted. I was eager to know what happened to them. But alas, I soon learned my lesson. The Santo Domingo massacres gave me cause for fresh and heartrending sadness. Till then I had regretted belonging to a race of outcasts. Now I had the shame of belonging to a race of barbarians and murderers.21

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Tellingly, no mention is made of the barbarous and murderous treatment of slaves by their owners, nor indeed of the success of the revolt. Ourika perceives the St Domingue revolt through the eyes of her French mistress. The two women survive the Terror, and Ourika falls even more deeply in love with Charles. When he is betrothed to a young Frenchwoman of the noble classes, Ourika fantasises about an alternative fate: What did it matter that I might now have been the black slave of some rich planter? Scorched by the sun, I should be labouring on someone else’s land. But I would have a poor hut of my own to go to at day’s end; a partner in my life, children of my own race who would call me their mother, who would kiss my face without disgust, who would rest their heads against my neck and sleep in my arms.22 This vision of slave life as lived in idyllic nuclear families is in direct contradiction to accounts of the lived experience of slaves, who often saw their offspring sold off, and who (as we have seen) were often prohibited from marrying. Miller has noted the revealing silences in Ourika’s tale: nowhere does she mention the Middle Passage, nor the Code Noir, nor the humiliating punishments to which slaves were subjected.23 The story ends when, broken-hearted, she retreats to a convent and dies there. In many ways, Ourika represents an attempt to resolve some of the unresolvable contradictions of the French Atlantic. Duras has created a compassionate portrait of the alienation and of the psychological impact of racism on enslaved African subjects that was far in advance of its time. And yet much of her own wealth was derived from her family’s plantations in Martinique, so to characterise her as an abolitionist writer is hardly accurate. Though Duras valued the theoretical ideals of Enlightenment rationality and Revolutionary fraternity, she projects on to her African protagonist her own guilt about the origins of her family’s material status, and her revulsion when enslaved people are no longer passive, acculturated house servants but rather take up arms to gain their freedom. Her novel depicts vividly the fact that in the French Atlantic the existence of slavery in France’s colonies was seen as part of the normal scheme of things, but that the presence of a woman of colour, however intelligent and personable, among the French elites in France, however ‘revolutionary’ their professed beliefs, was an aberration.

Victor Hugo, Haiti and Bug-Jargal In the work of Victor Hugo we encounter similar ambiguities and contradictions. In 1820, when he was only eighteen years old, he published a long short story in serial form in Le Conservateur littéraire titled ‘Bug-Jargal’, whose eponymous protagonist is an enslaved African prince who leads a slave revolt. Later, in 1826, he published an expanded version of the same story anonymously, and it is on this version that I focus here. The novel is set in St Domingue in 1791, the year of the revolt. It relates the story of Leopold d’Auverney, who has just arrived from France for a sojourn on his uncle’s plantation and becomes engaged to his cousin Marie. He learns that Marie is being serenaded by an unidentified suitor, who turns out to be a slave on her own plantation known as Pierrot. Pierrot saves Marie from being engulfed by an alligator, and this assures him of not only her gratitude but her fiancé’s as well. The slaves revolt on

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Marie and Leopold’s wedding day, and Leopold is compelled to leave his beloved on their wedding night before the marriage is consummated in order to join forces with those defending the interests of the plantation owners. We learn that the revolt is led by a man called Bug-Jargal, the evil mixed-race Biassou, and a masked obi or sorcerer. Leopold returns to a scene of devastation; he finds his uncle’s bleeding corpse and concludes that Pierrot has murdered him and his jester, ‘the devoted Habibrah’.24 Later, he sees Bug-Jargal carrying Marie off in his arms, plunging him into a wild state of sexual jealousy and causing him to conclude that his rival is going to rape her. Subsequently, Leopold is captured and taken to the rebel camp, where he is pardoned by Bug-Jargal. He later learns that Bug-Jargal, though he is in love with Marie, has safeguarded her chastity and kept her safe, and that the real assassin of his uncle is Habibrah the dwarf. The description of the burning plantation in the first-person narration of Leopold is extraordinarily vivid: I hardly even glanced at those immense plantations which were now nothing more than a sea of flames cascading along the plain, making thick waves of smoke through which every so often you could see large tree trunks blanketed with fire being swept along like sparks in the wind. Creaking, whispering sounds mixed in with a frightful crackling that seemed as if it were echoing the distant howls of the blacks, whom we could already hear but not yet see . . . With redoubled speed, we headed across the fields to the fort, at the foot of which you could see my uncle’s house; its doors and windows were broken, but it was still standing – all red in the reflected blaze of the fire, which hadn’t reached it because the wind was blowing from the sea and it was a good distance from the plantations . . . Lying concealed in this house, a throng of negroes suddenly sprang into view at each of the casements and even on the roof; their torches, pikes, and axes glinted amid the constant stream of gunfire they directed at the fort, while another mob of their comrades relentlessly scurried up the besieged walls, which they had covered with ladders, only to fall off and then scurry up again. From a distance, this flood of blacks, continually being pushed back and then resurfacing on those grey walls, resembled a swarm of ants trying to scale the shell of a big tortoise and being shaken off at intervals by the plodding animal.25 This Dantesque vision of an inferno of flame is conveyed by vivid visual metaphors. Some are maritime in nature, as befits an island: the ‘sea of flames’ interrupted sporadically by ‘waves of smoke’, or the ‘flood of blacks’; in others, the redness of the fire is reflected in the windows of the burning plantation house. In still others, the light glances off the weapons of the rebellious slaves. Auditory images are evoked as well: the creaking of the burning trees and the crackling of the wind echo the battle cries of the slaves. There is a disturbing slippage into tropes of animality, and a concomitant denial of the humanity of the insurgents, when Hugo describes them as a swarm of ants attempting to climb the shell of a giant tortoise. Inevitably, the plot ends in tragedy. Bug-Jargal saves Leopold from the clutches of Biassou, but Leopold sacrifices Marie’s happiness and his own as well as the life of Bug-Jargal when he gives his word to Biassou that he will return before nightfall. This he does, and as the French are under the mistaken impression that Leopold has been

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killed, they threaten to kill ten insurgent prisoners in retaliation. Bug-Jargal offers himself to be executed in their stead, and dies heroically. Marie later dies as well, and Leopold goes back to France to embrace death on the battlefield. Traditionally, critics have viewed Bug-Jargal as a minor piece of juvenilia, and only recently has the novel come in for sustained critical attention. It is a curiously complex and ambivalent work that reveals a great deal about racial politics during the Bourbon Restoration. On the one hand, one encounters a certain commitment to Enlightenment values, with Bug-Jargal seen as the noble embodiment of natural man. At the same time, however, he is seen as the incarnation of illicit, interracial desire, a virile, sexual threat to the purity of the heroine Marie. This in many ways reflects the ambivalence of Restoration politics toward people of colour and the terror provoked by situations of racial ambiguity. Bug-Jargal, the noble son of an African prince, is described in the best tradition of Oroonoko as a noble slave.26 Mixed-race characters, however, are vilified; Biassou, a real historical character of African descent, is inaccurately presented as a sadistic mulatto. Marlene Daut, in her seminal study Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865, argues convincingly that Bug-Jargal should be read in the context of the historical works consulted by Victor Hugo, which were representative of the widespread dissemination in Atlantic print culture of narratives of mulatto vengeance, in which the violent excesses of the Haitian Revolution are presented not as the consequence of a struggle for liberty by an oppressed people, but rather as the pathological revenge of biologically inferior creatures. Daut adds: Not only is the brutality of the revolutionists transformed from being about liberty to being about revenge, but the genocidal reaction of French colonists to the onset of revolution is characterized as the logical response to the characteristic callousness of the slaves of ‘mixed race’ rather than as merely the slaveholder’s further perpetuation of the depredations of slavery.27 Dominique Jullien has astutely pointed out that Leopold embodies the blinkered vision of the French colonisers. His incapacity to see things as they really are means that the novel will end in tragedy. Jullien states, ‘More a victim of his prejudices than of events, he [Leopold] is a worthy representative of the white colonists to whom he will be linked by marriage.’28 He is incapable of believing that an enslaved man could be his rival, though the identity of Marie’s suitor is blindingly obvious. He jumps to the conclusion that his uncle’s jester Habibrah is a faithful, loving retainer, when in fact the latter is his uncle’s murderer. In this funhouse mirror of a novel, doubles and images of doubling abound. The most obvious doubles are Leopold and Bug-Jargal, one the French aristocrat and military officer, the other African prince and revolutionary, both bound to a tragic degree to notions of honour. But these characters as well engender doubles of themselves: Pierrot, the noble but unthreatening house slave named for the harlequin clown figure of the commedia dell’arte, is revealed to be Bug-Jargal, virile African prince and son of the King of Kakongo, leader of the insurgent maroons of Morne Rouge. Leopold, whom we encounter at the beginning of the narrative as a grim, laconic officer seeking to embrace death, is shown to have been in the past a pleasure-seeking, romantic

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young gallant. By placing the vision of the death-seeking Leopold at the beginning of the novel, Victor Hugo enlists the reader’s complicity as the conflicts in the text slide inexorably toward tragedy. Throughout the novel, the genres of romantic melodrama and the Gothic coexist uneasily. Marie is a cipher upon whom the desires and rivalries of her two suitors are projected. As her name would imply, she embodies sexual chastity and innocence. The episode in which Pierrot/Bug-Jargal serenades her from a hidden vantage point and the scene in which she is saved from the revolutionaries and borne off in his arms are melodramatic in the extreme. And yet the text has darker Gothic undertones throughout. When Leopold is taken prisoner, he is surrounded by a mob of griotes who are, he is convinced, about to carry out the most excruciating tortures upon his person: The negresses, disturbed in their mysteries, all jumped up as if they had woken with a start . . . They were set on tearing me to pieces. The old one with the heron feather made a sign and yelled several times: ‘Zote corde! Zote corde.’ The frenzied women suddenly came to a stop, and with no small amazement I saw each and every one of them take off their feather aprons and throw them onto the grass, then they surrounded me and launched into that lascivious dance the blacks call la chica . . . I recalled the custom of those savage tribes who dance around their prisoners before slaughtering them, and I patiently stood by as these women performed the ballet portion of a play that was to end with me soaked in blood. However, I couldn’t help shuddering at that point in the dance, underscored by the balafo, when I saw each griote stick into the blazing fire the tip of a sabre blade, the head of an axe, the tip of a long sail-needle, the jaws of a pair of pincers, or the teeth of a saw . . . The dance was drawing to a close; the instruments of torture were red-hot.29 These dehumanised images of African women, described as ‘possessed by a crazed demon’, embody a staple of Gothic imagery: the monstrous feminine. In the tumult of the Haitian Revolution as seen by Victor Hugo, all the old hierarchies have been reversed. These enslaved women are not presented as the passive female victims of the male planters who exploit their labour and their bodies, but rather as the ultimate nightmare of the planter elites: monstrous female Furies out to exact the most excruciating revenge. As the novel unfolds, Bug-Jargal and Leopold d’Auverney come to recognise and value each other’s worth, and are edging toward the sentiment of brotherhood to which the French Revolution aspired. But at the same time, this brotherhood and a genuine recognition of enslaved people as human beings is doomed to failure. It would seem that, although lofty ideals work transatlantically, they are ultimately erased or distorted by cold economic realities. It is possible that some of the more contradictory facets of the novel are due at least in part to Victor Hugo’s own family antecedents. Like that of Claire de Duras, Victor Hugo’s family reflects the French ambivalence toward Caribbean slavery. His mother was born in Nantes and his maternal grandfather was involved in the West India triangular trade, carrying slaves from West Africa to the West Indies and returning to France with sugar and molasses,30 while his father, a general in Napoleon’s army, had published a pamphlet in 1818 on ‘the means of replacing the trade in Negroes with free individuals’.31

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Chris Bongie, in the scholarly introduction to his translation of Bug-Jargal, mentions that some critics have discussed a letter dated 18 December 1829 in which Hugo describes difficulties in securing his father’s inheritance, which cites ‘the holding back of my indemnity from St. Domingue by Boyer [President of Haiti from 1820 to 1843]’, though he acknowledges that this has not been substantiated by scholars researching in colonial archives in Haiti and in France.32 Whether or not his interest in the topic of St Domingue was motivated by personal factors, however, Hugo was not blind to the violence committed by both sides in the St Domingue conflict; the novel contains an allusion to the Citizen-General C., almost definitely the Marquis de Caradeux, who was reputed to have placed the decapitated heads of his slaves on pikes lining the alley leading up to his plantation house. This ambivalence – of recognising the barbarism and injustice of slavery as an affront to Enlightenment rationality, and at the same time acknowledging or repressing the visceral fear these conflicts provoked – is reflected in generic terms, as the novel veers from melodrama to darkly Gothic images of horror and racialised violence. Bug-Jargal would later be translated into most of the major European languages. In much subsequent writing on race and slavery, the tropes we encounter in Bug-Jargal (the noble African slave; the chaste protagonist whose virtue is menaced by illicit interracial desire; the monstrous feminine; the racialised doppelganger; the freak or monster; the treacherous mixed-race character) and the generic instability (the uneasy swerving between melodrama and the Gothic) are reproduced again and again throughout the Atlantic world. Herman Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno’ and George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes both feature protagonists whose blinkered vision renders them incapable of seeing the revolt of oppressed people in a clear-eyed way, as what it is. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin relates the story of a noble, asexual slave protagonist shackled by the conventions of melodrama and sentiment. Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! are populated by racialised doppelgangers and tragic ‘mulatto’ figures. Feelings of compassion for enslaved people, and efforts to procure their liberation, were indeed transatlantic in nature. But the discourse of ‘scientific’ racism still continues to brand those who advocate economic and social justice for people of African descent and those of ‘mixed’ race as either violent or monstrous.

Notes 1. Samuel Chapman, ‘ “There are no slaves in France”: A Re-examination of Slave Laws in Eighteenth-Century France’, The Journal of Negro History 85.3 (2000), p. 144. 2. Chapman, ‘ “There are no slaves in France” ’, pp. 144–6. 3. Chapman, ‘ “There are no slaves in France” ’, pp. 144–6. 4. Christopher L. Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 247; Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), pp. 37–40. 5. See David O’Connell, ‘Ourika: Black Face, White Mask’, The French Review 47.6 (1974), p. 48. 6. R. Darrell Meadows, ‘Engineering Exile: Social Networks and the French Atlantic Community, 1789–1809’, French Historical Studies 23.1 (2000), p. 70.

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7. See Heather Brady, ‘Recovering Claire de Duras’s Creole Inheritance: Race and Gender in the Exile Correspondence of her Saint-Domingue Family’, L’Esprit Créateur 47.4 (2007): 44–56. 8. Brady, ‘Recovering Claire de Duras’s Creole Inheritance’, p. 46. 9. See Une Correspondance familiale au temps des troubles de Saint-Domingue: lettres du Marquis et de la Marquise de Rouvray à leur fille: Saint-Domingue–États-Unis (1791–1796), ed. M. E. McIntosh and B. C. Weber (Paris: Société coloniale, 1959), p. 38 (my translation). In the original: ‘Comment aurais-je pu vous dire que, du sein de la plus grande aisance, votre famille et vous êtes sur le point de tomber dans la plus affreuse détresse? Que votre père, votre mère, votre frère, étaient menaces d’être engorgés par le fer de leurs esclaves révoltés; que nos possessions allaient être incendiées et détruites de fond en comble, et que l’espèce blanche touchait au moment da sa destruction?’ 10. Brady, ‘Recovering Claire de Duras’s Creole Inheritance’, p. 47. 11. Une Correspondance familiale, p. 97. 12. Gabriel Pailhès, La Duchesse de Duras et Chateaubriand d’après des documents inédites (Paris: Perrin, 1910), p. xiii. 13. Saint-Beuve, II, 1048, quoted in O’Connell, ‘Ourika’, p. 50. 14. Claire de Duras, Ourika, trans. John Fowles (New York: Modern Language Association, 1994), p. 7. 15. Duras, Ourika, p. 10. 16. Duras, Ourika, p. 11. 17. Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle, pp. 163–4. 18. Duras, Ourika, p. 14. 19. Duras, Ourika, p. 18. 20. Duras, Ourika, p. 20. 21. Duras, Ourika, p. 21. 22. Duras, Ourika, p. 39. 23. Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle, p. 169. Miller points out that a year after Ourika was written, and before it was published, an unsuccessful slave revolt took place in Martinique. The government mutilated and then executed twenty-one of the leaders; ten others were transported to France for a life sentence in the galleys. The discrepancy between Duras’s idyllic vision of slave life and the reality of slave existence in Martinique is stark. 24. Victor Hugo, Bug-Jargal, trans. Chris Bongie (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2004), p. 45. 25. Hugo, Bug-Jargal, p. 99. 26. See Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, ed. Janet Todd (London: Longman, 1999). 27. Marlene L. Daut, Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), p. 172. 28. Dominique Jullien, ‘Bug-Jargal: La Révolution et ses doubles’, Littérature 139 (2005), p. 82. Leopold’s obtuseness is reminiscent of that of Captain Delano, the protagonist of Herman Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno’, published nearly thirty years later in 1855. 29. Hugo, Bug-Jargal, pp. 112–13. 30. Graham Robb, Victor Hugo (London: Picador, 1997), p. 4. 31. Robb, Victor Hugo, p. 77. 32. Chris Bongie, ‘Introduction’, in Hugo, Bug-Jargal, p. 32.

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9 Crosscurrents of Black Utopianism: Martin R. Delany’s and Frederick Douglass’s Countercultural Atlantic Leslie Elizabeth Eckel

I

n an 1846 letter written from Ireland to his abolitionist mentor William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass renounces his nationality. His bold statement, ‘as to nation, I belong to none’, appears to signal a permanent rejection of the United States in favour of Ireland and Britain, where he had enjoyed a measure of personal freedom previously unknown to him.1 His decision the following year to return to US shores ‘to labor and suffer with the oppressed in my native land’ therefore seems to be a shocking change of heart. What Douglass’s rhetoric reveals, however, is that his twoyear sojourn abroad allows him to cultivate the kind of utopian thinking that leads to his wholehearted reinvestment in the US social experiment. The words that surround his initial declaration reveal his utopian mindset, for, like Thomas More’s islanders, he imagines that he inhabits an Atlantic ‘no-place’, where he has ‘no end to serve, no creed to uphold, no government to defend . . . no protection at home, or resting-place abroad’. This catalogue of dissociation is at once dystopian and utopian, for it mourns the absence of essential social attachments for members of the African diaspora even as it opens up the possibility of new forms of affiliation and creation. Together with his friend and colleague Martin R. Delany, who co-edited Douglass’s first antislavery newspaper The North Star, Douglass engages with what Paul Gilroy identifies as an Atlantic ‘counterculture of modernity’, recognising the ocean’s power to erase cultural identities and to reconstitute them in new, hybrid forms.2 Delany used the space of the Atlantic to explore black nationalist futures, particularly in the Caribbean, Central and South America, and Nigeria. Douglass, on the other hand, sought common ground with white Americans, modelling his vision of what the United States could become upon the relative interracial harmony that he experienced in Europe. The transatlantic Romantic idealism of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, who once had imagined an earthly paradise on the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania, carried forward into a profusion of utopian experiments in the 1840s United States, including the Transcendentalist communities founded at Brook Farm and Fruitlands and Henry David Thoreau’s utopia of one at Walden Pond. African American leaders such as Delany and Douglass were fired by similar utopian impulses, but their freedom to experiment was profoundly constrained by the limits of southern slavery and northern prejudice. In fact, Douglass’s years abroad coincided

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precisely – and ironically – with Thoreau’s meditative experience at Walden: while the former was a flight out of ‘stern necessity’ and in fear of recapture, the latter was the bold choice of a fortunately free man.3 Thoreau’s cabin was a retreat; Douglass’s journey was a ‘semi-exile’: half-desired, half-forced, and at the time ambiguous in its cultural value. While Thoreau staked his claim in both physical and imaginative terms, Douglass was recovering from the unnatural state of belonging as ‘a thing of household property’ to another human being: a condition that made it nearly impossible to achieve personal equality, let alone attempt social improvement on a larger scale.4 Where, then, could African Americans find a measure of utopia? If the nation to which they ostensibly belonged rejected them, and if they felt, as Douglass did, like ‘an outcast from the society of my childhood, and an outlaw in the land of my birth’, how could they imagine a progressive, principled future for the community as a whole?5 Both Douglass and Delany answered this call by looking outside the nation for the fulfilment of their hopes, for they found ‘that the slave must leave his native soil to be free’.6 Both leaders experimented with different scenarios and varied locations for the reformation of the black community during and after slavery. Robert S. Levine has written extensively on the geographical nature of their disagreements, which were often inflected by racial identity and the responsibility each man felt to speak for the black community.7 However, by changing the terms of the debate from where utopia would be located for African Americans to how it would be achieved, I consider how utopian language becomes a political tool for the purposes of black elevation.8 Due to utopia’s embeddedness in the discourse of topos, or ‘place’, and its imaginary counterpart, ‘no-place’, geography can never be eliminated entirely from this discussion. For both Delany and Douglass, the Atlantic world at large serves as a space of linguistic play and a catalyst of freedom that is not possible within US borders. As they construct their utopian politics, Delany and Douglass build upon terms such as ‘freedom’, ‘equality’ and ‘progress’. Partly recognisable as the abstractions favoured by Coleridge and Southey as well as the airy impossibilities of Transcendentalists such as Bronson Alcott, in the hands of black activists, these move audiences toward specific political goals of consensus, economic independence, and leadership. This chapter brings together the bold claims of newspaper articles and speeches with the utopian visions evoked in Douglass’s autobiographies and Delany’s fiction. Grounded in the recognition of dystopian conditions for African Americans on US soil, Delany and Douglass’s utopian thinking maps coordinates that circle the Atlantic from Canada to Britain and West Africa to the US via the Caribbean as it shapes new possibilities for diasporic black community. By navigating these trajectories, Delany and Douglass unsettle the temporal framework of the nation that holds them, choosing instead to occupy the realm of what I call the ‘utopian infinitive’, which stretches to encompass past, present and future at once. In its paradoxical temporality, their utopian work occupies all three of these Atlantic time zones as it projects an expansive feeling of ‘no-time’ to match the ‘no-place’ of More’s original island. In recent theories of temporality, Wai Chee Dimock identifies literature as ‘the home of nonstandard space and time’, and Lloyd Pratt asks us to consider the ‘humanity’ behind that writing as ‘immanent rather than transcendent – in rather than out of time’.9 Delany and Douglass capitalise on the flexibility of print to change the space-time coordinates of African American lives that have been severely compromised by others’ narratives. For them, utopian thinking allows them to find ‘immanent’ solutions that have ‘transcendent[al]’

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significance, to place themselves in time even as they imagine their way out of it. As they work in this infinitive mode, whether utopia appears at the start of Douglass’s career or toward the end of Delany’s matters less than the broadening spirit in which they speak. They become masters of the Atlantic counterculture, unlocking the chains of the Middle Passage and transforming the genealogy of utopia as an Atlantic genre.10

Douglass’s Transatlantic Paradox In 1845, complete liberty for an African American on US soil was inconceivable. As Douglass explains this situation to an Irish audience, he shocks them by stating ‘there is not a single spot in all his land where the sable man can stand free’.11 In Ireland and Britain, Douglass marvels at the absence of constraint as he passes through daily life unchallenged and unbarred from the kind of social privileges that whites in the US enjoyed as a matter of course. For him, this constitutes ‘a transformation’ that allows him to ‘live a new life’.12 Douglass writes: I breathe, and lo! the chattel becomes a man. I gaze around in vain for one who will question my equal humanity, claim me as his slave, or offer me an insult. I employ a cab – I am seated beside white people – I reach the hotel – I enter the same door – I am shown into the same parlor – I dine at the same table – and no one is offended. This catalogue of actions is at once mundane in fact and utopian in its broader significance. In a fascinating instance of transatlantic paradox, as Douglass travels through Britain on equal terms, he becomes a ‘man’ and then, thanks to his displacement, a fully realised ‘citizen’ of the United States. The other Americans with whom he travels, Douglass observes, ‘looked as sour as vinegar, and as bitter as gall’ in the face of this colour-blind hospitality, yet he takes pride in standing ‘on an equal footing with my white fellow-citizens’.13 By leaving the US, Douglass gains ground in his quest for social improvement. His claim to that ‘property’ was immediately challenged by US slaveholders, who, in reading the extensive transatlantic press coverage of Douglass’s lecture tour, conclude that ‘he was quite out of his place here amongst white people, treated and shook hands with by the white people, as if he were one of themselves’.14 As Douglass voices the fears of pro-slavery Americans, on this occasion from a lecture platform at the Glasgow City Hall, his language carries a definite utopian charge. When he is ‘out of his place’, he occupies that utopian ‘no-place’ that allows for the kind of personal and collective liberation that leads to progress, or a social state in which one would find oneself ‘above’ where one was before. Britain, however, is not the endpoint of Douglass’s utopian dreams. He recognises its function as an intermediary social world that makes his own projects in the ‘new’ world possible. More than the Anglophilia that Elisa Tamarkin has explored, which leads nineteenth-century Americans more generally and African Americans in particular to idealise British society with what she terms ‘a rather causeless enthusiasm’, Britain is for Douglass a means to an ultimately American end.15 When he says to his British friends ‘I owe my freedom in the United States’, we might take those words both literally and figuratively.16 His abolitionist supporters did indeed purchase his ‘freedom’ for the sum of a hundred and fifty pounds, but in addition, Douglass gained an intangible and crucial feeling that the freedom he enjoyed abroad could be realised

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at home in the United States. Progress in the US is thus a result of transatlantic investment, for Douglass rightly recognises the powerful political and moral influence that Britain wields at this point over US cultural affairs. Often paraphrasing Irish nationalist John Philpot Curran, Douglass celebrates Britain as his ‘home’, and imagines ‘liberty commensurate with, and inseparable from British soil’, yet, like Curran, ultimately seeks to plant the seeds of that utopian society elsewhere.

Alliance and Divergence After achieving great success as a lecturer abroad and realising the political impact of press coverage of antislavery activism, particularly outside the United States, Douglass returned to his homeland with the focused mission of starting a newspaper of his own. This transatlantically funded venture, titled at first The North Star (1845–51), and then Frederick Douglass’ Paper (1851–8), benefited from the professional expertise of his co-editor Delany, who had established his credentials as the founding editor of the Pittsburgh-based newspaper The Mystery (1843–7). Douglass explains: The grand thing to be done, therefore, was to change the estimation in which the colored people of the United States were held; to remove the prejudice which depreciated and depressed them; to prove them worthy of a higher consideration; to disprove their alleged inferiority, and demonstrate their capacity for a more exalted civilization than slavery and prejudice had assigned to them.17 Douglass’s editorial project is powered by a series of utopian infinitives: his intentions ‘to change’, ‘to remove’, ‘to prove’, ‘to disprove’ and ‘[to] demonstrate’. These verbs look to the future, as they can be infinitely conjugated; they have not yet fallen into the contingencies of he or she, or, more importantly, us versus them. As Douglass sees it, the possibilities of his newspaper are ‘grand’, and he looks forward to using this print sphere to map out an ‘exalted civilization’ in the continuing absence of a physical space in which to realise black advancement. As editors in the black press, Douglass and Delany both face the challenge of staking a claim to citizenship in a country that denies them the right to vote and to own property. Instead of land ownership, they choose to cultivate their intellectual property in print. This property is the figurative ground upon which they can establish their utopian credentials and construct a more ideal society in which they become active civic leaders. While fellow editor James McCune Smith imagined the black press as a ‘field’ that would produce a promising harvest, Delany offers an alternative metaphor for black print counterculture that invokes the transnational experience of African Americans.18 In his words, his newspaper The Mystery is a ship, ‘still afloat, with the solemn promise of the Publishers, to keep her tiding on the broad waters of destiny, doing battle in the great struggle for liberty and right, elevation and equality, God and humanity, as in days bygone’.19 When he makes this comparison, Delany is actually in the process of jumping ship to join Douglass’s venture The North Star. Still, his vision suggests that the black press has the capacity not only to reshape national life, but also to process the complex Atlantic history that both haunts and enriches African American culture. Delany sees himself as one who is firmly in command of this history as he navigates the waters of Gilroy’s black Atlantic, where the ship is ‘a living, micro-cultural, micro-political system

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in motion’.20 In itself, the ship seems like a utopia (or dystopia) at sea, disengaged from landed places and outside the jurisdiction of their laws. Delany’s choice to frame his project in these terms, therefore, gives the black press a quality of imaginative flexibility and opens up the possibility of its use as an escape route from the nation. When Delany envisions his newspaper as a ship, ‘launch[ing] forth upon the mental ocean’, he tips his hand about the direction in which his interests lie for the development of the black press as a utopian endeavour.21 Although Delany’s and Douglass’s founding documents of their print enterprises sound similar, and line up directly with more generally held notions of black elevation, their editorial collaboration on The North Star exacerbated fault lines that would ultimately separate their visions for the future of the black community. They agreed on the task before them – the cultivation of the ‘moral vineyard’, as Delany put it – but they located that fertile landscape in very different places. To invoke Gilroy again, Douglass saw that future as firmly ‘rooted’ in the national territory of the United States, while Delany ‘routed’ his hopes through Central and South America and Africa as he pursued his emigrationist agenda.22 When Douglass settled in Rochester, New York, in 1847, he received a land grant from white abolitionist Gerrit Smith: a parcel of property at ‘Timbucto’, a proposed agrarian community further upstate in North Elba to be developed by a multiracial group of settlers that included James McCune Smith, editor Willis Hodges and militant radical John Brown. Timbucto was a utopian experiment in which white as well as black abolitionists had a stake, and Douglass’s co-ownership of that property allowed him to physically ground his assertions that black Americans had earned their right to cultivate the nation’s soil.23 Although Douglass never lived in this utopian community, his imaginative ties to some portion of the national landscape fuelled his belief that there was room within US borders for reform and regeneration. In the pages of The North Star, Douglass promotes Timbucto as precisely that concrete solution for which black Americans have been waiting. He writes: The sharp axe of the sable-armed pioneer should be at once uplifted over the soil of Franklin and Essex counties, and the noise of falling trees proclaim the glorious dawn of civilization throughout their borders. Let the work be commenced at once. The day has come. The spring is near at hand. Seed-time is near; and what a man soweth that shall he reap.24 In Timbucto, all is fresh, as at the ‘dawn of civilization’. The work of conquering the wilderness, which John Stauffer has recognised as Douglass’s gesture toward the familiar Romantic rhetoric of the western frontier, promises to renew a people once forced to labour for others.25 This is the start of the ‘day’, the ‘spring[time]’ of a glorious community. Like many antebellum utopian experiments, however, that community would struggle to sustain itself economically due to the financial obstacles of resettlement and the harsh conditions homesteaders discovered upon arrival. For Delany, on the other hand, Central and South America and the Caribbean were ideal sites in which to pursue the larger project of African American political elevation. In 1852, while living in New York City, he was elected mayor of Greytown, Nicaragua: a colony on the Mosquito Coast once inhabited by Olaudah Equiano, his predecessor in black Atlantic exploration. Although he never took office in Greytown, Delany argued that the dissolution of ties to the US would allow African Americans

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to enjoy the benefits of full citizenship they could not yet achieve within national borders. In Delany’s mind, black nationalism rather than multiracial integration is the only viable utopian plan and the only form of belonging that matters. In The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852), he contends, ‘All we ask is Liberty – the rest follows as a matter of course.’26 He exhorts his readers to [g]o not with an anxiety of political aspirations; but go with the fixed intention – as Europeans come to the United States – of cultivating the soil, entering into the mechanical operations, keeping of shops, carrying on merchandise, trading on land and water, improving property – in a word, to become the producers of the country, instead of the consumers. Despite their geographical divergence and their disagreement on the matter of racial destiny, Delany’s and Douglass’s utopian plans actually sound strikingly similar. Both command their pioneers to ‘cultivat[e] the soil’ and to ‘improv[e] property’, and both contain the potential energy of the utopian infinitive: that capacity ‘to become’ the creators of culture that might compensate for decades of oppression. Inspired by travel to Britain and Canada and trained in the black press, Douglass and Delany capitalise on the territorial spaces available to them to reimagine the African American future. Yet, their capacity for revolutionary thought and social organisation depends on ‘no-place’ in particular, as their countercultural experimentation takes place in the flexible medium of print. As Douglass continued to publish his newspaper and Delany serialised his radical novel Blake; or the Huts of America (1859–62) in The AngloAfrican Magazine and The Weekly Anglo-African, they relied on the press to support their utopian visions and to speak with immediacy to the communities that they sighted on the horizon line of possibility.

Utopian Politics Before utopian language can be used for political purposes, writers must work to create hospitable conditions for thinking about utopia. For African Americans and their Atlantic peers who live within the long shadow of slavery, this proves far more complicated than it does for their white counterparts who have grown accustomed to shaping their own personal and collective destinies. The severe restrictions and outright horrors of nineteenth-century black life in the Atlantic world leave little room for utopian thinking. One of the challenges we face as interpreters of black political progress in this period, Gilroy notes, is in trying to understand ‘how the realm of freedom is conceptualised by those who have never been free’.27 Delany, who plays a central role in the historical groundwork of Gilroy’s Atlantic theory, emerges in the 1850s as a profoundly utopian thinker: one who is capable of releasing others in the African diaspora from the ‘mental slavery’ that Bob Marley believes persists well into the twentieth century.28 Delany creates and disseminates utopian possibility from the broken ground up by calling attention to dystopian circumstances, advocating the violent seizure of utopian necessity, and promoting the infinitive development of utopian potential. The negativity of Delany’s contributions to The North Star in the late 1840s and his political speeches of the 1850s makes it difficult to imagine that his voice would ever

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assume a utopian tone. He asks in an 1848 article, ‘But how will America stand, when compared with other countries, dark as may be the gloom of their semi-barbarous laws? Condemned must she be in the moral vision of the whole enlightened world.’29 The US has become John Winthrop’s yet-unseen but much-feared failure, ‘moral[ly]’ bankrupt and scorned in the larger cosmopolitan community. Delany’s addresses to emigration-minded audiences on the ‘Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the American Continent’ (1854) and ‘Political Aspect of the Colored People of the United States’ (1855) work to illuminate exactly how hopeless the conditions of black life within US borders truly are. In ‘Political Destiny’, a complex speech that reportedly took him seven hours to deliver, Delany explains that his ‘object’ is ‘to place before you our true position in this country – the United States –, the improbability of realizing our desires, and the sure, practicable and infallible remedy for the evils we now endure’.30 Utopia is both an ‘improbability’ and an impossibility in such an ‘evil’ environment, and the element of utopian ‘desire’ that Ruth Levitas celebrates cannot be accommodated within US borders.31 As Delany works to persuade others of the extent of African American dystopian experience, he uses his platform in ‘Political Aspect’ to detail the ‘oppression’ in each state, both North and South.32 Martha Schoolman has highlighted the degree to which Delany’s imagination is geographical; as Delany writes, she observes, he draws a map, especially as his eponymous protagonist travels through the South in Blake.33 In these speeches, geography becomes a political tool for Delany, charting the scope of dystopia and offering viable alternatives elsewhere.34 The only cure for the social ‘disease’ that afflicts African Americans, Delany argues, is ‘Emigration’.35 Mobilising such an effort, however, would take Delany decades, starting in the 1830s with his initial vision of an African community and carrying through until the 1860s, when the Civil War and various logistical difficulties finally closed out that possibility. In his North Star articles of the late 1840s, Delany’s language is pragmatic, urging African Americans to take action and to shape their own destiny. His voice sounds discordant in this decade of wild experimentalism, and his approach seems anti-utopian in its insistence on engagement with the here and now, learning ‘how to live in this world’ and encouraging African Americans to become ‘a business, money-making people’.36 On the other hand, the absence of such practicalities sank so many otherwise promising utopian ventures that this might be, as Thoreau’s ‘Economy’ chapter in Walden (1854) suggests, the quantifiable foundation upon which a successful dwelling could be built. Not only do blacks need to empower themselves as agents of commerce, thereby rejecting their history as commodities traded by others, but Delany insists that they must alter their self-perception and begin ‘thinking for yourselves’.37 This shift betokens greater independence of mind even as it expects African Americans to start thinking as a collective grouping of ‘selves’ instead of as individuals, family units, or residents of a particular locality. Delany’s fictional hero Blake makes building consensus his primary work in Part I of the novel as he travels from plantation to plantation in the Deep South. After forming an alliance with fellow slaves in Mississippi that is cemented by a ‘plight of their union and fidelity to each other’, Blake proposes that their task is to ‘organize continually’.38 As they join hands, pledge ‘union’, and vow to ‘organize’ others, these figures become the agents of political change. For Delany, the groundwork of utopian politics is precisely this kind of mutually committed consensus. In Blake, the progress of black utopia depends on the confluence

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of individual consciousness and collective action. Delany allows Blake himself to explain: Light, of necessity, had to be imparted to the darkened region of the obscure intellects of the slaves, to arouse them from their benighted condition to one of moral responsibility, to make them sensible that liberty was legitimately and essentially theirs, without which there was no distinction between them and the brute. Following as a necessary consequence would be the destruction of oppression and ignorance.39 Here, utopian politics start with principles, with the recognition of ‘moral responsibility’ and the ability to grasp the abstraction of ‘liberty’. Once Delany’s ‘slaves’ attain such consciousness, they are capable of taking political action, which in this case violently alters present conditions in its ‘destruction of oppression and ignorance’. While the construction of utopia through consensus building may be painstaking, its execution has the potential to be swift and decisive. Both in an 1849 article on ‘The Redemption of Cuba’ and later in Blake, where he develops his vision of hemispheric black rebellion, Delany imagines that African Americans will ‘strike for Liberty’, thereby seizing utopia in one determined blow.40

Delany’s Atlantic Projections Delany may have laid the groundwork for his utopian vision in his early political writings and speeches as well as in Blake, but it was the idea of African settlement that most consistently inspired his perception of utopian possibility. Departing from the integrationist position favoured by Douglass, Delany promoted emigration as a key tool for ‘our political advancement’.41 Leaving the United States would allow ‘the sunbeam of hope to radiate in every direction, and the clear unobscured sky of promise and joy, spreading fully to our view, dissipating every doubt as to the future prosperity and successful elevation of our race’. As he contemplates such an endeavour, Delany’s language shifts its polarities from darkness to light, despair to ‘hope’, deprivation to ‘prosperity’. First proposing ‘the West Indies, Central and South America’ as sites for this optimism to settle, Delany quickly moves beyond the American hemisphere and into the larger Atlantic world, launching the African project of which he had dreamed since the 1830s.42 The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States carries an appendix on ‘A Project for an Expedition of Adventure, to the Eastern Coast of Africa’. As Delany extends the geographical reach of his utopian plans, he speaks in an increasingly ambitious tone, asserting, ‘Every people should be the originators of their own designs, the projector of their own schemes, and creators of the events that lead to their destiny – the consummation of their desires.’43 Although they appear later, Delany’s illuminations of dystopia in his political speeches and his fictional protagonist’s consensus building in Blake lead directly to this insistence on ‘origina[l]’ thinking and ‘creat[ive]’ energy that drives utopia. The language Delany uses to articulate his African project identifies this endeavour as the rhetorical cognate to Douglass’s Timbucto. As ‘the projector of [his] own

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schemes’, Delany generates a sense of infinite possibility by using infinitive verbs. He envisions a Board of Commissioners . . . whose duty and business shall be, to go on an expedition to the EASTERN COAST OF AFRICA, to make researches for a suitable location on that section of the coast, for the settlement of colored adventurers from the United States, and elsewhere.44 His intent ‘to go’ and ‘to make’ locates this experiment in a curious element of utopian time. As Douglass uses it in reference to Timbucto, the infinitive verb has not yet been conjugated or fallen into social contingencies. It occupies neither the past nor the actual present, and only hints at a shared future. While Delany’s journey certainly had a future, as his expedition came to pass in 1859, the infinitives he uses inhabit ‘no-time’ just as they project outward into the ‘no-place’ of Atlantic space. On the one hand, they simultaneously invoke past, present and future – a black Golden Age in Africa, the immediate work to be done, and the ‘grandest prospect for the regeneration of a people’ – but on the other, they are purely theoretical.45 In an unusually self-conscious moment, Delany admits that in speaking about Africa, he must sound profoundly utopian, for ‘[t]his calculation may, to those who have never given this subject a thought, appear extravagant, and visionary’.46 This Atlantic prospect proves both linguistically and philosophically distinct from his other projections within the American hemisphere, which emphasise quantifiable circumstances and tangible results.47 When Delany launches his voyage to Africa on the Mendi in 1859, he expands his Atlantic range beyond what Gilroy terms the ‘middle passage in reverse’ taken by Blake.48 This journey is truly circumatlantic, as Delany works to recruit potential settlers from Canada while he negotiates for land with Egba leaders in Nigeria and seeks funding for his venture from England and France.49 The written record of Delany’s expedition, Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party (1861), which Levine notes was ‘drafted . . . in the early months of 1860, most likely while sailing to England’, is an Atlantic work that brings different compass points of the known world together even as it attempts to create an entirely new destination for black community. When Delany explains ‘I have outgrown, long since, the boundaries of North America, and with them have also outgrown the boundaries of their claims’, his effort to reframe his allegiances bears a strong resemblance to Douglass’s 1846 declaration: ‘as to nation, I belong to none’.50 Yet Delany’s politics, as Jordan Stein has argued, were always national, despite his assertion that he had ‘outgrown’ his American origins.51 Douglass’s transatlantic experience leads him to shun nationality, or at least to insist upon the right to determine where he ‘belong[ed]’, which turns out to be a radically reimagined United States. However, Delany embraces nationality as a source of utopian possibility in itself. He writes: I have determined to leave to my children the inheritance of a country, the possession of territorial domain, the blessings of a national education, and the indisputable right of self-government; that they may not succeed to the servility and degradation bequeathed to us by our fathers.52

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Given the extent to which he insists on emigration and perpetually relocates his concept of utopia within the larger Atlantic world, Delany’s ideas about ‘country’, his ‘territorial’ thinking, and his commitment to ‘national’ identity now appear strikingly ‘rooted’ as opposed to ‘routed’ in Gilroy’s terms. While Gilroy suggests that black Atlantic culture ‘can be defined, on one level, through this desire to transcend both the structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity’, Delany appears, contrary to expectations, to be pursuing precisely those kinds of particularities in his African experiment.53 The Atlantic imagination therefore does not exclude nationality, but embraces it as one mode of thought while simultaneously rising above its constraints. In response to a colleague who favoured Haitian emigration, Delany defended his Atlantic hopes, which he ‘proclaimed in tones unmistakable upon the high seas, in the capital of Liberia, for twenty-five hundred miles along the coast of Africa, in the Metropolis of the world, and through the United Kingdom until they “career against the wind,” reverberating from the top, and rippling the surface of Ben and Loch Lomond’.54 Delany’s utopian vision takes shape in transit through the Atlantic and in relation to both its waters and the landmarks he sights around the ocean’s rim. Despite this oceanic compass, Delany, like Douglass, roots his utopian enterprise in agriculture, at least metaphorically speaking. Neither Douglass nor Delany ever broke ground or engaged in physical labour in their utopias, but the language of planting and harvesting animates their rhetorical projections. Delany starts with the African land itself, claiming, ‘The land is ours – there it lies with inexhaustible resources; let us go and possess it.’55 This declaration recalls John Louis O’Sullivan’s earlier boasts of the US as ‘The Great Nation of Futurity’ (1839) at the height of Young American faith in Manifest Destiny, drawing the US back into Delany’s circumatlantic endeavour, however much his ‘African Dream’ may have diverged from O’Sullivan’s American one.56 Like the utopian infinitive, which embraces multiple verb tenses at once, agricultural language helps Delany and others figure the pursuit of utopia as a process that unfolds over time and that is subject to contingencies of leadership, collaboration and political ‘weather’. Douglass speaks of ‘[s]eed time’ at Timbucto, and Delany’s Blake follows this pattern, with Blake himself ‘sowing seeds from which in due season, he anticipated an abundant harvest’.57 On US soil, Delany imagines that such a harvest would be deeply radical, uprooting the social order. As Blake moves through the South and finds himself in the Dismal Swamp alongside rebels and runaways, ‘he continued to go scattering to the winds and sowing the seeds of a future crop, only to take root in the thick black waters which cover it, to be grown in devastation and reaped in a whirlwind of ruin.’58 This is where utopian promise turns to dystopian apocalypse: without the escape route of Atlantic possibility, revolution turns inward upon itself, obliterating everything in its drive toward ‘devastation’.59

Utopia as Circle and Cycle Delany proposes an agricultural enterprise for his African settlement that has a deeply dystopian Atlantic history: the production of cotton. Delany intends to reclaim that history by establishing his utopian community as a point of origin for the cotton trade, reducing British dependence on US-produced cotton and thereby undermining the economy of the slaveholding US South. This plan appears both audacious

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and impossibly indirect; on the one hand, it situates Africa, and Delany’s utopian settlement in particular, at the centre of the system through which cotton circulates as ‘the great commodity of the world’, but on the other, it hopes to affect US policy by sending waves of economic pressure that would take months, if not years, to reach the country’s shores.60 By 1861, the eve of the Civil War, such a gradual sea change seems utopian indeed. Delany’s hopes for cotton production appear far more promising as political goals than as engines of economic transformation. ‘To succeed as a state or nation,’ he writes, ‘we must become self-reliant, and thereby able to create our own ways and means; and a trade created in Africa by civilized Africans, would be a national rock of “everlasting ages.” ’61 For Delany, agriculture and the generation of commercial goods are the ‘means’ to ‘create’ new possibilities for a community formed in the crucible of the black Atlantic, and for its members to act as the ‘originators’ of their own future, as he suggests in his earliest writings on Africa. The capacity to sow one’s own seeds is key to the state of ‘self-reliance’ that Delany’s Transcendentalist counterparts assumed as a matter of course in the 1840s. What was once a chosen mode of being in the world for Emerson and his cohort, however, must be constructed by Delany and Douglass through a complex Atlantic network. In pursuit of funding for his project, Delany travels to England, writing up his findings in Africa as he moves north. His appearance at the International Statistical Congress in London in 1860, which proves incendiary for pro-slavery US representatives, echoes Douglass’s politically charged participation in the World Temperance Convention in 1846, bringing the two figures into the same Atlantic circle, albeit over a decade apart.62 Arriving at a fortuitous moment, Delany attempts to sow political seeds that nonetheless endanger his utopian enterprise. Widespread suspicion of emigration in the African American community, power struggles among rival organisations that looked to Africa with different agendas, and internal dissension in Delany’s own ‘exploring party’ threatened to undermine his plans for Nigerian settlement from the start.63 In a squabble reminiscent of the disagreements between Coleridge and Southey and Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane that doomed their respective utopian collaborations, Delany’s partner in prospecting and fundraising, Robert Campbell, said at one point that he would be indifferent ‘if the whole affair should end in smoke’.64 Under the auspices of the Colored Free Produce Society, founded in Philadelphia in 1831 and later supported by Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet and Alexander Crummell, the idea of producing cotton in Africa outside the slave system had been part of the abolitionist movement for years.65 Yet in Delany’s hands, attempts to triangulate alternative Atlantic trade routes for a key commodity through what he hoped would be a ‘triple alliance’ between ‘colonists, capitalists, and the African owners of the land’ threatened to reify existing currents of exploitation.66 In this utopian moment, experiments that attempt to sustain themselves through agriculture seem especially tenuous. Alcott and his Fruitlands compatriots intend ‘to plant a Paradise’ but pay no attention to the details of their labours, later discovering that ‘each had been sowing a different sort of grain in the same field’.67 Without tangible roots, their utopia is purely imaginary, simply a ‘no-place’ that generates a doubtful, even laughable ‘invisible harvest’. Thoreau mocks himself in the bean field at Walden, saying that he is ‘determined to know beans’, and he admits that the entire project

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was ‘on the whole a rare amusement, which, continued too long, might have become a dissipation’.68 The Transcendentalists take such labours lightly, biding their time in the present while dreaming of a more principled future, but for Delany and Douglass the stakes are higher. In his circle of utopian thinking, Delany attempts to bring disparate locations in the Atlantic world – North America, Britain, Africa – into utopian alliance with one another, but he ends up implicating himself in the recreation of dystopian dynamics between white capital and black labour that he attempted to reverse thirty years before. Once fired by his experience of social equality in Britain, Douglass returns to the United States, from whence Delany departs, seeking that possibility in multiple places, finally routing his hopes through Africa and Britain. Utopia may be a circle, but it is also a cycle: the dystopian present finds its utopian future elsewhere, then struggles to escape its own past, leaving it at sea in what Pratt describes as ‘the heterochronic time of modernity’, with ‘forces moving in several directions at once’.69 Bound by the places that frame it, yet unbound by its very nature, the Atlantic both sustains and starves ideas of utopia, the ‘good place’ that is forever out of reach.

Notes 1. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), in John W. Blassingame, John R. McKivigan and Peter P. Hinks (eds), The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series Two: Autobiographical Writings, 3 vols to date (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999–), vol. 2, pp. 211, 217. 2. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 37. Gilroy links this Atlantic counterculture to ‘the resolutely utopian politics of transfiguration’, concerned with ‘both an imaginary anti-modern past and a postmodern yet-to-come’. 3. Douglass, Papers, Series Two, vol. 2, pp. 210, 219. 4. Douglass, ‘My Experience and My Mission to Great Britain’ (14 October 1845), in John W. Blassingame (ed.), The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, 5 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979–92), vol. 1, p. 37. 5. Douglass, Papers, Series Two, vol. 2, p. 211. 6. Douglass, ‘Slavery and America’s Bastard Republicanism’ (10 November 1845), in Papers, Series One, vol. 1, p. 85. 7. See in particular Robert S. Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass and the Politics of Representative Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 8. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, p. 23. Gilroy suggests prioritising politics over place in the study of Delany, whose ‘primary concern was not with Africa as such but rather the forms of citizenship and belonging that arose from the (re)generation of modern nationality in the form of an autonomous, black nation state’. 9. Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 4; Lloyd Pratt, Archives of American Time: Literature and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), p. 190. 10. From More’s Utopia onward, utopian writers look west across the Atlantic from Europe, but in the nineteenth century, that imaginative trajectory is reversed, thanks to revolutionary thinkers such as Delany, Douglass and Margaret Fuller, among others. For more on the westward impulse of this genealogy, see Wil Verhoeven, ‘Transatlantic Utopianism and the Writing of America’, in Eve Tavor Bannet and Susan Manning (eds), Transatlantic Literary Studies, 1660–1830 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 28.

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crosscurrents of black utopianism 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

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Douglass, ‘Slavery and America’s Bastard Republicanism’, p. 86. Douglass, Papers, Series Two, vol. 2, pp. 212–13. Douglass, Papers, Series Two, vol. 2, p. 215. Douglass, ‘An Account of American Slavery’ (15 January 1846), in Papers, Series One, vol. 1, p. 139. Elisa Tamarkin, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 188. Douglass, Papers, Series Two, vol. 2, p. 215; Douglass, ‘Farewell to the British People’ (30 March 1847), in Papers, Series One, vol. 2, p. 50, and ‘Slavery and America’s Bastard Republicanism’, p. 85. Douglass, Papers, Series Two, vol. 2, p. 224. C. Peter Ripley (ed.), The Black Abolitionist Papers, 5 vols (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985–92), vol. 4, p. 8. Delany, ‘Farewell to Readers of the Mystery’, in Robert S. Levine (ed.), Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), p. 39. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, p. 4. Delany, ‘Farewell to Readers of the Mystery’, pp. 39–40. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, p. 19. John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 155. Other property owners at Timbucto included Smith, John Brown, William Wells Brown, William Nell, Charles Redmond, Henry Bibb, and Lewis, Milton and Cyrus Clarke. Douglass, ‘The Smithland’, The North Star, 18 February 1848. 19th Century U.S. Newspapers. Gale Digital Collections. Last accessed 15 July 2016. Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men, pp. 149–50. Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852; New York: Arno Press, 1968), pp. 189, 187. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, p. 68. Bob Marley, ‘Redemption Song’ (1980). Delany, ‘True Patriotism’ (8 December 1848), in Levine (ed.), Martin R. Delany, p. 139. Delany, ‘Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the American Continent’, in Levine (ed.), Martin R. Delany, p. 245. Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (New York: Philip Allan, 1990), p. 199. Levitas distinguishes her theory of utopia as ‘desire’ from Ernst Bloch’s foundational work in The Principle of Hope, 3 vols, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986). Delany, ‘Political Aspect of the Colored People of the United States’, in Levine (ed.), Martin R. Delany, p. 281. Martha Schoolman, Abolitionist Geographies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), pp. 2, 6. In ‘Political Destiny’, Delany explores possible sites for black emigration to ‘the West Indies, Central and South America’ by listing the surface area and population of various countries (pp. 253–8). It is crucial to his argument in favour of black leadership that, numerically speaking, ‘the ruling element . . . of those countries’ consists of ‘colored persons’. Delany, ‘Political Destiny’, p. 249. Delany, ‘Political Economy’ (16 March 1849), in Levine (ed.), Martin R. Delany, p. 150; Delany, ‘Domestic Economy’ (23 March–20 April 1849), in Levine (ed.), Martin R. Delany, p. 151. Delany, ‘Domestic Economy’, p. 153. Delany, Blake; or the Huts of America (1859–62; Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), pp. 39–40. Delany, Blake, p. 101.

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40. Delany, ‘The Redemption of Cuba’ (20 July 1849), in Levine (ed.), Martin R. Delany, p. 168; Delany, Blake, p. 128. While Delany does not feature in his study, Larry J. Reynolds draws important conclusions about Douglass’s eventual support of violent rebellion in Righteous Violence: Revolution, Slavery, and the American Renaissance (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), pp. 85–111. 41. Delany, ‘Political Aspect’, p. 289. 42. Delany, ‘Political Destiny’, p. 267. 43. Delany, ‘A Project for an Expedition of Adventure, to the Eastern Coast of Africa’, in Levine (ed.), Martin R. Delany, p. 320. 44. Delany, ‘A Project’, p. 321. 45. Levine discusses Delany’s preoccupation with a black Golden Age in Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, p. 186. Delany sees African settlement as the ‘grandest prospect’ in Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party (1861), in Levine (ed.), Martin R. Delany, p. 357. 46. Delany, ‘A Project’, p. 323. 47. Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, p. 190. Levine finds utopian intent in Blake’s travels, which mirror the progress of Delany’s imagination. However, he sees Delany engaging in ‘utopian’ thinking within the Americas, whereas I believe he has a more pointedly utopian relationship with Africa. 48. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, p. 27. 49. Delany first includes these European countries in his utopian trajectory in ‘A Project’ (1852), where he suggests, ‘To England and France, we should look for sustenance, and the people of those two nations – as they would have every thing to gain from such an adventure and eventual settlement . . .’ (p. 322). 50. Levine (ed.), Martin R. Delany, p. 336; Delany, Official Report, p. 350. 51. Jordan Alexander Stein, ‘ “A Christian nation calls for its wandering children”: Life, Liberty, Liberia’, American Literary History 19.4 (2007), p. 864. Stein discerns ‘a linkage of political life and the nation form which is crucial to Delany’s thought’. 52. Delany, Official Report, p. 351. 53. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, p. 19. 54. Delany, letter to James T. Holly (15 January 1861), in Levine (ed.), Martin R. Delany, p. 366. 55. Delany, ‘A Project’, p. 323. 56. Cyril E. Griffith, The African Dream: Martin R. Delany and the Emergence of Pan-African Thought (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975), p. 1. Griffith asserts, ‘the only consistency in his [Delany’s] life was his obsession with Africa.’ 57. Delany, Blake, p. 73. 58. Delany, Blake, p. 112. 59. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, p. 56. Gilroy argues that under slavery, ‘a rationally pursued utopia’ is less accessible than ‘a revolutionary or eschatological apocalypse – the Jubilee’. From this perspective, despite its similarities with other forms of Atlantic experimentalism, it might be useful to think about black utopianism in this period as both a destructive and a constructive force. 60. Delany, Official Report, p. 354. 61. Delany, Official Report, p. 355. 62. R. J. M. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), pp. 32–3. 63. For further explanation of Delany’s frustrations with competing emigrationist groups while in Britain, see Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall, p. 178. 64. Floyd J. Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality: Black Emigration and Colonization, 1787–1863 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), p. 193.

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65. Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality, p. 220. 66. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall, pp. 184, 176. 67. Louisa May Alcott, ‘Transcendental Wild Oats’ (1873), in The Portable Louisa May Alcott, ed. Elizabeth Lennox Keyser (New York: Penguin, 2000), pp. 539, 544. 68. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 161–2. 69. Pratt, Archives of American Time, p. 199.

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10 Black Diaspora Literature and the Question of Slavery Yogita Goyal

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n her work outlining a method to read American literature, Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison reminds us that ‘the concept of freedom did not emerge in a vacuum. Nothing highlighted freedom – if it did not in fact create it – like slavery.’1 This insistence on the conjoined, even mutually constitutive nature of the technologies of racial terror and the Enlightenment project also remains one of the most crucial lessons of Paul Gilroy’s groundbreaking study The Black Atlantic.2 Motivated in large part by a refusal to accept the history of black people and that of the West as two separate and unconnected entities, Gilroy posed a direct challenge to a vast tradition of thinking that mulls the meaning of freedom and ethics, life and death, identity and sociality without any reference to the cultural production of the African diaspora. Gilroy remains useful because one cannot think of the black Atlantic without thinking of the interconnected histories of capital, empire, slavery, nationalism, Enlightenment and revolution, even if his own work does not always draw the links among these or emphasise them equally.3 Offering a path to identifying a coherent tradition over a hundred years beyond the confines of nation or racial identity figured in essentialist terms, Gilroy rightfully enjoys exemplary status in the field. His insistence that black culture is at the heart of any credible definition of modernity still needs repeating since far too much of the discourse of transatlanticism continues to be shaped by the notion of an Anglo-American special relationship or a North Atlantic frame alone. As Gilroy argues, a concept of modernity that is worth its salt ought, for example, to have something to contribute to an analysis of how the particular varieties of radicalism articulated through the revolts of enslaved people made selective use of the ideologies of the western Age of Revolution and then flowed into social movements of an anti-colonial and decidedly anti-capitalist type.4 Viewing the project of Enlightenment not just as concurrent with the regime of terror unleashed by slavery but as driven by it, Gilroy suggested that one cannot think of modernity and its meaning – rationalism, secularism, humanism, community, ethics, aesthetics – without first reckoning with the legacy of race and Atlantic slavery. The historical memories preserved by the descendants of slaves thus became defining features of what Gilroy termed a black Atlantic counterculture to modernity. The intense exploration of slavery in contemporary black diaspora literature – in a genre often called the neo-slave narrative – may be seen to offer, in Gilroy’s

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terms, ‘a means to restage confrontations between rational, scientific, and enlightened Euro-American thought and the supposedly primitive outlook of prehistorical, cultureless, and bestial African slaves’.5 Part of this exploration involves situating black populations not as belated recipients of modernity but in fact as prior bearers and exemplary subjects. As Morrison puts it, ‘modern life begins with slavery’, and as Gilroy glosses her claim, ‘the concentrated intensity of the slave experience is something that marked out blacks as the first truly modern people, handling in the nineteenth century dilemmas and difficulties which only become the substance of everyday life in Europe a century later.’6 As is clear from the complicated temporality laid out in this rethinking of blackness and modernity, turning to slavery and taking it seriously as the lens through which a philosophical critique may be mounted requires a fundamental rethinking of time itself and of familiar chronologies and conventions of periodisation. Here it is helpful to recall William Boelhower’s influential account of what he terms the new Atlantic studies matrix – the work of Gilroy, Joseph Roach, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker – and its reliance on the notion of the historian as ‘mnemon’, reminiscent of the ‘memory-bearer’ of ancient Greek city-states, as well as a judge and a ‘ “vicarious witness” ’.7 Such an emphasis on the creative power of memory and imagination required in historical research is obviously part of a much larger blurring and converging of the disciplines of literature, ethics and history. For some, literature and history appear as competing disciplines in the field of Atlantic studies, with literature as a belated participant in the dialogue. But, as Elizabeth Dillon points out, ‘literary studies as a discipline has historically been related to a pedagogy of cultural nationalism’ and is thus itself immensely useful for Atlantic studies as offering a shift outside the frame of the nation on its own terms.8 In discussing the representation of slavery in recent neo-slave narratives in this chapter, accordingly, a larger debate about historicism emerges as well. Even if we grant that the energy of the institution of Atlantic studies begins with historical studies, literary questions need be neither sidelined nor seen as less urgent or theoretically generative for the field. The complex and unresolved questions about the status of history and historicism as method that emerge in neo-slave narratives help stage the ongoing promise and challenges of black Atlantic studies. Moreover, since the new Atlantic studies might well be nothing more than ‘a coded version of Black Atlantic studies’, as Jed Esty suggests, the dilemmas and challenges exhibited in the neo-slave narrative speak to the very conceptual core of Atlantic studies as a field.9 As new frameworks compete with the more established Atlantic one – hemispheric, transoceanic, or even planetary – it becomes necessary to assess the precise analytical and methodological valence of the Atlantic frame. Since moving beyond the national frame is now almost axiomatic, to argue for the continuing value of Atlantic studies involves – to my mind – placing slavery at the centre of the field, and nowhere are the contradictions posed by Atlantic slavery and historicism subject to as intensive an examination as they are in black diaspora literature of the last four decades.

Reconstructing the Past in Neo-Slave Narratives We are living in a moment of unprecedented interest in literature on Atlantic slavery. Ishmael Reed, Octavia Butler, James McBride, Andrea Levy, Charles Johnson,

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Fred D’Aguiar, Caryl Phillips, Paule Marshall, Marlon James, Barbara Chase-Riboud, David Bradley, Gayl Jones, Bernardine Evaristo and M. Nourbese Philip are only some of the names that join Morrison in reviving the historically obsolete genre of the slave narrative. In aesthetic terms, the subject of slavery forces a confrontation with key literary questions: how to write absence into presence, how to attain the semblance of historical truth in light of the silences of the archive, and how to transform loss into neither survival nor transcendence, but a reckoning. In addition to the political goals of combating widespread amnesia about slavery and its legacy of black dehumanisation and subordination, neo-slave narratives – in seeking to narrate, in Morrison’s pithy phrase, ‘unspeakable thoughts, unspoken’ – confront and creatively negotiate a crisis of representation.10 Such novels explicitly foreground the fact that their reconstruction of slavery has as much to do with generating a fuller consciousness of the past as with the transmission of memory in the present. Rather than simply looking back in time, therefore, they also look ahead, to plot possible futures. Highlighting a pervasive anxiety about the possibility of representing the real in fiction, they reinvent and transform the slave narrative form in order to elaborate the ethical ambiguities of current politics of race at the same time that they insist upon the impossibility of ever being able to know the truth of slavery. As Gilroy puts it, a black Atlantic response to slavery generates the aesthetic mode of the sublime, beyond the reach of reason, ‘struggling to repeat the unrepeatable, to present the unpresentable’.11 Sherley Anne Williams’s 1986 novel Dessa Rose perhaps lays this out most starkly in its preface: Afro-Americans, having survived by word of mouth – and made of that process a high art – remain at the mercy of literature and writing; often, these have betrayed us. I loved history as a child, until some clear-eyed young Negro pointed out, quite rightly, that there was no place in the past I could go and be free.12 Here, Williams evinces the ambivalence evoked by print culture, an ambivalence that Madhu Dubey has shown to be widespread in contemporary black literature, as writers turn to oral and folk forms of expression, assuming that print culture can only represent a diminished form of authenticity.13 Williams thus decides to write a novel that takes up two actual historical incidents: the sentencing of a pregnant black woman in 1829 in Kentucky for leading a slave rebellion, and reports that a white woman on an isolated North Carolina farm had sheltered runaway slaves in 1830. Williams imagines an encounter between these two women – Dessa Rose, scarred by torture and the loss of her lover, and Rufel, deserted by her husband and haunted by memories of her ‘mammy’ – in order to explore the psychological complexities of the relations between black and white women. Not just interested in a historically realist account of slavery, then, this exploration speaks as much – and perhaps even more so – to intense debates about universal feminism and the relation between black and white women that were raging in the 1970s and 1980s. Accordingly, Dessa Rose emphasises questions of subjectivity, especially highlighting the psychological trauma caused by slavery and laying out strategies of survival and resilience. Neo-slave narratives embody such uneasy negotiations of fact and fiction, turning to slavery neither to simply memorialise, nor to reconstruct a faithful account of life as a slave, nor to argue for reparations, but rather to stage ethical questions

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that seemingly have no resolution. Rather than using the confident language of rights, truth, justice, literacy and self-fashioning made famous by the likes of Frederick Douglass, neo-slave narratives traffic in modes of negation, ambivalence and melancholy. Haunted by the unprocessed legacy of slavery, such fictions frequently resort to metaphors of haunting, deploying them to signal the uncanny dimensions of the experience of slavery, beyond the reach of reason. Such ghosts symbolise the unprocessed historical remains of violently forgotten and traumatic pasts, the unclaimed memories and voices of the dead, but also figure material dispossession in the present.14 This is also to say that the turn to slavery is never just about correcting the historical record, but is always embroiled in attempts to reshape contemporary politics of race and nation. The look backwards in time speaks as much to ongoing conflicts over historical memory, political resources and cultural understandings as to an accurate history of slavery itself. For many scholars, the politics of the Black Arts era provided a clear impetus for the exploration of slavery in the late twentieth century, as the reconstitution of the black family, and the reconstruction of the black man in particular, required reckoning with the legacy of slavery.15 For such black nationalist thinkers as Amiri Baraka and Malcolm X, slavery became a metaphor for subordination and emasculation, and the division of the house slave and the field slave a potent metaphor for class divisions among African Americans. In response, writers like Octavia Butler parse the differences between militant resistance and more complex notions of a compromised freedom, laying the ground for a more textured understanding of agency. Butler’s 1979 novel Kindred, for example, may easily be read as an attempt to reshape the black nationalist narrative. Butler blurs the boundaries of past and present as Dana, a young black woman living in California in 1976, is inexplicably transported to a plantation in early nineteenth-century Maryland and comes to learn that she has been pulled back to her enslaved ancestors’ home. All certainties of time and place are thus upended, and as Dana shuttles back and forth between her present in California and slaveholding Maryland, she realises that her usual sources of historical knowledge – maps, slave autobiographies, her family Bible, films, black history textbooks – are no help at all. Part of Butler’s lesson here is about the impossibility of understanding what slavery was like from a contemporary vantage point, as Dana has to learn the limits of her ability to tolerate that which her ancestors must without any recourse. Butler has said that she was motivated by the black nationalist tendency to see the enslaved as subservient figures, content to inhabit the role of an ‘Uncle Tom’ or a ‘Mammy’, and by making an independent twentieth-century woman viscerally experience the difficulty of resistance, Butler hoped to expand the dialogue on agency and make available a more nuanced understanding of the compromised agency available to the enslaved. Dana comes to learn her own kinship with Sarah, ‘the kind of woman who might have been called “mammy” in some other household’, ‘the kind of woman who would be held in contempt during the militant nineteen sixties’, as her understanding of what Harriet Jacobs termed ‘something akin to freedom’ rather than freedom itself expands to accommodate nuance and texture rather than a binary of militancy and subservience.16 In doing so, novelists like Butler offer an understanding of slavery markedly different from that being constructed by historians, anthropologists and curators of projects of memorialising slavery across the world. As historians reconstruct with ever-greater fidelity the world slaves made, we learn more than ever before what slaves ate, what

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they wore, how they worshipped or mourned, but not what they thought or felt, which remains the province of imaginative literature rather than history, and calls for speculation rather than reconstruction. Memorial projects often emphasise a politics of veneration, and do not always find room for the experimental and ethical quandaries of novels about slavery, from Butler’s intertwining of science fiction with the history of slavery in Wild Seed (1980) to Charles Johnson’s riotous meditations on Buddhism and Hegelian dialectics in Middle Passage (1990) and Oxherding Tale (1982). While the historical or archaeological recovery of the moral and psychic universe of the enslaved is a vitally important task, many novelists have turned to something more imaginative, fantastical, and even impossible. Johnson, for instance, represents a captured African god of the Allmuseri tribe in the hold of a slave ship as part of an argument about the limits of Hegelian reason and its complicity with racial terror in Middle Passage. In Beloved (1987), Morrison famously represents the ghostly return of a child murdered by her fugitive mother to save her daughter from slavery. Eschewing even the binary of master and slave, Edward Jones goes so far as to feature black slave owners in The Known World (2003), and in Cambridge (1991) Caryl Phillips reconstructs the murder of an overseer from the point of view of the racist plantation owner’s daughter rather than solely recuperating the subjectivity of the enslaved. Bernardine Evaristo’s Blonde Roots (2009) systematically reverses historical reality, imagining ‘whyte Europanes’ enslaved by ‘blak Aphrikans’ rather than the other way round. The novel narrates the capture, enslavement and eventual escape of Doris Scagglethorpe, born to a cabbage farmer in England who lives in serfdom. There are plantations in the West Japanese Islands, so named because of an Aphrikan explorer’s quest for Asia, and the seat of the empire is the United Kingdom of Great Ambossa off the coast of ‘Aphrika’. Evaristo strikes notes of both counterfactual history and satire, simultaneously inviting the reader to sympathise with the misery of Doris as a slave and mocking contemporary cultural practices by inverting them – showing ‘whytes’ frequenting tanning salons, getting nose-flattening jobs, and replacing their blonde hair with ‘Aphrikan’ weaves. In one scene, Doris stands in front of a mirror and chants to herself a parody of the ‘black is beautiful’ mantra, saying that I may be fair and flaxen. I may have slim nostrils and slender lips. I may have oilrich hair and a non-rotund bottom. I may blush easily, go rubicund in the sun and have covert yet mentally alert blue eyes. Yes, I may be whyte. But I am whyte and I am beautiful!17 Here, Evaristo emphasises the psychological scarring that results from a history of oppression, by showing black standards of beauty as the norm in this counterfactual world. In asking readers to de-link blackness from slavery, Evaristo seeks to unsettle what we know as fact, and by showing how her fictional world denigrates whiteness in order to maintain domination, she implies that anti-black racism also has a particular history that is rooted in pro-slavery ideology. While Doris’s capture, whipping, forced labour, sexual threat and continuing humiliation evoke sympathy, the consistent satirical impulse of the novel makes difficult a sentimental closure, and the novel’s satire and its alternative history create a difficult world with no clear ethical valence or moral lesson. Rather, psychological and aesthetic complexity appear as the real payoffs of such a provocative fiction.

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It seems clear then that the persistent return to slavery in contemporary black diaspora fiction far exceeds the task of reconstructing the past to fill in the gaps left by a violent history. In the influential terms offered by Saidiya Hartman, we could say that such neo-slave narratives imagine our present as the ‘afterlife of slavery’.18 Part of this reluctance to resort to expected ways of treating slavery has to do with the fact that these writers are writing in a moment of widespread exhaustion with identity politics and frequent declarations of post-racial triumphalism. Moreover, there is always the risk of transforming an interest in the lives of the enslaved into a commodified form available for capitalist sublimation. When the past becomes available as a tourist site in the name of heritage, as in the slave castles on the West Coast of Africa, or a genre film like Django Unchained (2012) which plays fast and loose with history, more thoughtful attempts to reckon with an always already co-opted past rely on difficulty, opacity, and even impossibility, calling into play distancing mechanisms of one kind or another, including parody and satire, highlighting the impossibility of retrieving the past as memory.19 The task of these writers is to convert the unspeakable into narrative without replicating epistemic violence or silencing those voices they are supposed to memorialise. In asking the question ‘how does the past make us who we are?’, these writers also draw attention to the way in which the present remakes the past as well. As Hartman notes in Lose Your Mother, it is imperative to reckon with the critical desires scholars bring to the study of slavery. She writes, ‘I was loitering in a slave dungeon less because I hoped to discover what really happened here than because of what lived on from this history. Why else begin an autobiography in a graveyard?’20 Confronting the relation between past and present, and between collective and individual identity, these works engage historical trauma to confront inequality without rehearsing older forms of resistance. Most of them move beyond a recuperative moment to signal something much more unresolved, and perhaps unresolvable – how to tell stories of a past that has not been processed as history but leaves material imprints everywhere. Neo-slave narratives are therefore characterised by intense temporal experimentation, not just to find a way to make the bourgeois form of the novel adequate to the fracture of slavery, but to convey the interrogation of the very foundation of the world as we understand it. They are necessarily concerned with time in multiple ways: with questions of origin, with the transmission of cultural memory, with generations and genealogy, with breaks and fractures in time. Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River (1993) is perhaps the best example of such experimentation, as the novel features three seemingly unrelated stories set in Liberia, Kansas and Yorkshire, written in distinct narrative styles, connected simply by a prologue detailing the sale of the three children who make up these lives by their impoverished African father to a slaver whose ship log makes up the third part of the novel. Taking place over two and a half centuries, in far-flung places, the novel still insists that there is a ‘common memory’ here – a tale of loss and heartbreak, but also of survival and redemption.21 The novel mimics in its formal fragmentation the fracture caused by the Middle Passage, signalling via its temporal experimentation not only a refusal to accept narratives of progress or linear time, but a desire to dissolve all certainties of time and place altogether. Beloved, the novel I turn to next, is one of the most well-known instantiations of such temporal experimentation, with its relentless cross-cutting and shifts in perspective to convey the power of a memory that is impossible to live with or to forget.

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Rethinking Memory It would perhaps be most accurate to trace the origins of the genre of the neo-slave narrative to the phenomenally successful television show Roots: The Saga of an American Family, which helped shape the imagery – scenes of whipping, families torn apart on the auction block – as well as the central themes of loss of home, the search for lost kin, and the redemptive power of love.22 But if there is one text that has shaped a more sophisticated understanding of slavery and its aftermath – the unrelenting pull of trauma, the difficulty of survival – it is, of course, Toni Morrison’s Beloved. While the novel has occasionally been dismissed as a ‘blackface holocaust novel’ by patently anti-black critics, most readers have recognised its foundational theorisation of slavery as a world-destroying institution, and its complex layering of time, memory and perspective.23 To do so is to recognise that Beloved and other neo-slave narratives are also offering theories of history, because slavery as a subject necessarily intervenes in how disciplinary formations and divisions like history and literature are understood. Such an exploration also underscores problems of epistemology: how do we know what we know, what sources do we consider worthy of study, and how might we recover absence, or pursue the archive that will not yield the presence scholars seek? Although many critics have read Beloved as a novel written to memorialise slavery, or to emphasise the necessity of healing or exorcism, Morrison makes such neat readings difficult to maintain. While Morrison poses a clear ethical question – does a slave mother have the right to kill her own child to save her from slavery? – the novel works hard to make any simple response to this question impossible without entering into the dizzying and grief-stricken world of the recently emancipated. In fact, at times, Beloved seems to resist interpretation altogether. Clearly, this is partly because Morrison wants the novel to be technically and emotionally resistant to singular meaning, so that such complexity would prevent an easy or cathartic reading experience, where one could recognise that slavery was terrible but could be surmounted. Such a simple narrative of redemption cannot convey the horror of slavery. But even more importantly, Beloved raises difficult questions about the relationship between history and memory. When the past is so horrible, how does one revisit it safely? Memory is often understood as a nurturing force, providing a sense of roots, heritage and identity. But what if memory itself turns predatory? What if the past is so horrifying that its remembrance becomes a site of permanent and ever-evolving trauma? How then do you remember? That is why Beloved ends with the ambiguous statement that ‘this is not a story to pass on’.24 Such ambiguity frames Morrison’s notion of ‘rememory’, reminiscent of Pierre Nora’s famous notion of a lieu de mémoire.25 The ghost of Beloved asks Sethe to remember what she had repressed as ‘unspeakable’, to take pleasure in telling her daughters about her crystal earrings and the memories of her mother. Sethe realises that ‘she was remembering something she had forgotten she knew’ – the memory of a woman named Nan, who spoke of a life before Sweet Home, in a language before the Middle Passage.26 While this message is one of knowing that Sethe’s mother loved her, and that she was born of love rather than rape, other kinds of memories are more dangerous yet are unavoidable because they are material, not just psychological. Sethe warns Denver of the risks of this kind of ‘rememory’, the memory of the grotesquely named Sweet Home which is still out there, and says, ‘if you go there and stand in the

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place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you.’27 The past leaves physical traces in the present. A figure for the continuing and very real afterlife of slavery, rememory as a concept escapes a normative historicism based on rationality, and is sufficiently sensitive to the plangent voices of the enslaved, as notions of time and space need to stretch to try to describe the void of the Middle Passage. Along similar lines, Gilroy’s challenge to conventional or positivist histories also requires recognising that this is ‘vital work of enquiring into terrors that exhaust the resources of language amidst the debris of a catastrophe which prohibits the existence of their art at the same time as demanding its continuance’.28 While the generative power of Beloved could hardly be overstated, some critics of the novel help further illuminate these questions of method in the study of slavery, and I now turn to an equally important novel, Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage, which clearly speaks back to Beloved, and insists on the need for a more precise understanding of the relationship between race, culture and capital.

Charles Johnson’s Quarrel with History It may be helpful to first admit that Charles Johnson offers a somewhat difficult figure for such an exploration, given his refusal to adhere to any pieties of the African American literary canon or those of US multiculturalism. Despite the fact that he is the author of several stunning novels which take up slavery in original and challenging ways, including the National Book Award winning Middle Passage, he has not only attacked Beloved as a ‘middle-brow’ creation, but has also spoken in favour of leaving slavery behind.29 In ‘The End of the Black American Narrative’, Johnson calls for a shift away from the ‘experience of victimization’ which he claims has been at the back of the African American narrative. Johnson argues that the post-civil-rights generation should recognise its distance from previous generations, and recognise the chance for middle-class success, as proven by the examples of President Obama and the prominence of Oprah Winfrey.30 Johnson also invokes a demographic reality – blacks are not culturally homogeneous, because of a significant percentage of immigrant populations from across the diaspora, so the narratives derived from Atlantic slavery will have to change accordingly. He condemns the old black American narrative as ‘ahistorical’, an anachronism for our times, as absurd as ‘the Ptolemaic vision before Copernicus’.31 He writes, It is simply no longer the case that the essence of black American life is racial victimization and disenfranchisement, a curse and a condemnation, a destiny based on color in which the meaning of one’s life is thinghood, created even before one is born. The nationalist story of struggle between white and black Americans fails formally as well, because ‘it is conceived as melodrama, a form of storytelling in which the characters are flat, lack complexity, are either all good or all bad, and plot involves malicious villains and violent actions’.32 For Johnson, leaders like Louis Farrakhan or Jeremiah Wright are displaying ‘emotional attachment to a dated narrative’ and committing the ‘logical fallacy known as misuse of analogy’ when they connect past exploitation with present inequality. When Farrakhan says the nation ‘is becoming a plantation again’,

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Johnson counters with literalism: ‘we obviously do not live on plantations.’33 Morrison’s Beloved comes in for similar critique because it’s about a woman who killed her child and ‘if black people had done that en masse, we would not be here today’.34 Here, in Johnson’s conception of the relation between past and present, history becomes a leaving behind, as he champions a fairly simplistic post-racial narrative, emphasising the progress made by some African Americans, and refusing to acknowledge differences of class or continuing forms of racial subordination. He also views the turn to slavery as a distraction from present-day concerns, as slavery offers a fantasy of racial solidarity in the past as an antidote to division today. Despite this polemic, I want to suggest – reading Johnson against the grain, as it were – that Middle Passage offers a vision that usefully fleshes out this reductive appraisal, ensnaring race and capital in the same web, and probing the implications of separating the two. The seeming dichotomy between focusing on class conflict in the present or racial solidarity in the past simply doesn’t hold according to the terms of the novel, and neither does the choice between phenomenology and institutional oppression. Middle Passage does so by jettisoning every historical tenet, every moral demand of realism for the treatment of the subject, seeking to create instead a ‘philosophical black novel’, but one regularly punctuated by absurd and comic scenarios.35 This is not to say that the novel shies away from expressing the horror of Atlantic slavery, but to note that it refuses the demand to approach the subject with solemnity or historical fidelity. Rather, the novel reaches outward into our future more than looking back into the past, juxtaposing contemporary racial dilemmas with the chaotic events of a rebellion on the aptly named slave ship the Republic. The novel, though set between 14 June and 1 August 1830, in the form of a slave ship’s log, constantly pulls forward in time, calling on anachronism not just as a narrative feature, but as an organising principle. Ebenezer Falcon, captain of the Republic, an explorer, imperialist, sometimecannibal, inventor of sock-suspenders, at once Ahab, Kurtz, Icarus and Magellan, outlines his vision of the ‘end of the world’ or the ‘last hour of history’ in terms that describe (filtered through his racist ranting) the multicultural moment of the last two decades of the twentieth century: ‘the civilized values and visions of high culture, have all gone to hell in fine old hamlets filled high with garbage, overrun by Mudmen and Jews . . . sexes and races were blurred . . . I saw a ship with a whole crew of women. Yellow men were buying up half of America. Hegel was spewing from the mouths of Hottentots.36 Apocalypse, for Falcon, is simply the multicultural America of the late twentieth century. Such anachronisms in a purportedly historical novel about slavery deny the reader the safety of the past, requiring connections – however ridiculous they seem – between then and now. But they are often so absurd that they fight against any sense of continuity between past and present, as clearly the violence on the slave ship does not compare to contemporary concerns. Even as the novel depicts slavery as a destroyer of worlds, it does so in the mode of parody rather than reverence, refusing to offer a redemptive view of history. And yet, critics have been slow to take seriously the comic notes of the novel, following Johnson’s lead when he claims that writing Middle Passage ‘required

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seventeen years of research on the slave trade and another six on the vast lore of the sea’.37 Despite such professions of research, Johnson’s characters violate most existing notions of historical or geographical accuracy, as the captured Africans – the tribe of the Allmuseri – espouse tenets clearly attributable to Buddhism, and the captain of the slave ship is often referred to in terms of science fiction, his forehead reminding the narrator, Rutherford Calhoun, of ‘the kind fantasy writers put on spacemen far ahead of us in science and philosophy’.38 Rutherford himself willingly runs into slavery, joining the slave ship as a stowaway, hoping to escape marriage to ‘a spirited Boston schoolteacher named Isadora Bailey’ who has agreed to pay his extensive gambling debts to Papa Zeringue in exchange for matrimony.39 Rather than producing a narrative that offers psychological or social realism, Johnson somewhat heavy-handedly emphasises the metaphorical and allegorical aspects of slavery. Captain Falcon, like Johnson himself, is profoundly interested in phenomenology. ‘Mind was made for murder,’ he says, and ‘Dualism is a bloody structure of the mind,’ which makes slavery simply the ‘social correlate of a deeper, ontic wound’.40 The central drama of Atlantic slavery, then, appears to be a philosophical antagonism based on racial difference between the West and Africa, represented by Captain Falcon (‘a Faustian man of powerful loves, passions, hatreds . . . like the fledging republic itself, . . . eager to push back frontiers’) and the Allmuseri (‘a whole tribe – men, women, and tykes – of devil-worshipping, spell-casting wizards’).41 The novel presents the collision of the two forces rendered not via verisimilitude but as metaphysical entities, or allegorical forms, through differing temporal regimes, with the Allmuseri experiencing complete unity of being but unable to deal with fracture, and Captain Falcon seeking to conquer time and space as an empire-builder. In the middle is Rutherford, neither here nor there, but tied to both in an incoherent oscillation, evinced by his rapidly shifting loyalties. The Allmuseri, we are told, have no use in their language for nouns or static substances: ‘A “bed” was called a “resting,” a “robe” a “warming.” ’42 The Allmuseri, Johnson’s fictional tribesmen, are the ‘Ur-tribe of humanity itself’, but with no lines on the palms of their hands and with a second brain at the base of their spines. For Rutherford, they were ‘a remarkably old people’ with ‘the smell of old temples’ and looking at them ‘you felt that they had run the full gamut of civilized choices, or played through every political and social possibility and now had nowhere to go’.43 An ‘ageless culture’ with no use for property or war, they are vegetarian and skilled in capoeira.44 Johnson thus sets up an elaborate edifice of two distinct and opposed systems of thought – the West represented by the bloodthirsty Captain Falcon and the rest by the Allmuseri.45 Africa, in this rendering, emerges not as a geographical entity but as a philosophical principle, with linguistic, phenomenological and animist dimensions rather than geopolitical ones. The slave ship and the Middle Passage, then, seem to be the occasion for engagement with philosophical questions, rather than about producing an accurate sense of the past or providing a window into contemporary black diaspora subjectivities. But seductive as this narrative is of an African response to Cartesian dualism, I think, it turns out to be something like a red herring. Johnson sets up a narrative of fundamental cultural differences based on a concept of race as the foundation of Atlantic slavery only to reveal it, at the end of the novel, as a hoax. That is to say, Rutherford finds out that the ship and its cargo are owned by investors, one of whom is Philippe Zeringue, the Creole New Orleans race man from whose clutches

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Rutherford tries to escape at the novel’s opening. The central revelation of the novel is that capital, not race, controls slavery. As Falcon nears death, and reveals this secret to Rutherford, he wonders, ‘was Ebenezer Falcon telling me that he, at bottom, was no freer than the Africans?’46 To take this epiphany seriously is to have to grapple with the uncertain epistemic status of the novel’s claims about the Allmuseri and their culture. In terms of the plot as well, what moves things forward is not the acquisition of racial or cultural knowledge by a picaresque figure who refused to accept respectability as the norm but learned to see the value of it. Some critics have indeed read Rutherford’s journey as a Bildungsroman that shows him accepting a domestic life at the end, committed now to Isadora and to the child Baleka, willing even to return to Makanda, Illinois. But it’s worth remembering that at the level of plot, the novel’s happy ending and these reversals are enabled only by Rutherford’s assumption of the role of the blackmailer. Tracking the unfolding of this reversal also illuminates the status of the novel and of writing itself in this metafictional vision. To trace the novel’s story about its own existence is to realise that Rutherford is writing for Falcon – in his stead, as his spy, who composes the logbook when Falcon no longer can. The role fits Rutherford’s chameleon personality as he believes that ‘theft . . . was the closest thing I knew to transcendence’. Moreover, this isn’t simply a personal choice, but a historical formation – ‘was I not, as a Negro in the New World, born to be a thief? Or, put less harshly, inheritor of two millennia of things I had not myself made?’47 At the end of the novel, when Rutherford produces proof of slavery in the form of a logbook with ‘the ship’s manifest, with names for each Allmuseri slave on board, payment rates for the ship’s principal investors’, the novel itself becomes a form of evidence, fulfilling not a metaphysical function but serving as a commodity with the exchange value needed for blackmail.48 He concludes that in myself I found nothing I could rightly call Rutherford Calhoun, only pieces and fragments of all the people who had touched me, all the places I had seen, all the homes I had broken into. The ‘I’ that I was, was a mosaic of many countries, a patchwork of others and objects stretching backward to perhaps the beginning of time. What I felt, seeing this, was indebtedness.49 The lesson Rutherford learns at the end of the novel is the same one Papa Zeringue had offered at the novel’s opening. For Zeringue, ‘the very Ur-type of Gangster’, this is how the world works, as a giant ‘Social Wheel . . . oiled by debts, each man owing the other somethin’ in a kinda web of endless obligations’.50 Capitalism, theft and slavery become interchangeable here, and it becomes clear that what seemed like the meticulous construction of an alternative epistemology – a counterculture to modernity, to return to Gilroy’s language – is wholly from the point of view of Rutherford, writing as Falcon’s spy. Any seeming knowledge of the Allmuseri way of being is filtered through Western fantasies of the other, which is why critics who go looking for anthropological antecedents are bound to be disappointed.51 What seems like an alternative to the West turns out to be a Western fantasy about Africa. The novel’s ending, accordingly, seemingly checks all the boxes for a conventional resolution as Rutherford acquires a child he loves, a wife who is now pretty and sexually adventurous, and even Santos (Zeringue’s fearsome henchman) as kin and protector.

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The deliberate overloading of wish fulfilment thus becomes a way for Johnson to ironically comment on the reader’s desire for such closure. Because Johnson provides a culturalist construction of race only to undermine it, and sets up a metaphysical understanding of slavery only to reveal it as subject to capital alone, capital rather than race emerges as the motor of Atlantic modernity, with nothing outside it.52 It is in this sense that the novel is nihilistic rather than redemptive, content to parody not only uplift and pacifism (in the person of Rutherford’s saintly brother, Jackson) but also black revolutionary possibility (in the character of Diamelo who, after the rebellion, quickly becomes a tyrant too). A novel that doesn’t connect race to slavery as much as it turns to slavery to attack pieties of race, Middle Passage emblematises the range of contradictions offered by neo-slave narratives, often with no resolution proposed. The question may be framed thus: on the one hand, such fictions insist that slavery is fully a part of modernity and the descendants of the African diaspora must be seen as fully a part of the West; on the other, as Gilroy claims in The Black Atlantic, they also remain outside it, hence double consciousness as the framing metaphor of the book, and arguably the field. But does that frame – inside and outside, participant and critic – sustain compelling visions of a desirable future? Can we think of slavery as part and parcel of the thing we call modernity and at the same time assert that it has generated ways of seeing and being that reach outside the violence that engendered it? A transcendence? For Morrison, such a transcendence is possible, even if at the level of metaphor, as she searches for a notion of race not subsumed by capital. For Johnson, there is no outside. Continuing the insistence on claiming modernity for the black Atlantic in the vein of Gilroy, Johnson also offers a corrective, by prioritising capital rather than race as its fulcrum. Such questions about the relations among race, capital and slavery remain a robust area of inquiry in the scholarly study of slavery, even as the erasure of slavery from at least the US national imaginary remains as strong as ever. In contrast to memorial projects in the UK in 2007 marking the bicentennial of the abolition of the British slave trade, the US has yet to construct a museum dedicated to slavery, and (apart from such projects inspired by Morrison as ‘A Bench by the Road’) routinely exhibits in mainstream political culture the urge towards erasure of the slave past.53 Accordingly, some scholars have begun to emphasise the role of institutions rather than focusing on the psychic dimensions of post-slavery trauma in order to understand the impact of slavery and its relation to contemporary practices of racial subordination. In particular, they point to the spectacular violence visited on black bodies today in order to reveal continuities between slavery and contemporary carceral regimes, including mass incarceration and the use of prisoners as the new slave labour force. In the words of Angela Davis, ‘Slavery continues to live on in contemporary institutions – as in the cases of the death penalty and the prison.’54 Such thinking reveals the links between systems of racialised oppression that are permanent, often passed on from generation to generation, and deliberate, a result of state policy rather than an unhappy accident or failure of public policy. Such scholars emphasise the need to erase the temporal boundaries that separate slavery from Jim Crow from the post-civil-rights era, arguing for continuities from slave ship to barracoon to plantation to factory floor to chain gang to prison. They show that the nature of power (including but not limited to racial domination) does not change across these historical, political and economic systemic shifts, but mutates to maintain forms of subordination developed during slavery.55

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For example, Dennis Childs reads Beloved as a look not just back into the past of slavery but into the future of chain gang labour, not as a neo-slave narrative but as a narrative of neo-slavery.56 And Angela Davis traces ‘an unbroken line of police violence in the United States that takes us all the way back to the days of slavery, the aftermath of slavery, the development of the Ku Klux Klan’ in response to the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.57 Along similar lines, Marcus Rediker explains that he decided to write a book on the slave ship during a visit to Mumia Abu-Jamal on death row. Rediker, an opponent of the death penalty, also linked Abu-Jamal’s experience of the conjunction of race and terror to Rodney King and Trayvon Martin. When questioned about the aptness of calling slavery the African holocaust, Rediker emphasises not only the depth and scale of suffering (still insufficiently understood), but also the centrality of slavery to the development of global capitalism. Rather than fixating on questions of ‘comparative suffering’, Rediker argues that ‘we should ask whether there are systemic links among these mass deaths, and how such things are part of the larger history of capitalism’.58 Black diaspora literature on slavery continues to raise such questions in its exploration of past and present, hoping to imagine a better future by revisiting the slave past.

Notes 1. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 38. 2. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 3. Critics of The Black Atlantic have pointed out its North Atlantic focus, and lack of engagement with Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America. See Charles Piot, ‘Atlantic Aporias: Africa and Gilroy’s Black Atlantic’, The South Atlantic Quarterly 100.1 (2001): 155–70. 4. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, p. 44. 5. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, p. 220. Bernard Bell was the first to define neo-slave narratives as ‘residually oral, modern narratives of escape from bondage to freedom’; The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), p. 289. The term has since expanded to include texts set during slavery and afterwards to explore the continuing aftermath of the experience of bondage and freedom. See Ashraf Rushdy, Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 6. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, p. 221. 7. William Q. Boelhower, ‘The Rise of the New Atlantic Studies Matrix’, American Literary History 20.1–2 (2008): 83–101, p. 89. Also see Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: CircumAtlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), and Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000). 8. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, ‘Atlantic Practices: Minding the Gap between Literature and History’, The William and Mary Quarterly 65.1 (2008): 181–6, p. 183. 9. Jed Esty, ‘Oceanic, Traumatic, Post-Paradigmatic: A Response to William Boelhower’, American Literary History 20.1–2 (2008): 103–7, p. 104. 10. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Vintage, 1988), p. 235. 11. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, p. 38. 12. Sherley Anne Williams, Dessa Rose (New York: Harper Collins, 1986), pp. 5–6.

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13. Madhu Dubey, Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 14. See Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), and Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 15. See Rushdy, Neo-Slave Narratives. 16. Octavia Butler, Kindred (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979), p. 145; Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 17. Bernardine Evaristo, Blonde Roots (New York: Riverhead Books, Penguin, 2009), p. 32, italics in original. 18. Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), p. 6. 19. See Caryl Phillips, The Atlantic Sound (New York: Knopf, 2000). 20. Hartman, Lose Your Mother, p. 130. 21. Caryl Phillips, Crossing the River (New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 235. 22. Roots aired in 1977 and was based on Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of an American Family (New York: Doubleday, 1976). 23. Stanley Crouch, ‘Literary Conjure Woman’, The New Republic, 19 October 1987. 24. Morrison, Beloved, p. 324. 25. Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations 26 (1989): 7–24. 26. Morrison, Beloved, pp. 69, 73. 27. Morrison, Beloved, pp. 43–4. 28. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, p. 218. 29. Jonathan Little, ‘An Interview with Charles Johnson’, Contemporary Literature 34 (1993): 159–81, p. 167. 30. Charles Johnson, ‘The End of the Black American Narrative’, The American Scholar 77.3 (2008): 32–42, p. 33. 31. Johnson, ‘The End of the Black American Narrative’, p. 38. 32. Johnson, ‘The End of the Black American Narrative’, p. 37. 33. Johnson, ‘The End of the Black American Narrative’, p. 40. 34. Little, ‘Interview’, p. 171. 35. Charles Johnson, Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). 36. Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (New York: Scribner, 1990), pp. 144–5. 37. Charles Johnson, Soulcatcher (San Diego: Harvest Original, Harcourt, 1998), p. xi. 38. Johnson, Middle Passage, p. 29. 39. Johnson, Middle Passage, p. 1. 40. Johnson, Middle Passage, p. 98. 41. Johnson, Middle Passage, pp. 49–50, 43. 42. Johnson, Middle Passage, p. 77. 43. Johnson, Middle Passage, p. 61. 44. Johnson, Middle Passage, p. 78. 45. As Ashraf Rushdy explains in ‘The Phenomenology of the Allmuseri: Charles Johnson and the Subject of the Narrative of Slavery’, in Rudolph Byrd (ed.), I Call Myself an Artist: Writings by and about Charles Johnson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 369–96, what may be called an Allmuseri phenomenology could actually be traced across several of Johnson’s novels and short stories, though it is most fully instantiated in Middle Passage.

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160 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58.

yogita goyal Johnson, Middle Passage, p. 147. Johnson, Middle Passage, pp. 46, 47. Johnson, Middle Passage, p. 200. Johnson, Middle Passage, p. 163. Johnson, Middle Passage, pp. 13, 15. See Rushdy, ‘The Phenomenology of the Allmuseri’. For Leslie Eckel, in ‘Oceanic Mirrors: Atlantic Literature and the Global Chaosmos’ (Atlantic Studies: Global Currents 11.1 (2014): 128–44), Johnson’s exploration of the black self in oceanic space also gestures beyond the black Atlantic to an encounter with Pacific and Indian oceans, leading him to the Middle Path of Buddhism. For the ‘A Bench by the Road’ project, see (last accessed 14 April 2016). Angela Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (New York: Seven Stories, 2005), p. 31. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2012). Dennis Childs, Slaves of the State: Black Incarceration from the Chain Gang to the Penitentiary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). Angela Davis, interview with Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian, 14 December 2014, (last accessed 14 April 2016). Marcus Rediker, interview with Nirit Ben-Ari, Haaretz, 21 April 2014, (last accessed 19 May 2016).

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11 The Early Modern Queer Atlantic: Narratives of Sex and Gender on New World Soil Jennifer Frangos

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his chapter focuses on three seventeenth-century transatlantic narratives in order to highlight opportunities represented by sex/gender crossings, class mobility and European colonial activity in the New World. By triangulating the 1629 Virginia court case of Thomas/Thomasine Hall with the memoir of Catalina/Antonio de Erauso (c. 1626) and Aphra Behn’s play The Widow Ranter (1689), I suggest that the early European contact with the New World and the transatlantic circulation of goods, people and ideas opened up new, decidedly queer possibilities for identity and subjectivity for the Europeans who found themselves in a new physical and cultural environment. The circulation of representations of these queer identities in the (print) culture of the Old World in particular, I will argue, helped to publicise and popularise the transformative power and queer potential of the early modern Atlantic world.1 In 1629, the General Court of Virginia was called upon to rule on the sex of one of the residents in the Virginia Bay Colony. Thomasine Hall, also known as Thomas Hall, an indentured servant, had caused a great deal of unrest in the community by appearing to be both male and female at different times. Born in England, Hall had been christened Thomasine and raised as a girl but in 1625 had dressed in men’s clothing and enlisted in the army as Thomas. When presented with the opportunity to immigrate to North America, Hall did so, as Thomas. In Virginia, however, Hall lived as both Thomas and Thomasine, changing clothing, names and social roles – sometimes of hir own accord and other times in response to orders from officials in the colony – but apparently not attempting to maintain two distinct identities.2 When asked by the authorities to describe hirself, Hall responded ‘both man and woeman’, an answer that historian Mary Beth Norton reads as an expression of Hall’s complex sexual and gendered identity, one that clashed with a very strict binary conception of sex that had crossed the Atlantic with the colonists but that was sanctioned by the colonial judiciary system nonetheless.3 Another celebrated New World figure of the seventeenth century was La Monja Alférez (the Lieutenant Nun), Catalina or Antonio de Erauso (1592?–1650). Born female and raised in a Spanish convent, Erauso left before taking nun’s vows and travelled to the New World as a man, where ze joined the Spanish army and lived nearly twenty years before confessing hir birth sex while seeking refuge from the law. Rather remarkably, ze was awarded both a soldier’s pension from the Spanish Crown

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for years of service in New Spain and special dispensation from the Pope to continue wearing men’s clothing. In the 1620s, accounts of Erauso’s exploits circulated as the public on both sides of the Atlantic relished the story of the Lieutenant Nun. Crowds followed hir in Peru and packed the streets of Madrid and Rome in order to get a glimpse of hir. In 1630, Erauso requested permission to return to New Spain and lived the rest of hir life as a mule driver. Aphra Behn’s final play, The Widow Ranter (1689), shares a New World setting with these two stories and features characters who cross-dress. Although The Widow Ranter does not confuse sex/gender distinctions in the same way that Hall’s and Erauso’s stories do, the play’s persistent emphasis is on the systematic self-reinvention of the residents of the Virginia Colony, which is largely made up of indentured servants and transported felons ‘who, having acquired great Estates, are now become your Honor and Right Worshipful, and possess all Places of Authority’.4 Unlike many crossdressing heroines of the English stage, however, the title character of Behn’s play does not revert to skirts at the end of the play. In fact, her new husband encourages her to keep wearing her trousers because he likes her better that way. In The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures, Ralph Bauer argues that the ‘discovery’ of the New World had a profound effect on European cultures and practices, especially in terms of what constituted authority and knowledge. ‘The early modern reorganization of knowledge’, he writes, ‘must be seen as a response not only to the socio-political but also the geo-political questions raised by European expansionism in the New World.’5 Through an analysis of Spanish and English texts dealing with the New World, Bauer explores how information and experiences from the New World changed the European worldview and social order, as ‘ancient authorities’, traditional ways of understanding the world and humankind, were ‘confuted’ or challenged, even as the Old World struggled to maintain its authority, control and perspective. Bauer traces the limitations of accepted modes and concepts in a New World context, concluding that the Old World ideas almost never transferred without adaptation and usually posed a problem to a regime more interested in perpetuating itself in colony and culture than in embracing the new and different. The New World assertion of its authority and knowledge, in other words, begins with imported ideas and structures but finds them inadequate and modifies them based on local needs and desires that could not have been anticipated in their originary contexts. Bauer’s theory draws on both the scientific methodology coming into popularity in Europe and a corresponding emphasis on the individual as a centre and source of meaning. Mary Beth Norton and Terri L. Snyder strike similar chords in their analyses of English colonial societies and cultures and their relation to the imperial centre.6 On an admittedly much smaller scale, I am interested here in the ways that Old World ideas about what we would call gendered identity were tried out in a New World context and adapted to meet needs or desires that were unaddressed, or perhaps impossible, in a European context.

Thomas/Thomasine Hall According to Norton, Hall was brought before the General Court of the Colony of Virginia in August of 1629 after a series of community disagreements over Hall’s sex.7 Hall was born in England and raised as a girl. In hir early twenties, ze dressed as a man

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and joined the army and in 1627 was sent to the Isle of Ré in France; shortly afterward, ze came to the New World (first Massachusetts, then Virginia), in men’s clothing and using the name Thomas, as an indentured servant. The problem that drew the Court’s attention seems to have arisen because in Virginia Hall performed different kinds of labour and social functions, at times acting feminine (wearing skirts, sewing) and at other times acting masculine (wearing men’s clothing, being the subject of a rumour that ze had sex with a female servant on a neighbouring plantation). Hall’s first two masters seem to have believed ze was female; the second one, John Atkins, employed hir specifically as a maidservant. Several groups of women and maybe as many as five men examined Hall’s body and arrived at different conclusions about how to classify hir; the women consistently declared that Hall was male, while at least two of the men ‘pulled out his members’ and were satisfied that ze was male.8 When the local authority, Captain Nathaniel Basse, questioned Hall about hir bodily configuration, he received ‘a description of a unique anatomy with ambiguous physical characteristics: [. . . as] “both man and woeman” ’, including both ‘a mans parte’ and ‘a peece of an hole’.9 On the basis of this interview, Basse ordered Hall ‘to be putt in weomans apparell’.10 When members of the community continued to call for Hall to be considered a man, the matter was referred to the General Court. Despite the fact that Hall had committed no crime, witnesses were called, evidence was heard, and the Court ruled that Hall was henceforth to be considered ‘a man and woeman, that all the Inhabitants there may take notice thereof and that hee [sic] shall goe Clothed in mans apparell, only his head to bee attired in a Coyfe and Crosecloth wth an Apron before him’. Ze was further required to ‘post bond for good behavior until formally released from that obligation’.11 With this ruling, Norton writes, ‘paradoxically, a society in which gender – the outward manifestation of sex – served as a fundamental dividing line had formally designated a person as belonging to both sexes. Yet at the same time it was precisely because gender was so basic a concern to seventeenth-century society that no other solution was possible.’12 The Virginia Court’s decision to declare Hall to be ‘both man and woeman’ and to impose that decision sartorially is, as Norton observes, both superficially astonishing and strangely logical.13 Several groups of women had examined Hall’s body and declared hir to be male. How, then, could the court rule that ze was female without causing significant unrest among the female population of the community that brought the complaint in the first place?14 Further, Norton embeds her discussion of Hall in a larger study of seventeenth-century social interaction in the English colonies in North America and concludes that ‘the colonies’ founders did understand on one level that, if the fragile settlements were to survive, English people in America would have to cooperate with one another in more egalitarian ways than the [contemporary social] theory allowed’.15 In addition to adapting notions of social class, then, the colonists in Virginia also recognised that seemingly inflexible (even God-given) concepts like a binary system of sexual difference could be altered when the necessity arose. The fact that Hall was ordered to post bond for hir good behaviour, which may be reflective of hir status as an indentured servant, suggests that class does indeed inform the court’s decision; it may be that class provides a level of stability to balance out the acknowledged flexibility in sex and gender. The court case of Thomas / Thomasine Hall, I argue, illustrates the practice of adapting Old World ideas to New World contexts. Thomas Laqueur has observed that

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in early modern Western culture ‘[t]o be a man or a woman was to hold a social rank, a place in society, to assume a cultural role, not to be organically one or the other of two incommensurate sexes’.16 Hall challenges this conventional wisdom by shifting between cultural roles associated with men and women, exploiting the permeability of the sex/gender system but also stubbornly refusing to remain fixed in one role or the other until an identity is imposed by the court. There do not appear to be similar cases on the record in European courts from the period,17 which suggests that both a person like Hall and a decision like the General Court of Virginia’s may be unique to the New World.18 Because court records are always filtered through the recording clerk, and thus contain second-hand information at best, it is impossible to know what Hall intended or how ze thought of hir gendered identity on a personal level. But it is clear that this individual drew on familiar structures of knowledge about sex and gender, reconfigured them, and chose to live a differently gendered life in the New World rather than the Old.

Catalina/Antonio de Erauso, the Lieutenant Nun The New World context is similarly crucial to the narrative of a famously ambiguous figure: Catalina de Erauso, who went by a number of names including Francisco Loyola, Alonso Díaz Ramírez de Guzmán and Antonio de Erauso but was celebrated as La Monja Alférez, the Lieutenant Nun. Born to a prosperous Basque family near the end of the sixteenth century,19 Erauso was raised in a convent until, at the age of fifteen, ze20 slipped out one night, changed hir convent uniform for men’s clothing and made hir way to New Spain. There ze lived as a man for nearly twenty years, first as assistant to a merchant, then as a soldier, then more or less as a ruffian. In about 1620, as part of the process of evading arrest by claiming sanctuary in a church, ze confessed to a Spanish bishop that ze had been born female and became a local then an international celebrity. Ze returned to Spain in 1624, successfully petitioned the Spanish king Philip IV for a soldier’s pension, obtained permission from Pope Urban VIII to continue to wear men’s clothing, ostensibly wrote or dictated a memoir,21 then in 1630 returned to the New World, where ze died in 1650.22 The memoir does not appear to have been published until the nineteenth century, but there is a print record of the Lieutenant Nun from the seventeenth century: several relacións or news reports in the 1620s and 1630s, and at least one play based on Erauso’s life written and performed in Spain in 1625 (Comedia famosa de la monja Alférez by Juan Pérez de Montalbán). According to the memoir hir story spread very quickly both in the New World and in the Old: ze recounts that on the day after hir confession to the bishop, there was ‘a crowd so huge, it was hard to believe there was anyone left at home, or that we would ever get to the church’ where ze was to reside. In Seville, ‘swarms of people . . . turned up everywhere, trying to catch a glimpse of me in men’s clothing’.23 During a six-week stay in Rome, ze comments that ‘it was remarkable to see the throng that followed me about – famous people, princes, bishops, cardinals’ and notes that ‘scarcely a day went by when I did not dine with princes’.24 Erauso lived most of hir nearly sixty years in the New World, which at the time was practically synonymous with ‘fabulous wealth’ in Spanish culture, and was attractive to many because of the possibilities for gaining wealth and improving one’s social status.25 As a consequence, the New World was a place in which the Spanish social order was

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brought under tremendous pressure, with opportunities available to people from all levels of society. According to Michele Stepto, many of Peru’s early conquerors were men of plebeian roots, transformed by the reward of rich encomiendas [royal grants of Indian labour/tribute] into the governing elite of the new kingdom. . . . [I]n the chaotic world of Peru every Spaniard who came afterward, even the humblest baker or foot soldier, could expect to improve his or her condition in ways impossible to those who stayed at home.26 The Spanish social order and way of life was brought over with the early conquerors and settlers, and though it was necessarily adapted to conditions on the new continent, ‘it was nevertheless recognizably Spanish’.27 Along with wealth, natural resources and stories, some of these socio-cultural changes were no doubt imported back to Europe, as was the case, briefly, with Erauso hirself. Though conspicuously lacking in details about Erauso’s motivation both for changing from women’s clothing to men’s and for migrating to the New World, the memoir clearly depicts an individual taking advantage of the transformative opportunities available in the New World.28 There is a period in which, after escaping from the convent, Erauso (using a series of male names) finds accommodations and work in the areas of Spain in which ze was born, living incognito with an uncle’s family and working as a page for the king’s secretary. Hir fortunes change drastically when in 1603 ze slips off the Spanish merchant ship that brought hir into Nombre de Dios. Unlike many who travelled from the Old World to the New, Erauso does not overtly seek profit from hir activities in New Spain: speaking to a former employer, ze says that ‘I had a mind to travel and see a bit of the world’.29 It is a different kind of transformation at the centre of this narrative. Erauso’s life in New Spain is a violent and chaotic one. Ze frequently gets into fights at the card table or on the street, kills an alarming number of men (including, unbeknownst to hir at the time, hir brother Miguel) and runs afoul of the law more than a few times, and not always for crimes ze admits to. There are several brief anecdotes about flirtations with women and two different sets of plans to marry hir to heiresses, but this narrative lacks an explicitly erotic component, something that modern readers (and probably seventeenth-century readers as well) expect in crossdressing narratives. As Marjorie Garber comments, ‘Catalina’s [sic] story does not seem to be about “sex,” at least as she [sic] tells it.’30 Indeed, the memoir refuses to participate in the usually explicit alloerotic, heteronormative drive characteristic of most early modern cross-dressing narratives, both ‘actual’ and fictional.31 Judith Butler has identified a ‘heterosexual matrix’ that normalises the relationships between sex, gender and desire in Western culture.32 The memoir, with its insistence on the supposed contradiction of a female body and a manly gender and social role, troubles this ‘logical’ association of sex with gender; furthermore, the near absence of sexual desire from the Lieutenant Nun’s narrative confounds the expectation of alloerotic, heterosexual desire that might otherwise help to resolve the doubled or ambiguous gendering of Erauso’s body. Unlike European theatrical cross-dressing plots of the period, even though Erauso’s ‘true’ sex is revealed and confirmed, ze does not revert to petticoats and hir former female social role in the end, but rather makes hir own way. Ze even practically

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challenges the king of Spain to order hir to dress as a woman in the petition requesting a pension for military service: His Majesty should also have to decide if it best served his intentions for her to dress like a woman, however, His Majesty should know that she has no inclination to change or modify her current habit of dress, which is like a man.33 The king sidestepped the issue of Erauso’s clothing, at which point ze appealed to the Pope, who ‘gave me leave to pursue my life in men’s clothing’.34 Given Erauso’s apparent preference for a masculine presentation and social role, it is interesting that ‘nun’ remains an important part of hir public identity – even more so when readers learn that word is sent from Rome that Catalina de Erauso never took nun’s vows and thus ‘wasn’t, nor had [ze] ever been, a professed nun’.35 Federico Garza Carvajal notes an anecdote in a relación from 1645 about a family that hires Antonio de Erauso to carry their daughter to another town, despite knowing that ze ‘dressed as a man’,36 which suggests that in hir second and final stint in the New World, Erauso no longer passed as a man but openly lived as a masculine woman wearing men’s clothing and working at a man’s profession as a muleteer. This was an identity that ze would arguably have had a very hard time maintaining in Spain without at the very least passing as a man: it was illegal in Spain for women to wear men’s clothing.37 Although it is fascinating to try to unravel – as many critics have done and will no doubt continue to do38 – the ‘truth’ of Erauso’s identity (hir ‘real’ sex and gender, sexual orientation, motivations, and so on), I believe that such answers are beyond our reach at this historical distance and, in significant ways, beside the point. What I am interested in is the memoir’s implication that the New World was the best place for someone who did not fit into ‘traditional’ gendered socio-cultural roles or a binary of sexual categories. The protagonist of the memoir of the life of the Lieutenant Nun uses the possibilities that the New World seemed to offer to members of the seventeenth-century Spanish empire in order to create and maintain an identity that would have been difficult, if not impossible, to embody in the Old World. Furthermore, by petitioning the king and the Pope, Erauso sought recognition and reward from the Old World powers-that-be for hir New World activities, including what most people would understand to be cross-dressing, as well as permission to carry on in the New World context. Combining hir soldier’s pension (reward) with the Pope’s dispensation (recognition), Erauso capitalises on the Old World’s investment in narratives of New World transformations in order to arrive at an identity that confounds Old World categories and limitations. Then ze removes hirself to the New World, safely away from the reach of the very structures and authority that sanctioned hir in the first place, thus reducing the likelihood that the Old World order could be reasserted or reimposed.

Aphra Behn’s Widow Ranter The Widow Ranter was the last play written by English playwright Aphra Behn; it was performed posthumously in 1689 and published in 1690; while not terribly successful at the time, scholars now consider it to be an important part of her corpus. As one of her ‘American’ texts (along with Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave), The Widow

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Ranter is often read either as a colonial text depicting the effects of the English conquest of North America39 or as presenting a critique of Old World heroic sensibility for its inflexibility and inattention to women’s needs.40 I am interested in how the play foregrounds its New World setting, especially in the ways that Behn suggests that the Virginia Colony is the site of social and cultural practices different from those in the Old World. As Adam Beach observes, the structure of Behn’s play ‘encapsulates the dynamic process by which new ideological positions are produced’.41 Behn’s authorial career was marked by attention to issues of sex, gender and sexuality, especially the sexual double standard that licensed male sexual promiscuity while punishing female sexual desire when expressed outside of narrow, culturally sanctioned realms. The Widow Ranter signals its interest in categories of sexual identity through its title character, the widowed Mrs Ranter, who spends the fourth and fifth acts of the play dressed in men’s clothing and fighting in Bacon’s Rebellion in a bid to win the affection of one of Bacon’s men, Colonel Daring. A second plot in act 4 – the heroic but doomed love between General Bacon and the Indian Queen Semernia – also features a cross-dressed female character: Semernia dresses in (Native American) men’s clothing in order to flee after the death of her husband during a clash with Bacon’s forces. These cross-dressing plots derive from the theatrical convention in which the audience knows of the cross-dressing while most of the other characters on stage do not and thus interact with the female characters as if they were men. Ranter fights alongside male soldiers in battle scenes, and challenges Daring for the hand of Chrisante, a challenge that Daring initially accepts; Semernia is mistaken for an Indian warrior and fatally wounded by her lover Bacon, who cannot see through the disguise. From the audience’s perspective, there is little confusion over the ‘true’ sexual identity of either Ranter’s or Semernia’s male alter ego; however, within the logic of the play, there is enough authenticity to the female characters’ masculine presentations and performances to allow their male identities to go for the most part unquestioned. The play also highlights issues of class mobility and identity, specifically locating the New World’s promotion of class-crossing and self-(re)invention. Ranter arrived in Virginia as either a transported felon or an indentured servant – the play does not specify which – who was bought off the boat as a household servant and later married by her master, who died and left her a very rich widow worth £50,000.42 Ranter is an unconventional female character: she likes to drink and entertain, smokes tobacco, and speaks brusquely, in sharp contrast to the character of Chrisante, the play’s model of femininity, who is modest, retiring and chaste. As a widow, Ranter would have had a great deal of autonomy in Anglo-Virginian society, and her status as a wealthy landowner in the Virginia Colony grants her both a large measure of social influence and a great deal of tolerance for eccentric behaviour.43 The opening scene introduces the transformative properties of Virginia, with special attention to younger sons of the English gentry. Friendly relates that he has come to Virginia upon inheriting an American estate from an uncle, while Hazard explains that his older brother, ‘being mollified by Persuasion, and the hopes of being for ever rid of me, sent me hither with a small Cargo to seek my Fortune’.44 Friendly declares, ‘Thou . . . art come just in the nick of time to make thy Fortune’ and recruits Hazard into a scheme to marry him to a young woman who is likely to become a wealthy widow very soon.45 Marriage is thus established as one sure way to change one’s social standing, to make one’s fortune. Interestingly, while in a European context marrying

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up is a common trope for women, in Behn’s play it is advocated as a good option for men as well; the Widow Ranter (herself married into New World money) even quips to Hazard, ‘we rich Widows are the best Commodity this Country affords, I’ll tell you that.’46 The play endorses another narrative for the younger son, as well: Colonel Surelove, now one of the wealthiest merchants in Jamestown, started out as ‘a Leicestershire younger Brother, [and] came over with a small Fortune, which his Industry has increas’d to a thousand Pounds a year; and he is now Colonel John Surelove, and one of the Council’.47 Colonel Surelove has amassed a fortune in an honourable, New World way, through ‘Industry’ and hard work. We do not know if Colonel Ranter was a similar figure (who worked his way to wealth and respect), but it is possible, even likely; he seems to have been free enough to marry for love rather than for alliance or fortune. Thus, both Hazard and Daring profit from other men’s industry and fortune in the New World and are able to bolster their own prospects. The newly wealthy younger brother was a figure possible chiefly in the New World: in a way, Colonels Ranter and Surelove function as surrogate fathers for these young men, allowing them to inherit more than enough money to live comfortably without the taint of labour or the actual earning of money. Other men in Virginia, especially those with criminal or dishonourable backgrounds, are able to reinvent themselves as well. According to local rumour, back in England Boozer was a pickpocket, Timorous an excise man who embezzled from the king, and Dullman a tinker-turned-thief; Timorous gossips that Dunce was a farrierturned-life-guard-turned-counterfeit-chaplain.48 These men are all members of the Jamestown Council and so they are socially and culturally important figures (if they do say so themselves). Although they vehemently deny such rumours about their pasts, the audience understands that beneath the bluster is probably a similar story; Friendly’s quip to Hazard only reinforces our inclination: ‘for want of a Governour we are ruled by a Council, some of whom have been perhaps transported Criminals, who having acquired great Estates, are now become your Honour and Right Worshipful, and possess all Places of Authority.’49 That these men were criminals who have assumed positions of honour and respect adds to the humour of the rustic plot, contrasting their Old World disgrace with their New World honour, but the plots of male self-(re)invention also depict the New World as the site of the only real social mobility available in the English social structure: in Virginia, pickpockets, embezzlers and farriers become councilmen. Female characters have similar opportunities for self-(re)invention, though in Behn’s plot they do not have an overtly criminal past to escape from; one might reasonably expect to find that transported female felons have a background of prostitution, but Behn consistently avoids such implication. Local rumour holds that Flirt’s father was a tailor bankrupted over Cromwell’s funeral, and who moved the family to Virginia to start afresh, though she insists that he was a baronet ‘undone in the late Rebellion’.50 Her family’s Old World misfortune is thus a generation removed, but in Virginia she is a tavern owner and an independent, (more or less) respectable member of the community. Ranter too was able to marry into respectability and leave behind her Old World past, whatever that may have been. Behn not only resists the implication of prostitution in either woman’s past but also subjects neither of the two to ridicule or mockery as she does with the male rustics; the effect is to focus on the transformation and respectability the female characters have found in the New World.

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Behn takes liberties with the historical timeline and events surrounding Bacon’s Rebellion;51 similarly, she plays fast and loose with systems like class, sex, gender and social order that an English audience might enjoy seeing troubled but would expect to be restored by the end of the play. Behn invokes the conservative world-turned-upsidedown convention, with rustics like Whiff and Whimsey in charge, but opts not to observe the expected resolution when it comes to Ranter in the same way that she does with the characters in the rustic plot (Whiff, Whimsey, Dullman, Timorous, et al.) who might be considered Ranter’s peers. Ranter is, lest we forget, the title character, which calls attention to her fate and her actions in a way that reinforces the ‘dynamic process by which new ideological positions are produced’ called out by Beach.52 Though the play includes cross-dressing, the characters who exchange their clothing are not, in the end, restored to their former proper wardrobe and social role: Semernia is dead and Ranter is encouraged by her beloved to continue wearing her breeches: Dar. Give me thy Hand, Widow, I am thine – and so entirely, I will never – be drunk out of thy Company: – [Parson] Dunce is in my Tent, – prithee let’s in and bind the Bargain. Ran. Nay, faith, let’s see the Wars at an end first. Dar. Nay, prithee take me in the humour, while thy Breeches are on – for I never lik’d thee half so well in Petticoats. Ran. Lead on, General, you give me good incouragement to wear them.53 Daring takes a liking to the woman who declares – and literally fights for – her love for him, insisting that they be married at once, and that she remain in breeches. If, as Heidi Hutner suggests, Ranter is the nexus of a number of Restoration anxieties involving class, race and gender/sex, as well as a solution to those conflicts and concerns,54 it is important to note that Ranter is not simply incorporated back into the (corrected) status quo: she marries up, class-wise, shows no indication that she will change to become more like Madam Surelove or Chrisante, and is preferred by her husband in breeches rather than in petticoats. It may be that Ranter’s gendered presentation has finally aligned with her boisterous, ‘ranting’ personality, but in the end the play delivers the sense that there is a place in Virginia society for a married woman in breeches who drinks, swears and entertains lavishly – a figure who, however beneficial to the younger sons in the world, would arguably have been subjected to regulatory or corrective social forces in the Old World. The narratives of Thomas/Thomasine Hall, Catalina/Antonio de Erauso and the Widow Ranter, in their different ways, argue for a place in New World society for a new gendered figure – someone who combines characteristics usually associated with ‘both man and woeman’. Through an analysis of gender as a subset of transformative behaviours, I have explored how (some) Europeans in the New World, confronted with cultural and social conditions in which their conventional or ‘traditional’ concepts do not seem to inhere, may have taken the opportunity to question the rigidity of such imported notions on New World soil in ways that would have been difficult or impossible in the Old World. In addition to undermining the stability of the European class system (through, for example, the creation of new wealth), colonial expansion also provided opportunities to renegotiate expectations about gender and sex, especially the foundational belief that anatomy (sex) leads directly

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and predictably to social role (gender). And, like the wealth and natural resources increasingly demanded for Old World consumption, New World concepts and paradigms were imported back to the Old World through anecdotes and relacións, plays and autobiographical narratives, and occasionally as bodies and spectacles, which allowed for gendered identities queer possibilities that the Old World may never have been able to realise on its own.

Notes 1. I should specify that my argument is limited to the ways that Europeans found a certain liberty and possibility in and through their presence in the New World; the experience would have been decidedly different from the perspective of the Native North Americans. For an analysis of the effects of European presence on Native women, see for example Heidi Hutner, Colonial Women: Race and Culture in Stuart Drama (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 89–106. 2. I use the gender-neutral pronouns ‘ze’, ‘hir’ and ‘hirself’ in this chapter in order to highlight the ambiguous sex of the people and characters I discuss. This is an anachronistic use of a twenty-first-century convention articulated in transgendered and queer discourse, I realise, but it is a strategic one. I do want to make it clear, however, that I am in no way claiming that Hall, Erauso or any of Behn’s cross-dressing characters should be best understood as transgendered or queer in the modern sense, nor that any of them would necessarily have identified as transgendered, queer or otherwise if given the opportunity. 3. See Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), pp. 183–202. See also Kathleen Brown, ‘ “Changed . . . into the Fashion of a Man”: The Politics of Sexual Difference in a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Settlement’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 6.2 (1995): 171–93. 4. Aphra Behn, The Widow Ranter, in Five Plays, ed. Maureen Duffy (London: Methuen, 1990), pp. 214–15; act I, scene i. Subsequent citations will be to act and scene, followed by page number. 5. Ralph Bauer, The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 118. 6. See Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers, and Terri L. Snyder, Brabbling Women: Disorderly Speech and the Law in Early Virginia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). 7. Norton draws from H. R. MacIlwaine (ed.), Minutes of the Council and General Court of Virginia 1622–1632, 1670–1676 (Richmond: Virginia State Library, 1924), pp. 194–5; she notes that many of the original records and documents concerning Hall’s case are either damaged or missing and so there is limited information available to historians, especially concerning Hall’s life after the General Court’s ruling. It is important to note that the North American colonies had distinct identities and often starkly different social and cultural milieux: the Virginia Colony, for example, contrasts dramatically with the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which demonstrated a different and far more violent policing of gendered behaviour in the Salem witch trials of the early 1690s. 8. Quoted in Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers, p. 188. 9. Quoted in Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers, pp. 186, 188. 10. Quoted in Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers, p. 186. 11. Quoted in Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers, pp. 187–8; a coif and crosscloth were a type of female headdress, p. 194. 12. Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers, p. 196. 13. Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers, pp. 194–5.

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14. Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers, pp. 191–2, 195–6. 15. Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers, p. 199. 16. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 8. 17. Indeed, in some European countries, cross-dressing was illegal and those who were caught wearing clothing that did not correspond to their sexed bodies and social roles were prosecuted (and sometimes executed). However, these cases were usually predicated on unambiguously sexed bodies – women wearing men’s clothing or men wearing women’s clothing (and usually prosecuted as sodomites); see, for example, Rudolf M. Dekker and Lotte C. van de Pol, The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989); Brigitte Eriksson, ‘A Lesbian Execution in Germany, 1721: The Trial Records’, Journal of Homosexuality 6.1 (1981): 27–40; and Federico Garza Carvajal, Butterflies Will Burn: Prosecuting Sodomites in Early Modern Spain and Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003). There were a few celebrated cases of ‘hermaphroditism’, such as Marie/Marin le Marcis and Marie-Germain in France, but these were treated as medical cases and were generally considered to be instances of spontaneous sex change from one sex (usually female) to the other (usually male), with no lingering ambiguity; see Laqueur, Making Sex, pp. 135–9, and Lorraine J. Daston and Katherine Park, ‘The Hermaphrodite and the Orders of Nature: Sexual Ambiguity in Early Modern France’, GLQ 1 (1995): 419–38. 18. It is not fundamentally applicable to Hall’s case, which involves European concepts of sex and gender and shows no evidence of awareness of Native American cultures or practices, but it is worth mentioning that some Native American peoples have a sex/gender system that allows for doubly sexed individuals known as two-spirits, joyas or berdache (note that this last term is now considered problematic in many contexts); see, for example, Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas and Sabine Lang (eds), Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997). 19. The memoir attributed to Erauso claims that ze was born in 1585, although one editortranslator notes that ze was not baptised until 1592, so the earlier date may not be accurate; see Michele Stepto, ‘Introduction’, in Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World, trans. Michele Stepto and Gabriel Stepto (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), p. xxvi, and Mary Elizabeth Perry, ‘From Convent to Battlefield: Cross-Dressing and Gendering the Self in the New World of Imperial Spain’, in Josiah Blackmore and Gregory S. Hutcheson (eds), Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 394–419, p. 413 n. 1. 20. Again, I use the ungendered pronouns ‘ze’ and ‘hir’ in my discussion of Erauso. Others have opted for different ways to acknowledge the difficulty of speaking and writing about such an individual; for a particularly interesting decision along these lines, see Perry, ‘From Convent to Battlefield’, p. 395. The Spanish original is even more complicated, given the gendered inflections of nouns and adjectives in Spanish; see Stepto’s commentary about the slippery treatment of sex in the original memoir and the impossibility of rendering that into English (‘Translator’s Note’, Lieutenant Nun, pp. xlvi–xlviii). Similarly, because Erauso went by a number of names during hir lifetime, one must make a choice regarding how to refer to hir by name. I have opted for ‘Erauso’, both because ‘Catalina de Erauso’ is the name on the manuscript memoir – Vida y sucesos de la Monja Alférez Doña Catalina de Erauso, Escrita por ella misma – and because ‘Antonio de Erauso’ is the name that ze used for the last twenty years of hir life, after ze had publicly claimed hir dual identity as the Lieutenant Nun. It seems significant that ze resumed the family name to which ze was born after the petitions to the king and the Pope, and after reconciling with hir family after more than twenty years’ absence (see Stepto, ‘Introduction’, p. xlii).

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21. No manuscript copy of the memoir exists, and hence there is some doubt as to the ‘authenticity’ of the text – that is, whether or not it is an account of Erauso’s life in hir own words, either written or dictated by Erauso between 1626 and 1630 while in Spain. Because many details and people in the memoir correspond with historical events and people that can be corroborated with other primary sources from the time, most scholars proceed on the assumption that these are indeed Erauso’s authentic experiences. See, for example, Sherry Velasco, The Lieutenant Nun: Transgenderism, Lesbian Desire, and Catalina de Erauso (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), pp. 2–6, and Sonia Pérez Villanueva, ‘Crossing Boundaries: Authority, Knowledge, and Experience in the Autobiography Vida y sucesos de la monja alférez’, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 28.2 (Winter 2013): 296–316, esp. pp. 303–4 and 309. Given the popularity of the Lieutenant Nun, however, it is quite possible that this narrative was written by someone else as an attempt to capitalise on public interest. Even if the memoir is in fact from the lips or pen of Erauso, it is wise to be wary of looking for an ‘authentic’ or ‘true’ experience in the memoir. I confine my own argument to the narrative and its narrator, without making assumptions about the historical Erauso hirself. 22. The memoir ends in 1626 with Erauso in Naples. For hir life after 1626, see Garza Carvajal, Butterflies Will Burn, pp. 187–8, Stepto, ‘Introduction’, pp. xlii–xliv, and Velasco, The Lieutenant Nun, p. 11. 23. Catalina de Erauso, Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World, trans. Michele Stepto and Gabriel Stepto (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), pp. 66, 73. 24. Erauso, Lieutenant Nun, p. 79. 25. Stepto, ‘Introduction’, p. xxix. 26. Stepto, ‘Introduction’, pp. xxix–xxx. 27. Stepto, ‘Introduction’, p. xxviii. 28. Christopher Kark accounts for this lack of personal detail generically, identifying the memoir as picaresque rather than confessional (‘Latent Selfhood and the Problem of Genre in Catalina de Erauso’s Historia de la Monja Alférez’, Revusta de Estudios Hispánicos, 46.3 (October 2012): 527–46; see esp. pp. 535–6). Stepto characterises ‘observation and selfexamination . . . [as] activities of leisure and quiet, conditions she willingly abandoned with the veil’ (‘Introduction’, p. xxxv). 29. Erauso, Lieutenant Nun, p. 17. This comment has led some critics to conclude that Erauso wanted access to a lifestyle available only to men, or at the very least an escape from the confines of convent life; such readings are usually informed by a belief that Erauso is ‘truly’ a woman. See, for example, Velasco, The Lieutenant Nun, p. 8, and Velasco, Lesbians in Early Modern Spain (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2011), p. 70, and Marjorie Garber, ‘Foreword: The Marvel of Peru’, in Erauso, Lieutenant Nun, pp. vii–xxiv. I want to argue instead that Erauso was seeking a way of being in the world that worked around exclusive binaries like male and female. 30. Garber, ‘Foreword’, p. xiii. 31. See Garber, ‘Foreword’, pp. xix–xx, and Stepto, ‘Introduction’, pp. xxxviii–xxxix. See also Julie Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids: Women Who Dressed as Men in Pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness (London: Pandora Press, 1989), Dianne Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry 1650–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), and Dekker and van de Pol, The Tradition of Female Transvestism. 32. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 47–106. In Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993), Butler clarifies a common misinterpretation of her earlier theory: that performativity is a forced repetition of gendered expectations and norms, not a playful ‘choice’ of personal identity (pp. 10, 30); cross-dressing, or choosing to perform the identity of the ‘opposite’ sex for a limited period, is not what she refers to as performativity.

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33. Catalina de Erauso, El Alférez doña Catalina de Erauso ha dado una petición en el consejo, en que refiere ha diez y nuebe años pasó a las provncias de Perú en ábito de barón, quoted in Garza Carvajal, Butterflies Will Burn, p. 35 (translation, and pronouns, are Garza Carvajal’s). 34. Erauso, Lieutenant Nun, p. 78. 35. Erauso, Lieutenant Nun, p. 69. 36. Garza Carvajal, Butterflies Will Burn, p. 187. 37. See Garber, ‘Foreword’, p. xi. 38. Nearly everyone who writes about Erauso accepts that ze is ‘truly’ female. See, for example, Velasco, The Lieutenant Nun, pp. 8–9, and Velasco, Lesbians in Early Modern Spain, chapter 4, and Garber, ‘Foreword’. Garber in particular seems to have forgotten her own injunction to look at rather than through the cross-dresser to some notion of original and authentic sex; see Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 10. For an interesting approach to the problem of inadvertently gendering through the use of pronouns, see Perry, ‘From Convent to Battlefield’, p. 395: Perry alternates the pronouns ‘he’ and ‘she’ in every other sentence in order to resist the impression of a stable gendered identity for Erauso. See also Stepto’s ‘Translator’s Note’ on the difficulty of rendering complicated gendered inflections from Spanish into English. Interestingly, Garza Carvajal cites Erauso as the quintessential or prototypical ‘perfect Spanish Vir’, the embodiment of the manly ideal constructed in the Spanish culture as a result of its contact with and conquest of the New World (Butterflies Will Burn, chapter 1). It is a provocative argument that an ambiguous, doubled and New World figure embodies the ideal of Spanish masculinity. Stepto too identifies Erauso with Spanish colonial masculinity, calling hir ‘the perfect colonialist, manipulative, grasping, and at moments out and out bigoted’ (‘Introduction’, p. xli). 39. See, for example, Hutner, Colonial Women, pp. 89–106, and Jenny Hale Pulsipher, ‘The Widow Ranter and Royalist Culture in Colonial Virginia’, Early American Literature 39.1 (2004): 41–66. 40. See, for example, Hutner, Colonial Women, pp. 104–6, Margarete Rubik, Early Women Dramatists, 1550–1800 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 32–9, and Adam R. Beach, ‘Anti-Colonialist Discourse, Tragicomedy, and the “American” Behn’, Comparative Drama 38.2–3 (Summer/Fall 2004): 213–33. 41. Beach, ‘Anti-Colonialist Discourse’, p. 221. 42. Critics tend to assume that Ranter was an indentured servant, not a felon. But she demonstrates enough familiarity with criminal cant to call that into question when she says to a boy just arrived, ‘What, from Newgate or Bridewell? from shoveling the Tumbler, Sirrah, lifting or filing the Cly?’ (I, iii; p. 225). 43. Snyder reads Ranter as a ‘brabbling woman’, an unruly figure of particular interest to the Virginian authorities as a New World phenomenon (Brabbling Women, pp. 10–15). 44. Behn, Widow Ranter, I, i; p. 212. 45. Behn, Widow Ranter, I, i; p. 212. 46. Behn, Widow Ranter, I, iii; p. 227. 47. Behn, Widow Ranter, I, i; pp. 213, 216. 48. Behn, Widow Ranter, I, i; pp. 218, 217. 49. Behn, Widow Ranter, I, i; pp. 214–15. 50. Behn, Widow Ranter, I, i; pp. 217–18. 51. See Hutner, Colonial Women, pp. 94–100, and Pulsipher, ‘The Widow Ranter and Royalist Culture’. 52. Beach, ‘Anti-Colonialist Discourse’, p. 221. 53. Behn, Widow Ranter, IV, iii; pp. 276–7. 54. Hutner, Colonial Women, p. 105.

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12 ‘Local LOCAS’: Trans-Antillean Queerness in Mayra Santos-Febres’s SIRENA SELENA Ivonne M. García

T

he concept of an ‘Atlantic world’ has long called our attention to the connections first established in the fifteenth century between Europe, Africa and the Americas, which forever transformed those locations, inhabitants and cultures. Simultaneously, such contacts and clashes created ‘new peoples, societies, cultures, economies and ideas throughout the Atlantic littoral’.1 Scholars tend to agree that the nineteenth century, specifically the end of the African slave trade, functions as an epilogue for this ‘theoretical construction’, signalling the change ‘from regular, human linkages to infrequent contact and cultural vestiges’. 2 Many also agree that the lived legacies of what we know today as the ‘Atlantic world’ have helped it retain its ‘conceptual legitimacy’, as well as its significance as a site of critical inquiry.3 More specifically, Paul Gilroy’s ideation of a ‘Black Atlantic’ – characterised as ‘the stereophonic, bilingual, or bifocal cultural forms originated by, but no longer the exclusive property of, blacks dispersed within the structures of feeling, producing, communicating, and remembering’ – provides a key heuristic in the study of the ever-present and ever-changing multivocality of this discursively demarcated region.4 Within the stereophony identified by Gilroy, Joseph Roach has posited the ‘Circum-Atlantic’ as a ‘region-centered conception, which locates the peoples of the Caribbean rim at the heart of an oceanic interculture embodied through performance’.5 Building on these larger theoretical formations, this chapter is concerned with the representation of a queered and intersectional gender performance at the crossroads where race, gender and sexuality meet in the Caribbean. Within the region-centred theorisations of an Atlantic world, and of its defining relation to performance, Mayra Santos-Febres’s first novel, Sirena Selena, becomes an important subject of literary scrutiny. The novel, which the author has said was based on her own personal experiences working with gay activists in Puerto Rico, was well received critically in scholarly circles, and was also welcomed by many in the island’s LGBTQ community.6 Canonised almost immediately as a significant contribution to Puerto Rican and Caribbean queer studies when it first appeared in Spanish in 2000, the novel was published a year or so later in its English translation.7 While the Spanish original included one chapter in English, narrated by a gay Canadian tourist character, the translation also sought to represent the region’s multivocality by using many unglossed Spanish terms. As Juana María Rodríguez has noted, the infusion of Spanish into the English narration makes ‘literal the transnational multiplicities of

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the text’ and ‘registers the same heteroglossic effect as many US Latino novels written in English’.8 Divided into forty-nine chapters, the translated version is focalised through ten different characters, but mainly (in eighteen chapters) through the eyes and experiences of the fifteen-year-old male protagonist, who is a cross-dressing singer of boleros (sad love songs).9 An orphan rescued by older transvestites from the streets of Puerto Rico, where he had been viciously raped and become drug-addicted, he is mentored by Martha Divine, a transvestite businesswoman, until the protagonist becomes a consummate performer. The novel begins with Martha and Sirena travelling to the Dominican Republic, hoping to land a performing deal for Sirena at a hotel on that island. Sirena’s voice, as she sings the boleros learned from her grandmother (the first person to call him sirenito, or small male siren) while they cleaned rich people’s houses, has a nearly supernatural, ‘siren-like’ effect on those who listen.10 Once in the Dominican Republic, Sirena meets Hugo Graubel II, a rich businessman who invites her to his house for a private performance, and, unbeknownst to Martha, Sirena leaves the hotel to pursue this opportunity on her own. At Hugo’s house, Sirena meets Solange, Hugo’s neglected and sexually dissatisfied wife. Also during her stay in the Dominican Republic, Sirena briefly meets Leocadio, a young, poor, abandoned Dominican boy, who sees in Sirena the possibility of what he might become. After delivering a superb performance and then making love to Hugo at his house, Sirena disappears from the narrative. Debra A. Castillo argues that ‘Sirena is and must remain a fabulous creature in both senses of the word; she seduces us only to disappear from the novel and back into legend.’11 By the novel’s end, Martha, who has given up on ever seeing Sirena again, trains her sights on Leocadio, who works at a hotel that caters to gay tourists. Through these different narratives, the novel intertwines the lives of Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Latin Americans, North Americans and Europeans in an Atlantic tableau where queer identities are the norm, not the exception. Near the novel’s conclusion, Martha describes Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic as ‘this soup of islands stewed in hunger and the desire to be someone else’.12 This representation of locations cooked together to produce unfulfilled physical and psychological needs among its inhabitants points to how the history of colonialism and slavery in the Atlantic – the ‘soup’ Martha refers to – indelibly marked these geographies and their peoples. To ‘survive in these islands’, Martha notes, requires ‘the tricks’ she is an expert in, and that she teaches her protégé as they travel to the Dominican Republic to arrange a drag show for tourists. Martha adds that ‘without the makeup and the glamour, without the dreams and the memories . . . without tricks and betrayal, life isn’t life for one who lives with this weight in her belly’ (211), associating queer tactics of survival with stylisation, commodification, drama and performance.13 By that point in the narrative, readers know that Martha dreams of making enough money as Sirena’s agent for a sex-change operation, so surviving with a ‘weight in her belly’ suggests how she bears the burden, like biological women might when pregnant, of an unborn identity within her. Like the other island locas (the term Martha uses to describe the queer male characters in the novel, translatable as ‘crazy women’), she finds her ‘true’ self within and not outside her body. In introducing the reader to the worldview of transvestites, mostly in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, Santos-Febres crafts a pan-Antillean queer identity.14

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At the same time, and because her characters are also steeped in the Afro-diasporic racial and cultural context of the Atlantic world, Santos-Febres sketches the intersectional contours of what I am calling a trans-Antillean queerness, which simultaneously transcends gender and sexuality, is racially mixed, and Caribbean.15 By linking the islands through the struggles of queer individuals who must fight for their survival not only in socio-economic terms but also, more importantly, in an existential sense, Santos-Febres builds on a long-theorised pan-Antillean identity.16 In her study on the nineteenth-century Puerto Rican doctor Ramón Emeterio Betances, who was among the first to articulate the notion of a pan-Antillean region, Irmary Reyes-Santos locates Betances within ‘a multi-lingual . . . and Afro-diasporic decolonial tradition’.17 This creolised figuration of pan-Antillean identity, within the larger spectrum of Atlantic studies, is the backdrop against which I read Santos-Febres’s representation of male queerness – the ‘local locas’ that Martha recognises once she is in the Dominican Republic (183). In representing a trans-Antillean queerness, Santos-Febres’s primary focus is on the evolution of her male characters (women characters problematically remain mostly unaltered), and she achieves this through a series of oppositions and/or doublings.18 Martha is juxtaposed with Sirena; Sirena is contrasted with Solange; Hugo is juxtaposed against Sirena; and, finally, Leocadio is contrasted with Sirena. By the novel’s end we know that, if Martha has her way, Leocadio will become the next Sirena, after the protagonist runs away from Hugo’s house, effectively disappearing from the diagetic space as she is not mentioned again in the novel. My examination of Santos-Febres’s constructions of gender in this novel is structured through these comparisons, which elucidate the novel’s most troubling message: that the gender construct of ‘woman’ (whether heteronormative or queered) is a prison that only biological males can both successfully perform and transcend (whether identified as transgender or transsexual) presumably because they are, ultimately, males.19 In this way, the novel privileges male queerness while setting up ‘womanhood’ as a gender construct that offers no possibilities of growth or transcendence for biological females. This problematic representation of ‘womanhood’ can be found in the two transvestites’ self-representation as ‘businesswomen’, a word that both Martha and Sirena use to describe themselves and each other. One of the main lessons Martha bestows on Sirena is that of becoming, above all, a ‘businesswoman’, who can traffic her body for the entertainment and/or pleasure of others but who retains ultimate control over herself as a commodity. Early on in the narrative, when Martha and Sirena travel to the Dominican Republic to book the adolescent boy as a drag performer (US laws on child labour prevent Sirena from working in Puerto Rico), Sirena reflects on how they ‘were going on business to see if they could sell his show to a hotel. They both had the blood of businesswomen running through their veins’ (4). This representation introduces the notion that their business acumen, their ability to sell their gender performance, is inherent to their identities even if being a woman is not. In a later chapter, Sirena reflects on Martha’s lesson that all she needs is a ‘little talent and a lot of businesswoman’s instinct’ (30). What Sirena has learned, as Martha’s adoptive ‘daughter’, is how to control and exploit the commodification of her adolescent, sexually ambiguous body. Once in the Dominican Republic, this lesson in seemingly gendered intuition leads Sirena to leave Martha behind at the hotel while she plans to seduce Hugo, the rich Dominican businessman, who offers her a considerable amount of money for

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a private show at his residence. In Santos-Febres’s trans-Antillean queer world, the biological men – including Hugo – embody sexual ambiguity and gender-crossing mobility. Indeed, Martha describes these ‘businessmen’ that she meets as ‘most likely closeted homosexuals’, or, in the case of a club-owning Swede known as Stan, as a ‘repressed draga’, the anglicised Spanish slang for drag queen (182, 185).20 That the novel connects ‘businesswoman’ to a rather cut-throat ethos of looking out primarily for oneself while ‘businessmen’ are identified as sexually ambiguous or ambivalent men sets the tone for the gender structures at play in the narrative. Indeed, Sirena knows Martha will not blame her for leaving her mentor behind without a backward glance because, in imagining herself as speaking to Martha, Serena states: ‘You know full well that in my place you would have done the same’ (190). Sirena believes that Martha would have even praised her (if ‘the loser’ had been someone else), noting the ‘businesswoman’s blood running through your veins!’ (190). By the end of the narrative, Martha, without Sirena, has manoeuvred to obtain a profitable deal with the Swedish ‘Stan’, who turns out to be a closeted cross-dressing club owner. Although she realises that it may take longer without Sirena to make the money for her own sex operation, Martha is sure ‘she would manage [and] could feel it in her businesswoman’s blood’ (198). In both of these instances, Martha and Sirena naturalise their commodified ‘investment’ in each other by associating their self-serving actions with a conflation of business savvy and gender. This representation suggests there is something nearly monstrous in a woman who excels in business, a mostly male-dominated field, especially in the Caribbean, and that both Martha and Sirena, as transvestites, know how to exploit that monstrousness. Santos-Febres further expands on this connection between the transvestite protagonist and the ‘monstrous’ in relation to biological women through the juxtaposition of Solange Graubel and Sirena Selena. While the novel creates clear parallels between Solange and Sirena – they both come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, they both perform an identity that they were not born to (Solange acts out the ‘living image of elegance’ while Sirena enacts the ideal of glamorous and mysterious womanhood), and they both traffic their ‘womanhood’ to get to where they are – they each see the other as their most dangerous enemy (74). Although Martha and Sirena achieve nearly uniform acceptance among the men they meet in the Dominican Republic, Solange is the most vocal and the most cruel in her rejection of Sirena, calling her a ‘freak’, a ‘porquería’, or waste, a ‘bestia’, or beast, even a ‘monster’ (127, 192, 193). Solange acknowledges that she has been ‘changed’ by ‘playing the role’ of a ‘lady’, a role she has taken on in every aspect, both physical and psychological: learning ‘to speak, to walk, to differentiate between the salad fork and the meat fork, to host soirees for stockholders, to dress like a lady of style, so decent’ (129). But now that she has embodied her performance and feels like a ‘señora for real’, Solange is unwilling to give Hugo up to Sirena, not because she loves her husband, but because she needs ‘status at the top, and Hugo gives her status’ (129). In enacting a role, not only of gender but also of class, and in conflating her desires with her status, Solange is similar to Sirena, but she is also worse because she is not interested in personal – only in financial – fulfilment. In fact, Solange embodies a gender ‘policing’ that cannot abide the reminder, provided by Sirena, that the concept of ‘woman’ is entirely performative. The main distinction between them, the narrative suggests, is that Solange’s gender as a biological woman makes her higher social position both feasible and possible.

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On the other hand, while Sirena has the same ambition (to be the ‘lady’ of a house), she is not allowed to achieve that goal because she can only perform – not actually live – a biological woman’s role. Notwithstanding, Sirena determines that because they both suffer as ‘women’, she will use Solange as an inspiration for her performance for Hugo and his guests in his house. Solange may have ‘furs, breakfasts each morning with fresh fruit shakes and croissants, but (insert a tear) how she suffers, because of a problem she cannot solve’, ostensibly what Hugo describes as his same-sex ‘perversions’ (132, 115). ‘Sirena Selena’, the narrator states, ‘will dramatize Solange as she imagines her; their frustration will be united . . . She is going to need all her pain to play the señora’ (132). Castillo has argued that ‘Sirena possesses the ability to confuse and seduce [Solange], while at the same time the lonely woman implicitly understands that Sirena is the most dangerous of all possible rivals for her husband’s affections, a perfect and fabulous and monstrous presence who can easily out-woman Solange woman-to-woman precisely because she is not a woman at all’.21 The suggestion is that while the biological woman can enact a higher socio-economic class than she was born into, she cannot ultimately fulfil the main purpose of her biological sex: to satisfy her husband’s sexual needs. Sirena, meanwhile, may not be a biological female but it is her sexual ambiguity that enables her to outperform Solange and be preferred by Hugo. A clear understanding of how her performance of sexualised womanhood gives her power further separates Sirena from Solange. Along with her recognition that Solange is ‘a climber, like me, a young girl dressed like a woman, who believes in reaching the top’, Sirena comprehends that ‘so much depends on the one who puts you’ at the top (133). This realisation by Sirena differentiates her from Solange and gives her more power, even though they both disappear from the diagetic space when Solange walks out on Hugo and takes her children to the capital, while Sirena leaves Hugo after their final love-making without as much as a note. Despite the similarity in their final actions, we understand that Sirena has made a choice to protect her transsexuality by rejecting the heteronormative role of becoming Hugo’s lover, effectively avoiding the gendered prison in which Solange has lived. Indeed, Sirena’s choice by the novel’s end is one of the strongest gender subversions in the narrative given that, as she considers her options, she decides that she will not be dependent on a male provider in the same way that her transvestite mentors – and Solange – have allowed themselves to be. As Sirena contemplates her future, she determines: No, that couldn’t happen. Sirena couldn’t allow herself to depend on this host . . . Yet, as Sirena gazed at the setting sun, she realized it was easy to fall in the same trap as her mentors . . . It would be so easy to take the gift of his confidence in her hands, the gift of his love, which she knew was a lie. (190–1) Sirena thereby rejects the heteronormative role of the woman who agrees to perform happiness and fulfilment, rather than actually experiencing these, in exchange for a life of luxury – the trope of the ‘kept woman’. Unlike Solange, as well as unlike her transvestite mentors, Sirena determines not to traffic her ambiguous body – and her performance of womanhood – as a commodity in return for financial stability within the pretence of heteronormativity.

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Further supporting this moment of queer male empowerment is the fact that Sirena makes her choice because she understands that while Hugo may say (and even believe) that he loves her, he ‘always insisted that she dress as a woman’, suggesting that he loves Sirena’s gender performance, not her transsexuality (191). Thus, when Sirena determines that ‘she had to protect herself from that promise of love’, she rejects a heteronormative relationship as a shackle through which she (as a transsexual transvestite) can find herself disempowered (191). Further, while Sirena is a consummate performer of glamorous, highly stylised womanhood, she is also proud of the size of her penis (something that is remarked upon several times in the novel): ‘It’s not that Sirena wanted to boast, but she had enough down there to share and then some’ (34). Even Hugo daydreams of Sirena’s ‘verga’, or penis, ‘wide as a water snake, wide and thick, in the very middle of all that fragility’ (176). Both of these representations, of a large, bountiful male organ that belies Sirena’s enactment of feminine vulnerability, suggest that it is Sirena’s biological – if concealed – maleness that gives her the power to stand up for what the novel represents as her transsexuality (176). Sirena’s maleness also appears to be the catalyst that profoundly changes Hugo so that he seems to come to terms with his own troubled queerness. Hugo, the son of a rich ‘don’, was a ‘feeble white boy who looked like a girl’, who perceived how people ‘looked at him with a mixture of desire and hate’ (103–4). At age sixteen, Hugo is taken by his father to have sex with a woman he has paid, and that moment forever disconnects Hugo from his own body, until he meets Sirena, ‘the delicate, wicked boy-woman’ (107). Though he has insisted that Sirena always remain in drag when they are together, when Hugo and Sirena make love for the last time, he calls her ‘Sirenito [using] the masculine form he has never used’, and he also alters the phrase he continually repeats throughout the novel – that he will love her like he has ‘always wanted to love a woman’ – to say ‘I will love you Selena as I have always wanted to love . . .’. The ellipsis suggests that Hugo is finally open to the possibility of perhaps loving himself as a queer man or of loving another man (206). Castillo notes how Hugo ‘loves the performative femininity in her (Solange/Sirena) as he always wanted to love a woman, as if s/he were that woman, an ideal Woman. He echoes back to Sirena the cliched formulas that she so ably represents and that form the basis of her identity as the fabulous diva.’22 When Hugo finally ‘feels that she is another version of himself’, Sirena takes control of the sexual act and penetrates him but does so silently because ‘to speak she would have to let go of who she really is, who it took her so much work to become’ (206). At the moment when Hugo appears to confront and maybe even accept his queerness as a man, Sirena refuses to join him, suggesting that it is in that liminal space between man and woman, in that queer transsexuality, that Sirena wishes to exist. Therefore, because she will not be made to choose, she disappears from the narrative, as there seems to be no space available for her transAntillean queerness within the novel’s worldview.23 At the same time that Sirena vanishes we do not know where to, we know that Martha has targeted the young Leocadio, one of the characters in the final doubling/ juxtaposition of the novel that I want to address. Although the novel suggests that Leocadio is the heir apparent to Sirena’s place in Martha’s plans, Rodríguez has noted how, because ‘their tales of tropical urban poverty begin to blur’, some reviewers of the novel have erroneously assumed ‘that Leocadio was merely Selena’s male alter ego’.24

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Similar to how she mirrors Solange, the Puerto Rican Sirena shares many descriptive traits with Leocadio, a Dominican youth raised by a single mother in abject poverty, who is ‘tracked down everywhere’ by other men, who see ‘something in him that made them drool over him and filled their eyes with trouble’ (40). It is at the beach, where his mother is trying to cook a meagre meal over an open fire, that Leocadio and Sirena meet for the first and last time. Leocadio sees ‘a boy who looked like a girl. Just like him, just like his sister, but with light cinnamon-colored skin, extremely dark hair, and carefully plucked eyebrows. The boy returned the stare with open hostility. But then he smiled at Leocadio. And Leocadio smiled back’ (41). Rodríguez notes how, at this moment, ‘Positioned facing the sea they share, this sense of curiosity, hostility, and sameness serves as a metaphor for both gender solidarity and solidarity between these two island cultures.’25 Through this act of mutual recognition between the queer Dominican boy and the Puerto Rican adolescent transvestite, both part of an Afro-diasporic racial continuum in the Atlantic, Santos-Febres builds her construct of empowered (and empowering) trans-Antillean queerness in her male characters. Perhaps more crucial than Sirena as a character in the story, Leocadio is an important cog in Santos-Febres’s narrative machinery because he does more than function as a double for Sirena. He actually achieves an understanding of queerness that moves well beyond Sirena’s own escapist decision to disappear so she can continue to exist, as ‘legend’, in a sexually liminal space.26 Leocadio effectively becomes orphaned when his mother hands him over to Doña Adelina, a woman who takes in abandoned youths from the streets, because the mother feels she cannot protect him from male predators. In Doña Adelina’s home, Leocadio – whose name references his yellow, lion-like eyes – befriends Migueles, an older, orphaned youth who works as a waiter at a hotel bar where he also prostitutes himself to European and US tourists to support Doña Adelina’s home, where he and other street boys live. Migueles fully hails Leocadio into a heteronormative gender ideology by telling the younger one that an ‘hombre’ makes a living for himself and takes care of others, all the while insisting that he himself is ‘no maricón’, the derogatory Spanish slang for homosexual (159). When Migueles gets a dish-washing job for Leocadio at the hotel, the younger child becomes obsessed with the bar/discotheque where Migueles works at nights and where men dance together. Leocadio begs Migueles to show him inside, even though Stan, the owner, has prohibited Migueles from allowing the younger child into the bar. Though he resists at first, Migueles finally gives in and surprises Leocadio one day, taking him into the bar when there is no one there. When Leocadio asks how men dance together, Migueles pulls him into his arms and shows him, and when Leocadio notes how the ‘bigger one leads the smaller one’, Migueles disagrees, noting, ‘Not always. Sometimes el más grande no es el más hombre’, or the bigger one is not always the manlier one (203). Leocadio asks what Migueles means by that and the older boy explains: ‘El hombre is the one who leads, the one who decides. The other one is la mujer, the woman’ (203). Through this explanation, Migueles suggests that the man is the one manipulating the situation (what Migueles does with male tourists), and they are the ‘woman’ in the equation because they are passive and allow themselves to be led. Even though Migueles is queering gender by suggesting that men can be ‘women’, referring to the men he uses as the ‘man’ in the relationship, this explanation is invested in heteronormative and asymmetrical notions of gender.

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Leocadio, however, expands on Migueles’s definitions as the novel concludes to propose a more fluid concept of gender that gives the story its most powerful definition of trans-Antillean male queerness. Leocadio mulls over Migueles’s instructions: The bigger one, the smaller one. One is hombre, the other is mujer, although he can be the smaller one; the man is not necessarily stronger or bigger than the other one, but he’s the one who leads, who decides, who rules. There are many ways to rule, many things required to be un hombre or to be una mujer, for each person can decide for himself. Sometimes you can even be both. Without having to choose one or the other. (208) Leocadio identifies agency, whether in choosing to be submissive or in choosing to be assertive, as the key to being ‘both’ a woman and a man, depending on what is wanted or needed. Rodríguez suggests that in the same way that ‘Leocadio articulates the many ways to be a man and the many ways to negotiate and exercise power, the novel suggests there are varied articulations of sexual identity, including different ways to inhabit and narrate transgender subjectivities and different ways to perform and validate same-sex desire’.27 Here, Santos-Febres does have her character articulate what Martin Joseph Ponce identifies as a ‘gender-crossing positionality’ that values ambiguity, mobility and fluidity.28 Jossianna Arroyo notes that, if Leocadio functions ‘as Selena’s double, or, more clearly, as his more human and agential characterization, we could affirm that this new subject that emerges in the novel . . . exemplifies the negotiations of agency in contemporary Caribbean reality’.29 This is true of how the novel structures its trans-Antillean queerness for male characters, but, as I have suggested, this mobility does not extend to the female characters or to the novel’s construction of womanhood. In Santos-Febres’s novel, both Sirena and Leocadio embody what Gloria Anzaldúa described, when discussing her life as a queer woman, as a ‘mita’ y mita’, neither one nor the other but a strange doubling, a deviation of nature that horrified, a work of nature inverted’.30 Anzaldúa felt that ‘[t]here is something compelling about being both male and female, about having an entry into both worlds’, and she disagreed with psychiatrists to note that ‘half and halfs are not suffering from a confusion of sexual identity, or even from a confusion of gender’. Anzaldúa concluded: What we are suffering from is an absolute despot duality that says we are able to be only one or the other. It claims that human nature is limited and cannot evolve into something better. But I, like other queer people, am two in one body, both male and female. I am the embodiment of the hieros gamos: the coming together of opposite qualities within.31 It is precisely this being ‘two in one body’, this rejection of the ‘despot duality’, that forces people to choose a gender, which Santos-Febres enacts through both Sirena and Leocadio. And while Sirena cannot act on that doubleness without losing what she has fought hard to become (a ‘legendary’ being), Leocadio comes to understand and accept his queerness as part of being a ‘man’. While these characters struggle within the narrative with ambiguity and uncertainty, by the end, both of them take control of their

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mita’ y mita’, and empower themselves through that ‘coming together of opposites’ in Anzaldúa’s terms. However, unlike Anzaldúa, who identified queerness as a source of power in and for women, Santos-Febres’s novel suggests that only queer males, because they are already biologically empowered within a heteronormative worldview, can achieve this reconciliation of opposites. In the novel, a dark-skinned Cuban drag queen who likes women, and whom Martha describes as ‘pata’ – the derogatory Spanish term for lesbian – is found ‘shot in an overgrown lot in Bayamón’ (24). Martha also describes the ‘buchas, and biological women who like to sit and watch men cackling’, as ‘poor things’ (86). Doña Adelina, who basically looks the other way when her street boys prostitute themselves, is described as having been ‘very machera’, or very masculine, and Sirena’s grandmother describes her aunt, Crucita, as ‘kind of a machorra’ (96, 121), also in masculinist terms. In the novel, females, whether or not they are queer, are largely disempowered and the only difference the novel imagines for them is as ‘butch’ characters. They are not envisioned by the narrative as able to occupy the same liminal space or to have access to the same opportunities of transformation to which queer males have access. This emphasis that Santos-Febres places on the transvestite experience, specifically an Antillean one – contextualised within a colonial experience, especially vis-à-vis the United States – points us to Judith Butler’s notion of ‘performative subversions’.32 In analysing the novel, critics have drawn from Butler’s paradigm-changing notion that gender functions as ‘a fiction that disguises itself as a developmental law regulating the sexual field that it purports to describe’.33 Further, Butler describes gender as ‘performative in the sense that the essence or identity that [gender] otherwise purport[s] to express are fabrications, manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means’.34 In considering the role of cross-dressing, Butler notes ‘that drag fully subverts the distinction between inner and outer psychic space and effectively mocks both the expressive model of gender and the notion of a true gender identity’; she emphasises that ‘[i]n imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself – as well as its contingency’.35 Examined through Butler’s formulations, it is not surprising that Santos-Febres’s novel focuses on the performative aspects of her ‘dragas’ – an anglicism in Spanish for drag queen. We would also expect her work to destabilise the notion of any ‘essence’ in what it means to be a ‘woman’. However, while Santos-Febres queries the meaning of an Antillean ‘manhood’, giving her male characters the possibility and agency for queer transformation and empowerment, her characterisation of ‘womanhood’ remains mostly static and unchallenged.36 In his review of the Spanish novel, Rubén Rodríguez Jiménez points to how Santos-Febres ‘problematizes the categorization and taxonomy of the masculine subject, exemplifying what is bittersweet in the urban Puerto Rican society’.37 He also adds that Santos-Febres ‘exemplifies through Selena, Martha Divine and Leocadio what feminists such as Judith Butler and Gayle Rubin have argued in their writings’, namely that ‘the terms “man” and “woman” are no longer applicable to our contemporary society’.38 Although Rodríguez Jiménez identifies this purpose as aligned with ‘gender feminists’, the novel’s limiting and limited representation of ‘womanhood’ – except when it is performed by queer males to assert their agency – raises important questions about the novel’s approach to gender.

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Santos-Febres establishes three characters – the Puerto Rican Sirena, the Honduran Martha, and the Dominican Leocadio – as the main queer identities engendered by what the novel defines as the performative and ambiguous nature of the region. In her essay on the novel, Juana María Rodríguez quotes an interview in which SantosFebres compared Caribbean and Latin American cities to ‘transvestites dressed as the First World, adopting the ways and manners of countries that don’t correspond to them as a means of “escaping” their reality and approaching what every day seems farther away: progress and civilization’.39 While Rodríguez expresses concerns about a ‘literal, essentialist, and transphobic reading of this quote’, she opts for a ‘more productive interpretation’ by noting that representing Puerto Rico ‘as a First World transvestite aptly casts the island as a politically and economically ambiguous national body’.40 Notwithstanding the novel’s ‘normalization’ of ambiguity, the image in Santos-Febres’s statement of the transvestite as reaching for but never achieving something akin to ‘progress and civilization’ sets up one of the problematic binaries that limit the narrative’s subversive promise. We can look to Santos-Febres’s own words for answers to the contrast that she establishes between the agency her novel bestows on trans-Antillean queerness among male characters, and the more dispiriting (and even dispirited) representation of ‘womanhood’ in that work.41 In the CENTRO Journal 2003 issue dedicated to the novel, Santos-Febres writes about ‘the challenges of women in the new millennium’, stating, in a section of the essay tellingly titled ‘The body as prison’, that ‘We, women and the body, have always had a problematic relationship’.42 The author goes on to ask: ‘Because, let’s admit it, who has not secretly desired to be completely possessed? Possessed, yes, treated like a spoiled, consented mascot, and thereby relieved of the incredibly painful and lonely responsibility of being a full being, capable of making decisions and facing consequences.’ Santos-Febres eloquently describes the ways in which gender constructs oppress women, even today, and how women are hailed into the structures of domination that gender creates and reproduces. In discussing the twentieth-century changes that brought more professional and personal choices for women, she adds: ‘But this change has not liberated our body. It happens to many of us who still feel asphyxiated, trapped by the body and by the net of meanings that it knits.’43 She concludes by noting that laughter may be the only way to ‘escape from being the bait and the prey’, and that women must learn to laugh ‘even at this terrible game that is believing you’re more woman than anyone else’.44 One cannot help but notice a parallel between Santos-Febres’s concern about being ‘more woman than anyone else’ and how Sirena achieves just that in her clash with Solange. Further, the author’s prescription of ‘laughter’ as the way to handle the challenges of the new millennium reminds us of how her trickster-like protagonist escapes the narrative because she cannot find a way to exist in a liminal state. It is as if, because Santos-Febres identifies as a cisgender woman, she can imagine agency and freedom in the male bodies that perform womanhood in search of sexual agency, but not in female bodies themselves. Thus, the intersectional trans-Antillean queerness that Santos-Febres’s novel celebrates, one in which gender, sexuality and race merge to empower, not to debilitate, is limited by its failure to also envision the female body as a site of empowerment.45 Instead, most female characters in Santos-Febres’s novel are stereotypes (the suffering grandmother/mother, the jealous/jilted wife) who do not develop or transform in the way the queer males do. Ultimately, the transformative

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trans-Antillean queerness that Santos-Febres identifies is available only to her male characters. In this way, the novel ends up re-establishing – rather than fully subverting – the very same fictions of gender that it works so hard to challenge.

Notes 1. Benjamin Thomas, The Atlantic World: Europeans, Africans, Indians and their Shared History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. xxiii. 2. Amanda Warnock, ‘Gender and Identity in the Twentieth-Century Atlantic World’, in Toyin Falola and Kevin D. Roberts (eds), The Atlantic World, 1450–2000 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), pp. 315–17. 3. Warnock, ‘Gender and Identity’, pp. 315–17. 4. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 3. 5. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 5. 6. Mayra Santos-Febres has said it was through her work with gay activists that she was introduced to gay clubs and to transvestites. See Rubén Rodríguez Jiménez, ‘Review’, Hispania 85.4 (December 2002), p. 868. For the novel’s critical reception and the reaction of the ‘gay community’ on the island, see Arturo Sandoval-Sánchez, ‘Sirena Selena: vestida de pena: A Novel for the New Millennium and for New Critical Practices in Puerto Rican Literary and Cultural Studies’, CENTRO Journal 15.2 (Fall 2003): 4–23, pp. 6–7. 7. For more on the critical reception of the novel, see Luis Aponte-Parés, Jossianna Arroyo, Elizabeth Crespo-Kebler, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes and Frances Negrón-Muntaner, ‘Puerto Rican Queer Sexualities: Introduction’, CENTRO Journal 19.1 (Spring 2007): 4–24, p. 8. 8. Juana María Rodríguez, ‘Translating Queer Caribbean Localities in Sirena Selena vestida de pena’, MELUS 34.3 (Fall 2009): 205–23, p. 216. Rodríguez notes how ‘Stephen Lytle’s English translation of the text contains unusually heavy doses of Spanish, demanding a basic knowledge of Spanish that evidences how Spanish has come to function as the foreign national language of the United States’ (p. 216). 9. The novel uses different gender pronouns to refer to the protagonist, depending on whether or not he/she is ‘in drag’. I refer to the protagonist as ‘he’ or ‘she’ in keeping with the novel’s usage. 10. Rodríguez, ‘Translating Queer Caribbean Localities’, p. 208. Rodríguez states that ‘the novel is not preoccupied with the perceived gender angst of transgenders. Although she has survived a violent rape and lives precariously between two diametrically situated genders, Selena is “dressed in pity” (“vestida de pena” [the phrase is part of the Spanish title but not that of the English translation]), but is not pitiful.’ 11. Debra A. Castillo, ‘She Sings Boleros: Santos-Febres’s Sirena Selena’, Latin American Literary Review 29.57 (January–June 2001): 13–25, p. 22. 12. Mayra Santos-Febres, Sirena Selena: A Novel, trans. Stephen Lytle (New York: Picador, 2001), p. 211. All in-text references are to this edition. 13. Radost Rangelova, ‘Nationalism, States of Exception, and Caribbean Identities in Sirena Selena vestida de pena and “Loca de la locura”’, CENTRO Journal 19.1 (Spring 2007): 75–88. Rangelova argues that Santos-Febres’s novel ‘proposes a critique of capitalist domination and of the way that it brings together, yet alienates the Caribbean islands. In Sirena Selena, the transvestite embodies the experience of the flow of global capital, and at the same time represents the cultural and economic transvestism that takes place in the Caribbean under the intensification of the capitalist economic relations’ (p. 87).

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14. Efraín Barradas, ‘Sirena Selena vestida de pena o el Caribe como travestí’, CENTRO Journal 15.2 (Fall 2003): 53–65. Barradas discusses the ‘pan-Antillean vision’ of the novel and quotes an interview with Santos-Febres in which she describes her novel as a way to think about Caribbean and Latin American cities as ‘travestis’, in that they ‘dress themselves as First World [and] adopt the uses and manners that are not theirs to “escape” their reality’ (pp. 56, 58, translation mine). 15. Jossianna Arroyo, ‘Sirena canta boleros: travestismo y sujetos transcaribeños en Sirena Selena vestida de pena’, CENTRO Journal 15.2 (Fall 2003): 38–51. Arroyo argues for the notion of a ‘trans-Caribbean’ identity that ‘breaks with the traditionally fixed definitions of the “Puerto Rican” or “Dominican” nation’ (p. 41). For my reading, I move from the focus on nation to that of queerness, using ‘trans-Antillean’ as a way to designate intersections of gender, sexuality and race in Santos-Febres’s characterisations of queerness. 16. In the nineteenth century, long before the United States invaded and acquired Puerto Rico as a territory in 1898, Ramón Emeterio Betances was among the intellectual visionaries who proposed a ‘confederation of independent Antillean nations’ to, among other goals, strengthen the smaller islands’ ability to resist the push and pull of a fledgling US empire. In advocating for pan-Antillean sovereignty and confederacy, Betances ‘refused to claim whiteness to describe these territories in order to demand their right to self-government’, articulating ‘a creolized approach to Caribbean demographics and politics’. See Irmary Reyes-Santos, ‘On Pan-Antillean Politics: Ramón Emeterio Betances and Gregorio Luperón Speak to the Present’, Callaloo 36.1 (2013): 142–157, p. 155. 17. Reyes-Santos, ‘On Pan-Antillean Politics’, p. 143. 18. Sandoval-Sánchez has noted how ‘the novel is constructed through the mechanism of the doppelganger and stark dualities (i.e., Junior/Sirena Selena, Sirena Selena/Leocadio, Sirena Selena/Solange, abuela/Doña Adelina, country/city, Puerto Rico/Dominican Republic, biological family/choice family) in order to uncover how these new subjectivities, always in the making, operate outside traditional and national identity formations in both countries’ (‘Sirena Selena’, p. 10). 19. I use the term ‘transgender’ to describe Martha, a character represented as understanding herself to be a ‘woman’ and wishing to have a sex-change operation, while ‘transsexual’ describes Sirena, who is represented as a biological male who performs being a woman but who also feels empowered by his large penis. 20. Here, I draw from the definition of queerness as ‘a thorough resistance to regimes of the normal’, proposed by Michael Warner, and applied by Martin Joseph Ponce in his study of the ‘blues poetics’ of Langston Hughes. Ponce argues that Hughes’s queerness in his poetry refers not only to what ‘challenges “regimes of the normal” in terms of literary form and cultural politics . . . but also because the ambiguity and mobility of the “I” emerging in those poems point toward Hughes’s fluid, gender-crossing positionality’. Martin Joseph Ponce, ‘Langston Hughes’s Queer Blues’, Modern Language Quarterly 66.4 (2005): 505–37, p. 507. Michael Warner (ed.), ‘Introduction’, in Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. xxvi. 21. Castillo, ‘She Sings Boleros’, p. 19. 22. Castillo, ‘She Sings Boleros’, p. 22. 23. Rodríguez has noted how the novel’s structure shapes ‘the formation of a queer Caribbean subjectivity’, one in which Sirena finds ‘a way to live creatively in the interstice of gender’, in comparison to Martha, whose ‘gender is unequivocably female throughout the novel’. Rodríguez, ‘Translating Queer Caribbean Localities’, pp. 205, 206. 24. Rodríguez, ‘Translating Queer Caribbean Localities’, p. 214. 25. Rodríguez, ‘Translating Queer Caribbean Localities’, p. 215. 26. Castillo, ‘She Sings Boleros’, p. 22. 27. Rodríguez, ‘Translating Queer Caribbean Localities’, pp. 219–20.

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28. Ponce, ‘Langston Hughes’s Queer Blues’, p. 507. 29. Arroyo, ‘Sirena canta boleros’, p. 50 (translation mine). 30. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987; San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2007), p. 41. 31. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, p. 41. 32. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990; New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 175. 33. Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 185. 34. Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 185, emphasis in original. 35. Butler, Gender Trouble, pp. 186, 187, emphasis in original. 36. Rodríguez notes how although the novel is ‘saturated with the production and circulation of discourses of Latinized femininity, [it] offers very little in the way of significant female characters’. Rodríguez, ‘Translating Queer Caribbean Localities’, p. 212. 37. Rodríguez Jiménez, ‘Review’, p. 868, translation mine. 38. Rodríguez Jiménez, ‘Review’, p. 869, translation mine. 39. Rodríguez, ‘Translating Queer Caribbean Localities’, p. 213. 40. Rodríguez, ‘Translating Queer Caribbean Localities’, p. 213. 41. Mayra Santos-Febres, ‘Más mujer que nadie: los retos de las mujeres en el nuevo milenio’, CENTRO Journal 15.2 (Fall 2003): 107–15, all translations mine. 42. Santos-Febres, ‘Más mujer que nadie’, p. 110. 43. Santos-Febres, ‘Más mujer que nadie’, p. 110. 44. Santos-Febres, ‘Más mujer que nadie’, p. 114. 45. For more on intersectionality, see Michelle Tracy Berger and Kathleen Guidroz (eds), The Intersectional Approach: Transforming the Academy through Race, Class, and Gender (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

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13 Queer Atlantic Modernism and Masculinity in Claude McKay’s BANJO and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s TENDER IS THE NIGHT Daniel Hannah

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t the close of Claude McKay’s 1929 picaresque novel Banjo: A Story Without a Plot, Lincoln Agrippa Daily, ‘familiarly known as Banjo’, announces he will not be sailing to the Caribbean from Marseilles with his friends, a ‘formidable polyglot outfit’ of transnational, makeshift sailors.1 Rather, Banjo vaguely plans to skip town and proposes to Ray, the novel’s bookish central character, to join him: ‘And Ise gwine beat it outa this burg some convenient time this very night, pardner. Tha’s mah ace a spades so sure as Ise a spade. You come along with me?’ Not going on the ship. . . . Beat it. . . . Come along with me. (318) That Ray registers Banjo’s proposition through a coordinating series of asyndetonic, elliptical phrases encapsulates the novel’s characteristically modernist investment in parataxis as a formal feature. But Banjo’s queerly resonant proposition – ‘You gwine with a man or you ain’t?’ – also asks the reader to think of the novel’s deployment of parataxis as thematically and erotically significant (325). When Ray suggests it ‘would have been a fine thing’ for them to travel with their female companion, Latnah, he finds himself reproved in Banjo’s (and the novel’s) final words: ‘Don’t get soft ovah any one wimmens, pardner. Tha’s you’ big weakness. A woman is a conjunction. Gawd fixed her different from us in moh ways than one. . . . Wese got enough between us to beat it a long ways from here.’ (326)

Such an ending invites, as Michelle Stephens notes, a ‘queering of heterosexual assumptions about the formation of a transnational African American masculinity’.2 It also, I wish to argue, ties Banjo’s vision of transatlantic vagabondage and suggestive and misogynistic male bonding to the novel’s own wandering aesthetic, its paratactic, anti-conjunctional inscription of a ‘Story Without a Plot’. As such, Banjo’s conclusion suggestively illuminates a recurrent feature in expatriate American fiction: an equation of modernist style – paratactic, juxtapositional, fragmentary – with a queerly masculinist and transatlantic erotics.

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In proposing a queer Atlantic reading of McKay’s novel alongside F. Scott Fitzgerald’s contemporaneous Tender is the Night (1934), I am mobilising an adjectival phrase whose intersectional purchase depends upon this same juxtapositional logic and on its familiar modernist effects of ambiguity and ambivalence.3 Banjo and Tender is the Night both take the quite different transatlantic displacements of their American protagonists – Banjo’s enduring vagabondage or Dick Diver’s gradual collapse – as scenes for narrative experiments that challenge normatively linear and heterosexual accounts of successful American masculinity as neocolonial and capitalistic mastery of the home, the workplace and the nation (or, as in the case of the dominant discourse of crisis attending middle-class American masculinity in the 1920s, failed mastery and emasculation).4 For the male protagonists of these novels, questions about their conflicted identities – American and cosmopolitan, brashly straight and provocatively queer – invariably become questions about their conceptualisation of selfhood as a style to be circulated between men. Both texts, in often ambiguous ways that render the work they do queerly transatlantic, figure the (dis)placement of their expatriate subjects as demanding and producing paratactic representational structures. Parataxis – quite literally in the Greek the placing of material side by side – produces an aesthetics of proximity that would appear to invite an interpretive desire to bring the proximate objects into relation. Walt Whitman’s list-like poetics, inscribing both a globalising vision of e pluribus unum and a concept of male comradeship, provides an early queer model for such modern parataxis. But paratactic arrangements can also, as Franco Moretti argues with regard to Joyce’s Ulysses, refuse meaningful association: Parataxis offers a reliable, mechanical grid, where each present is at once followed by another – different, but no more important. No instant ever stands out from the others, unrepeatable . . . to fix the meaning of the story once and for all.5 Both Banjo and Tender is the Night take the movements of their central characters – Banjo’s vagabondage and Ray’s wandering eye; Dick Diver’s knack for artful transitions and his wife Rosemary’s mental breakdowns – as the basis for sudden shifts in narrative focus. Those shifts place seemingly straight American men (Banjo is the ‘strutting cock’ (10) and Diver refers to himself as ‘[l]ucky Dick’ (130)) in queer proximity with a range of non-normatively gendered and erotic narrative events, events that also call into question sureties of national character. Queer theory’s deconstructive attention to proximities (of ‘heterosexual/homosexual’, of performative acts to reified ‘modalities of power’, of self and other) offers up a valuable lexicon for exploring and critiquing such formalised attention to ambiguous proximity.6 This is not to say that McKay’s and Fitzgerald’s texts are simply queer. Rather, a queerly oriented approach to their paratactic structures cannot help but unhinge the texts’ sometimes strident insistence on the straight, hyper-masculine and simply nationalist quality of exchanges between men, exchanges that inscribe even as they excise the conjunctional woman.

‘a churning agglomeration’: Banjo’s Plotlessness While Claude McKay’s Banjo sells itself as ‘A Story Without a Plot’, its seemingly meandering flow belies its careful tripartite arrangement of disparate sites of plotlessness. The novel’s first part follows Banjo and his fellow beach boys of the Ditch

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panhandling and playing bars, culminating in their performance of the ‘Jelly-Roll’ (‘Shake That Thing!’) in the Café African; the second and longest section of the novel introduces Ray (who featured in McKay’s previous novel, Home to Harlem) to the beach boys, vaguely traces Banjo’s dreams of an ‘orchestry’ (91), and closes with Banjo leaving Marseilles with a group of white swells; Third Part opens with Banjo returning penniless and melancholy, working in coal and falling ill, and then, as the boys are one by one deported, recovering to hatch his plan for escape. In the words of McKay’s narrator, this large loose structure enacts the ‘grand rhythm of life’ with its ‘patterns . . . ever changing’ (235). Nevertheless, the novel’s shifting patterns also evoke a juxtapositional logic and produce a queer resonance, as the sudden transitions from subject to subject and from scene to scene sound out concealed intimacies. Given the circulation of Banjo and the ‘beach boys’ outside and between nation-states (‘Without a Plot’ of land), McKay’s playful title also asks us to link such formal erotics to the novel’s transnational scene. As ‘a churning agglomeration’ of paratactic pleasure, Marseilles acts as a kind of transatlantic conduit for the novel’s oblique tracing of the romance between Banjo and Ray (13). Seized by ‘the old restlessness for a sea change’, Banjo arrives in Marseilles after having got himself deported from the States, disowning his American citizenship in favour of an ‘unquenchable desire to be always going’ (11). McKay situates Banjo’s radical resistance to national belonging – what Brent Hayes Edwards terms his, and the novel’s, ‘vagabond internationalism’7 – as only one of many forms of displacement circulating in the Mediterranean port. Marseilles is home to white men, brown men, black men. Finns, Poles, Italians, Slavs, Maltese, Indians, Negroids, African Negroes, West Indian Negroes – . . . bumming a day’s work, a meal, a drink, existing from hand to mouth, anyhow any way, between box car, tramp ship, bistro, and bordel. (6) Piling subject on subject and makeshift home on makeshift home, parataxis, here, signifies the ‘whole life’ to which Banjo’s ‘soul thrill[s]’ (13): ‘Every chord in him responded to the loose, bistro-love-life of the Ditch’ (11). Likewise, Ray is drawn to the ‘barbarous international romance’ of Marseilles: Europe’s best back door, discharging and receiving its traffic to the Orient and Africa, favorite port of seamen on French leave, infested with ratty beings of the Mediterranean countries, overrun with guides, cocottes, procurers, repelling and attracting in its white-fanged vileness under its picturesqueness . . . (69) Ray’s attunement to this ‘picturesque’ and ‘bawdy’ scene comes, we are told, as ‘a great fever in his brain, a rhythm of a pattern with the time-beat of his life, a burning, throbbing romance in his blood’ (689). While the novel might trace ‘patterns . . . ever changing’, Ray’s ‘fever’ (like Banjo’s responsive ‘chord[s]’) suggests a rhythmic pattern to this ‘bawdy’ space, a pattern born of both corporeal and formal (linguistic and musical) appropriations of that space. While both Banjo and Ray respond viscerally to the paratactic ‘rhythm’ of the port, their distinct outlets for expressing that rhythmic connection – Banjo’s as a musician, Ray’s as an author – produce significantly different yet queerly interconnected narratives of the city’s transoceanic space.

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In his reading of Banjo’s ‘queerblack anarchist plot’, Gary Holcomb describes the binary handling of Banjo and Ray: ‘Where Banjo is formally unschooled, Ray is educated; where Banjo is a primitive, Ray is a modern; where Banjo seeks his pleasures of the flesh with the opposite sex, Ray is same-sex oriented.’8 While Holcomb accurately accounts for the explicit love-life of Banjo, it is worth further considering the kinds of homosocial and potentially homoerotic proximities his rhythmic, musical selfhood generates. Banjo’s namesake instrument is, he declares, ‘moh than a gal, moh than a pal; it’s mahself’ (6). In First Part’s climactic ‘Jelly-Roll’ chapter, Banjo ‘dominates the other’ feminised ‘instruments’ in the Café African, and his performance sets the dance floor alight with ‘[h]andsome, happy brutes’ who ‘dance better male with male or individually, than with the girls, putting more power in their feet, dancing more wildly, more natively, more savagely’.9 When, in another bar, two more men beg Banjo to play the ‘Jelly-Roll’ (‘Shake That Thing’) again, McKay closes First Part with a paratactic collapsing of borders both national and erotic: Sweet dancing thing of primitive joy, perverse pleasure, prostitute ways, many-colored variations of the rhythm, savage, barbaric, refined – eternal rhythm of the mysterious, magical, magnificent – the dance of life . . . Oh, Shake That Thing! (57–8) Indeed, it is worth noting that the model of a potentially queer patronage that McKay associates with Banjo’s successful musical performances bears similarities with the ‘real man story’ that Banjo elliptically recounts in Second Part. Banjo recalls being taken out on the town in ‘gay Paree’ by a ‘money cracker’: He was one thoroughmost-going baby, and jest so nice and nacheral about it as you makem. . . . Yessah, we-all flopped together, I ain’t telling you no lie, either, and imagine what you want to, but there wasn’t no moh than one baid, neither. And befoh he left the next morning he had me a thousand-franc note . . . (125–7) It is no accident, I would suggest, that in the aftermath of this decidedly queer story (on which none of Banjo’s auditors pass comment) Banjo begins to whistle once more the tune of ‘Shake That Thing’ (128). Where Banjo’s performances (sexual and musical) punctuate First Part, the second section of the novel turns to Ray’s new eyes as a structuring presence. The eleventh chapter, entitled ‘Everybody Doing It’, plays out in miniature the novel’s elliptical and wandering focalisation of Ray’s queerly and transnationally mobile perspective. The chapter’s opening scene takes Ray’s excursion to ‘an agency on the Canebière’ (133) as an invitation to survey Marseilles’s main street, framing Ray, ‘standing on the corner’, between two otherwise unconnected queer scenes (133–4). In the first, a ‘bloated, livid-skinned Egyptian solicit[s] all the male tourists that passed by’ (133). The second, after the brief return to Ray, whom we are told two passing cocottes have ‘smiled at’, shows two sailors observing two ‘very English-looking’ gentlemen (possibly gigolos), who are ‘apparently absorbed’ in looking at a ‘plaster-of-paris’ HMV advertisement in which the famous dog is also absorbed in listening to ‘La voix de son Maître’: Glancing furtively at the gentlemen, who were tongue-licking their lips in a curious, gentlemanly way, one of the sailors approached with a convenient cigarette

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butt. As they were exchanging lights, two passing cocottes bounced purposely into them and kept going, hip-shimmying and smirking, looking behind. . . . Nothing doing. (134) The passing reference to the prostitutes’ interested smiles and the absence of any reference to Ray’s reaction to this contrasts, only by degrees, with the absolute failure of the sailors and gentlemen to respond (‘Nothing doing’) to the hip-shimmying cocottes (and its tension with the chapter’s ecstatic title and refrain, ‘Everybody Doing It’). Ray’s proximity, ‘standing on the corner’, allows the ambiguously focalised narrative voice to stand by, consume and transcribe these scenes, treading a fine line between absorbing and being absorbed by the act of queer solicitation. Ray’s standing on the corner also situates him at an intersectional location from which he draws out the transnational strands that connect the diverse ‘human stream’ moving down the Canebière (133). Paratactically following on from the scene between the sailors, the gentlemen and the cocottes, the narrator records how a ‘small party of English shouldered Ray against the corner, talking animatedly in that overdone accent called the Oxford’. The interruption occasions Ray’s renewed musing on similarities between the Oxford accent and ‘that of the Southern Negro’ (134). Where in the previous scene queerness passed in absorbed silence, here Ray’s attentiveness to ‘la voix’ allows both for the novel’s purposively disruptive troubling of national differences (between ‘Oxford’ and Southern Negro) and for its reading of national identity as open to performative, ‘overdone’ interventions. A further interruption of voice – a policeman spits and says ‘Les sale Anglais’ as the English group cross the street – leads Ray to recall an article in the morning newspaper reporting on an Englishwoman being ‘nearly lynched by a theatre crowd’ for having pushed ‘too hastily through the crowd while talking English’; ‘such incidents’, the editorial noted, ‘would not happen if the post-war policy of the Anglo-Saxons was not to treat France as if she were a colony’ (135). In this scene, then, Ray’s role as both observer and reader allows the narrative to traverse a series of voices (the ‘Oxford’ accent, the policeman’s slur, the newspaper) that playfully splices the English subject: as the subject of an ‘overdone’ performance; as alien resident akin to the ‘Southern Negro’, subject to lynchings and the whims of the mob; and as tourists enacting a ‘policy’ of informal colonisation. While the novel initially streams without connection between these opening passages of unvoiced queerness and transnational voicing, the very next scene, which suggests Ray’s immunity to the solicitation of women, explicitly draws the passages together: Ray grinned again, showing all his teeth, and a girl across the street, thinking it was for her, smiled at him. But he was grinning at the civilized world of nations, all keeping their tigers’ claws sharp and strong under the thin cloak of international amity and awaiting the first favorable opportunity to spring. (135) The exchange is indicative of the novel’s tendency to align Ray’s distance from the heterosexual to his critical distance from the ‘civilized world of nations’, ‘a black boy looking in on the civilized scene’ (135–6). The narrative links Ray’s seeming obliviousness to the woman’s smile at this moment to his performative sense of himself: ‘He loved to pose as this or that’, British or American, ‘without really being any

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definite thing at all’ (135–6). For Ray, the whole exchange calls forth his sense of extra-national identity and his conviction that it is ‘a most unnatural thing to him for a man to love a nation’: the vagabond lover of life finds individuals and things to love in many places and not in one nation. Man loves places, and no one place, for the earth, like a beautiful wanton, puts on a new dress to fascinate him wherever he may go. (137) Evoking desire as diverse and multiple, invoking and redirecting a homophobic discourse of ‘unnatural’ love back against the nation, and yet recasting ‘vagabond’ life as a pursuit of the feminine, Ray’s resistance to nationalist affiliation signals both a queer and resolutely heterosexual embrace of Marseilles’s transatlantic scene. So in Banjo’s immersive ‘music of life’ (49) and Ray’s detached wandering, McKay traces two alternative masculine and paratactic responses to Marseilles’s transatlantic scene. In the final part of the novel, however, Ray’s desire to stand back and hold ‘intact the rough, joyous, free picture of the beach boys’ life’ proves untenable – pulled back to tend to Lonesome Blue’s legal difficulties with deportation and to Banjo in his illness, he finds life to be ‘artistically uncompromising, . . . putting a hard fist to a splendid plan and destroying our dearest artifice’ (248). McKay specifically positions Ray’s new responsiveness to Banjo’s world – encapsulated in his rhapsodic embrace of a ‘sublime’ and ‘grand gesture’ of ‘waste’ – as a coming together of two styles made possible by the European port’s transnational scene (260). Various critics have noted how the brief reintroduction of ‘Home to Harlem Jake’ in Third Part allows McKay to reframe his earlier novel’s domestic containment of the potentially queer bond between the two men.10 When Jake declares, on their meeting and kissing, that it is the ‘fust time I evah French-kiss a he’, Ray’s response is suggestively flirtatious: ‘That’s all right, Jakie, he-men and all. Stay long enough in any country and you’ll get on to the ways and find them natural’ (292). What has been less noted is the way in which Ray conceives of his embrace of Jake as part of a new immersion, physical and linguistic, in the style of Banjo and the black boys’ life: Close association with the Jakes and Banjoes had been like participating in a common primitive birthright. Ray loved to be with them in constant physical contact, keeping warm within. He loved their tricks of language, loved to pick up and feel and taste new words from their rich reservoir of niggerisms. (321) Here, at the novel’s conclusion as he ponders Banjo’s queer proposition, Ray discovers in ‘the rude anarchy of the lives of the black boys – loafing, singing, bumming, playing, loving, dancing, working’ an ‘irrepressible exuberance’ that he can oppose to the ‘ever tightening mechanical organization of modern life’, an exuberance figured here in a paratactic accumulation of present participles refusing (in tense and in action) to be settled (324). Lacking the ‘conjunction’ of a woman, Ray’s turn to Banjo’s vagabond life – ‘Without the Plot[s]’ of heterosexual and national romance – figures, here, as a defiantly wasteful refusal of nationalism’s reproductive syntax (the ‘grand mechanical march of civilization’ (324)) and a queer reorienting of modernist style.

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‘in the plot’: Tender is the Night’s Narrative Crossings Where McKay’s Banjo imagines resistance to nationalist and heterosexist masculinities emerging from the radical mobility of subjects on the edges of the nation, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night traces the instability and violence of those same mythologies through cosmopolitan mobilities enabled by privilege. Tender is the Night situates Dick Diver’s eponymously phallic descent as both a failure in masculine migration and a sign of the United States’ own feminisation.11 At a critical turning point in his fortunes, placed at the end of Book Two, Dick returns to the US to bury both his father and his ‘ties’ to the Fatherland (‘Good-by, my father – good-by, all my fathers’ (224)); he returns to Europe only to self-destruct in a bar-fight in Rome that leaves him under the thumb of his patroness, Baby Warren, the ‘American Woman’ whose ‘clean-sweeping irrational temper . . . had broken the moral back of a race and made a nursery out of a continent’ (253). On the surface, then, a plot of perversely misdirected heterosexual fathering comments figuratively on Fitzgerald’s story of transatlantic decline – it is a plot that Ruth Prigozy has identified as emerging from the period’s investment in ‘daddy scandals’.12 Fitzgerald traces the ‘blunt[ing]’ of Dick’s manly ‘spear’ (220) through his suggestively pederastic marriage to his patient Nicole Warren and his dalliance with movie starlet Rosemary Hoyt (a.k.a. ‘Daddy’s Girl’). Yet as Katherine Cummings notes, Fitzgerald’s straight plot of masculine deflation depends on a cast of queerly coded characters ‘to introduce and in part represent a whole (dis)order of the perverse’.13 Building on Cummings’s work, I want to offer a closer examination of how these same characters (Luis Campion, Dumphrey and Francisco y Cuidad Real) also frame the novel’s attention to a negotiation of proximities – by seamless transitions, by stark interruptions, by a marking out of ‘frontiers’ – as the structuring activity for both transatlantic masculinity and the novel’s own style. In the opening section of the novel, Fitzgerald yokes his careful arrangement of narrative structure, its dual attention to sexual and (trans)national drama, and his sense of that structure’s potentially queer fragility with the Divers’ careful partitioning of their public lives as resident tourists. While the Divers lay claim to their corner of the French Riviera (it is ‘[o]ur beach’, Nicole declares (29)), they space their days, we learn, ‘like the day of the older civilizations to yield the utmost from the materials at hand, and to give all the transitions their full value’ (30). The Divers’ neoclassical and capitalist command of ‘transitions’ charms the newly arrived American traveller, Rosemary Hoyt, so that she soon yields to Dick’s movements ‘as if it had been an order’ (30), swimming when the Divers deem it time. But, in this exemplary instance, Fitzgerald tellingly frames Dick’s inscription of such ‘order’ as a queer act. Dick ‘inspire[s] a commotion’ when he appears in seemingly ‘transparent black lace drawers’ that on closer inspection reveal themselves to be ‘lined with flesh-colored cloth’; it is, in the would-be novelist McKisco’s words, ‘a pansy’s trick’, a homophobic slur for which McKisco immediately apologises to the effeminately paired Mr Dumphrey and Mr Campion. This crucial, yet seemingly flippant, exchange encapsulates the novel’s complicated use of its queer outliers. Dick’s neocolonial claiming of space, as the narrator elliptically notes at this stage, hides the signs of ‘a desperate bargain with the gods’, one that ‘had been attained through struggles’ Rosemary ‘could not have guessed at’ (30). Like the swimming trunks, Fitzgerald’s narrative intervention, here,

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reveals yet conceals the perverse doctor-patient, father-daughter ‘struggles’ behind the Divers’ artful transitions. At the same time, McKisco’s identification of the ‘pansy’s trick’, as a sign of commotion and the site of an apology, reveals and conceals the novel’s uneasy mobilisation of queerness as a symbol for Dick’s fragile, mannered performance of masculinity. This critical, fleeting exchange should remind us that it is Luis Campion who, from the novel’s opening scene, frames Dick’s ‘quiet little performance’ (15) on the beach and who will go on to frame our judgement of Dick’s performances in the light of alternative masculinities. As the first voice to greet Rosemary on the beach, ‘minc[ing]’ (13) Campion becomes the text’s means for inserting the reader into this space (via Rosemary’s point of view). Campion invites her to join the ‘untanned people’ and to approach the Divers from outside ‘the plot’. Fitzgerald’s first flamboyant narrative transition in the text is to interrupt Rosemary’s conversation with Campion’s companions so that Mrs McKisco’s statement ‘We thought maybe you were in the plot’ becomes the opening sentence of the second chapter (16). At the same time, Rosemary’s homophobically tinged ‘vague antipathy’ for Campion’s group ensures she will disentangle herself from the characters who must remain supplementary to the plot (14). Such framing repeats, however, when Rosemary takes up this same liminal space in the company of Campion at Book One’s anticlimactic yet pivotal scene of masculine performance: the duel between McKisco and the cosmopolitan, mercenary soldier Tommy Barban (Dick’s eventual Europeanised successor as Nicole’s lover). As a peculiar interruption in the plot, the misfiring duel – staged because Barban continuously interrupted Violet McKisco as she tried to reveal the ‘scene’ she had earlier stumbled into concerning the Divers (45) – functions, once more like the swimming trunks, both to conceal and reveal (for Rosemary and for the first-time reader) the disturbances behind the Divers’ façade. While, in the prelude to the duel, Rosemary is initially drawn to Campion’s resemblance to ‘a weeping woman’ (50), she finds she cannot restrain her ‘sudden disgust’ for his womanliness: ‘His face was repulsive in the quickening light’ (51). Despite her instinctive distaste, Rosemary attains a distanced witnessing of this masculinist contest through Campion’s ambivalent emotional investment in the sensationalism of the duel: though he abhors violence (52), he drives Rosemary to the duel with his movie camera, proclaims the spectacle ‘too much’ (59), and ends the scene ‘gasping’ on the ground, ‘the only casualty of the duel, while Rosemary suddenly hysterical with laughter kept kicking at him with her espadrille’ (61). Campion’s excessive zeal for filming the violent scene is, for Rosemary, a comic sign of his necessary degradation: ‘He was so terrible that he was no longer terrible, only dehumanized’ (58). But while Campion allows both Rosemary and the narrative to maintain distance from the duel’s melodrama, the scene also suggests, by omission, a critique of Rosemary’s interruption and neglect of the unexplained source of Campion’s womanly weeping. While we might assume this was a rift with Dumphrey (whom the text never explicitly positions as his lover), Rosemary is incapable of making this leap; she presumes he must care as much about the Divers’ backstory as she does. Fitzgerald reveals yet conceals a fragmented narrative of queer (melo)drama and, by doing so, queries the homophobic distance Rosemary inserts between her spectatorship (which is also the reader’s) and that of the ‘dehumanized’ Campion, ‘the only casualty of the duel’.

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Campion’s comic ‘casualty’ in the duel scene echoes in the actual casualty of Jules Peterson, the ‘small, respectable Negro’ who accompanies Abe North in the violent scene that finally exposes Nicole’s mental illness to both Rosemary and the reader at the end of Book One (119). Rosemary regards Jules Peterson, as she did Campion, with a ‘distaste’ that allows her to distance herself from his predicament – his person and situation are ‘as remote from her as sickness’ (119–20). While Jules might not be coded as queer, the uncanny appearance of his corpse on Rosemary’s bed in the wake of her and Dick’s first kiss (which Peterson and Abe North interrupt) positions his liminal presence as a spectral emptying out of their heterosexual union. Where Dick dismisses the incident as ‘only some nigger scrap’, Nicole’s unhinging insists on the scrap’s relevance to the white Americans’ sexual couplings (123). In contrast with Dick’s ‘strong, sure, polite voice, making it all right’, Nicole, here, descends into what Rosemary hears as ‘a verbal inhumanity’, a response that places her in proximity with both the ‘dehumanized’ Campion and the ‘distorted intonation’ of Peterson, the ‘colonial’ subject (125, 120). Nicole’s fragmented speech, untethered now from the artful transitions that defined the Divers’ early movements in the novel, refigures Dick’s protective presence as an interruptive force: ‘you come to intrude on the only privacy I have in the world’ (125). And her decontextualised (and decontextualising) charge queerly replicates the text’s homosocial framing of Dick’s desire for Rosemary. Rosemary only becomes fully desirable for Dick in the wake of Collis Clay’s story of their earlier sexual escapade, an ‘image of a third person’ (100) that reverberates for Dick in a repeating fragment of imagined, decontextualised dialogue, a question about enshrining ‘privacy’ and resisting interruption: ‘Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?’ (100–1, 106, 113). The scene of Nicole’s fragmentation, or the exposure of her fragmented self, is of course also the site of the narrative’s most dramatic transition, backward through time at the start of Book Two to the scene of Dick’s arrival in Zurich in the spring of 1917. The novel’s temporal and geographical rupture at this moment helps to make thematic sense of the ways in which Fitzgerald critically examines his representation of Dick’s earlier self, a ‘big stiff’ in the ‘very acme of bachelorhood’, as the manifestation of a peculiarly American yoking of masculine virility, mobility and liminality (130, 126). Book Two opens with Dick stationed at the frontier of the war on the ‘island’ that is Switzerland, ‘washed on one side by the waves of thunder around Gorizia and on another by the cataracts along the Somme and the Aisne’ (129). The geographical (dis)location of the frontier yokes, here, the novel’s dual interest in sexual disorientation and transatlantic encounters and their uncertain proximity to violent rupture. While Dick desires to emerge from the war less ‘intact’, to ‘build out some broken side’ of his ‘original structure’, his desires are conditioned by American illusions about his necessary security: the ‘illusions of a nation, the lies of generations of frontier mothers who had to croon falsely, that there were no wolves outside the cabin door’ (131–2). Dick acts out, in Fitzgerald’s terms, a specifically American and gendered ‘frontier’ mindset, protected by the lingering narrative voice of the mother yet desirous of a seemingly sexual violence that would paradoxically render him ‘complete’: ‘Lucky Dick . . . must be less intact, even faintly destroyed’ (131). Dick’s negotiation of his American relation to space stands, then, as a question of style and storytelling just as the novel’s rupture from Book One to Book Two asks us to think of the frontier as a textual form and anticipates the manner in which paratactic

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jolts will puncture the middle book’s account of Dick’s ‘heroic period’ (130). Nicole’s fragmented self-expressions – first in a section detailing her correspondence with Dick and later in a section granting us access to fragments of her internal thoughts – queerly interrupt the geography and ‘biography’ of ‘Dick Diver’s moment’ (132). Where Dick locates in Alpine Zurich a ‘perpendicular starting off to a postcard heaven’, Nicole’s elliptical correspondence suggestively deflates his straight, ‘stiff’ story (132): you seem quieter than the others, all soft like a big cat. I (2) have only gotten to like boys who are rather sissies. Are you a sissy? There were some somewhere. (136) Reproduced in its typographical format, this fragment from Nicole’s letters not only returns us to the novel’s obliquely spatial imagining of queerness (‘There were some somewhere’) but it also enacts such spatialisation as an uncontainable textual effect: the splintering of Nicole’s ‘I’ across two pages suggestively ties her ongoing mental struggles with the question of Dick’s sissiness. When the novel returns to Nicole’s fragmented internal voice – in the elliptical section that takes us from the Divers’ departure from Zurich and their global travels up to Rosemary’s arrival at the Riviera – we will see that same splintering figured as a homosocial passing of her voice across the novel’s male cast. She says, ‘Talk is men. When I talk I say to myself that I am probably Dick. Already I have even been my son, remembering how wise and slow he is. Sometimes I am Doctor Dohmler and one time I may even be an aspect of you, Tommy Barban’ (179). Ironically, of course, the remainder of the novel will chart Nicole’s gradual selfassertion, finding herself in the virile voice of cosmopolitan Tommy Barban, darkened by ‘unknown suns’ and nourished ‘by strange soils’, and the concomitant deflation of Dick, the ‘deposed ruler’ of the beach (289, 301). The curtailment of Dick’s career in Zurich comes on the heels of his attendance to the case of Señor Pardo y Cuidad Real who seeks assistance to curb his son Francisco’s homosexuality (and drinking). Tucked away in a ‘corner of Europe’ that ‘does not so much draw people as accept them without inconvenient questions’ (268), Dick’s interview with Francisco – whose ‘manliness’ has been perverted (265) – suggests an obverse mapping of Dick’s American tourism and functions not unlike the marginal yet structuring appearances of Campion in Book One. Where the Riviera figured Dick’s neocolonial desire to claim space, Lausanne suggests Europe’s capacity to conceal a homophobically tainted degeneracy. Nevertheless, the conversation between Dick and Francisco becomes Dick’s closest path ‘to comprehending such a character from anything but the pathological angle’ – he finds himself subject to the ‘very charm that made it possible for Francisco to perpetrate his outrages’. Critically, Dick finds in Francisco a stylistic model – the ‘independent existence’ of ‘charm’ – capable of converting a ‘drab old story’ through ‘courageous grace’. And in his assessment of that charm, his effort ‘to dissect it into pieces small enough to store away’, Dick recognises the contours of his own dissipation: he is intimately composed of others’ fragments; ‘personalities had seemed to press so close to him that he became the personality itself’; ‘it was as if . . . he was condemned . . . to be only as complete as they were complete themselves’ (265).

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While Fitzgerald’s narrative once more, here, animates distaste for ‘typically’ (265) homosexual behaviour (behaviour that the novel would seem quite happy to bury in a remote ‘corner of Europe’ (268)), it also positions the attractiveness of queer ‘charm’ at the centre of its modernist play with proximities. The scene does reinscribe the novel’s persistent suspicion of Dick’s performances as a more general suspicion of the queer subject’s perverted manliness. But the scene also asks us to think about how it is precisely the form of Dick’s dissipation (which mirrors the form of Nicole’s self-construction) – his capacity ‘to dissect’, to ‘store away’ and to ‘carry with him the egos of certain people’ – that provides the model for the novel’s characteristically modernist, paratactic rescuing of order from a ‘broken universe’ (265).

Conclusion: Ships of Passage Through a closing reading of the ship as a transatlantic ‘chronotope of passage’ (to borrow from Paul Gilroy), I want to offer some concluding thoughts on what might be gained by a comparative approach to these unevenly matched, queerly transatlantic mobilities: Banjo’s and Ray’s vagabondage, Dick’s moneyed leisure and eventual dissipation.14 Throughout Banjo, ships in port stand as oddly immobilised symbols of transnational capital converted, by the boys, into homosocial sites for illicit consumption – the panhandlers regularly gather to tap wine barrels being brought in. The largely stationary ships serve as a counterpoint to the mobility of Banjo, who enters the text ‘like a sailor on the unsteady deck of a ship’ (3). And indeed the novel’s ‘unsteady’ narrative movement around the ships of commerce would seem, then, to signal what Brent Hayes Edwards describes as Banjo’s attempts ‘to locate what eludes or exceeds the logic of capitalist civilization’ (224). Along these lines, the ‘wealthy shipowner from the Caribbean basin’ who promises to take the beach boys west at the end of the novel, ‘profiting by the exchange rate’ (317), exemplifies the lure of transnational capitalism for these homeless subjects. Rejecting his circulation in an ‘exchange rate’, Banjo proposes an elopement that, as Michelle Stephens argues, yokes this economic rejection of ‘ships and seafaring’ with a homosocial refusal of ‘dependence on women and the nation as the final source of home and employment’ (197). But Banjo’s final plotting (in this plotless text) is also an extension of the novel’s earlier attention to the boys’ pilfering of ship-wine and, to a certain extent, of a piece with the other beach boys’ decision to join the crew: ‘They were all “going on the fly” and none of them was thinking of staying with the boat after the trip, but rather of getting to Cuba, Canada, and the United States’ (317). Banjo’s queer proposal to abscond with Ray and a ‘full month’s wages’ (318) figures, then, as part of a range of redeployments of commercial shipping by black ‘vagabond’ subjects in the novel. While economic ‘exchange’ and regulation structures the transatlantic passage of ships in Banjo, McKay’s ‘queer Atlantic’ involves men setting in motion, ‘like a sailor’, alternative forms of value, outside exchange and ‘on the fly’. Clearly Fitzgerald’s Dick Diver enjoys a whole other kind of social mobility, one made possible, offstage, by the transatlantic steamship and its steady channelling of American tourists into post-war Europe. Dick’s return from America after burying his father becomes an opportunity for the narrator to muse on the undesirability of the ‘steamship piers’: ‘the past, the continent, is behind; the future is the glowing mouth in the side of the ship; the dim, turbulent alley is too confusedly the present’ (224). Dick’s

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privileged yet troubled return to his pursuit of ‘Daddy’s Girl’ becomes, here, symptomatic of the father(land)less American, unable to occupy the present and drawn on by an irresolvable, reproductive desire for a new Europe. But towards the novel’s close Fitzgerald returns to further complicate this exploration of ship-motion as a figure for transatlantic desire. When Dick and Nicole swim out to join a party on board the Margin (the ‘motor yacht of T. F. Golding’ (288)), Dick becomes caught up in a nasty series of exchanges with Lady Caroline Sibly-Biers, whose tubercular body bears ‘aloft the pennon of decadence, last ensign of the fading empire’ (291) (and who, in a later episode, will be saved by Dick from scandalous accusations of lesbian solicitation). It is Nicole’s perspective that guides the reader through this scene and, as a result, we take in Dick’s reckless insults through the ‘snatches’ that reach her: ‘. . . It’s all right for you English, you’re doing a dance of death. . . . Sepoys in the ruined fort, I mean Sepoys at the gate and gaiety in the fort and all that. The green hat, the crushed hat, no future’ (292; ellipses in original). Recalling Nicole’s broken language from the novel’s first volume, Dick’s distanced and dislocated speech extends to his response to Lady Caroline’s innuendoes about his time with a ‘questionable crowd’ in Lausanne (tending to Francisco y Cuidad Real): ‘So I am actually a notorious —’. Golding ‘crushe[s] out’ Dick’s ‘phrase with his voice’ (293), and in the elliptical margins of Dick’s speech, Fitzgerald yokes narratives of decadent imperial decline and ‘notorious[ly]’ queer dissipation; for the novel’s contested social imaginary, both are (anticipating Lee Edelman) sites with ‘no future’.15 So as the Margin follows a ‘motion westward’ through the Mediterranean, reversing that of the steamship, Dick looks ‘toward the veil of starlight over Africa’ and takes Nicole’s wrist with a seemingly ‘detached’ contemplation of the prospect of a drowning to end his marriage: ‘You ruined me, did you?’ he inquired blandly. ‘Then we’re both ruined. So —’ Cold with terror she put her other wrist into his grip. All right, she would go with him – again she felt the beauty of the night vividly in one moment of complete response and abnegation – all right, then — — but now she was unexpectedly free and Dick turned his back sighing: ‘Tch! tch!’ (294) Dick’s ‘dance of death’ gives way to the same elliptical disorder by which the narrative takes up and steers round imperial malaise and queer notoriety. In this chapter that nods toward the broader, triangulated space of the Mediterranean (as an outflow of the Atlantic) between the margins of Europe, America and Africa, Fitzgerald’s fragmented, paratactic form (‘The green hat, the crushed hat, no future’) should remind us, with limitations, of the future, marginal(ised) spaces McKay imagines at Banjo’s conclusion. Banjo closes with a vision of queer, transnational vagabondage that refuses the nation-state’s (feminine) conjunctions and that is, yet, marked out by its necessarily marginalised and endangered relation to the nation-state. Tender is the Night self-consciously evokes the marginalised, elliptical and fragmented presence of queer masculinity as a haunting reminder of what must be excised in order to produce, as Tommy Barban does, a successful and violent performance of transatlantic manhood. But at the same time, Fitzgerald’s novel cannot help but align its own modernist form – its fragmented and paratactic account of subjectivity – with such excisions. Where Banjo imagines ‘queer Atlantic’ masculinities being forged ‘without’ the

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‘plot’ of transnational capitalism, Tender is the Night requires its characters, and its readers, to orient themselves through queer subjects and to find themselves (as Violet McKisco phrases it) ‘in the plot’ (16).

Notes 1. Claude McKay, Banjo: A Story Without a Plot (1929; New York: Harcourt Brace, 1957), p. 317. All further references, cited in text, are to this edition. 2. Michelle Ann Stephens, Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914–1962 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 169. 3. In her account of ‘Virgina Woolf’s Queer Atlantic Oeuvre’, Laura Doyle suggestively introduces this phrase to describe Woolf’s figurative deployment of Atlantic sea-space in her modernist ‘elegies’ for non-normative ‘bodies and sexualities drowned within’ the ‘British colonial economy’. See Laura Doyle, Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940 (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 413. 4. For an account of how various media traced a range of ‘crises’ faced by white American masculinity during this period (including dwindling economic opportunities, demographic shifts and new public cultures of femininity and homosexuality), see Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 140–9. 5. Franco Moretti, Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to García Márquez (London and New York: Verso, 1996), p. 153. 6. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1990), p. 9; Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), p. 241. 7. Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 187. 8. Gary Holcomb, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance (Gainsville: University of Florida Press, 2007), pp. 140, 155. 9. Holcomb, Code Name Sasha, pp. 48–9. 10. See Stephens, Black Empire, pp. 199–200, and Holcomb, Code Name Sasha, p. 161. 11. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night (1934; London: Penguin, 2000), pp. 147, 338. All further references, cited in text, are to this edition. 12. Ruth Prigozy, ‘From Griffith’s Girls to Daddy’s Girl: The Masks of Innocence in Tender is the Night’, Twentieth Century Literature 26.2 (1980): 189–221. 13. Katherine Cummings, Telling Tales: The Hysteric’s Seduction in Fiction and Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 256. 14. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 4. 15. See Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

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14 Urban Reform, Transatlantic Movements and US Writers: 1837–1861 Brigitte Bailey

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s historians have traced the transatlantic networks of antebellum reform movements,1 literary critics have studied the genres involved in transatlantic travel and reform: genres that reported on international movements (such as journalism), or that sought to re-form national imagined communities through sympathetic identification between middle-class readers and the disempowered (such as fiction), or that performed rituals of national and class identity in international space (such as travel writing). Amanda Claybaugh, for example, has examined English and American novels in the context of intertwined Anglo-American reform societies and print culture, while Leslie Eckel reads such US journalists as Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass and Grace Greenwood as part of a transatlantic public sphere.2 There has been less work to date specifically on transatlantic literary considerations of the modern city and its reform. British authors such as Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell have received extensive attention as public-sphere writers who represent and seek to reform the metropolis and the industrial town – that is, new nineteenth-century urban formations.3 And, in a more recent turn toward the analysis of antebellum urban writing, critics have brought perspectives from the concept of the flâneur and critical geography to the tasks of situating US writers in these emerging sites of modernity and ‘spaces of capital’ (to quote the geographer David Harvey) and of reading their representations – reformist or otherwise – of these new spaces.4 The broader concern of this chapter lies with US writers who engaged questions of urban reform in a transatlantic context during the peak decades of the ‘condition of England’ debates, prompted by Britain’s industrialisation and urbanisation. Their writings helped to create a transatlantic conversation around urban reform and linked it with such movements as abolitionism, feminism, socialism and revolutionary republicanism. Transatlantic reform contacts were at times direct; for example, Fuller met Harriet Martineau on Martineau’s tour of the United States and encountered her again when she visited Britain.5 On the other hand, Rebecca Harding Davis’s fiction on urban and industrial spaces reveals readings of British reform writers and, therefore, indicates a textual map of the circulations of reform discourse. The narrower focus of the chapter is on three US writers – Margaret Fuller, William Wells Brown and Herman Melville – who travelled to Britain and wrote in three genres – journalism, travel writing and fiction – on the modern city and the industrial town in the crucial decade of the late 1840s and early 1850s. Their texts

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show how thoroughly transatlantic discourses of urban representation and reform were entangled with other reform questions. Fuller’s dispatches to the New-York Tribune in 1846–7 describe Britain’s industrial and metropolitan centres and reform institutions, as well as British reformers and their print culture, even as she brings a feminist eye to bear on the place of women in this new landscape. She also begins a suggestive meditation on the relationship between the observer and the metropolitan scene. Brown’s travel book The American Fugitive in Europe (1855), on his sojourn in Britain from 1849 to 1854, focuses on tourist sites and claims the privileged gaze of the cultured traveller. However, his travels also imply connections between the antislavery, peace and temperance movements in which he participates and industrial reform questions. And one description of London, sharply different from his tourist depictions, represents the isolated self in the modern metropolis. In 1854, Melville produced three sets of paired stories (of which ‘The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids’ is the best known) that depict US and British urban and industrial sites linked through the workings of global capitalism. Written after his trip to England in 1849–50 and drawn in part from his journal of that trip,6 they probe the mystified connections between labour and commodity, exploitation and leisure, and cultural institutions and class. All three writers make connections between British and US sites; all three are at work elaborating a transatlantic world deeply integrated and geographically transformed by the circulations of labour, capital and liberatory movements.

Antebellum Representations of the City in Transatlantic Contexts The antebellum period produced a series of interlocking reform movements, many of which intersected with urban issues, but most activists did not yet connect these initiatives into comprehensive plans to change the nature of existing cities.7 Therefore, although reform questions – about class relations, sanitation, working conditions, the need for public parks, and education – anticipated the movements that characterised what Michael H. Ebner and Eugene M. Tobin have called ‘the age of urban reform’ in the late nineteenth century,8 US reformers in the 1840s (heirs of the Second Great Awakening) focused on individual reformation as the precursor to social change or on utopian reimaginings of collective life, where the nebulous conditions of unmanageable cities might be exchanged for the spatial clarity and scientific social engineering of communities designed by such theorists as Charles Fourier. Indeed, as Dolores Hayden has demonstrated, the major decade for the creation of utopian communities in the US was the 1840s.9 In contrast to this utopian clarity, what most characterises antebellum urban writings is a search for language with which to define the confusing spaces of the modern city. These spaces were being created by the ‘founding boom of the modern world market’, an economic take-off that, according to historians from Eric Hobsbawm to David Scobey, ‘instituted the rapid, predictable, fluid circulation of capital, labor, information, and goods’ beginning in the 1840s.10 This international surge in and systemisation of trade and the social crises exacerbated by such consequences of capitalist transformations as the Panic of 1837 were most visible in cities.11 The deeper economic forces

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triggering the period’s explosive urban growth and transatlantic movements of labour and goods, however, were less visible; writers depicting the transformation of cities on both sides of the Atlantic grappled with terms to describe these intensified sites of capitalist modernity.12 The language surrounding cities in two documents of the 1840s illuminates the contrast between the utopian rejection of modern cities and the attempt to describe them. In Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s essay ‘Plan of the West Roxbury Community’ (1842), in the Transcendentalist journal The Dial, the city is the product of warfare and an emblem of humanity’s fallen state; its ‘dark cellars’ and ‘crowded streets’ shut out nature, the ‘symbol of God’. As did many come-outer proclamations, this call for an alternative social organisation – the utopian community Brook Farm – to the urban one of ‘competition’ and incipient class warfare defines cities in religious terms: ‘a conspiracy against the soul’.13 In contrast, another periodical publication, Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Man of the Crowd’ (1840), defines the problem of the modern city in social and psychological terms; the character who functions as the avatar of the city is the ‘essence’ of ‘crime’.14 Several critics have examined this tale as an early American depiction of the metropolis; Robert H. Byer, for example, has read it as a searching treatment of human relations under urban capitalism.15 The more obvious problem the tale explores is that of urban interpretation: how can the middle-class observer ‘render’ the spaces of the city and the ‘physiognomies’ of its inhabitants ‘legible’?16 Indicating his interest in the interpretive problem of the modern metropolis, Poe sets his tale of obsessive but failed interpretation in the period’s largest city and epitome of the modern urban world: London. US writers trying to represent the transformations of the city at home did so in the context of transatlantic circulations of texts, genres and models of looking – and with the assumption that the European metropolitan centres of London and Paris foreshadowed the future of US cities. As Meredith L. McGill has demonstrated, the antebellum period saw the height of a ‘culture of reprinting’, in which British writings circulated widely in the US.17 Dana Brand has demonstrated the ways in which Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman adapted the French and English figure of the flâneur, the journalist-stroller of the city, who interprets its neighbourhoods as spectacles to be consumed by the middle-class reader.18 The consumption by American readers of such ‘informal journalistic sketches’, as Scott Peeples has shown, became widespread in the 1840s, when ‘the “Letters from New York” subgenre’ pervaded the national press and attracted such authors as Poe, Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel P. Willis and George G. Foster.19 And novelists attempting to clarify, often through sensationalising, the spatial and social confusions of the city found the European model of the ‘city-mysteries’ novel useful for US sites. Drawing on Eugène Sue’s popular Les Mystères de Paris (1842–3), positively reviewed by Fuller in the Tribune for its social critique,20 and paralleled by similar British works, US novelists wrote urban exposés in the 1840s and 1850s; George Lippard attacked the capitalist elite of Philadelphia with Gothic depictions of urban scenes in The Quaker City, or The Monks of Monks Hall (1845) and ended another novel, New York: Its Upper Ten and Lower Million (1854), with one character’s exodus from the city and founding of a utopian working-class settlement in a vaguely defined West. Combining working-class outrage, a European model of fiction, and anti-urban utopian imaginings, Lippard’s novel demonstrates one fusion of reformist agendas and urban writings.21

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To depict the emerging modern city, writers needed to adjust their vision. Jeffrey Steele describes how Child and Fuller, in describing New York, moved beyond views of the city, such as that of the flâneur, which emphasised its consumption as a visually accessible spectacle, to methods of looking that acknowledged its ‘multi-layered’, ‘discontinuous’ complexity. Fuller’s columns on New York reform institutions and other sites that highlighted social crises, Steele argues, worked to elicit a ‘critical’ form of public ‘ “attention” ’ (Fuller’s word), to shape both her own and her readers’ habits of perceiving the urban scene and its less visible ideological underpinnings.22 Such re-visioning of the city – a reshaping of social ‘attention’ – was a prerequisite for urban reform and a goal for post-Civil War urban reform writers. US reform writers wrote in dialogue with their British contemporaries and predecessors. Whitney A. Womack has examined the ways in which Elizabeth Gaskell’s industrial reform novel Mary Barton (1848), which focused on factory workers in Manchester, and the model of authorship Gaskell embodied inspired American women writers. Harriet Beecher Stowe drew on the example of Mary Barton as she wrote her abolitionist bestseller Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), while US writers who read industrial reform novels by Gaskell, Dickens, Charlotte Brontë and others also brought their engagement with these works to their fiction on the industrial town itself. As Womack argues, Rebecca Harding Davis, author of perhaps the first reformist work of fiction on the US industrial landscape, ‘Life in the Iron Mills’ (1861), drew on and critiqued this tradition in her novel Margret Howth (1862), indeed ‘sought . . . to reform the industrial novel by exposing its . . . flaws’.23 Reform movements both focused on the ills of cities and triggered the pooling of reform institutions in and around cities on both sides of the Atlantic, including New York, Boston, Toronto, Philadelphia, London, Manchester and Glasgow. Writers toured such embodied reform projects as asylums, prisons, orphanages and hospitals together with reformers, foreign dignitaries and casual spectators; indeed, as Janet Miron has documented, visiting these spatial configurations of ideologies of reform became part of the culture of tourism.24 Writers and activists, such as Dorothea Dix, in Remarks on Prisons and Prison Discipline (1845), developed modern genres to theorise, advocate for, and report on these burgeoning institutions. Fuller’s Tribune reviews both of urban novels, such as those by Balzac, and of asylum and prison reports imply that she read them as related urban genres. Writers on both sides of the Atlantic also supported reform societies; Catharine Maria Sedgwick joined the Female Department of the New York Prison Association in 1845 and later served as the ‘First Directress of the Home for Discharged Female Convicts’.25 Dickens and other British writers supported the movement for working-class education and cultural uplift – for mechanics’ institutes and athenaeums.26 Although most writers who discussed urban and industrial sites were elites, working-class writers also found outlets for publication, sometimes through such uplift projects: Lucy Larcom in the Lowell Offering (1840–5) published poems that gave a voice to Massachusetts mill girls. On the other hand, the British Chartist organiser Thomas Cooper wrote poetry and edited such journals as the Plain Speaker (1849) that resisted the state; he called on working-class writers ‘ “to create a literature of your own’”.27 His ‘working-class reading practices’, Mike Sanders argues, linked the ‘rupture’ of aesthetic response with shifts in political consciousness.28 As these examples indicate, this period saw a surge in urban periodicals. By the 1840s in the US, as

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David M. Henkin notes, newspapers covered the city extensively and configured its readership as urban.29 Several of these periodicals were organs of reform societies; the New York paper Child edited and in which she published her ‘Letters from New York’ was The National Anti-Slavery Standard.30 American writers thinking about urban and industrial sites and travelling to Great Britain in the 1840s and 1850s, in other words, did so in the contexts of vigorous international print cultures and reform movements.

Americans in British Cities: Fuller, Brown, Melville These writers arrived in Britain when the ‘condition of England’ debates had perhaps reached their most thorough articulation. Mary Poovey has documented that reform writings – government reports, novels, tracts issued by benevolent societies – reached a peak in Britain in the 1830s to 1840s.31 Reading Fuller and Brown together reveals the range of uses to which reform writers working in popular non-fiction genres put urban representations. I will treat their works first and then turn to Melville’s fiction, which is not directly engaged in covering or eliciting reform but is equally analytical of urban and industrial spaces. As two of the most visible, widely networked, transatlantic public intellectuals in the period, Fuller and Brown shared reform commitments, travel routes, a few contacts, and an entrepreneurial pursuit of multiple genres in order to reach the widest audiences.32 Perhaps because of the breadth of antebellum networks, as well as Fuller’s late embrace of abolition and departure from Boston before Brown’s arrival there as a fugitive slave in 1847, they do not seem to have crossed paths. Indeed, neither of their most exhaustive biographers (Charles Capper and Ezra Greenspan) names the other.33 Nevertheless, it is instructive to compare their English writings: Fuller’s dispatches to the New-York Tribune from Britain in 1846 and Brown’s travel book The American Fugitive in Europe (1855), on his British sojourn in 1849–54, a stay prolonged because of the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. Although not members of the same circle, they pursued parallel paths in their transatlantic engagements with social and political movements – abolitionism, peace and temperance in Brown’s case, and issues from feminism to prison reform to revolutionary republicanism in Fuller’s – and in their travels on the beaten track of tourism. Fuller and Brown travelled to England at the time not only of the reform debates prompted by British industrialism but also of the revival of the British antislavery movement.34 Fuller, as a correspondent for the liberal Tribune, and Brown, as an antislavery lecturer, visited the same cities (such as Liverpool, Glasgow, Newcastle and London), literary sites of pilgrimage (such as the Lake District and Sir Walter Scott’s Abbotsford), and one or two of the same reformers (such as Martineau). They participated both in conversations about reform and in the discourse and practices of tourism; therefore, their works reveal tensions and intersections between the reformer’s vision and the tourist’s gaze. During their British sojourns, Fuller and Brown (the latter as a lecturer) were engaged in reform rhetoric, which expressed a liberal vision of social amelioration rather than a revolutionary vision of the overthrow of states and institutions.35 It is interesting that both later moved away from this reformist orientation: Fuller toward revolution in Italy and Brown toward ‘antislavery militancy’, as Martha Schoolman notes.36 Indeed, Larry J. Reynolds connects Fuller’s later advocacy

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of violence with that of New England abolitionists in the 1850s.37 The reformer’s vision saw society in transition and combined the shock of present injustice with the prospect of change. On the other hand, the tourist gaze saw ‘places and people’ (the subtitle of Brown’s travel book) as static – canonised objects and essentialised people – whose visual consumption demonstrated the viewer’s mobility and cultural literacy and, therefore, could function to consolidate a national elite.38 Fuller clearly uses the rhetoric of reform in her travel accounts: ‘The manufacturing . . . towns . . ., burning focuses of grief and vice, are also the centers of intellectual life, as in forcing beds the rarest . . . fruits are developed by use of . . . repulsive materials.’39 On the other hand, Brown claims the racialised tourist gaze and the cultural capital of aesthetic response at such canonised tourist sites as Tintern Abbey, where he frames his aesthetic appreciation with quotations from British poets, and where the sun mimics the tourist’s fantasy of unlimited visual access to the scene: ‘The sun was pouring a flood of light upon the old gray walls, lighting up its dark recesses . . . I gazed with . . . admiration at . . . the superb Gothic windows [and] the beautiful Gothic pillars . . . The once stone floor had disappeared, and we [stood] on a floor of unbroken green grass . . . looking so verdant . . . that it seemed the very floor of fancy.’40 Fuller’s Tribune columns are examples of journalism’s generic focus on news, on what she calls the ‘signs of the times’ (TSBGD 43), on a modern nation in crisis and in the process of re-forming, while Brown’s deliberately constructed piece of tourist literature was, as Greenspan notes, a ‘middle-class volume in design, content, and genre, . . . handsome[ly]’ bound, a book that ‘disappoint[ed]’ one of his strongest British antislavery allies by veering ‘toward travelogue rather than activism’.41 However, their writings also push against the purposes of the genres they engage and create a tension between their tourist descriptions and their political concerns. Fuller’s dispatches, as I have argued elsewhere,42 map out the geography of modernity and describe the efforts of reformers; she focuses on industrial sites, technological infrastructure (such as railroads), urban slums, and sites of uplift, such as mechanics’ institutes. For example, at the steel mills of Sheffield, seeing ‘the sooty servitors tending their furnaces’ prompts an incipient analysis of the alienation of labour: ‘I saw them also . . . going to receive [their] poor wages, looking pallid and dull, as if they had spent on tempering the steel that vital force that should have tempered themselves to manhood’ (TSBGD 83). This sentence conveys a proto-Marxist understanding of the ‘externalization of the worker in his product’, to quote Marx, who writes in reaction to the same crisis conditions of the 1840s. In Marx’s famous formulation, ‘The worker puts his life into the object; . . . it no longer belongs to him but to the object.’43 Fuller observes the circulation of goods and workers within industrial capitalism; she views the global movement of goods represented by the enormous Liverpool docks and the warehouses in Manchester, full of commodities for a burgeoning middle-class market, but also sees the migration of labour – the displacement and clustering of labourers in cities – and the social destabilisation created by the new organisation of production and consumption.44 In Glasgow, ‘people are more crowded together and the . . . misery and degradation more . . . appalling’ (TSBGD 79). Throughout Britain, Fuller visits reform institutions – schools, prisons, and a new ‘admirabl[e]’ space of domestic labour: public laundries in London (TSBGD 103), which anticipated late nineteenthcentury feminist architectural experiments.45 And she comments on speeches and publications that support efforts of urban and working-class amelioration. On the other

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hand, she shifts from the rhetoric of reform in industrial towns such as Manchester to the aestheticising language of the tourist in such undeveloped rural hinterlands as the Lake District or the Scottish Highlands, where she takes pleasure in their archaic, ‘romantic’ aspects (TSBGD 78). Brown’s travel book is emphatic in claiming the perspective of the educated tourist – a political gesture in and of itself – in recounting visits to the British Museum and to landscapes with literary associations.46 But he also includes moments that engage his antislavery activism. For example, he contrasts ‘the condition of the working-classes of England’ (AFE 140) in such sites of resource extraction as Newcastle, whose coal mines fed Britain’s factories, with the conditions of US slaves in order to counteract the pro-slavery argument for the more benign conditions of enslavement. In using these terms, Brown engages the language of British political economy. With such eruptions of the rhetorical other into these texts (the tourist gaze into the reform text, or the reformer’s argument into the tourist’s scene), Brown’s travel book and Fuller’s columns complicate the genres through which Americans regarded Britain. In representing London, Brown uses two different approaches: the tourist’s privileged gaze and its opposite, the modern experience of disorientation, isolation and constriction of vision. The social significance of Brown’s use of tourist aesthetics in London becomes clear in the context of other forms of cultural production he pursued in Britain. As Greenspan documents, Brown’s English years were highly productive. In addition to his lectures, he published his narrative of enslavement and escape, wrote the first version of The American Fugitive in Europe (Three Years in Europe, published in London in 1852), wrote his novel Clotel, and commissioned the painting of a panorama, with which he toured and lectured. Panoramas – series of large paintings of geographical or tourist sites that were scrolled in front of an audience and narrated by a lecturer – were popular in England and brought the experience of tourism to those at home.47 However, his was a panorama with a difference; while an earlier panorama of the Mississippi included slavery as a benign part of ‘a white-dominated manifest destiny’, Brown’s pulled slavery into the foreground. The catalogue of this now-lost panorama called it ‘ “a series of sketches of beautiful and interesting American scenery, as well as of many touching incidents in the lives of Slaves”’.48 Brown’s fusion of landscape aesthetics with antislavery reveals his awareness of what was at stake in the apparently apolitical genre of the travelogue. The art historian Alan Wallach has argued that, for the rising middle class, panoramas and similar views represented a ‘metaphor for social aspiration’ and naturalised ‘ideologies in which the exercise of power . . . required vision and supervision’, an orientation ‘equally applicable to panoramic views and to the operation of . . . reformed social institutions’.49 While Brown’s experience under slavery would have clarified the association of the gaze with power, his travel book connects the visual mastery of landscape with the social mastery of reform. Just as literary publication itself refuted ‘the doctrine of the inferiority of the negro’, as one of the British reviews Brown included in the US edition of his travel book said (AFE 320), so did the conceptual mastery and supervisory capacity demonstrated by the panoramic gaze. Brown uses the term ‘panorama’ in visiting three tourist sites in London in 1851; given his concurrent development of a painted panorama, his use of the word signals his awareness of its social implications.

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Brown’s three instances focus on exemplary scenes of the metropolis. The first passage illustrates a classic tourist’s panoramic view: the view of London from the top of St Paul’s Cathedral. Achieving this view is both empowering (‘splendid’) and conceptually demanding; Brown notes that a painter who tried to capture ‘the metropolis of the world’ in a ‘panorama’ went insane. The second episode – a visit to Westminster Abbey’s Poet’s Corner – identifies writers (with whom Brown repeatedly identifies) as the cultural figures whose ‘genius’ is best able to represent ‘the whole panorama of nature’ as well as ‘the human soul’, that is, best qualified to oversee both landscapes and societies. The third passage recounts a visit to the 1851 Great Exhibition, where he views the Crystal Palace, its cultural and mechanical exhibits, and the heterogeneous ‘international’ crowd touring the building. Fusing aesthetic response and social commentary, Brown observes the ‘beauties’ of this ‘various assemblage of the human race’ and praises the Exhibition’s democratising effect. In doing so, he reverses what William W. Stowe calls the ‘notorious ethnocentricity’ of the tourist’s ‘subjugating gaze’50 and transforms the Exhibition’s celebration of the ‘articles’ of empire into a celebration of the equality of its visitors, of the ‘matchless panorama’ of ‘all the kingdoms of this world’ (AFE 131, 132, 205). These passages move from an encompassing view of the city to the encompassing cultural and historical view associated with nationally significant writers to the encompassing view of international racial diversity at the Exhibition – a sequence which implicitly creates the reformer’s perspective.51 Fuller also develops urban perspectives through aesthetic responses; however, she evokes not the authority and clarity of the panoramic gaze but the trope of the mystified city. She describes the enormity of London, ‘in itself a world’, shrouded in ‘coalsmoke and fog’ (TSBGD 87), and the centre of empire. Fuller’s visit to London was short, and she is conscious of the tentative quality of her ‘slight’ ‘sketches’ (TSBGD 93). In her New York writings, Steele explains, Fuller asked her readers to move beyond ‘the touristic desire for visual amusement’ and to extend a sympathetic gaze into regions – ‘blind spots’ – marked by poverty and disability.52 In London, she also defines the development of vision as a gradual process: London is ‘an inexhaustible studio, . . . if life were only long enough, I would live there for years obscure in some corner, from which I could issue forth . . . to watch unobserved the vast stream of life, or to decipher the hieroglyphics which ages have been inscribing on the walls of this vast palace’ (TSBGD 88). This configuration of London as a ‘studio’ and Fuller as an anonymous observer learning to read the city’s ‘hieroglyphics’ reveals her concept of vision as a collaborative process between the urban environment and its observer. London is a site of creation – the studio – not dominated but inhabited by the ‘obscure’ artist. It is also the ‘palace’ – the monument – that is the object of the tourist’s gaze, albeit a resistant object that refuses an immediate reading. Therefore, although Fuller sometimes sketches the ‘mysteries’ of the city in the reductive ‘sunshine and shadows’ tradition,53 with its easy visual contrasts between rich and poor, she understands this representation as a preliminary sketch. The degree of ‘misery, squalid, agonizing, ruffianly, which stares one in the face in every street of London and hoots at the gates of her palaces’ is new: ‘Poverty in England has terrors of which I never dreamt at home’ (TSBGD 88). And so Fuller resorts to the productively confusing image of London as both object and creative space that will make possible the generation of its own representation.

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Fuller’s and Brown’s travels to Britain’s cities trigger investigations into connections among sight, mobility and power. Their simultaneous engagement in the other kind of ‘movements’ – reform movements – similarly jars assumptions and creates the conditions in which the genres of journalism and travel book may be reimagined. Melville’s fiction shares these generic instabilities. Journalism, travel writing and fiction are here subjectivity-shaping and capacious ‘reporting’ tools – dialogic, encyclopedic – and therefore push against their own generic limits. Encountering the modern city stretches these genres and makes them borrow from each other. Brown’s other sustained description of urban experience in London – which explores the related topics of alienation, anonymity, economic precariousness and benevolent networks – parallels aspects of Melville’s sketch ‘Temple Second’. Brown recounts a day of literal and financial ‘darkness’ in London, when circumstances have left him momentarily without money and when he roams the city in a disorienting ‘London fog’ out of which emerge figures that reflect both the city and the Atlantic world – a beggar child, another American fugitive slave looking for work – as well as a coach that almost runs him down. Brown says, ‘Nowhere in the British empire do the people witness as dark days as in London’, where the street lights are lit during the day but still do not make it possible to see the city. Similarly, London epitomises the anonymity and poverty of the urban environment: ‘Where on earth is a man without money more destitute? The cold hills of the Arctic regions have not a more inhospitable appearance than London to the stranger with an empty pocket.’ Brown’s references to ‘empire’ and the ‘Arctic’ link the metropolitan heart of the modern British Empire with its furthest economic and exploratory reach (AFE 117–21);54 the darkness he describes is not only a result of coal smoke but also an emblem of the mystified relations among empire, labour and the city. Also hidden within the urban darkness, however, is the transatlantic network of benevolence; the chapter ends unexpectedly, when a British abolitionist who has sold copies of Brown’s narrative to his father’s congregation brings the proceeds to Brown. If Fuller and Brown read British urban sites in broader Atlantic world contexts, Melville more explicitly juxtaposes British and US places to tease out the social consequences of a transatlantic economic and industrial development centred in cities. Indeed, his six sketches, organised in three pairings of American and British stories, begin with rural poverty in the US but immediately (with the second sketch) move into urban and industrial territory – territory they explore with increasing intensity. By the end of the set, Melville connects English and US sites in one Atlantic system of economic exchange and exploitation. The first two tales, ‘Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs’, focus on the hunger of the American rural poor and British urban poor and on the veneer of benevolent middle-class rhetoric that obscures and justifies this poverty, whose ‘misery and infamy’ is ‘precisely the same in India, England, and America’. After hearing a poet effuse about the ‘charities’ bestowed by ‘the blessed almoner, Nature’ on poor farmers, the narrator visits a poor family and shares its almost inedible food, an experience that reduces such benevolent language to bitter parody.55 In London, the same narrator goes with a ‘civic’ functionary to witness one of the ‘Lord Mayor’s Charities’, the feeding of a lavish state banquet’s leftovers to the poor; where the American poet used the sentimental language of a solicitous nature to obscure the economic exploitation of the poor by the rural gentry, the narrator’s ‘guide’ in London uses the abject language of royalty

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worship to deflect attention from a system of food distribution that serves delicacies to ‘kings’ and leaves the urban poor ‘roar[ing] with famine’. When the guide exults that a ‘pale girl’ gets to eat a pasty partially eaten the night before by ‘the Emperor of Russia’, the narrator replies sardonically, ‘Very probably . . . It looks as though some omnivorous Emperor or other had had a finger in that pie’; his dirty joke cuts through the other’s rhetoric to clarify the economic and sexual cannibalism of the ruling class. Melville’s speaker makes transatlantic connections among urban centres of power – the rear entrance to the hall ‘was grimy as a back-yard in the Five Points’ in New York – and their production of a dehumanised poor, the ‘mass’ of ‘famished . . . creatures’ (PT 297–9). ‘The Two Temples’ pairs an account of being shut out of a fashionable church in New York – because of shabby clothes – with being welcomed into the working-class gallery of a theatre in London. The narrator compares the ‘theatric wonder’, ‘spectacle’ and ‘show’ of the ‘temple’ in New York with the ‘blazing spectacle’ of the second ‘temple’ in London but finds ‘charity’ only in the second (PT 306, 312–14). The account in ‘Temple Second’ of being stranded in London without money participates in the same tradition of the uprooted self in the alien metropolis as Brown’s chapter on the ‘darkness’ of London.56 Melville’s narrator is a temporarily unemployed American physician, walking the streets on a Saturday night in order to avoid his landlady’s demand for rent; his language describing ‘great London, the Leviathan’ echoes Poe’s: ‘I drifted among those indescribable crowds which . . . pour and roar’, ‘one unceasing tide’, through the streets: ‘The fiendish gas-lights shooting their Tartarean rays across the muddy . . . streets, lit up the pitiless . . . scene.’ And his isolation as ‘a penniless stranger in Babylonian London’ echoes Brown’s: ‘without a friend, I staggered on through three millions of my own human kind.’ As does Brown, Melville includes the unexpected surfacing of genuine benevolence; a ‘working-man’ leaving a theatre early gives the narrator his ticket, and a boy selling ale gives him a free mug of it, in honour of the boy’s father, who has ‘gone to Yankee-land’. Housed, fed, and welcomed into a community of lower-class theatregoers, the narrator moves from feelings of alienation to those of ‘love’ (PT 310, 312, 314); refuge in the city shifts from a potential source of reform efforts – the church, which alienates and objectifies the lower classes – to the working-class community of spectators at a popular amusement who take care of each other. The most trenchant analysis, as readers have noted, in these transatlantic sketches comes in ‘The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids’. These tales meditate on connections between the epitome of personal autonomy, privilege and material comfort – located in the heart of London – and the emblem of imprisonment, deprivation and isolation that is a New England paper factory. In describing a convivial dinner in an apartment in the Temple, the area in London devoted to the law, Melville’s narrator contrasts this ‘cloister[ed]’ area – the ‘dreamy Paradise of Bachelors’ – with the ‘stony heart of stunning London’. Set aside from the crowded conditions of the city and apparently from its economic concerns – the ‘rise of bread and the fall of babies’ – this ‘delightful spot’ enables the ‘fraternal’ comfort of an all-male dinner, which features a long list of food and alcohol consumed and tales of travel, connoisseurship, literature and politics exchanged. The narrator says, ‘It was the very perfection of . . . good living, good drinking, good feeling, and good talk’ and emphasises the participants’ social and geographical mobility and freedom from ‘pain’ and ‘trouble’ – all traits associated with ‘bachelors’, the symbols of economic and social privilege (PT 316, 319, 322).

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If the end product of the modern world market is the elite urban enclave of the Temple, then its engine is the factory and the industrial labour force. As the sketch’s title indicates, Melville represents ‘the Devil’s Dungeon paper-mill’ in hellish terms, among ‘Plutonian’ mountains and past a ‘Dantean’ pass; in January, the mill appears as ‘some great whited sepulchre’. While the narrator’s visit to the Paradise of Bachelors is social, he comes to the mill on business – to order paper. As does Fuller in Sheffield, Melville depicts the industrial draining of humanity by the paper machine, ‘this inflexible iron animal’; the mill ‘girls’ are ‘cogs’ and as featureless, as white, as the paper they produce. Their working conditions are a death sentence: ‘So, through consumptive pallors of this blank . . . life, go these white girls to death’ (PT 324–5, 333, 328, 330). If the benefits of this system converge in the mobile, well-fed, educated bachelors, its costs accrue to the unmarried and virtually imprisoned ‘maids’ of the mill. Readers have noted the ‘sterility’ of this separation of upper-class men and working-class women; this paradoxical lack of productivity is part of Melville’s critique of industrial capitalism.57 The final transatlantic insight comes with the narrator’s intuition of parallels between the mill and the Temple, a resemblance whose ‘partial inadequacy . . . tinge[d] the similitude not less with the vividness than the disorder of a dream’. The ‘quaint groupings of the factory-buildings’ trigger a memory of buildings in the Temple and become for the narrator ‘the very counterpart of the Paradise of Bachelors, but . . . frost-painted to a sepulchre’. This uncanny mirroring of labour and leisure, production and consumption, are fleshed out in the details of international commerce; the narrator learns that the rags that go into the paper come from both local and transatlantic sources, including London (‘there may be some old shirts’ from ‘the Paradise of Bachelors’), and ruminates on the myriad uses of the ‘blank’ mass-produced paper (‘sermons, lawyers’ briefs’) as it enters the world market. As Aaron Winter points out, this ‘diptych evokes a global network of sexual, economic, and moral relationships’.58 Melville indicates the narrator’s final grasp of this global economic system by describing the disorienting vertigo of insight: ‘Something of awe now stole over me. . . . I stood spell-bound and wandering in my soul’ (PT 326–7, 330, 333–4). To adapt Sanders’ discussion of the Chartist Thomas Cooper, the ‘rupture’ of perception opens the way for an understanding of political economy. The implicit conversation among Fuller, Brown, Melville and their contemporaries anticipates the terms and preoccupations of the urban journalists, novelists and reform writers, such as Jacob Riis, William Dean Howells and Jane Addams, who analysed, reformed and worked in US cities after the Civil War. However, this earlier conversation is provoked by an engagement with British cities; concepts of the modern city emerge in transatlantic circulations of texts and travellers. These concepts go on to shape both the urban writings and the cities themselves in the more nationally focused discussions and projects of urban reform to come.

Notes 1. See Margaret H. McFadden, Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), on transatlantic networks of feminists (including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Fredrika Bremer and Frances Power Cobbe); and R. J. M. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), for a history of US abolitionists (including Frederick Douglass, Charles Remond and John Brown) in Britain.

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2. Amanda Claybaugh, The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the AngloAmerican World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007); Leslie Elizabeth Eckel, Atlantic Citizens: Nineteenth-Century American Writers at Work in the World (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). 3. See, for example, Amanda Claybaugh, The Novel of Purpose, and Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 4. David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (New York: Routledge, 2001); Dana Brand, The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Jeffrey Steele, ‘The Visible and Invisible City: Antebellum Writers and Urban Space’, in Russ Castronovo (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 179–96. 5. Joan Von Mehren, Minerva and the Muse: A Life of Margaret Fuller (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), pp. 70, 232. 6. Merton M. Sealts Jr, ‘Historical Note’, in The Writings of Herman Melville, Volume IX: The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces 1839–1860, ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1987), p. 698. 7. David M. Scobey states that comprehensive urban planning in New York began in the late 1850s and the 1860s: Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), pp. 1–3. See Thomas Bender on the development of urban perspectives in Lowell, the ‘first New England industrial city’ (p. xii), and of urban reform in mid-century New York: Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth-Century America (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1975). 8. Michael H. Ebner and Eugene M. Tobin (eds), The Age of Urban Reform: New Perspectives on the Progressive Era (Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1977). 9. Dolores Hayden, Seven American Utopias: The Architecture of Communitarian Socialism, 1790–1975 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976). 10. Scobey, Empire City, p. 70; Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (New York: Scribner, 1975). 11. For a recent discussion of this panic, see Jessica M. Lepler, The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 12. For a summary of the history of antebellum urban growth, see Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 526–32. See Liza Picard on the British population shift into the city; urban dwellers outnumbered rural dwellers by mid-century: Victorian London: The Life of a City, 1840–1870 (London: Phoenix, 2005), p. 73. 13. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, ‘Plan of the West Roxbury Community’, in Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance, ed. William E. Cain (Boston: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), p. 426. See Charles Sellers for a discussion of evangelical calls to ‘ “come out” of a world corrupted by market egotism’ (p. 157): The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 157–61; Peabody uses comeouter language explicitly: the organisers of Brook Farm ‘feel it is necessary to come out in some degree from the world’ (p. 426). 14. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Man of the Crowd’, in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume II: Tales and Sketches, 1831–1842, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 505. 15. Robert H. Byer, ‘Mysteries of the City: A Reading of Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” ’, in Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (eds), Ideology and Classic American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 221–46.

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16. See David Harvey on French novelists and cartoonists depicting urban spaces and people through the conventions of physiognomic categorisation and the gaze of the flâneur: Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 25, 38. 17. Meredith L. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). 18. Brand, The Spectator and the City. 19. Scott Peeples, ‘ “To Reproduce a City”: New York Letters and the Urban American Renaissance’, in J. Gerald Kennedy and Jerome McGann (eds), Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012), pp. 101, 106. 20. Margaret Fuller, ‘French Novelists of the Day: Balzac . . . George Sand . . . Eugene Sue’, in Margaret Fuller, Critic: Writings from the New-York Tribune, 1844–1846, ed. Judith Matteson Bean and Joel Myerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 54–64. 21. See David S. Reynolds for a discussion of Lippard and the ‘city-mysteries’ tradition: Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Knopf, 1988), pp. 82–4. 22. Jeffrey Steele, ‘Reconfiguring “public attention”: Margaret Fuller in New York City’, in Brigitte Bailey (ed.), Nineteenth-Century Prose: Special Issue on Margaret Fuller, 42.2 (2015), pp. 129, 131, 137. 23. Whitney A. Womack, ‘Reforming Women’s Reform Literature: Rebecca Harding Davis’s Rewriting of the Industrial Novel’, in Jill Bergman and Debra Bernardi (eds), Our Sisters’ Keepers: Nineteenth-Century Benevolence Literature by American Women (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), p. 110; Whitney Womack Smith, ‘Stowe, Gaskell, and the Woman Reformer’, in Denise Kohn, Sarah Meer and Emily B. Todd (eds), Transatlantic Stowe: Harriet Beecher Stowe and European Culture (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006), pp. 89–110. 24. Janet Miron, Prisons, Asylums, and the Public: Institutional Visiting in the Nineteenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011). 25. Lucinda L. Damon-Bach and Victoria Clements, ‘Introduction’, in Damon-Bach and Clements (eds), Catharine Maria Sedgwick: Critical Perspectives (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003), p. xxxviii. 26. Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 163–76. 27. Quoted in Rob Breton, ‘Genre in the Chartist Journal’, in Aruna Krishnamurthy (ed.), The Working-Class Intellectual in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), p. 123. 28. Mike Sanders, The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 9–10. He notes that the Chartist press reprinted American abolitionist and working-class reform poems (see, for example, the list on p. 269). 29. David M. Henkin, ‘City Streets and the Urban World of Print’, in Scott E. Casper, Jeffrey D. Groves, Stephen W. Nissenbaum and Michael Winship (eds), A History of the Book in America, Volume III: The Industrial Book, 1840–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, in association with the American Antiquarian Society, 2007), p. 333. 30. Carolyn L. Karcher discusses Child’s editorship and New York writings in The First Woman of the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 267–319. 31. Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). See also Robert Gray, The Factory Question and Industrial England, 1830–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 32. See John Ernest on Brown’s entrepreneurial practices in ‘The Reconstruction of Whiteness: William Wells Brown’s The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom’, PMLA 113.5 (1998), pp. 1108–9.

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33. Charles Capper, Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, Volume II: The Public Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Ezra Greenspan, William Wells Brown: An African American Life (New York: Norton, 2014). 34. See Blackett on ‘the emergence of blacks as the principal spokesmen for the American slave on the international scene in the 1840s’ (Building an Antislavery Wall, p. 79). 35. See Capper’s characterisation of the reform circles Fuller engaged in in London (Margaret Fuller, pp. 296–7). 36. Martha Schoolman, ‘Violent Places: Three Years in Europe and the Question of William Wells Brown’s Cosmopolitanism’, ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 58.1 (2012), p. 27. 37. Larry J. Reynolds, Righteous Violence: Revolution, Slavery, and the American Renaissance (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011). 38. For the sociology of the ‘tourist gaze’, see John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage Publications, 1990). 39. Margaret Fuller, ‘These Sad But Glorious Days’: Dispatches from Europe, 1846–1850, ed. Larry J. Reynolds and Susan Belasco Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 79. Subsequently cited as TSBGD in the text. 40. William Wells Brown, The American Fugitive in Europe: Sketches of Places and People Abroad (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1855), p. 157. Subsequently cited as AFE in the text. 41. Greenspan, William Wells Brown, pp. 276, 279. 42. Brigitte Bailey, ‘Margaret Fuller’s New-York Tribune Dispatches from Great Britain: Modern Geography and the Print Culture of Reform’, in Beth L. Lueck, Brigitte Bailey and Lucinda L. Damon-Bach (eds), Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain (Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2012), pp. 49–70. 43. Karl Marx, Selected Writings, 2nd edn, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 87. Christina Zwarg studies Fuller’s anticipations of Marx’s thought in Feminist Conversations: Fuller, Emerson, and the Play of Reading (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 189–220. 44. David Harvey explains that the drive to reduce ‘turnover time’ created ‘the agglomeration of laborers [and] the concentration of population’ in such centres of textile production as Manchester and Glasgow: Consciousness and the Urban Experience: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp. 40–1. 45. Dolores Hayden documents these later experiments in The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981). 46. See William W. Stowe on the ‘political project’ of Brown’s use of the ‘conventional form of the travel narrative’: Going Abroad: European Travel in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 70–1; John Ernest on Brown’s ‘modes of performance’ in his travel book, where, as a ‘fugitive tourist’, he simultaneously ‘challeng[es]’ while apparently ‘imitat[ing]’ the cultural assumptions of the tourist: Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), p. 334; and Elisa Tamarkin on ‘the “England” that figures prominently in abolitionist discourse’ (p. 179), including African American travel narratives, in Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), pp. 178–246. 47. Stephan Oettermann discusses the panorama’s popularity across class lines in The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (New York: Urzone, 1997). 48. See Greenspan, William Wells Brown, pp. 240, 242–3.

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49. Alan Wallach, ‘Making a Picture of the View from Mount Holyoke’, in David C. Miller (ed.), American Iconology: New Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 84. 50. Stowe, Going Abroad, pp. 47–8. 51. As a tourist, Brown also seeks sites of past revolt against oppression. Charles Baraw argues, ‘Brown’s travels are characterized by an irrepressible interest in scenes of . . . revolutionary violence’: ‘William Wells Brown, Three Years in Europe, and Fugitive Tourism’, African American Review 44.3 (2011), p. 456. Schoolman adds that he ‘discover[s] political possibility in Europe’s violent past rather than its reformist present’ (‘Violent Places’, p. 20). 52. Jeffrey Steele, ‘Sympathy and Prophecy: The Two Faces of Social Justice in Fuller’s New York Writing’, in Brigitte Bailey, Katheryn P. Viens and Conrad Edick Wright (eds), Margaret Fuller and Her Circles (Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2013), pp. 169–70. 53. Steele, ‘Sympathy and Prophecy’, p. 165. 54. Schoolman reads this moment in terms of Brown’s changing sense of the connections among American fugitive slaves, their limited employment opportunities in Britain, and employment/exploitation prospects in the post-emancipation West Indies (‘Violent Places’, pp. 12–19). 55. The Writings of Herman Melville, Volume IX: The Piazza Tales, pp. 296, 289. Subsequently cited as PT in the text. 56. Dennis Berthold reads the stories in the context of the theatre battles in New York: ‘Class Acts: The Astor Place Riots and Melville’s “The Two Temples” ’, American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography 71.3 (1999): 429–61. For another discussion of these tales and of Melville’s account of Israel Potter in ‘the labyrinthine underworld of London’ (p. 225), see Wyn Kelley, Melville’s City: Literary and Urban Form in Nineteenth-Century New York (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 216–32. 57. For an analysis of this ‘sterility’, see Karen A. Weyler, ‘Melville’s “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids”: A Dialogue about Experience, Understanding, and Truth’, Studies in Short Fiction 31.3 (1994): 461–9. 58. Winter summarises recent critical approaches to these sketches in ‘Seeds of Discontent: The Expanding Satiric Range of Melville’s Transatlantic Diptychs’, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 8.2 (2006): 17–35 (p. 32).

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15 Early Feminism and the Circulation of Self-Reliance in the Atlantic World Clare Frances Elliott

‘I can live alone, if self-respect and circumstances require me to do so. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure, born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld; or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.’1

T

hese are the words that Rochester ventriloquises for Jane Eyre when he reads her fortune while disguised as the old gypsy woman Sibyl, in chapter 16 of Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel. The ‘inward treasure’, which he attributes to Jane, we might call self-reliance, that determined spirit which she so famously possesses and that feminist criticism since the 1970s has tended to view as her dominant characteristic.2 More recent critical attention – most significantly Christine Doyle’s book Louisa May Alcott and Charlotte Brontë: Transatlantic Translations (2000) and John Seelye’s Jane Eyre’s American Daughters (2005) – has focused on Brontë’s influence on or affinities with US writers.3 As yet, however, there has been little consideration of Jane’s self-reliance in a transatlantic context, which is surprising given the weighty Transcendentalist implications of the term. In this chapter I will explore the ramifications of using the term ‘self-reliance’, which scholars in Atlantic literary studies will associate with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous essay ‘Self-Reliance’ (1841), to reflect on the figure of Jane Eyre, a quintessentially English heroine. I will also compare Jane Eyre to the work of two New England Transcendentalist women writers of the nineteenth century, Elizabeth Peabody and Louisa May Alcott. The writings of both women absorb and refract Emerson’s philosophy and they both played an important role in transatlantic intellectual exchange. Elizabeth Peabody, a relatively neglected member of the Transcendentalist coterie, overshadowed by the critical legacies of the men and women she associated with (Emerson, Hawthorne, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller), ran a ‘foreign library’ out of her Boston bookstore, while Louisa May Alcott had a specific fanaticism about the work of Charlotte Brontë. In this comparison of self-reliance in English fiction and New England writings of the nineteenth century, I will suggest that reading Brontë, Peabody and Alcott together, rather than in local and national traditions, offers new, important insights into geographically distributed concerns about gender and the autonomy of women in ways that are often overlooked by a critical obsession with geographically contained sites: the Brontë parsonage, the famous Transcendental Club and the Alcott family school.

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Jane Eyre’s Self-Reliance Despite the many critical claims made about Jane Eyre’s self-reliance, the term is never once used in the novel.4 Rather, Brontë gives the expression to Lucy Snowe, in her last novel Villette (1853), who claims, ‘I know not that I was of a self-reliant or active nature . . . but self-reliance and exertion were forced upon me by circumstances.’5 The self-reliance that critics have taken to be innate in Jane Eyre seems to be of this exact kind. That is to say, Jane’s self-reliance, like Lucy’s, is forced upon her by circumstances; she builds self-reliance from very early in the novel in her attempts to endure painful experiences at the hands of mostly misogynistic men. Seelye is the only critic who links Jane’s self-reliance to Emerson’s philosophy. He writes that the ‘not very carefully concealed message in Jane Eyre’ about the ‘power of deep psychic strength to overcome physical and emotional deprivation’ can loosely be associated with ‘Emerson’s notion of self-reliance’.6 However, to conflate Jane’s experiences with Emerson’s philosophy is to misunderstand his term. Jane’s experience is much like Lucy’s in that her self-reliance is not a liberated and transcendental act of total autonomy (as Emerson’s is) but rather a survival skill that grows out of her privation. A distinction between Jane’s self-reliance and Emersonian self-reliance can also be discerned when we consider the idea of transcendence in Emerson’s writing and its representation in Jane Eyre. In his essays, Emerson’s concept of self-reliance becomes a gateway to transcendence. In the famous ‘transparent eye-ball’ episode from ‘Nature’ (1836), an idealised mode of transcendence allows direct communication with God. The land around him is cleared of all distractions and Emerson is ‘uplifted into infinite space’, where he quickly sheds all ‘egotism’. Importantly, the outcome of this transformation is that ‘the name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental. To be brothers, to be acquaintances, – master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance.’ In this famous climax to the essay Emerson’s transcendental experience separates him from all earthly distractions. Friends become foreign and to be in any relationship with another person is a ‘disturbance’. Instead, the self reaches its zenith by becoming ‘part or particle of God’.7 By becoming self-reliant, Emerson activates a transcendental episode which leads to a purer relationship with the self, undiluted by worldly interference. If we compare this to Jane’s transcendental episode, also born out of her self-reliance, we find something very different. The fulfilment of Jane’s self-reliant efforts (her reward, as it were, for protecting her sense of self from those who would have it compromised) is reunion with Rochester. Their reunion comes about in a way that might be termed transcendental, as Jane hears Rochester cry out ‘Jane! Jane! Jane!’ from miles across the moors.8 It is certainly a supernatural episode, and a break in the novel’s realist texture, as she is called to Rochester across an improbable geographical distance, as if in some strange transmigration of souls. But Jane’s transcendental episode is the antithesis of Emerson’s experiences in his famous ‘transparent eye-ball’ episode. Rather than cutting out worldly distractions, Jane’s transcendental episode reunites her with Rochester; and where Emerson becomes ‘part or particle of God’, the novel encourages the reader here, more than anywhere else in the novel, to see that Jane belongs with Rochester in partnership.9 Jane’s realisation might be regarded as equivalent to Catherine Earnshaw’s in Wuthering Heights when she declares, ‘I am

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Heathcliff!’10 But Carla Kaplan reminds us that Jane Eyre resists an entirely happy ending: Jane is never unsure of what she wants or why she wants it. Her desires – for intimacy, recognition, sisterhood, a change in her gender and class position and in the meanings attached to such categories – resonate with every important theme in the history of feminist struggle. Our romance with the text, in that sense, is hardly unfounded. But if Jane knows just what she wants, the novel – quite rationally in my view – does not know how to give it to her. Even as it creates a paradigm of transcendence and romance, Jane Eyre also resists the unproblematic articulation of easy or utopian solutions.11 Jane’s transcendental episode leads her back to a transformed Rochester. Now blind and lame, Rochester is a tamer man than the brooding hero with whom she fell in love: towards the end of the novel she presents the reader with the minutiae of her caring duties for her husband, becoming ‘his right hand’ and being ‘knit . . . so very close’ specifically because of his new disabilities.12 Kaplan is correct to notice that, if Jane Eyre is a model of transcendence and romance, then the transcendence it offers is actually rather worldly (recalibrating human relationships rather than retreating from them) and the romance messy, complicated and dutiful. Only once this power dynamic has been reversed in Jane Eyre (once Rochester has undergone the symbolic castration of his blindness and lameness) can Jane marry him.13 The reader may celebrate what Jane achieves in the novel – survival despite her early deprivation and abuse, an inherited wealth of her own, a marriage to the man she loves, motherhood – yet cannot ignore the terms on which the marriage takes place. His symbolic castration may well, then, leave the reader feeling slightly cheated. Yet, despite our doubts over the terms of Jane’s marriage to Rochester, we can easily notice her increased self-reliance as the novel ensues, as shown first in her revolt against the tyranny of the misogynistic John Reed after the red-room incident, and then, again, at Lowood, where she experiences the violent regime of Brocklehurst.14 His brutal treatment of the girls at Lowood ultimately contributes to the death of the saintly Helen Burns, and upon Jane’s arrival there he instructs the teachers at Lowood to ‘punish her body to save her soul’.15 Climactically, Jane draws on her self-reliance when she leaves Rochester on the eve of their wedding, on discovering his wife Bertha Mason. Throughout the novel, a series of mostly male obstacles lie before her: John Reed’s misogyny, Brocklehurst’s violence, Rochester’s lying and manipulation, St John Rivers’s asphyxiating romantic demands. Jane’s self-reliance is, then, very specifically, her defensive protection against male threat in the novel. It has very little of Emerson’s transcendental philosophy about it, which, as I will go on to show, speaks of an equality for all individuals, including women.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Self-Reliance’ and Gender If it can be agreed that there is self-reliance in Jane Eyre, it lies in her determination to protect her sense of self against external (mostly male) threats, and she exhibits a pragmatic self-reliance which is quite different from Emerson’s idealist-transcendental version. The essay ‘Self-Reliance’ begins with the assumption that we are all innately

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individual thinkers who should listen to our own internal voices, as in this famous passage: Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connexion of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age . . .16 While it may seem that Emerson addresses an exclusively male readership here, the rhetoric of ‘Great men’ conforms to the discursive conventions of the age and need not automatically signal a deeply held patriarchal commitment (despite his reputation for cultural conservatism). All the same, Emerson scholars tend to find his broad support for women developing rather late in his career, after 1850. Before then, Emerson was reluctant to speak up directly for the equality of races or genders, as Leslie Eckel points out: ‘Emerson was not drawn to essentialist terms [but rather] he preferred to operate in a realm that he called “the old largeness”, an expansive freedom of mind to which he would escape when pressed on matters of nationality, gender and race.’17 This retreat to ‘the old largeness’ had the problematic potential to excuse Emerson from the pressing topics of the day concerning race and gender. As Phyllis Cole and Jana Argersinger have stated, consequently ‘too often feminist critics still see transcendentalism as only a discourse of [white] male egotism and privilege’.18 Cole puts Emerson’s gender politics to the test in a study that examines his relationships with the women in his family circle and their influences on his thinking. Conscious that she is writing in ‘the same years that critics have scrutinized the gender politics of Emersonian rhetoric’, Cole argues that, rather than looking to 1850 and beyond for Emerson’s interest in women as intellectual equals, his early address ‘The American Scholar’ (1837) already subtly proposes the rebalancing of gender relations. While the essay ‘epitomizes androcentrism in its greeting to the gentlemen of Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa society and its call for a heroic, individualistic “Man Thinking,” ’ it also simultaneously seeks a new human unity bordering on traditionally female domains. ‘The feelings of the child’ and ‘the meaning of household life’ are among topics affirmed as worthy of exploration and poetic rendering by this thinker. And when Ralph Waldo Emerson names ‘nature’ as a primary influence upon the scholar’s mind, he designates the household scene as part of nature: ‘Every day, men and women, conversing – beholding and beholden.’ This language tells of a visual and verbal exchange across gender that is both level and reciprocal.19 Despite Emerson’s attempt to seek a ‘new human unity’, Cole concludes that ‘[t]he Emersonian “Man Thinking” really is male’. Yet, crucially, she notices that he ‘counts women among his sources’, hinting at the cross-gender intellectual exchange that would later characterise his relationships with Margaret Fuller and Louisa May Alcott.20 Emerson’s call to ‘Great men’ in ‘Self-Reliance’ might well be read as the sexist exclusion of female readers. However, given his intellectual relationships with women in his circle, and his developing commitment to the women’s rights movement, we should read Emerson’s call to ‘trust thyself’ and to accept ‘the connexion of events’ as an example of his interest in establishing the ‘new human unity’ that Cole locates in ‘The American Scholar’.21

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Emerson’s essays were aimed at unlocking the potential for self-determination in female readers too. And, as an ageing Emerson’s attitudes to race began to change later in life, his focus on gender equality developed significantly after 1850.22 He supported the women’s rights movement in the US from its conception, and he attended the National Woman’s Rights Convention held in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850, two years after the historic Seneca Falls Convention. In 1855 he addressed the Woman’s Rights Convention with a speech that would become ‘Woman’ (1855), and by 1865 he was an honorary member of the New England Woman’s Club, where he attended meetings. He even tried to recruit the suffragette Elizabeth Oakes Smith to his Transcendental Club in Concord.23 Emerson’s letters to one active member of the Transcendental Club, Margaret Fuller, testify to his serious commitment to gender equality, not least in the evident appreciation of her intellect. In a letter typifying the reverential tone of his correspondence with Fuller, he writes: See you not that I cannot spare you? that you cannot be spared? that a vast & beautiful Power to whose counsels our will was never party, has thrown us into strict neighbourhood for best & happiest ends? . . . Speak to me of every thing but myself & I will endeavour to make an intelligible reply. Allow me to serve you & you will do me a kindness . . . let me visit you and I shall be cheered as ever by the spectacle of so much genius & character as you have always the gift to draw around you.24 In this letter Emerson calls on Fuller as his intellectual equal who ‘cannot be spared’ and who has been paired with him by a ‘beautiful Power’ giving a divine authority to their marriage of minds. In her important study of Emerson’s letters to Fuller, Christina Zwarg claims that such passages ‘provide an intrinsic feminist frame [and that] studying the letters to Fuller encourages a reconsideration of the critical frames we have used to evaluate Emerson’s more traditional writing’.25 In her essay on Emerson and reform, Armida Gilbert goes further than this and argues that by the ideological standards of the mid-nineteenth century, Emerson has to be considered a ‘radical feminist’ since he ‘inspired the reader to consider for himself or herself the implications of a particular idea’. She claims that Women could then apply these implications to and for themselves, as Margaret Fuller had done in extending Emerson’s concepts of self-reliance, individualism, and the primacy of spiritual or moral character to women and their conditioning in Woman in the Nineteenth Century.26 Indeed, in Fuller’s groundbreaking work Woman in the Nineteenth Century we find Emerson’s philosophy developed and manipulated to highlight the plight of women who, due to society’s expectations, could not fully take up Emerson’s call to be selfreliant. Fuller writes, with critical verve, of what it means for women to nurture their inner authority: though I might be aided and instructed by others, I must depend on myself as the only constant friend. This self dependence, which was honoured in me, is deprecated as a fault in most women. They are taught to learn their rule from without, not to unfold it from within.27

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Although she recognises the legitimacy of Emerson’s self-reliant philosophy, and subscribes to ‘this self dependence’, Fuller laments the fact that most women in the nineteenth century were taught to follow male instruction. Emerson does not attempt to flatter Fuller when he says that he would be ‘cheered as ever by the spectacle of so much genius & character as you have always the gift to draw around you’. He is referring to Fuller’s ‘Conversations’, the meetings for women that she led at Elizabeth Peabody’s bookstore in Boston between 1839 and 1844, where Emerson’s philosophy was discussed. Peabody and the many women who attended Fuller’s ‘Conversations’ reflected on Emerson’s concept of self-reliance, and in doing so extended his philosophy to themselves. As the host of these meetings, Peabody certainly followed Emerson’s teachings, as did his daughter-figure, Louisa May Alcott. Both were able to adopt Emersonian self-reliance and transform it into a feminist sensibility in their own writings, including Peabody’s critically overlooked Record of a School (1835) and Louisa May Alcott’s acclaimed Little Women (1868–9).28

Elizabeth Peabody’s Record of a School Elizabeth Peabody’s position at the centre of the Transcendentalist movement is sometimes forgotten, but she was a crucial part of that group who advised Emerson, who taught with Bronson Alcott, and who was involved in the Brook Farm utopian community. She wrote directly on Transcendentalism in her essay ‘A Vision’ (1843), which Diane Brown Jones claims should be read as a ‘manifesto’ of the Transcendentalist movement.29 Peabody was also an important figure in the Alcott family’s life, working as an assistant teacher in Bronson’s Temple School in Boston where her sisters Mary and Sophia visited, and her pioneering work on Atlantic literary affinities elsewhere merits a focused consideration. As an intellectual at the centre of the Transcendentalist movement, Peabody engaged in important transatlantic creative commerce. In 1838, for example, after a lengthy correspondence, she sent Wordsworth two of Emerson’s recent works, ‘Nature’ and ‘The American Scholar’, following this in 1841 with a copy of Emerson’s Essays: First Series.30 A little later, in 1842, Emerson came to own a copy of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience that was given to him by Elizabeth Peabody and is inscribed ‘R. W. Emerson from his friend E.P.P.’.31 Her ‘foreign library’ that she ran out of her Boston bookstore introduced the Transcendentalists to international literature and philosophy. The collection of around 1,000 items was gifted to Concord Free Public Library in 1978–9 and the bulk of material was published between 1820 and 1850.32 Her library included work by Coleridge, Carlyle, Wordsworth, Constant, Cousin, de Gérando, Goethe, Richter, Schiller, Schlegel and de Staël, but frustratingly there is no fiction by the Brontës, although some titles did go missing.33 However, these examples testify to Peabody’s active role and position in the transatlantic dynamics of Romanticism. Yet the legacy of Fuller’s ‘Conversations’ and the reputation of the men in the Transcendental Club have overshadowed Elizabeth Peabody’s intellectual endeavours. In one of the few studies of Peabody,34 Bruce Ronda writes: it has been Margaret Fuller’s destiny to receive the greater critical and biographical attention. Fuller’s brilliant Conversations, her feminist challenge to assumptions about gender and social institutions, her career as critic and journalist, the dramatic end to her Italian adventure – all these have fascinated readers and commentators

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since her death in 1850. In contrast, Peabody appears in a variety of supporting and secondary roles in New England reform and literary culture throughout much of the nineteenth century.35 However, Peabody’s writing is worth a closer look as Emerson’s philosophy of selfreliance is absorbed into her account of her time teaching at the Temple School in her book. For example, Megan Marshall has observed that: Record of a School was no slight book of pedagogy; Elizabeth’s aim was to diagram the unfolding of the human soul. In the Temple School, as described in Elizabeth’s Record, children were viewed as possessing an intuition of God and goodness that their teachers helped them to recognize and cultivate.36 But this was not to set children apart. In the broader Transcendentalist philosophy driven by Emerson, adults, too, possessed an intuition of God if they listened closely enough to their own voices and accepted their ‘transcendent destiny’.37 In the Temple School the imagination was ‘called into life’, and readers of Record of a School could follow Alcott’s discourse on ‘the inward truth’ as ‘the first truth’.38 This was Emersonian self-reliance in action. Sarah Elbert has noticed the influence of this democratic feeling on the women writers who were Emerson’s and Bronson Alcott’s associates. Elbert writes, ‘As Bronson had said to his pupils, the reformers believed that every human being is God or has a God-like endowment of reason and imagination, and therefore all people are equal and gifted with divinely democratic potential.’39 Record of a School is infused with this profound belief in equality and democracy that Peabody shared with other Transcendentalists. At one point she recalls teaching the children at Alcott’s school that life is essentially imagined by the individual in the sense that each ‘outward truth’ is translated by them into a ‘tale’ of their own creation. To illustrate this point to the children, Peabody tells them the first ‘tale that I remembered Life to have told me’. That narrative is the ‘story of the Pilgrim fathers’ arriving in the New World in a land where they worshipped God without ‘meeting houses’ but knelt and prayed in the wilderness that they found there.40 But in Peabody’s translated version of the story of the Pilgrim Fathers that she hears as a child, the tale is dramatically altered in a way that the Temple School children immediately spot: the Pilgrim Fathers are all women. She relates her story to the children: I saw a ship on the horizon . . . As it came near, there was a company of women standing on the deck . . . At last the vessel stopped by a large rock on the shore. I did not see a single sailor, or any anchor, I never had heard of an anchor, but it seemed to me these women walked off the deck upon the rock; and walked over the rock carefully, looking at their feet, and holding up their robes; and they glided over the frozen snow into a high, dark, deep, evergreen forest; and under the trees they knelt down and worshipped God, though there were no meeting-houses.41 In Peabody’s rendering of the story, these celestial women replace all men on the ship. In fact she ‘did not see a single sailor’. In a self-reliant gesture, Peabody is blind to the male sailors one might expect to imagine as part of the nautical tale because she allows

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herself to narrate it from a female perspective – indeed, shaped by her own perspective. By foregrounding women in the privileged position of the heralded Pilgrim Fathers, Peabody shows the children the potential of women to assume historical importance while highlighting the legitimacy of one’s own truth, regardless of any hierarchy of gender. Indeed, she asks the children, ‘now tell me do you think I gained most truth or falsehood from that picture? The boy to whom I asked the question, answered that I gained more truth than falsehood. Yes, said I, the truth of the mind.’42 In agreeing with Peabody’s version of this important historical memory, the boy conforms to her feminised transformation of the story of the Pilgrim Fathers in a gesture of gender equality so that the ‘inward truth’ becomes validated as ‘the first truth’. Of course, it is that ‘inward truth’ that Emerson calls readers to listen to when he says ‘trust thyself’.43 It also recalls the ‘inward treasure’ that Rochester notices Jane Eyre to possess, but Peabody’s feminist declaration in Record of a School – where she converts the story of the Pilgrim Fathers into a narrative privileging ‘Pilgrim Mothers’ – is a much more radical statement than anything Brontë attempts in Jane Eyre. Peabody presents this as one of several victories for sexual equality throughout her time at the school. Elsewhere she gives an account of Alcott discussing ideological conditioning with the children: Who are truly blind, those who cannot see inward things, or those who cannot see outward things? Those who cannot see inward things. You know when we talked a while ago, we said something about a net which catches. Things, perhaps, are a net which catches us sometimes. Perhaps some of you are caught?44 Bronson Alcott explicitly warns the children against the limiting ideology of the time (which Peabody must have read as including gender difference) as a ‘things’ net that snares the individual in external or material conditions, and he proposes instead a blindness to outward things in favour of a happy cultivation of an inward sight which is associated with feelings and a good conscience. Bronson Alcott’s Temple School would fail – as most of his disastrous ventures did – but Peabody’s Record of a School does justice to his good intentions and should be read as a significant Transcendentalist text rather than a functional pedagogical instruction manual.

Self-Reliant (Little) Women While Bronson Alcott’s school was failing and he was making a mess of the family’s affairs, Emerson acted as an intellectual father-figure for Alcott’s daughter, Louisa May. Carolyn Maibor has written a full account of Emerson and female self-reliance in Labor Pains: Emerson, Hawthorne, and Alcott on Work, Women, and the Development of the Self (2004), in which she observes ‘[Louisa May] Alcott . . . is interested not in challenging the philosophies of independence and self-reliance put forth by Emerson and others, but rather in specifically showing how they apply to young women as well as young men.’45 My argument in this chapter so far has been that Brontë seems to impose Jane Eyre’s self-reliance on her, much as she does to Lucy Snowe in Villette, as a defensive strategy allowing her to endure her precarious position as a single woman limited by the structures and strictures of patriarchy. Unlike Brontë, by taking Emerson’s message to be valid for women too, Peabody and Alcott are able to offer a much more radical vision of

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gender equality in their writings. ‘In her fiction, Alcott fleshes out Emerson’s views on the benefits of labor, and demonstrates how women can achieve the same independence, education, and sense of purpose in the world which young men are encouraged to seek through work,’ Maibor claims.46 Whereas Jane Eyre’s position as a governess enables her to meet and marry Rochester, thus fulfilling her romantic destiny, Louisa May Alcott is much more interested in the liberating benefits of work for women as well as for men. She undoubtedly absorbs this belief in the freeing power of labour from Emerson, whose philosophy focused on the religiosity of work. In ‘Self-Reliance’ he celebrated the ‘prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it’, claiming that the prayers of labour are ‘true prayers heard throughout nature’.47 For Emerson (and the Alcotts), work could be a sort of divine worship and was therefore capable of transporting the individual from drudgery to redemption. Alcott was a lifelong admirer of Charlotte Brontë, and especially of Jane Eyre. Having read Gaskell’s biography of Brontë, she wrote, ‘I can’t be a C.B., but I may do a little something yet.’48 Christine Doyle observes that Alcott repeated the motif of Jane Eyre throughout her writings but that she ‘incorporated a more active form of heroism than she found in Brontë’.49 Doyle does not mention Emerson in her study, but this ‘active form of heroism’ that she notices in Alcott’s more successful works might be put down to an Emersonian self-reliance that she writes into Little Women. Alcott’s twist on Jane Eyre, enhancing Brontë’s narrative with Emerson’s philosophy, exposes the limitations faced by women in the original. After all, the heroine of Little Women, Jo March, exhibits a self-reliance that allows for the autonomy of the individual regardless of her sex. Sarah Elbert has noticed that Emerson’s essays (‘Experience’, ‘Self-Reliance’, ‘Friendship’ and ‘Love’) argued that the ‘person who experienced life directly grew into spiritual and intellectual self-reliance, becoming an individual fully capable of republican self-government and unselfish friendship and love’. And she claims that because of her investment in this intellectual growth, ‘Louisa May Alcott insisted that voluntary relationships could cross social boundaries.’50 Jo, unlike Jane, is able repeatedly to cross social boundaries in her traditionally masculine approach to life which positions intellectual work above all else. Little Women also imagines a version of Bronson Alcott’s failed Temple School. Its fictional counterpart, Jo’s Plumfield School, is an institution where ‘relationships could cross social boundaries’. The Plumfield (Temple) School thrives as an intellectual woman is elevated from being the mere observer of the experiment – as Peabody had been for Bronson Alcott – to the driving force behind the democratic vision come true. The closing scene at Plumfield paints a paradisiacal picture of a perfect day, and the success is down to Jo, who established the school in her late aunt’s home: The old orchard wore its holiday attire; golden rod and asters fringed the mossy walls; grasshoppers skipped briskly in the sere grass, and crickets chirped like fairy pipers at a feast. Squirrels were busy with their small harvesting, birds twittered their adieux from the alders in the lane, and every tree stood ready to send down its shower of red or yellow apples at the first shake. Everybody was there, – everybody laughed and sang, climbed up and tumbled down; everybody declared that there never had been such a perfect day or such a jolly set to enjoy it, – and every one gave themselves up to the simple pleasures of the hour as freely as if there were no such things as care or sorrow in the world.51

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In a vision of benevolent nature, social relations are harmonised and sweetly perfected (Mrs March closes the novel by saying that she ‘never can wish [the girls] a greater happiness than this!’).52 In this utopian scene reminiscent of Bronson Alcott’s Fruitlands, Alcott underlines the presence of Mrs March as the strong matriarchal figure celebrating with the boys at her daughter’s successful school, where ‘everybody was there’ and ‘everybody laughed’, before a fall into social difference and the separateness of gendered identity. It is not the only moment in the novel that exemplifies Jo’s ‘active heroism’, and the climactic success of the school is built on the independent spirit she has nurtured in the course of the narrative. In a revision of Jane Eyre, both this independent spirit and active heroism reach fulfilment in her union with Friedrich Bhaer.53 Reunited with the Professor, she discusses the equality of their relationship: ‘I’m glad you are poor; I couldn’t bear a rich husband!’ said Jo . . . The Professor found that so touching that he would have been glad of his handkerchief if he could have got at it; as he couldn’t Jo wiped his eyes for him, and said, laughing, as she took away a bundle or two, – ‘I may be strong-minded, but no one can say I’m out of my sphere now, – for woman’s special mission is supposed to be drying tears and bearing burdens. I’m to carry my share, Friedrich, and help to earn the home. Make up your mind to that, or I’ll never go,’ she added resolutely, as he tried to reclaim his load.54 Jo embraces Friedrich’s poverty in a reversal of the social mobility narrative of Jane Eyre. Without a rich husband Jo has none of the concerns over the ethics of wealth (does Jane question where Rochester’s wealth came from?) but also, without the status of wealth, Friedrich and Jo can be equals. When she does inherit Aunt March’s home she uses it as a boarding school for motherless boys. Plumfield happily rids Jo of the trappings of wealth and any associated status anxiety. The message of gender equality is underscored here when Jo sardonically calls it a ‘woman’s special mission’ to dry tears and bear burdens. But, of course, the reader is aware that Jo does not believe this. Instead, the two are pictured jostling over bundles of books, Jo carrying a bundle or two and Friedrich trying ‘to reclaim his load’. The equal division of the burden of the parcels here is an obvious symbol of their equality in other ways. Finally, if the reader still doubts the equal nature of Jo and Friedrich’s relationship, Jo gives a speech about the importance of work in her life. Friedrich asks, ‘Haf you patience to wait a long time, Jo? I must be away and do my work alone’ [to which Jo replies] ‘I have my duty also, and my work. I couldn’t enjoy myself if I neglected them even for you, – so there’s no need of hurry or impatience. You can do your part out West, – I can do mine here, – and both be happy.’55 Alcott’s message about the liberating effects of work for women as well as men is clear here. Intellectual work, usually considered masculine (recall Hawthorne’s slight on what he saw as a ‘damned mob of scribbling women’), sets Jo free.56 The reader is given the conventional resolution of marriage at the end of the novel in a self-conscious allusion to Jane Eyre, but where Jane will exclaim ‘Reader, I married him’ as the climax of her life’s story,57 Jo remarks that work comes first, telling the Professor that she would

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not neglect duty even for him, as without work and duty she could not be happy. Jo’s self-reliance, and how it informs her relationships with men, has been consistently displayed throughout the novel, first in rejecting Laurie and then in achieving a relationship with her intellectual equal. Jane returns to Rochester only after his symbolic castration; Jo enters into a relationship that is a meeting of minds and incomes where neither party is elevated over the other and where the dignity of work – in an Emersonian sense – is elevated above both.

Concluding Thoughts This chapter has offered a transatlantic comparative analysis of two concepts of self-reliance, to show that Emerson’s writings present an egalitarian philosophy that aimed at unlocking the potential for self-determination in female readers as well as ‘Great men’.58 His self-reliance is transcendental in character and meaning, rather than pragmatic and adaptive as it is in Jane Eyre. Women writers in the US, especially Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody and Louisa May Alcott, were able to absorb Emerson’s message and show in their own writing how it could and should be applied to women as well as to men. Peabody and Alcott, under Emerson’s influence, were able to offer a more radical vision of gender equality than we find in Jane Eyre, the English novel that has long been celebrated as an important early work of feminist fiction. In Little Women Alcott adopts, for Jo March, the kind of feminist self-reliance that Peabody teaches her children in Record of a School. ‘Jane Eyre fever’ hit the Transcendentalists, as it did many nineteenth-century readers in the US, and Alcott consciously rewrote Jane Eyre in Little Women by infusing Jo March’s character with a self-reliance that was not fully open to Brontë’s character.59 Alcott’s creative remediation of Jane Eyre offers her readers a vision of self-reliance that ignores gender and thereby underlines limitations in the source narrative. Peabody’s Record of a School has gone virtually unnoticed in literary criticism, and scholars have mostly read these three writers as regionally positioned (Brontë confined to the Yorkshire Moors, and Peabody and Alcott as Transcendentalist writers of Massachusetts). This chapter, on the other hand, outlines what might be gained from reading them together in a transatlantic context, noticing important differences in the liberation of Peabody’s and Alcott’s feminism when compared to Brontë’s. Where Jane’s marriage with Rochester depends on his incapacity, Jo manages to fashion an equal relationship with Friedrich Bhaer and Peabody instructs her children about Pilgrim Mothers, not Fathers. John Seelye links Jane Eyre to ‘Emerson’s notion of self-reliance’, gesturing to the circulation of self-reliance in the Atlantic world.60 However, although nineteenth-century US writers were caught up in ‘Jane Eyre fever’, Jane’s self-reliance was entirely pragmatic and born out of difficult experiences and therefore unlike Emerson’s transcendental philosophy.61 Louisa May Alcott may have celebrated Jane’s self-determination but she infused that character with an Emersonian self-reliance that transcended gender division and instructed on the importance of work for self-development. Emerson’s concept of self-reliance certainly spread among New England women writers, and Elizabeth Peabody engaged in the significant transatlantic circulation of self-reliance by ensuring that Emerson’s concept crossed the Atlantic to Wordsworth through her gifts to him of Emerson’s work. This chapter has

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shown that new understandings of Brontë, Peabody and Alcott can be achieved when their writing is considered in a system of literary and cultural exchange that crosses the Atlantic, and this requires a new critical configuration which can show how Peabody and Alcott capitalise on both Brontë’s novel and Emerson’s essays to create a vision of self-reliance that is larger than the sum of its parts.

Notes 1. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. Richard J. Dunn (1847; London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), p. 171. 2. Ellen Moers, Literary Women (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976); Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the NineteenthCentury Literary Imagination, 2nd edn (1979; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing, 2nd edn (1977; London: Virago, 1982); Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady (New York : Pantheon Books, 1986). 3. Christine Doyle, Louisa May Alcott and Charlotte Brontë: Transatlantic Translations (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2000); John Seelye, Jane Eyre’s American Daughters (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005). See also Birgit Spengler, ‘American Jane Eyres: Louisa May Alcott’s and Anna Katharine Green’s Transatlantic Dialogues with Charlotte Brontë’, in Beth L. Lueck, Brigitte Bailey and Lucinda L. Damon-Bach (eds), Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain (Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2012), pp. 255–78. 4. Authors of readers’ guides often discuss Jane Eyre as a self-reliant character. Harold Bloom has written that ‘the values Jane Eyre herself represents appear chiefly to be ethical, with a particular focus on self-reliance’; Bloom’s Guides: Jane Eyre (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009), p. 43. Likewise, Zoe Brennan discusses Jane’s ‘increasing self-reliance’ in Brontë’s Jane Eyre (London: A & C Black, 2010), p. 46. Much earlier, Jerome Beaty described Brontë’s protagonist as ‘the proudly self-reliant young Jane’ in ‘Jane Eyre Cubed: The Three Dimensions of the Text’, Narrative 4 (1996), p. 75, and he refers to Jane as being ‘self-reliant’ again in Misreading Jane Eyre: A Postformalist Paradigm (Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1996), p. 83. Elsewhere, Drew Lamonica gives a good overview of the path shaped by critics such as Gilbert and Gubar, Showalter, and Moers, whose readings highlight Jane’s self-reliance, in We Are Three Sisters: Self and Family in the Writing of the Brontës (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), pp. 68–9. 5. Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853; London: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 31. 6. Seelye, Jane Eyre’s American Daughters, p. 220. 7. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Nature’, in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume I: Nature, Addresses, and Lectures (1836; Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 10. 8. Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 357. 9. Emerson, ‘Nature’, p. 10. 10. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, ed. Pauline Nestor (1847; London: Penguin Books, 2003), p. 82. 11. Carla Kaplan, The Erotics of Talk: Women’s Writing and Feminist Paradigms (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 98. 12. For more on Rochester’s disability see David Bolt et al. (eds), The Madwoman and the Blindman: Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012); Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 384.

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13. Elaine Showalter discusses Rochester’s symbolic castration, writing, ‘The recurring motif in feminine fiction that does seem to show outright hostility, if not castration wishes, toward men, is the blinding, maiming, or blighting motif.’ Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (1977; London: Virago, 2009), p. 123. 14. Julia Sun-Joo Lee has dealt with the power dynamics between Jane Eyre and John Reed and discusses the similarities between Jane as ‘rebel slave’ and the language of slave narratives. See The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 31–5. 15. Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 56. 16. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Self-Reliance’, in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume II: Essays: First Series (1841; Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 28. 17. Leslie Eckel, ‘Gender’, in Wesley T. Mott (ed.), Ralph Waldo Emerson in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 189; the quotation is from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The Poet’, in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume III: Essays: Second Series (1844; Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 22. 18. Phyllis Cole and Jana Argersinger, ‘Exaltadas: A Female Genealogy of Transcendentalism’, ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 57.1–2 (2011): 1–18, p. 9. 19. Phyllis Cole, ‘ “Men and Women Conversing”: The Emersons in 1837’, in Wesley T. Mott and Robert E. Burkholder (eds), Emersonian Circles: Essays in Honor of Joel Myerson (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1997), p. 128. 20. Cole, ‘ “Men and Women Conversing” ’, p. 129. 21. Emerson, ‘Self-Reliance’, p. 28; Cole, ‘ “Men and Women Conversing” ’, p. 129. 22. Emerson’s changing attitudes to race are interesting to note. In 1840, he had written about African Americans, ‘It is plain that so inferior a race must perish shortly’; Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, Volume VII: 1838–1842, ed. A. W. Plumstead and Harrison Hayford (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969), p. 393. Yet by 1857 he had reached the view that where slavery was concerned ‘the time had come to meet force with force’ and he began to support John Brown’s cause. See Len Gougeon, ‘Historical Background’, in Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, ed. Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. xlvi. 23. For more on Emerson’s activism within the women’s rights movement see Armida Gilbert, ‘ “Pierced by the Thorns of Reform”: Emerson on Womanhood’, in T. Gregory Garvey (ed.), The Emerson Dilemma: Essays on Emerson and Social Reform (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2001), pp. 93–114. 24. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘To Margaret Fuller, October 24, 1840’, in Selected Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Joel Myerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 237. 25. Christina Zwarg, Feminist Conversations: Fuller, Emerson, and the Play of Reading (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 32. 26. Gilbert, ‘ “Pierced by the Thorns of Reform” ’, pp. 108–9. 27. Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Larry J. Reynolds (1845; London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998), p. 22. 28. This work builds on Tiffany K. Wayne’s account of Transcendentalism and feminism in Woman Thinking: Woman and Transcendentalism in Nineteenth-Century America (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2004), where she argues that Transcendentalism provided a language that attracted nineteenth-century women writers and helped to promote an emerging feminist movement. 29. Phyllis Cole and Jana Argersinger have read Peabody’s ‘A Vision’ in brief and have shown how her essay ‘enters into lateral relationship with Emerson’ and ‘parallels [Margaret]

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30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56.

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Fuller, who was in 1843 ransacking ancient mythologies to find archetypes of woman for “The Great Lawsuit” ’. They notice that, like Fuller, Peabody in ‘A Vision’ ‘witnesses the arts and mythologies of India and Greece [and] imagines a dialogue with Plato and Socrates . . . Her expansive account makes no Fulleresque plea for women, but it enacts a woman’s intellectual and priestly power’ (Cole and Argersinger, ‘Exaltadas’, p. 6); see Diane Brown Jones, ‘Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s Transcendental Manifesto’, in Joel Myerson (ed.), Studies in the American Renaissance (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), p. 197. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Volume IV: The Later Years, Part I, ed. Alan G. Hill, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 231. Walter Harding, Emerson’s Library (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1967), p. 33. Peabody Books, 1524–1878, (last accessed 20 April 2016). Elizabeth Peabody’s Foreign Library, (last accessed 20 April 2016). There is also Louise Hall Tharp, The Peabody Sisters of Salem (Boston: Little Brown, 1950); Ruth Baylor, Elizabeth Peabody, Kindergarten Pioneer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1965); and most recently Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006). Barbara L. Packer discusses Elizabeth Peabody’s Record of a School in brief in The Transcendentalists (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), p. 58. Bruce A. Ronda, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody: A Reformer on Her Own Terms (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 1. Marshall, The Peabody Sisters, p. 315. Emerson, ‘Self-Reliance’, p. 28. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Record of a School (Boston: J. Munroe, 1835), pp. 16, 60. Sarah Elbert, ‘Introduction’, in Elbert (ed.), Louisa May Alcott on Race, Sex, and Slavery (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997), p. xvii. Peabody, Record of a School, p. 62. Peabody, Record of a School, pp. 61–2. Peabody, Record of a School, p. 62. Emerson, ‘Self-Reliance’, p. 28. Peabody, Record of a School, p. 174. Carolyn Maibor, Labor Pains: Emerson, Hawthorne, and Alcott on Work, Women, and the Development of the Self (2004; New York: Routledge, 2013), p. xxiii. Maibor, Labor Pains, p. xxiii. Emerson, ‘Self-Reliance’, p. 44. Quoted in Doyle, Louisa May Alcott and Charlotte Brontë, p. 19. Doyle, Louisa May Alcott and Charlotte Brontë, p. 262. Elbert, ‘Introduction’, p. xiii. Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 469. Alcott, Little Women, p. 473. Laura Dassow Walls has written on the political implications of Jo’s marriage to Friedrich Bhaer in her essay ‘The Cosmopolitan Project of Louisa May Alcott’, in Jana L. Argersinger and Phyllis Cole (eds), Toward a Female Genealogy of Transcendentalism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014), pp. 438–9. Alcott, Little Women, p. 462. Alcott, Little Women, p. 462. Nathaniel Hawthorne cited in Leland S. Person (ed.), The Cambridge Introduction to Nathaniel Hawthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 24.

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57. Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 382. 58. Emerson, ‘Self-Reliance’, p. 28. 59. Edwin Percy Whipple, ‘Novels of the Season’, North American Review 141 (October 1848): 354–69. 60. Seelye, Jane Eyre’s American Daughters, p. 220. 61. Whipple, ‘Novels of the Season’.

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16 Suffragette Celebrity at Home from Abroad: Feminist Periodicals and Transatlantic Circulation Barbara Green

P

eriodicals have proven to be an ideal resource for mapping the literary and cultural networks of modernity. The modern print cultural landscape was diverse and complex, characterised by efforts to reach wide audiences as well as ambitions to cultivate niche audiences. Mass-market newspapers emerged during the last decades of the nineteenth century due to new technologies for the rapid production and circulation of print, and an expanded popular readership due to the rise in literacy rates. The turn into the twentieth century also saw the rise of the little magazines, publications that generally sought out smaller audiences characterised by advanced taste. These dramatic shifts in the print media environment of the early twentieth century are generally understood in modern periodical studies as symptoms and symbols of modernity: Ann Ardis and Patrick Collier, for example, describe a ‘sea change in the world of Anglo-American book, newspaper, and periodical publishing’ at the turn of the twentieth century.1 Within this environment of media transformation in the Atlantic world, the Edwardian suffrage press played a significant role. Over twenty-five suffrage publications circulated in the UK alone in the early decades of the twentieth century. In addition, pro-suffrage positions were taken up in socialist papers, trade journals, and even within the more traditional women’s magazines.2 Similarly, a wide range of suffrage papers circulated in the US, reflecting the ambitions of individual feminist organisations and communities. The organ of the militant Women’s Social and Political Union in Britain, Votes for Women, is especially interesting for its blending of new promotional strategies adopted from the mass circulating press with an advanced approach that included attention to transatlantic feminism. Frederick Pethick Lawrence, one of the co-editors of Votes for Women, commented that the WSPU’s paper would fill a crucial need since the daily papers ignored the emerging ‘new class of readers’ composed of women interested in the political sphere and thus could not accommodate the ‘woman’s point of view’.3 Votes for Women captured the ‘woman’s point of view’ through a mixed-media format featuring a wide range of materials: editorials, political coverage, reportage on WSPU activities, information regarding meetings and activities, photographs, biographies of prominent suffrage activists, short fiction, poems, cartoons, book and theatre reviews, a fashion column, plentiful advertisements and coverage of US feminism. The paper mixed traditional

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and advanced positions and rhetorics, presenting readers with both popular literary forms and decidedly avant-garde positions. This juxtaposition of tones, forms and styles in an eye-catching and lively format has made the WSPU’s Votes for Women an especially exciting source for scholars working in feminist media studies and for those working in modernist studies more broadly. Because the militant leaders of the WSPU, Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel, were media sensations in Britain, North America and elsewhere, Votes for Women is an especially important source for the exploration of modern transatlantic feminist networks. The WSPU was established in 1903 by Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst with the aim of developing new strategies for the suffrage movement. The complex promotional culture of the militant WSPU captured the public imagination through a smart appropriation of modern advertising language and techniques. Suffragettes transformed the public arena into an elaborate stage for activist propaganda by chalking messages on pavements; using signboards to make suffragettes into messages; draping suffrage logos on trains, vans or automobiles; and exploiting the new public interest in the visual by staging marches, pageants or attention-grabbing deputations to Parliament. Resulting encounters with police were captured by newspaper photographers and transformed newspapers into a stage for the display of suffrage militancy.4 In addition, contributors and editors worked deliberately to promote suffrage leaders as celebrities within the pages of Votes for Women. Votes for Women has received quite a bit of attention from periodical studies scholars interested in a wide range of issues, from those interested in the rise of modern consumer culture to those interested in the development of a modern counterpublic sphere.5 The methodologies of those working in periodical studies, despite distinct disciplinary preferences, share an insistence that the periodical be understood as a text worthy of investigation in its own right rather than a container for valuable material. The materialist strategies of periodical studies encourage investigation of the ‘periodical code’ of papers including layout, typeface, illustration, modes of production, advertisement and circulation.6 Periodicals easily traverse oceans and borders, bringing authors of diverse nationalities together, and constructing transnational reading communities.7 Within this context, the ‘politics of the page’ in Votes for Women ties the circulation of feminist print cultural materials to the transatlantic movement of women activists.8 Because various forms of print cultural connectivity are represented within the pages of modern feminist periodicals and are thoroughly discussed, promoted and proclaimed in the press, the periodical archive allows us to track feminist transatlantic connections and explore how they manifest themselves in specific environments. In what follows, I’ll argue that the transatlantic periodical activity of the suffrage movement was instrumental in constructing a specific and modern form of affectfilled political celebrity. Votes for Women used a variety of modern New Journalistic and advertising methods, including journalistic travel writing, to celebrate the mother-daughter team Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst as well as the younger Sylvia Pankhurst as magnetic stars of the movement. Not only did travel journalism expand the feminist network transatlantically, but it also secured the commitment, dedication and desire of activists at home when suffrage leaders were unavailable because travelling abroad. Travel writing, for instance, could turn absence into periodical presence, allowing the suffrage leader Emmeline Pankhurst, her daughter (and Christabel’s sister) Sylvia Pankhurst, and Christabel herself to be, as one article put it, ‘in several places at once’.9 After exploring the significance of suffragette textual

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and embodied mobility, I will draw on three events from the early 1910s involving periodical coverage of the transatlantic travels (real and imagined) of members of the celebrated suffragist Pankhurst family: the 1911 North American lecture tour of Sylvia Pankhurst, the three-month North American lecture tour of suffrage leader Emmeline Pankhurst of October 1911 through to January 1912, and the (fantastic) travels of the ‘elusive’ Christabel Pankhurst, who had escaped from London to Paris to avoid arrest. Periodical studies, I hope to show, offers studies of the Atlantic world a detailed view of both the mechanics and the significance of print cultural circulation. Votes for Women used a variety of techniques of print cultural recirculation in order to make the absent suffragettes present – republication of articles and excerpts from US newspapers, the republication of letters from travelling suffrage leaders, as well as the reportage of suffrage speeches where telegrams or messages from absent leaders were made public. While examples of transatlantic suffrage travel surely worked to expand the feminist networks of modernity, the periodical coverage devoted to the travels of absent suffragettes also exploited the prosthetic subjectivities of periodicals to channel affect and emotion. Transatlantic suffragette travel writing of the sort published in Votes for Women illuminates the distinct models of feminist celebrity made possible by periodicals, models that maintained local attachments while extending the reach of global activist networks in the modern period.

Suffragettes on the Move: Transatlantic Travels and Periodical Circulation Transatlantic feminist mobility and transatlantic feminist periodical circulation were parallel and mutually supportive operations for suffrage activists since both suffragettes and periodicals marked their modernity through movement. The urban, national and transnational travels of suffragettes spread activist discourse through new communities. Similarly, the ambition to increase circulation of movement papers – through inventive promotional campaigns, street selling by suffragettes, and transatlantic exchange – marked suffrage papers as part of a modern media landscape characterised by speed, mass circulation, and visual and textual appeal. A study of the simultaneous flow of feminist periodicals and activists across the Atlantic brings together two mobilising truths of feminist studies of modernity: that the increased movement of women in and through the public sphere is distinctly modern, and that attending to the circulation of modern periodicals and their interlocking networks of authors and editors allows us to map the modern period in an entirely new way.10 The parallels between these two kinds of flow – the mobility of women and the circulation of print cultural materials – are dramatic. We often rely on the same language to describe both systems: terms such as ‘network’, ‘exchange’, ‘circulation’. The movement of women in the early twentieth century has been seen as distinctly ‘modern’ in studies of women as shoppers, women involved in social work, and women moving through urban streets as examples of the flâneuse. Deborah Parsons, for example, traces in the modern novel the story of ‘women [who] were entering the city with fresh eyes, observing it from within’.11 Similarly, metaphors of expansion, transport, distribution and conduits in periodical studies capture the energy and vitality of what Celia Aijmer Rydsjö and AnnKatrin Jonsson call the ‘sprawling network’ of transnational periodicals.12 Within this framework, the network incorporates both affective and textual relationships, providing an

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‘exchange of values, visions, ideas, financial circumstances, friendships, kinship and sexual relationships’.13 Here ‘international interconnectivity becomes praxis, as ideas, works and practices literally cross and question borders’.14 In addition, the systems that move bodies and texts are mutually supporting: periodicals are the vehicles for the transatlantic circulation of ideas and they register the movement of bodies, carrying the traces of transatlantic and global travel. Votes for Women participated in both of these approaches to circulation. The periodical constructed and maintained community by narrating its own circulation while also retracing the travels of suffrage organisers and members. Feminist activists of the WSPU marked their claims to being modern through their mobility and access to the public arena. The WSPU was imagined as a largely urban enterprise that remapped London through its pageants, open-air meetings, and branding of the public sphere through chalked pavements and posted placards. As suffragette Annie Kenney put it, ‘we were free and alone in a great brilliant city’.15 In addition to transforming the cityscape, suffragettes travelled widely throughout Britain, and these excursions were covered in the paper. Krista Cowman’s study of the ‘itinerant’ activists employed by the WSPU in the work of ‘mobile propagandizing’ shows how women saturated the country with feminist activism, moving from town to town, meeting to meeting, at a relentless and gruelling pace.16 No one campaigned more than suffrage leader Emmeline Pankhurst, who employed her own chauffeur in order to gain more control over her busy schedule and travelled over 10,000 miles in her North American tour.17 This sort of mobility – the movement of activist women through public space on foot and in cars, on trains and ships – allows for what Tim Cresswell has called the ‘reconfiguration of moral geographies of gender in the early part of the twentieth century’.18 Together, the transatlantic movement of women and papers built a network of friendships, alliances, shared strategies and languages that linked British and North American activists. The paper published notes on the travels of US suffragists who regularly came to Britain to study suffrage strategies. It also marked the attendance of US suffragists in meetings in New York or Boston when British suffragists spoke as guest lecturers. Members of US suffrage societies were frequently found at WSPU ‘at homes’ in London since, as Frederick Pethick Lawrence put it, ‘American women “doing” London considered their visit incomplete if they had not been present at at least one of these gatherings.’19 Votes for Women made note of these visits of US suffragists, encouraging readers to embrace their ‘sisters’.20 In addition, Votes for Women covered US street marches, featured prominent US women in biographical sketches, and followed the progress of US suffragist accomplishments on maps that displayed the number of states that gave women the vote. In ‘Not Necessary – Yet’, US activist Inez Millholland described the influence of British suffragettes: ‘The English women have seen results from what they have done . . . We can only emulate them, though such methods they have used are not necessary here – yet.’21 Through such transatlantic travel, militant WSPU strategies made their way to the US, influencing the development of a particularly national brand of militancy. Just as suffragists voyaged to discover new methods, so texts, images and advertisements circulated through periodicals, guiding readers to a world of shared materials that stitched them to intersecting but also nationally distinct feminist communities. US suffragists read British periodicals and borrowed their strategies when designing their own publications: for example, the American Suffragette modelled itself on the

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WSPU’s Votes for Women.22 The transatlantic exchange of promotional and print cultural materials was itself tracked in the pages of the suffrage press as feminist newspapers monitored sightings of feminist materials and advertised new ventures. Votes for Women noted such events as the emergence of a new US suffrage paper, The Pacific Suffragist, the availability of WSPU posters in San Francisco, and the influence of Votes for Women on US popular debate concerning British militancy: ‘ “Now when the name of the British Prime Minister is pronounced, even mispronounced, in Seattle, it means something. It means that Votes for Women is the talk of the day in all countries.” ’23 As Lucy Delap and Maria DiCenzo have argued, periodicals and the ready availability of print materials meant suffrage activism and membership in suffrage communities were forged primarily through print cultural relations, and ‘[p]rint cultural exchanges between Britain and the United States in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were particularly close’.24 The transatlantic circulation of bodies and texts was so effective, Delap and DiCenzo argue, that ‘British and American readers might be understood to be inhabiting not just overlapping “reading communities”, but a single reading community that transcended national boundaries’.25

‘The Journeys of Christabel’, Votes for Women, 31 May 1912. By courtesy of the Museum of London.

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Circulating Celebrity A juxtaposition of two issues of Votes for Women illustrates the significance of suffrage travel to the creation of transnational feminist communities. These two instances of suffrage travel also present us with the faces of modern suffrage celebrity, one organised around media saturation, the other around absence. In the first example, a frontpage cartoon entitled ‘The Journeys of Christabel’ features a map tracing the possible transatlantic travels of the ‘missing’ political leader Christabel Pankhurst, who had fled the country after a police raid of 5 March 1912 that was intended to paralyse the militant WSPU by removing its leaders.26 This plan to decapitate the WSPU was nearly successful, since Emmeline Pankhurst was already under arrest and the raid resulted in the arrest of Emmeline and Frederick Pethick Lawrence, the co-editors of Votes for Women. The cartoon attempts to answer the much-asked question – ‘Where is Christabel?’ – by tracking her travels across Britain, across Europe and Asia, and transatlantically to New York and Massachusetts. A key to the map of Christabel’s purported voyages indicates the various modes of transport theoretically employed to cover this ground so efficiently: ‘submarine’, ‘aeroplane’, ‘broomstick’ and ‘seven league boots’.27 Significantly, it is not just the elusive Christabel who is shown to have circulated so dramatically. The cartoon is anchored on the bottom right corner by a portrait of Christabel Pankhurst herself, positioned as if she is describing her travels, lacking only a pointer to assume her instructional role at the podium. The credits announce that the portrait reproduces an image penned originally by the London caricaturist ‘Spy’ (Sir Matthew Leslie Ward) in Vanity Fair. In addition, the information used to produce the cartoon was based on ‘sightings’ of Christabel Pankhurst reported in newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic as well as on the reports of Scotland Yard police. The editors of Votes for Women relished reporting these various sightings of ‘The Elusive One in Exile’, and republished reportage of Christabel’s global circulation with regularity.28 A poem entitled ‘Where Christabel Is’, published in Votes for Women on the topic of Christabel’s escape, was just one of many meditations on her absent presence in the pages of Votes for Women: Where is Christabel, oh, where? On the earth or in the air? Lurks she in some shadowy dell, Meet for sportive Ariel? Or does she, mounting on the breeze, Guide an aeroplane with ease?29 This coincident circulation of feminist bodies and texts within Britain and throughout the Atlantic world, whether by aeroplane, broomstick or more traditional modes of transport, points us toward a greater understanding of the mutually supportive notions of embodied and textual mobility that produced and maintained suffrage celebrity. In the second periodical example, Votes for Women traced the absence of Christabel Pankhurst days after the raid by publishing a ‘blank’ issue on 8 March 1912 that textually represented both the absence of the leaders’ voices and the presence of censorship. The issue went to press despite the fact that the paper’s co-editors, Emmeline and Frederick Pethick Lawrence, had been arrested in the sweep. In a short

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announcement titled ‘Significant!’ the new editors announced that ‘the blank spaces in this week’s issue . . . mark the suppression by the printers of articles, comments, and historical facts considered by them to be inflammatory matter’.30 The statements of various prisoners and the entirety of Christabel Pankhurst’s editorial were represented in this issue by white blankness – bare columns and sections of columns where feminist speech should be and had been formerly. Christabel Pankhurst’s editorial, ‘A Challenge!’, contained only the title and her signature, the ‘challenge’ silenced by governmental repression, the signature attached to an absent leader in flight.31 Such manipulation of the absent presence of a suffrage leader fully exploits the potential of the prosthetic subjectivities central to modern periodicals. Ann Ardis points out that authorship is complex in the ‘performative authorial environments’ of periodicals ‘where the play of signed, pseudonymous, semi-pseudonymous, and anonymous writings further complicates what Michael Warner terms the “prosthetic” personhood of a “disembodied public subject” ’.32 Within the context of periodical culture, Ardis argues, the abstracted and ‘disembodied’ subjectivity of the public sphere expresses itself in pseudonymous writing that can produce internal dialogue and debate. The prosthetic subject is a concept, I would argue, as adaptable to representations of modern subjectivity in periodicals as it is to variants of periodical authorship such as pseudonymous or anonymous publication. Attending to those aspects of suffrage celebrity that were made possible or enhanced through the mechanics of periodical publication such as prosthetic subjectivities reveals a special use of celebrity ideally suited to the construction of modern political (national and transatlantic) communities. An unsigned commentary on ‘The Journeys of Christabel’ entitled ‘The Missing Leader’ establishes the importance of periodicals themselves as community producers: We publish a map this week showing the recent travels of the fourth and missing defendant in the trial of the W.S.P.U. Leaders. As everyone must have felt, at the close of the proceedings at the Old Bailey, there are more ways than one of being a missing leader. This expression may mean the leader that the Government cannot find, or it may mean the leader that the printers would not print. (See Votes for Women, March 8, 1912.) In any case, we are sure our readers will like to be informed of the route said to have been taken by Miss Christabel Pankhurst during the eleven weeks in which she has eluded her pursuers; and if we do not add a diary of events, it is only because we cannot surmount the difficulty of explaining how she managed on so many occasions to be in several places at once.33 The commentary suggests that our understanding of the political cartoon will be enhanced if we consider the intertextual relationship between the May 1912 cartoon and the earlier 8 March 1912 blank issue explicitly referenced in the article: ‘(See Votes for Women, March 8, 1912),’ the author directs us. According to this line of thought, a complete and nuanced reading requires familiarity not only with the details of feminist politics – Christabel’s escape, the newspaper speculation regarding her possible whereabouts – but also with the periodical Votes for Women itself. The ideal reader possesses an activist’s knowledge that has accumulated over time through weekly reading of Votes for Women. This is feminist knowledge built through periodical seriality, loyalty rewarded by one’s ability to unpack explicit intertextual references. The fact of seriality determines that a periodical accumulates meaning through the dual mechanisms of

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continuity (this is the same publication as last week) and difference (this week’s issue is new and must be consumed). The winking references of ‘The Missing Leader’ force our attention through an irresistible joke deeper into the periodical archive to play with juxtapositions in order to make new meanings. The pun that links body and text (the missing ‘leader’ Christabel Pankhurst is like the missing periodical ‘leader’, that is, her weekly leading editorial) adds an amused grin to the early, more sombre coverage of the raid and censorship of Votes for Women and invites a return and rereading of the earlier coverage in light of a new attitude. In addition, for the author of this commentary, the term ‘leader’ signals the intimacy of the links between periodical textuality and embodiment. The missing ‘leader’ Christabel Pankhurst is represented in her absence through the erasure of her periodical writings. The blank issue then becomes a mechanism for framing the absence of suffrage leaders more generally. An emphasis on connectivity, on the network itself, allows us to see these movements and linkages as a web of modern activity that connects groups, authors, activists and periodicals and creates a ‘single reading community’ of transatlantic feminists. It is the nature of networks to expand, creating more and more attachments. We imagine – and, through visualisations, we diagram – these networks as grounded in the centre, becoming more and more fragile at the outer borders.34 But when the network is established through transatlantic travel, the network also represents a movement from one spot and to another, from home to somewhere away from home. That is to say that the network and the map function differently: the network can reveal the number of contacts as well as the frequency of connections; the map lets us envision these relationships as they unfold in time and across distances. Movement delineated by a map of activist travel is movement away from a familiar place. The connections forged are sometimes fragile; the line shot out to form a new connection tugs at the anchoring home. How does transatlantic movement look from the perspective of ‘home’? From the perspective of those who are left, rather than from that of the adventuring traveller? As the commentary on ‘The Journeys of Christabel’ teaches us, the adventuring suffragette is both an explorer in her own right and a ‘missing leader’, one who is herself missed, imaged and imagined as blank space and silence within the visually noisy pages of Votes for Women. Exploring the traces of transatlantic movement within the pages of the ‘home’ publication Votes for Women shows us how periodicals are uniquely positioned to represent the alternating rhythms of absence and presence, leaving and arrival, distance and proximity, longing and affectionate welcoming that compose suffragette celebrity and link activists more firmly to the movement. It is the periodical’s prosthetic subjectivities that make it possible for the missing leader to be ‘everywhere at once’, to be present while away, thus continuing to motivate connections to the movement.

Circulating Emotion A rule of saturation underwrote suffragette celebrity. Though the suffragette motto ‘deeds not words’ suggests a privileging of politicised performances rather than rhetoric, the performativity of suffrage often turned on the intimate relation of body and speech. Suffrage politics was ‘written on the body’, Lisa Tickner argued in 1988.35 In this respect, suffrage participated in larger trends in modern celebrity. Jean Lutes has shown, for example, how in a slightly different context ‘newspaper women’s bodies

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. . . became emblems of publicity’ in twentieth-century US popular culture.36 Similarly, in his work on Whitman, David Blake argues that ‘[i]n the highly politicized, sometimes volatile, and ever-shifting environment, celebrities emerged as a new and rather effective means for representing the public to itself’.37 Like other celebrities circulating in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Atlantic world, the Pankhursts constructed a collective identity – or what Blake calls a ‘collaborative identity’ – through mechanisms of publicity.38 The periodicals that circulated on both sides of the Atlantic were crucial to this work since, as Amanda Claybaugh points out, ‘social reform depended on print’ and was ‘crucially Anglo-American in scope’ during this period.39 This set of linkages between periodical textuality, embodiment, political movements and celebrity brings to the fore the emotional and affective facets of the modern suffrage movements. Mediating communication technologies such as periodicals provided the movement with unique ways of managing the demands of proximity and distance, intimacy and longing that organise political celebrity. As a recruiting tool and a mechanism for solidifying continued allegiance to the movement, the celebrity of WSPU leaders Christabel and Emmeline Pankhurst invited what contemporary critic Teresa Billington-Greig called the ‘subtle tyranny of affectional appeal’, and what film scholar Amy Shore calls ‘fandom’.40 While film in the US provided viewers with the opportunity to ‘gaz[e]’ upon ‘suffrage stars’, periodicals, I would add, provided contemporary readers on both sides of the Atlantic with a mechanism that adjusts to the rhythms of proximity and distance that come with modern suffrage celebrity culture.41 To go a step further, the periodical’s mixed media format and its serial temporality provide unique mechanisms for the construction of suffragette celebrity. On one level, mixed media formats that juxtapose textual content with visual content provide a rich environment for the promotion of suffrage leaders as celebrities. The use of portraits, cartoons, biographical sketches, first-person narratives, republication of key speeches, as well as the advertisement of suffrage collectibles that featured suffrage leaders – such as the board and card games in which Emmeline Pankhurst played a starring role, ‘Panko’ and ‘Pank-a-Squith’ – all worked to establish the WSPU brand by securing and maintaining the celebrity of suffrage leaders. In addition, in moments of stress, textual presence could be a proxy for physical presence. For example, during the spring of 1912 when suffrage leaders were either in prison or in hiding, Votes for Women published a special supplement with portraits of the leaders.42 Later issues presented readers with ‘pen portraits’ of leaders written by a variety of well-wishers and activists.43 Travel writing such as the coverage of the North American lecture tours of WSPU leaders provided an especially fertile medium for refreshing the image of an established figure through reportage on her reception in a new environment. Sylvia Pankhurst’s 1911 tour of the United States and Canada provides one rich example of this sort of travel writing, since her trip was exhaustively covered in the pages of Votes for Women. Biographer Barbara Winslow argues that Sylvia’s lecture tours of North America secured her independence from her family.44 Careful reading of the suffrage paper Votes for Women, however, suggests that it was periodical coverage, particularly the republication of articles originally printed in US papers, that guaranteed her influence. Republication (re)introduced Sylvia Pankhurst to British readers by tracing the responses of US audiences. Thus mimetic desire and affection could circulate via recycled newspaper coverage.

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Sylvia Pankhurst had been an active member of the WSPU in the organisation’s early years, working with Annie Kenney to mobilise women, serving as the WSPU’s first secretary, and also suffering imprisonment. Issues of Votes for Women featured instalments of her lengthy history of the movement from 1907 to 1909. This serialised history was published in book form after Pankhurst returned from her North American lecture tour, an advertisement proclaiming the arrival of The Suffragette: The History of the Women’s Militant Suffrage Movement, 1905–1910 in June of 1911. But Sylvia also spent time away from the centre of the organisation when she enrolled in art school and later took a drawing tour of north England that resulted in extraordinary sketches of women working.45 In 1911, Sylvia Pankhurst embarked on a lecture tour of North America that gave her the opportunity to forge connections with suffragist, socialist and African American leaders. The tour opened with a lecture at the Carnegie Lyceum, sponsored by Harriet Stanton Blatch and the Women’s Political Union, and featured stops throughout the US and Canada. In January 1911, she met with Blatch in New York, learned about striking laundry workers, met with Margaret Sanger and Max Eastman, and toured Hull House in Chicago. She lectured frequently on the topics of ‘Women in Politics’, ‘Women in Industry’ and ‘Life in a London Prison’, sometimes holding two meetings in one day.46 Through continued coverage of Sylvia Pankhurst’s lecture tour and through the republication of excerpts from US newspapers describing key speaking events, Votes for Women secured Pankhurst’s reputation. On 6 January 1911, Votes for Women republished promotional materials that were circulating in the United States and Canada in ‘Miss Sylvia Pankhurst’s American Tour’ including a potted biography.47 Reprinting publicity materials gave the editors of Votes for Women the opportunity to blend travel writing with the biographical sketch, a significant genre in feminist publications in its own right. Later coverage of Pankhurst’s tour testified to the significant collaborations between North American and British feminists, the reception of Sylvia in the United States standing as ‘further proof of the eagerness of the women there to join hands with their sisters in the Old Country’.48 Significantly, these reports recorded the reactions of US suffragists to the presence of Sylvia Pankhurst, building a portrait of the activist that emphasised her appeal. For example, Votes for Women published excerpts from Harriet Stanton Blatch’s review of the audience’s impressions of Pankhurst’s New York Carnegie Lyceum lecture: ‘Miss Pankhurst’s opening night in New York was a complete triumph. Everyone spoke of her sincerity, simplicity, youth and charm. I am sure it will be the same everywhere.’49 Reprinted excerpts from the New-York Tribune and other newspapers emphasised the ways in which feminist politics rested on the display of the female body: She didn’t look like a militant suffragette. She didn’t look like a suffragette at all. She flew into the headquarters of the Women’s Political Union like a schoolgirl back from her holidays – a round-faced, fresh-faced schoolgirl, with loose wisps of hair coming down from her cap. But when she sat down and began to talk suffrage, it was easy to believe that she was Sylvia Pankhurst.50 Similarly, the Chicago Tribune commented on Miss Pankhurst’s appearance: ‘How does this artist suffragette look? Well, pretty much as one would expect Ernestine Blount (in Elizabeth Robin’s The Convert) to look . . . The suffrage movement makes

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real women, well poised and self-reliant.’51 Republished US fashion reportage (and anti-fashion reportage) combined with statements emphasising the audience’s engagement and the reporter’s admiration provide the mechanisms that connected British readers anew to their feminist heroine and enabled them to imagine themselves as part of a transatlantic community forged through shared appreciation of the youthful and sincere Sylvia Pankhurst. The travel reportage of Votes for Women not only created the kind of unified transatlantic reading community noted by Delap and DiCenzo, but also constructed a periodical hall of mirrors where recirculation, republication, quotation and excerpting allowed British feminists to gaze upon North American feminists gazing upon their movement. This recirculation of materials enabled the transmission of emotional content through reportage of impressions and sensations, emphasising North American responses to the words and appearance of British suffragettes. Sara Ahmed’s reading of emotion’s proliferation through circulation stands as a useful tool for reading the significance of affect in republished suffragette materials. Emotion accumulates with time, according to Ahmed’s understanding of the politics of emotion, since feelings ‘are produced as effects of circulation’.52 Emotion doesn’t circulate on its own, according to Ahmed, but is produced when ‘objects’ circulate since ‘objects become sticky, or saturated with affect, as sites of personal or social tension’.53 Texts can be understood to produce affect similarly, since the ‘emotionality of texts is one way to describe how texts are “moving”, or how they generate effects’.54 This model of emotion accumulating rather than diminishing through the circulation of objects and signs (‘the more signs circulate, the more affective they become’) suggests a way of imagining the significant work that periodical reportage could do to establish and maintain community through reprinted affect-filled narratives.55 The narratives that chronicled the 1911–12 North American tour of Emmeline Pankhurst were especially striking in this regard. Votes for Women covered the great crowds that gathered to meet her ship when it arrived in New York, mentioning that a ‘large party of women who waited to welcome her were all carrying flags in the [WSPU] colours [of purple, white and green]’.56 The following week, the paper also reprinted coverage from the Brooklyn Eagle which emphasised the audience’s enthusiasm for her appearance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music: ‘ “The very roof rang with applause, which lasted for five minutes, when Mrs. Pankhurst made her appearance.” ’57 In addition, Votes for Women recirculated newspaper coverage that stressed the ‘brilliancy’ of her eyes, her ‘gentle’ voice, and the ‘power of personality’ that made her the ‘best loved and best hated woman in England’.58 In the wake of the November crisis within the suffrage community, when a widely supported Conciliation Bill was effectively torpedoed by Prime Minister Asquith’s introduction of a manhood suffrage bill, the WSPU’s coverage of Emmeline Pankhurst’s lecture tour included Pankhurst’s own impassioned language in the form of editorials, quoted letters and reprinted cables that circulated emotion throughout the transatlantic feminist community. For example, Votes for Women published Pankhurst’s own cabled declaration: ‘Am ready to renew the fight. Shall return with practical help from America.’59 On 8 December, Pankhurst published an editorial in Votes for Women that sent ‘love and gratitude to the women of our splendid army’ and described a desire for connection: ‘I long to be back in the glorious struggle.’60 The persistent use of affect-laden language of sentiment, affection, sacrifice and loyalty within the pages of Votes for Women functioned to construct and to manage

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readerly desire for the suffragette celebrity. Months later, during the crisis of March 1912 when the WSPU was functionally leaderless, Annie Kenney was placed in charge as Christabel’s proxy. Remembering this period, she wrote that ‘When the heads were gone the Movement for a short period languished and became sick. Those who had vitalized it, had given it their life-force, were withdrawn. The followers felt the effect. They were for a time mentally, morally, and spiritually underfed.’61 Kenney’s words provide clues to the function of celebrity in suffrage culture: the leader is significant not just because of her passion, oratorical power or charisma, but because her presence feeds the movement. When she is ‘missing’, whether in prison, in hiding from police, or travelling transatlantically for the cause, the movement is malnourished. Periodicals like Votes for Women are uniquely able to manage the problem of the ‘missing’ suffragette, since they allow the suffragette as celebrity to be, as the commentary on ‘The Journeys of Christabel’ put it, ‘on so many occasions . . . in several places at once’. Votes for Women provided both the medium and the argument for the power of the absent leader, suggesting that the prosthetic subjectivity provided within the pages of the paper was as powerful as or more powerful than the presence of the personality at an open-air meeting: Meantime, the other leader roams the earth, the ocean, or the air. Without being in the least like a Boojum, Miss Christabel Pankhurst has silently vanished away, and none knows whither, least of all the eminent detectives of Scotland Yard. Fond of hunting as the British people are, it is a peculiar thing that their sympathy is almost always with the fugitive, and we doubt if Sherlock Holmes himself would have a chance for their favour against a successful Vanishing Lady. So day by day, as the police went searching the British Isles, enquiring with simple guile at the residence of every noted Suffragist in the kingdom, the interest grew with laughter. . . . Miss Pankhurst herself can hardly ever have been so widely popular as her elusive shadow was from the hour when she took flight. So she remains, up to the time of writing, unheard, unseen, but none the less an inspiring influence to all who have known her intellectual power, unflagging courage, and charm.62 The imagined travels of the suffrage leader ‘roam[ing] the earth, the ocean, or the air’ expand her reach and ensure her celebrity. The voyaging leader remains influential in her absence. Her ‘elusive shadow’ established via the prosthetic authority of the periodical serves as a powerful stand-in for her presence. The travel writing produced to track the lecture tours of British suffragettes voyaging in America brought together these interlocking concepts of absence and presence that compose the prosthetic subjectivity of suffrage’s celebrity culture. It did so by facilitating and emphasising the circulation of emotion. Through the transmission of affect, then, the ‘elusive shadow’ of long-absent suffragettes exerted its hold over the readers of periodicals, and gives us an enhanced understanding of the role of sentiment and emotion in the workings of political celebrity in the modern Atlantic world.

Notes 1. Ann Ardis and Patrick Collier (eds), Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 1.

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2. Michelle Tusan, Women Making News: Gender and Journalism in Modern Britain (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), pp. 140–1. 3. Frederick Pethick Lawrence, ‘Is There a Press Boycott of Woman Suffrage?’, Votes for Women, 25 June 1909, p. 841. 4. Work on suffrage’s promotional culture includes Krista Lysack, Come Buy, Come Buy: Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women’s Writing (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008), and Margaret Mary Finnegan, Selling Suffrage: Consumer Culture and Votes for Women (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 5. See, for example, Mark Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), and Maria DiCenzo, ‘Gutter Politics: Women Newsies and the Suffrage Press’, Women’s History Review 12.1 (2003): 15–33. On print culture and reform movements more broadly, see Amanda Claybaugh, The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the AngloAmerican World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007); Mary Chapman, Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture and U.S. Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Rachel Schreiber, Gender and Activism in a Little Magazine: The Modern Figures of the Masses (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). 6. For periodical codes, see Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, ‘General Introduction’, in Brooker and Thackers (eds), The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Volume I: Britain and Ireland, 1880–1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 6. For an introduction to periodical studies methodologies, see Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman, Modernism in the Magazines: An Introduction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); for a description of modernist periodical studies, see Sean Latham and Robert Scholes, ‘The Rise of Periodical Studies’, PMLA 121.2 (2006): 517–31. 7. For studies of periodicals and transatlantic reading communities, see, for example, Ardis and Collier (eds), Transatlantic Print Culture. 8. The phrase belongs to George Bornstein, Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 9. ‘The Missing Leader’, Votes for Women, 31 May 1912, p. 555. 10. For the idea that mobility is in itself distinctly modern, see Enda Duffy, The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), and Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Western World (New York: Routledge, 2006). 11. Deborah Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 6; Erika Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s East End (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Wendy Parkins, Mobility and Modernity in Women’s Novels, 1850s–1930s: Women Moving Dangerously (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 12. Celia Aijmer Rydsjö and AnnKatrin Jonsson, ‘ “Published by Us, Written by Us, Read by Us”: Little Magazine Networks’, Global Review 1.1 (2013), p. 42. In addition, see Lucy Delap, The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Joseph Rezek, ‘What We Need from Transatlantic Studies’, American Literary History 26.4 (2014): 791–803; Andrew Thacker, ‘Crossing Borders with Modernist Magazines’, Variants 9 (2012): 199–210. For the metaphoric power of ‘network’, see James Murphy, ‘Introduction: Visualizing Periodical Networks’, Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 5.1 (2014): iii–xv. 13. Rydsjö and Jonsson, ‘ “Published by Us” ’, p. 42. 14. Rydsjö and Jonsson, ‘ “Published by Us” ’, p. 42. 15. Annie Kenney, Memories of a Militant (London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1924), p. 110. 16. Krista Cowman, Women of the Right Spirit: Paid Organizers of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), 1904–18 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 37, 55–6.

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17. Christabel Pankhurst, Unshackled: The Story of How We Won the Vote (London: Hutchinson, 1959), p. 196. 18. Tim Cresswell, ‘Mobilizing the Movement: The Role of Mobility in the Suffrage Politics of Florence Luscomb and Margaret Foley, 1911–1915’, Gender, Place and Culture 12.4 (2005), p. 447. 19. Frederick Pethick Lawrence, quoted in Patricia Greenwood Harrison, Connecting Links: The British and American Woman Suffrage Movements, 1900–1914 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2000), p. 57. 20. ‘American Suffragettes’, Votes for Women, 24 March 1911, p. 403. 21. Inez Millholland, ‘Not Necessary – Yet’, Votes for Women, 20 January 1911, p. 256. 22. Chapman, Making Noise, p. 29. In addition, Patricia Harrison has discovered the deep links between The Women’s Journal and Votes for Women; see Connecting Links. 23. ‘The Pacific Suffragist’, Votes for Women, 24 March 1911, p. 403; ‘The Purple, White, and Green in America’, Votes for Women, 20 January 1911, p. 256; Alice L. Park, untitled, Labour Clarion, quoted in ‘A Press View’, Votes for Women, 24 March 1911, p. 403. 24. Lucy Delap and Maria DiCenzo, ‘Transatlantic Print Culture: The Anglo-American Feminist Press and Emerging “Modernities” ’, in Ardis and Collier (eds), Transatlantic Print Culture, p. 55. 25. Delap and DiCenzo, ‘Transatlantic Print Culture’, p. 56. 26. ‘The Journeys of Christabel’, Votes for Women, 31 May 1912, p. 553. 27. ‘The Journeys of Christabel’, p. 553. 28. ‘The Elusive One in Exile’, Votes for Women, 13 September 1912, p. 793. 29. S.E.H., ‘Where Christabel Is’, Votes for Women, 22 March 1912, p. 397. 30. ‘Significant!’, Votes for Women, 8 March 1912, p. 349. 31. Christabel Pankhurst, ‘A Challenge!’, Votes for Women, 8 March 1912, p. 358. 32. Ann Ardis, ‘Staging the Public Sphere: Magazine Dialogism and the Prosthetics of Authorship at the Turn of the Twentieth Century’, in Ardis and Collier (eds), Transatlantic Print Culture, p. 31. 33. ‘The Missing Leader’, Votes for Women, 31 May 1912, p. 555. 34. Murphy, ‘Introduction’, pp. vii–ix. 35. Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign, 1907–1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 151. 36. Jean Marie Lutes, Front-Page Girls: Women Journalists in American Culture and Fiction, 1880–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 6. 37. David Haven Blake, Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 57. 38. Blake, Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity, p. 63. 39. Claybaugh, Novel of Purpose, p. 2. 40. Teresa Billington-Greig, ‘The Militant Suffrage Movement: Emancipation in a Hurry’, in Carol McPhee and Ann Fitzgerald (eds), The Non-Violent Militant: Selected Writings of Teresa Billington-Greig (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), p. 167; Amy Shore, ‘Suffrage Stars’, Camera Obscura 63.21.3 (2006), p. 4. 41. Shore, ‘Suffrage Stars’, p. 4. 42. Supplement, Votes for Women, 15 March 1912. 43. Various authors, ‘Pen Portraits of . . .’, Votes for Women, 29 March 1912, pp. 404–5. 44. Barbara Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics and Political Activism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), p. 25. 45. Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst, pp. 10–14. 46. Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst, pp. 19–25. 47. ‘Miss Sylvia Pankhurst’s American Tour’, Votes for Women, 6 January 1911, p. 222. 48. ‘News from America’, Votes for Women, 27 January 1911, p. 278.

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49. ‘News from America’, p. 278. 50. ‘News from America’, p. 278. 51. ‘American Impressions: How the Women’s Movement Is Understood’, Votes for Women, 10 February 1911, p. 304. 52. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), p. 8. 53. Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, p. 11. 54. Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, p. 13. 55. Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, p. 45. 56. ‘Mrs. Pankhurst in America’, Votes for Women, 27 October 1911, p. 58. 57. ‘Mrs. Pankhurst in America’, Votes for Women, 3 November 1911, p. 67. 58. ‘Mrs. Pankhurst in America’, 3 November 1911, p. 67; ‘Mrs. Pankhurst in America’, Votes for Women, 17 November 1911, p. 106. 59. Emmeline Pankhurst, in Votes for Women, 24 November 1911, p. 118. 60. Emmeline Pankhurst, ‘A Message from Mrs. Pankhurst’, Votes for Women, 8 December 1911, p. 161. 61. Kenney, Memories of a Militant, p. 181. 62. ‘The Outlook’, Votes for Women, 15 March 1912, p. 369.

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17 An Atlantic Adam: Emerson and the Origins of United States Literature David Greenham

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alph Waldo Emerson has often been held to be the mainspring of US literary originality: a man whose work marked, in Oliver Wendell Holmes’s resounding phrase, the United States’ ‘intellectual Declaration of Independence’.1 However, since Emerson’s first published utterances in the 1830s, his work has also been identified as a product of European Romanticism and French philosophy: what in 1839 Andrews Norton decried as ‘the influence of the depraving literature and noxious speculations which flow in among us from Europe’.2 Throughout the twentieth century this tension has produced a complex critical dispute that makes for an intriguing case study in US literary emergence within the framework of Atlantic studies. The dispute has at least four recognisable strands that may be broadly construed as follows. Firstly, there are critics like Charles Feidelson, R. W. B. Lewis and Sacvan Bercovitch who have pressed a claim for an indigenous literary strain taking its unique shape from Emerson’s ‘originality’ in the context of a Puritan inheritance.3 Secondly, there are those like Leon Chai, Samantha Harvey and myself who have made an effort to plot genealogies that demonstrate Emerson to be a belated transatlantic Romantic, evidencing his literary continuity with the Old World.4 In a third camp are Harold Bloom and F. O. Matthiessen, who have made a claim for Emerson’s originality while also recognising his transatlantic debts.5 Fourthly, there are those like Robert Weisbuch, Lawrence Buell and Paul Giles who see the ideological significance of Emerson’s apparent originality in the context of a post-colonial Atlantic.6 Each of these positions is valuable and helps us to locate Emerson critically and to understand his works better, and in what follows I shall sketch out in more detail some of the main trends in this critical controversy. But, I shall contend, none of these carefully argued positions has yet fully understood the reasons for the continued persuasiveness of the ‘Emerson as origin’ myth and, moreover, the way that Emerson’s transatlantic status enabled him to ground US literature. As we shall see, this has at least as much to do with Emerson’s complex response to the English Renaissance as with the prospect of an American Renaissance. It is also important to understand what Emerson took ‘originality’ to mean.

Emerson’s Originality Emerson himself had much to say on the subject of literary origins in his 1875 essay on the subject, ‘Quotation and Originality’. The position he takes towards the beginning

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of that essay may appear surprising for someone reflecting on forty years of intense literary endeavour: Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest or private addition so rare and insignificant, – and that commonly on the ground of other reading or hearing, – that, in a large sense, one would say, there is no pure originality. All minds quote.7 Our minds themselves, let alone our pens, are indebted to the vastness of an inheritance in which novelty emerges only from, at best, some kind of creative quotation, not from original addition, the spark of novelty being ‘rare or insignificant’ and, for the purposes of his essay, irrelevant. Emerson finds himself firmly grounded in the words of others, and as the names cited in his essay make clear, this particular debt is transatlantic in origin. Over the next few paragraphs he mentions Tasso, Virgil, Homer, Milton, Plato, Hegel, Proclus, Heraclitus, Plutarch, Lucian, Rabelais, Montaigne, Bayle, Swedenborg, Boehme, Spinoza, Aquinas, Reinhard the Fox, the brothers Grimm, Molière, Lafontaine, Boccaccio and Voltaire (Works 8: 94–5). There is not one American on this list. The literary tradition on which he draws is self-confessedly transatlantic. But it is a tradition that, necessarily, is also unoriginal; indeed, with playful paradox, he claims, ‘The originals are not original. There is imitation, model, and suggestion to the very archangels, if we knew their history’ (94). The first American to be mentioned a little later in the essay (one of only two) is the New England politician Daniel Webster, whose attributed bons mots he finds in Sheridan, who got them from D’Argenson, or in Southey, who got them from the Earl of Strafford (96). Emerson’s term for this kind of ceaseless borrowing is ‘vamping’ (98), the vampire bat being ‘an excellent sucking pipe to tap another animal’ (99). Quotation is a kind of drawing on the vascular lines of the past. Quotation is therefore nourishing and like food ceases to be alienating when we recognise that it actually shapes us – not in a mediated postmodern way, as if our selves were merely ‘textual’, but in a direct way, because we become one with the source of the quotation itself, which, Emerson contends, necessarily precedes the quoted author. Emerson offers the example of Wordsworth, who ‘as soon as he heard a good thing, caught it up, meditated on it, and very soon reproduced it in his conversation and writing. If De Quincy said, “that is what I told you,” he replied, “No, that is mine, – mine, and not yours” ’ (101). Wordsworth’s claim, perhaps unsurprisingly considering what is at stake in the argument, recalls one of the most famous lines from Emerson’s 1841 essay ‘Self-Reliance’: ‘In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty’ (Works 2: 27). What should be taken from this aphorism is that our alienation from works of genius is not a consequence of our distance from these high thoughts; rather, the alienation occurs because the work of genius reminds the reader of his own lost potential, and thus the ‘alienated majesty’ is his own. For Emerson the work of genius is an essential connection to a shared source which had been lost. The perception of the work of genius recreates that link to the source reminding each perceiver of their own authority. Because of this Emerson proposes that works of genius are the common property of all men, and, crucially, they do not belong to the individuals who created them. Indeed, for Emerson, genius is the absence of personality that allows a primal truth to flood individual being.

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After recalling the Wordsworth anecdote, Emerson quotes Francis Bacon: ‘I take all knowledge to be my province’ with the gloss ‘[i]t betrays the consciousness that truth is the property of no individual, but is the treasure of all men’ (Works 8: 101). When an author approaches the truth, which is the mark of genius, he ceases to possess his work and the ‘question of authorship’ is reduced to nothing (101). The reader may accept all past works, all efforts at truth, as his own, and in this the moment takes precedence over any claims of historical authorship: To all that can be said of the preponderance of the Past, the single word Genius is a sufficient reply. The divine resides in the new. The divine never quotes, but is and creates. The profound apprehension of the Present is Genius, which makes the past forgotten. And what is Originality? It is being; being oneself; and reporting accurately what we see and are. (105) Genius is a kind of transcendent reception of the moment, in which the past is subordinated to the demands of the present. Each moment, for Emerson, is a recreation of the whole in which a quasi-divine self refashions an original world in its own image, making everything new and consigning the past to a secondary status. He continues: ‘We cannot overstate our debt to the Past, but the moment has the supreme claim. The Past is for us, but the sole terms on which it can become ours are its subordination to the Present’ (107, italics added). Ultimately, the glories of the past have no existence but in our capturing of them, and though they may go towards creating us, may indeed be the reason for our current standing or even our very existence, any accumulated debt remains subordinate to the moment of our original reception. It is this astonishing inversion that, as I shall explain, enables Emerson to liberate Americans from transatlantic debts, even as they accrue them. Of course, it could be argued this is just so much Yankee bravado. But what Emerson has achieved is an account where originality and influence can be separated out. Yes, Emerson admits, my influences are myriad, indeed I may not even be aware of many of them, but yet I stand here an ‘original’. Originality, then, is not some kind of ex nihilo boot-strapping, it is a kind of rhetorical performance that centres all history on the present moment and sees the past as a production of that moment rather than as its foundation. Perhaps the twentieth-century critic most sympathetic to Emerson’s past-denying position is Harold Bloom. According to Bloom, Emerson refused the title of ‘a latecomer’ and was the exemplar of a ‘Titanic’ form of Romanticism that stated ‘Nothing need be lost’.8 Bloom cites Nietzsche’s sardonic observation that Emerson was ‘his own heir’, that he was the Father of Himself; thus, for Bloom, Emerson is the original figure of the American canon of strong poets.9 Significantly, though, Bloom argues that Emerson is not without influences; indeed, as part of the Romantic tradition he could not have emerged on his own. Rather Emerson is without an anxiety of influence, that is, he is not daunted or overwhelmed by the past or any sense of belatedness. But this is a process of ‘denial’ – in the Freudian sense, namely a repression. For Bloom Emerson is the great ‘daemonic’ poet, by which, in brief, he means that Emerson attempts to expand the power of his precursors by, for example, asserting that they are a force of nature and then claiming that power for himself, as though he can also be there before his precursors wrote, taking his inspiration from the same pool.10 As Emerson will write in ‘The Poet’, ‘poetry was all written before time was’ (Works 3: 5). It is the

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poet’s role to claim that primal, yet ever-present, space and to relate it. For Bloom this is an assumption too far, a denial of necessary limits, but it is what gives Emerson the great originating force that enables American poetry. Several earlier critics also located Emerson front and centre of the US literary canon. In Barrett Wendell’s 1900 A Literary History of America Emerson is ‘by far the most eminent figure . . . in all the literary history of America’.11 Wendell overrides any undue foreign influence by calling Emerson ‘A Yankee preacher of unfettered idealism’ and locates him at the heart of what he calls ‘The Renaissance of New England’ that emerges out of the tradition of indigenous oratory and Unitarianism’s ‘revolutionary spirit’.12 Thus the idea of a renaissance in Emerson’s period was not new when F. O. Matthiessen broadened its scope from New England to America in his 1941 canonfounding work American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. Nor was it new to recognise Emerson as its central figure, as Matthiessen does at the outset of his book: Emerson’s theory of expression was that on which Thoreau built, to which Whitman gave extension, and to which Hawthorne and Melville were indebted by being forced to react against its philosophical assumptions . . . To apply to [Emerson] his own words about Goethe: he was the cow from which the rest drew their milk.13 Matthiessen, then, provides a maternal image to set against Bloom’s patrilineal genealogy, and US literature has in Emerson both mother and father. Even so, Matthiessen suggests, if Emerson’s theory of expression comes from Coleridge and Schlegel, the idea that ‘word becomes one with thing’14 that is wrought out in Emerson’s 1836 essay ‘Nature’, then what is crucial is that the ‘thing’ the word becomes ‘one’ with is of the United States: its people, its landscape, its cultural possibilities. This is the ground for a peculiarly US expression which Matthiessen denotes as ‘symbolism’,15 namely seeing something small and local, such as the ‘meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan’ (Works 1: 5), as able to represent infinite possibilities: finding ‘the highest spiritual cause lurking, as it always does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature’.16 Such a move makes Emerson’s ‘expression’ of the United States, and, in Emerson’s terms, it also makes it original and foundational for the literature to come by liberating meaning from the necessity of the European sublime and from the weight of Europe’s past. A dozen years after Matthiessen had demonstrated that Emerson’s theory of expression, namely symbolism, had drawn upon Coleridge and the transatlantic migration of German Romanticism, Charles Feidelson Jr contended that Emerson’s enabling theory of symbolism was indigenous to the United States and, boldly following the more hesitant hints of the intellectual historian Perry Miller’s 1940 essay ‘From Edwards to Emerson’, he argued that they had a Puritan rather than a Romantic origin.17 As he writes, ‘The intellectual stance of the conscious artist in American literature has been determined very largely by problems inherent in the method of the Puritans.’18 The person who solved this inherent problem was Emerson. The ‘problem’ for the Puritans had been, Feidelson argued, that in seeing everything symbolically they had struggled to arrest the momentum of interpretation. But ‘Emerson was prepared to accept the incompleteness of any logical statement; he saw that every proposition aims at an absoluteness which its very nature precludes, since “we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other” ’.19 Thus Emerson’s purposive adaptation of

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something that was for the Puritans an insuperable problem becomes the great enabling gesture of American literature, a multivalent symbolism that gives us Hester’s A, Whitman’s grass, Ahab’s whale, Dickinson’s dashes, and Thoreau’s Walden Pond. It is the acceptance of what Feidelson calls ‘the language of paradox’.20 Important elements of Feidelson’s argument would be rehearsed by Sacvan Bercovitch in The Puritan Origins of the American Self (1975). Bercovitch also claimed a line of continuity between Emerson and his Puritan ancestors, such as Jonathan Edwards, though not without recognising important differences. What they held in common was a defining sense of the promise of the US landscape as a place of redemption. For the ‘colonial hermeneutics’ of the Puritans this meant the idea of a ‘paradise to be regained’.21 For Emerson, who rejected the grounding Puritan myth of original sin, the United States was already a paradise, and its promise was delivered by right perception. For the Puritans any such paradise was for the elect to struggle towards, a process of agonised and psychologically stressful regeneration. For Emerson genius made paradise available to all US citizens as a birthright; as such, nature allows the recovery of a self that has been lost to conformity and society. The US landscape was self-transformative and the site of a prelapsarian prophecy. For the Puritans this was because it was the site of the fulfilment of scriptural promise, but for Emerson, Bercovitch contends, it was because landscape was the ground of language, and thus of the self. This is the Emerson of the opening paragraph of Nature: Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportionate to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? (Works 1: 7) Again, as with ‘Quotation and Originality’, it is the moment that has the supreme claim, but it is the way the moment becomes available that is significant. It is US nature, as ‘new lands’, from which will necessarily emerge ‘new men, new thoughts’ (7). Thus, for Bercovitch, as for Matthiessen and Feidelson, Emerson’s ‘outlook became the basis for a distinctive symbolic mode’ and through Emerson ‘the distinctively American modes of expression matured’, and an ‘intellectual Declaration of Independence’ (in Holmes’s famous words cited above) was brought about.22

The Renaissance Ideal Emerson’s Nature, which has long sat at the heart of the origin myth of US literature, can be considered a call for a ‘rebirth’ or ‘renaissance’ in culture, letters and religion on exactly these terms: the transformation of the world into something original through a power of symbolic expression derived from the landscape of the United States. This ‘renaissance’ goes some way to justifying Matthiessen’s use of the term. But there is another way in which Emerson’s Nature may be thought of as calling for a renaissance, a way which again takes an Atlantic direction. To understand this we have to go back to the years just prior to Emerson’s publication of the essay in 1836, when he was starting his career as a lyceum lecturer in and around Boston. The mid-1830s were in many ways Emerson’s most intellectually creative period and he used the lecture platform to call for a rebirth that, as has been hinted above, is grounded on

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transformation and renewal. Though Emerson’s first public lectures in 1833 and 1834 were on natural history, in the year before Nature he turned to the examination and celebration of the main figures of the Renaissance, and here it is possible to identify in embryo the ways in which Emerson transformed an established foreign tradition into the conditions of possibility for a distinctive US literary culture. The first of these lectures was on ‘Michel Angelo’ in February 1835, and after a lecture on Martin Luther he quickly moved on to concentrate almost exclusively on the British writers of the English Renaissance from Chaucer to Milton. He finished 1835 with two lectures on Shakespeare.23 As usual, the key statement on Emerson’s relationship with these artists was made by Matthiessen, who considered the seventeenth-century English writers in particular as models for the New England intellectual scene of the early and mid-nineteenth century.24 He observed that the poets and intellectuals of seventeenth-century England were writing out of the same foment that sent the Pilgrim Fathers across the Atlantic to settle in New England.25 In support Matthiessen quotes Emerson’s close friend Margaret Fuller, who commented that Milton was ‘more emphatically American than any author who lived in the United States’.26 This would also suggest that critics like Bercovitch and Feidelson can only defer a European influence when they establish Emerson’s importance on Puritan grounds. But it is two different insights of Matthiessen that I want to pursue in what follows. First is the idea that seventeenth-century language was crucial for Emerson. It was this that was being reborn in New England after its eighteenth-century decay in old England and its colonies.27 Second is that what drew Emerson to the seventeenth century was, in Matthiessen’s words, ‘the image of himself that he found mirrored in these “idealists”’: George Herbert, John Donne, Robert Herrick, Ben Jonson, Thomas Browne, Ralph Cudworth, John Milton and others.28 After offering his insight into the importance of linguistic renewal, Matthiessen has no more to say on the subject. Emerson, though, is most voluble, and what he appreciated in the poets of the English Renaissance was their earthiness, which he saw as an antidote to the Augustan age of poetic sensibility within which he was raised. In his lecture on Chaucer he contends that after the demise of Latin the English poets ‘were forced instead of studying books to recur to the primitive and permanent sources from which the human mind draws excitement and delight, namely to natural objects and the common incidents of human business and adventure’.29 These ‘primitive and permanent’ sources are those things that are universally available and, importantly for Emerson, require no established tradition to access them. Thus: The poems of Chaucer, Shakspear [sic], Jonson, Herrick, Herbert, Raleigh betray a continual instinctive endeavour to recover themselves from every sally of imagination by touching the earth and earthly things and common things. The English muse loves the field and the farmyard. (Early Lectures 1: 263) It is evident that just as the spark of the English imagination is earthed by farmyard and field, these are also the very things that mark the everyday New England landscape. What he draws from English Renaissance poetry is the way it is shaped by the ordinary: Shakespeare’s ‘rain that raineth everyday’ or an English ballad’s sun shining ‘fair on Carlisle wall’, Herrick’s celebration of English pub culture in his ‘Ode to Jonson’ (‘the lyric feasts / Made at the Sun / The Dog, the Triple Tunne’ – all pub names), or Raleigh’s

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observation that the soul ‘glows and shines like painted wood’ (264–5). In each of these the everyday is used, symbolically, to represent something higher, something spiritual: tragedy, happiness, friendship, spirit. This will, as noted above, become a touchstone of Emerson’s theory of language where word becomes one with thing and where it is the ordinary, ‘the familiar, the low’ (Works 1: 67) that allows for the expression of the elevated. As he writes of Herrick a few lectures later: ‘He delights to show the muse is not nice or squeamish, but can tread with firm and elastic step in sordid places and take no more pollution than the sun-beam which shines alike on the carrion and the violet’ (Early Lectures 1: 346–7). Though, for Emerson, Herrick may push this too far, the allusion to Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure redeems him. In his first Shakespeare lecture, given earlier in the same series, he had cited, slightly misquoted, Angelo’s following lines: Not she tempts me not, but tis I Who lying by the violet in the sun Do as the carrion does not as the flower Corrupt with virtuous season. (292) In his lecture this is an example of Shakespeare’s all-controlling power of using nature to create mood and world. The ‘sordidness’ of the second image (sexual temptation figured by ‘carrion’) enhances rather than dilutes the power of the line by using the full breadth of nature to create representative, albeit debased, feeling. But the poet, like the sunbeam, takes no pollution. As he will write a few years later in ‘The Poet’, ‘The vocabulary of an omniscient man would include words and images excluded from polite conversation. What would be obscene, to the obscene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connection of thought’ (Works 3: 10–11). Indeed, in Nature Emerson will argue that ‘There is no object so foul that intense light will not make beautiful . . . Even the corpse hath its own beauty’ (Works 1: 12–13). This should always remind the reader that in 1832 Emerson opened his beloved first wife’s tomb a year after her death, and that in 1857 he opened the tomb of his son, Waldo, who had died of scarlet fever fifteen years earlier when he was only five years old.30 What this return to nature, to the everyday and even to the corrupt allowed, Emerson argues, is a kind of renaissance predicated on the liberation of language. And it is the artists who are the liberators, because for them that which shapes the world, namely language, is utterly malleable. Emerson’s first expression of this is with reference to a form in which malleability, ironically, may be a key metaphor: the sculptural prowess of Michelangelo. The ‘Michel Angelo’ lecture was the first Emerson gave on a prominent artistic figure, and was written at the beginning of 1835, drawing on the last afterglow of his own tour of Europe in 1832–3. ‘He alone’, Emerson quotes from Michelangelo himself, ‘was an artist whose hands can execute perfectly what his mind has conceived [and] the marble was flexible in his hands’ (Early Lectures 1: 110). This plastic power would become emblematic of the literary artist. He first used it to talk of a poet in his ‘John Milton’ lecture just a few weeks later: His mastery of his native tongue was more than to use it as well as any other; he cast it into new forms. He uttered in it things unheard before. Not imitating, but rivalling Shakespeare, he scattered, in tones of prolonged and delicate melody, his

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pastoral and romantic fancies; then, soaring into unattempted strains, he made it capable of an unknown majesty, and bent it to express every trait of beauty, every shade of thought; and searched the kennel and the jakes as well as the palaces of sound for the harsh discords of his polemic wrath. (153) Here is the poet as sculptor: casting new forms, flexing his medium as his will dictates, creating a new language of discordant beauty wrought from the ‘jakes’ and from the ‘palaces of sound’. In this passage Emerson is alluding not only to the ‘things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme’ that begins the first book of Paradise Lost, but also to the scatological puns of Milton’s war in heaven in Book 6.31 The full exploration of such a range, fusing high and low, the everyday and the sublime, was, Emerson contended, typical of the period. It is, as we have seen, also in Shakespeare, who ‘possesses the power of subordinating nature for the purposes of expression beyond all poets’, just as it is in Milton (Early Lectures 1: 292). But they are only representative; he sees it right across the poets of the English Renaissance. George Herbert, whose presence in the 1836 ‘Nature’ is second only to Shakespeare’s, is ‘a striking example of the power of exalted thought to melt and bend language to its fit expression’ (350). Indeed, he takes this further, quoting the earlier line from the Michel Angelo lecture: ‘The thought has so much heat as actually to fuse the words, so that language is wholly flexible in his hands’ (350). It is this flexibility, Emerson contends, that will allow language to renew itself. It is this flexibility that will enable it to speak for a new country and in speaking for it anew create it as for the first time. For Emerson does not want his audience to imitate the Renaissance ideals that are represented by Shakespeare, Milton, Herrick or Herbert, but to be liberated by them from the conventions and traditions of his time. This call for a new national language, as we have seen, is how his book Nature begins. In addition to a new language, Nature is also a call for new men. This takes me to Matthiessen’s second insight: Emerson’s discovery of the image of himself in the poets and thinkers of the Renaissance period, implying that he would fail to find such an image elsewhere, that is, in the United States. Emerson is dealing here in ideals, and despite his constant return to Shakespeare as a poet, it is to the unimpeachably moral Milton that he turns for a representative whole man. But, though he respects Milton, it is not the poet himself who can reach Emerson’s lofty ideal – it is Milton’s Adam, himself an ideal reflection of the poet who composed him: Was there not a fitness in the undertaking of such a person [as Milton], to write a poem on the subject of Adam, the first man? By his sympathy with all nature; by the proportion of his powers; by great knowledge, and by religion, he would reascend to the height from which our nature is supposed to have descended. From a just knowledge of what man should be he described what he was. (160) And Emerson goes on to quote the lines from Paradise Lost that give us Adam’s ‘hyacinthine locks’ and ‘eye sublime’ which declares ‘absolute rule’ (160). As such Milton admits us to Man before the Fall. That the Renaissance artists had access to something ideal of this type is a consistent theme of Emerson’s early lectures on English literature, and it is an idea that shares common ground with his theory of genius as something which allows us access to a primal source which can elevate all men; or, rather, allow them to discover themselves before the Fall.

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Again Michelangelo is prototypical. His work represents the idea that ‘Man is the highest and indeed but the only proper subject of plastic art’ (103). In addition he is the first artist in the lectures who represents one of Emerson’s key artistic desiderata, drawn from Coleridge and Goethe, to represent the one in the many. Emerson explains, ‘The Italian artists intimate this view of beauty by describing it as il piu nell’ uno, i.e., the many in one or Multitude in Unity’ (101; cf. Works 1: 17). Thus the unique beauties of Milton’s Adam and Michelangelo’s David have ‘a kind of universality’ (Early Lectures 1: 101) and are representative of common possibility rather than particular perfection. He sees something of this in Chaucer, who ‘is a man of strong and kindly genius possessing all his faculties in that balance and symmetry neither too little nor too much which constitute an individual sort of Universal Man’ (272). Emerson also recognises it in Francis Bacon, of whom he writes: ‘Not less than Shakespeare [Bacon] may claim the praise of universality . . . His expansive Eye opened to receive the whole system, the whole inheritance of Man’ (326). What these Renaissance artists and thinkers are able to do, through their control of nature, be it in stone, paint, science or the breath of words, is shape nature into an ideal image which is directly representative of the best possibilities of all men. The consequence of this, which is so crucial for the Emersonian, and the US, renaissance, is that this potential is universal. Nature, in building on his lectures on the Renaissance, will take from his vision of that heady time a call for originality in a language that draws on the full resource of US nature, and the vitality of a poetry that symbolises it; but most of all it will argue for the absolute centrality of man in the universe and the originality of his present moment.

An Atlantic Adam Emerson’s, then, is indeed an inviting origin story: for whatever is brought to the United States becomes of the United States simply by virtue of that transmission, just as anything that is brought to the self becomes the self. This is what at least one myth of the United States comes to be: that which transforms the Old into the New, which is, in Emersonian terms, a rhetorical performance that shapes both self and world. Perhaps the clearest articulation of this myth of US literary origins as a ‘myth’ was by R. W. B. Lewis in his 1955 book The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century, which explicitly (and unapologetically) begins by suggesting ‘the first tentative outlines of a native American mythology’.32 Here the key term is ‘innocence’ (the first term of the book’s subtitle) and, rather than the United States being the immature latecomer to a European cultural banquet, ‘the American myth saw life and history as just beginning’.33 Lewis claims: the new habits to be engendered on the new American scene were suggested by the image of a radically new personality, the hero of a new adventure: an individual emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritances of family and race; an individual standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with the aid of his own unique and inherent resources.34 This new hero was the ‘American as Adam’,35 and at least one thing that is remarkable about Lewis’s Adam is that although his figure has all the hallmarks of the speaker of

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Emerson’s lectures and essays (if hardly of Emerson himself), no identification is made. For Lewis – and this suggests the scope of the myth – Emerson is a symptom rather than a cause: ‘The American myth . . . was not fashioned ultimately by a single man of genius. It was and it has remained a collective affair.’36 Adam, then, is a symbol rather than a person. That this literary origin story is a myth is made explicit, but this does not dent either its resilience or its ability to explain the ‘optative mood’ that Emerson recognised as the key to his own era (Works 1: 207). But what Lewis’s myth also does, even more than Emerson’s redefinition of originality, is wipe away the past entirely. There can be nothing human before Adam, and the very use of that term by Lewis belongs to an effort to deny the Old World any continued presence in the New. There is, though, an important difference between denial and incorporation. Emerson is for the latter in all its vampiric nourishment; the former is not, even mythically, an option. Perhaps, then, an Emersonian myth that sees the cultures of the Old World ground down to feed the coming cultures of the New World is more compelling than an Adamic myth that forgets the Old to create its space for the New. Emerson at least holds on to the past even if he only allows it to gain its ultimate value in its new transatlantic context. However, it is still important to recognise that while this myth may prove sustaining, rigorous genealogical scholarship nearly always takes us elsewhere. The work of Robert Weisbuch, for example, sees Emerson directly reacting against British writers, such as Wordsworth, Carlyle and Coleridge, insofar as they are seen to be ‘nationally representative’.37 This ‘metonymic’ interpretation enables Emerson to reject contemporary British writing as ‘a failure of nerve [that] accommodates itself to a fallen world’.38 This allows a freedom from the anxiety of British tradition and, Weisbuch suggests, the emergence of American literary nationalism through competition rather than rebirth. In 1992, Lawrence Buell put forward the idea that US literature of the middle years of the nineteenth century was post-colonial, and challenged the hermeticism of standard interpretations; for example, the Bloomian idea that ‘no foreign power disrupts the [US] symposium once Emerson enters it’.39 He also contests the way that the study of American literary emergence has revolved around assumptions about the coherence of the American canon formed in the image of such myths of American distinctiveness as Puritan inheritance or Adamic innocence . . . as well as particular lineal succession stories like Edwards to Emerson.40 Buell, like Weisbuch, sees the US literary Renaissance as part of an ongoing dialogue with European, and in particular British, literature, wondering, for example, about the balance of significance for Hawthorne between the influences of Walter Scott or the Puritans. In further contrast to Bloom, Buell sees works like Emerson’s ‘The American Scholar’ (1837) as creating a tale of national literary origins ‘in the image of his own belated intellectual emergence, for which Coleridge helped, much more than any American thinker, to provide the scaffolding’.41 From 2003 onwards Paul Giles has refined this line of inquiry. He criticises the kind of US exceptionalism implicit in the myths of literary origins outlined hitherto for neglecting the transnational context of the burgeoning US Empire, namely the Native American suppression, the Spanish presence and the Mexican wars, as well as the colonial influence of Great Britain. As he quips, ‘The cradle of American

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literature . . . is in discord rather than Concord.’42 Thus, for Giles, Emerson’s ability to transform the particular into the universal (or everything into the ‘American’) is seen as prototypical of the ideology of US expansionism.43 There are more particular archaeological accounts than these. For example, Susan Manning traces Emerson’s unique literary style to his conflict with figures from the Scottish Enlightenment, and Leon Chai exhaustively locates Emerson, and his contemporaries, against the background of European Romanticism, opening a furrow that has been further ploughed in the last ten years by Patrick Keane, Samantha Harvey and myself, each revealing nuances of direct and indirect influence.44 However, as Buell points out, such ‘influence studies implicitly occupy a minor niche in the larger scheme of things’.45 Rather, what remains is a ‘myth’ of US literary origins that has a sustaining power quite beyond its evidential bases. At least one reason for this, I have argued here, is Emerson’s own rhetoric, which enabled him to absorb Europe without acknowledging its authority over him. Nevertheless, in too many ways to count, Emerson is the self-admitted product of European forebears. His early lectures in the 1830s are upon European subjects. When he set out to delineate his ‘representative men’ for a lecture series in the 1840s and the subsequent book, not one was American.46 In the full length of his lifelong journal he admits genuine admiration for very few Americans who are not his immediate contemporaries, yet Goethe, Shakespeare and Coleridge, to name just the most important Europeans to Emerson, are mentioned consistently and with reverence. Despite the arguments of Feidelson and Bercovitch it is actually quite hard even to assert a line of continuity with the Puritanism of Jonathan Edwards. In the ten volumes of the Collected Works and the three volumes of Early Lectures there is not one mention of his name. In the sixteen volumes of the Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, references to Edwards can be counted on your fingers, whereas the citations from and direct allusions to Goethe, Shakespeare, Milton and Coleridge are far too numerous to count. What is evident is that Emerson, the mythical father of US literature, despite any claims to the contrary, is a transatlantic figure. This is why I am calling Emerson an Atlantic Adam, for it is European culture that is being made new in the United States, rather than an American Adam who would deny the influence of the Old World. But what is much more important is that, through the force of his rhetoric, Emerson was able to direct the energy of two millennia and more of European thought into the shaping of an ‘original’ US tradition. It is not that he was without precursors, which no one would claim, but rather that he Americanised them, reframed them from a transatlantic standpoint, and thus brought about an American Renaissance.

Notes 1. Cited in Joel Myerson (ed.), Transcendentalism: A Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 195. 2. Andrews Norton, A Discourse on the Latest Form of Infidelity (Cambridge, MA: John Owen, 1839), p. 8. 3. Charles Feidelson Jr, Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953); R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955); Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975).

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4. Leon Chai, The Romantic Origins of the American Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987); Samantha Harvey, Transatlantic Transcendentalism: Coleridge, Emerson and Nature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013); David Greenham, Emerson’s Transatlantic Romanticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 5. Harold Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination (New York: Continuum, 1976); F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941). 6. Robert Weisbuch, Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and British Influence in the Age of Emerson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Lawrence Buell, ‘American Literary Emergence as a Postcolonial Phenomenon’, American Literary History 4.3 (1992): 411–42; Paul Giles, ‘Transnationalism and Classic American Literature’, PMLA 118.1 (2003): 62–77, p. 65. 7. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 10 vols, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971–2013), vol. 8, p. 94. Hereafter referred to parenthetically as Works. 8. Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, pp. 38, 57. 9. Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. 60. 10. Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, pp. 55–64. 11. Barrett Wendell, A Literary History of America (New York: Scribner, 1900), p. 311. 12. Wendell, A Literary History of America, p. 319; cf. pp. 297–8, 291. 13. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, p. xii. 14. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, p. 30. 15. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, pp. 42–3. 16. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, pp. 5–6. 17. Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (New York: Harper, 1956), pp. 184–203. 18. Feidelson, Symbolism and American Literature, p. 9. 19. Feidelson, Symbolism and American Literature, p. 94. 20. Feidelson, Symbolism and American Literature, p. 98. 21. Bercovitch, Puritan Origins, pp. 157, 143. 22. Bercovitch, Puritan Origins, pp. 161, 163, 168. 23. For more on this see my ‘Emerson’, in Peter Rawlings (ed.), Great Shakespeareans: Emerson, Melville, James, Berryman (London: Continuum, 2011), pp. 11–50. 24. For further views on Emerson’s relationship with English Renaissance writers, see Richard C. Pettigrew, ‘Emerson and Milton’, American Literature 3.1 (1931): 45–59; Norman Britten, ‘Emerson and the Metaphysical Poets’, American Literature 8 (1936): 1–21; J. Russell Roberts, ‘Emerson’s Debt to the Seventeenth Century’, American Literature 21.3 (1949): 298–310; Michael Colacurcio, ‘ “The Corn and The Wine”: Emerson and the Example of Herbert’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 42.1 (1987): 1–28. 25. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, p. 104. 26. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, p. 103. 27. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, p. 102. 28. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, p. 103. 29. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 3 vols, ed. Robert E. Spiller et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959–72), vol. 1, p. 274. Hereafter referred to as Early Lectures. 30. Robert D. Richardson Jr, Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 3; Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 16 vols, ed. William H. Gilman, Ralph H. Orth et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960–82), vol. 14, p. 154. 31. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Barbara Lewalski (1672; Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 12, 162–3.

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32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

Lewis, The American Adam, p. 1. Lewis, The American Adam, p. 5. Lewis, The American Adam, p. 5. Lewis, The American Adam, p. 5. Lewis, The American Adam, p. 4. Weisbuch, Atlantic Double-Cross, p. 21. Weisbuch, Atlantic Double-Cross, pp. 21–2. Buell, ‘American Literary Emergence’, pp. 412, 413. Buell, ‘American Literary Emergence’, p. 413. Buell, ‘American Literary Emergence’, p. 423. Giles, ‘Transnationalism and Classic American Literature’, p. 65. Giles, ‘Transnationalism and Classic American Literature’, p. 65. Chai, Romantic Origins; Harvey, Transatlantic Transcendentalism; Greenham, Emerson’s Transatlantic Romanticism. Susan Manning, Fragments of Union: Making Connections in Scottish and American Writing (London: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 253ff. Patrick Keane, Emerson, Romanticism and Intuitive Reason: ‘The Transatlantic Light of All Our Day’ (Columbia: University of Columbia Press, 2005). 45. Buell, ‘American Literary Emergence’, p. 412. 46. His choice of representative men was Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napoleon and Goethe (Works 4).

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18 Taming the American Shrew: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s New Woman and the Transatlantic Courtship Plot Sarah Wagner-McCoy

I

n the 1907 preface to The American (1877), Henry James acknowledges a discrepancy between changing social history – ‘the way things happen’ – and his nowobsolete fictional plot: ‘the way in which they are represented to have happened, in Paris, to my hero’.1 Christopher Newman, a ‘Western Barbarian’ with a fortune from copper and other ventures in mining and oil, comes to the Old World to find culture and a wife, ‘the best article in the market’, as he crudely puts it.2 He picks Claire de Cintré, a young widow from the noble House of Bellegarde, but ultimately her family cannot stomach a son-in-law with American manners, even in exchange for American money. This ending, James later concedes in his preface, does not accurately represent the aristocratic desperation for cash in Europe: ‘They would positively have jumped at my rich and easy American, and not have “minded” in the least any drawback.’3 In the thirty years between the novel’s first publication and its revision, James realised that America’s unprecedented wealth had completely upended the transatlantic hierarchies he mistakenly sustained in his hero’s failed courtship plot. The advent of staggering individual fortunes revolutionised the long-standing conventions of the international theme: American innocence still confronted European sophistication, but this time the US held the purse strings. Between the Civil War and World War I, the US economy ‘quintupled in size, with its growth accounting for a quarter of the world’s economic growth’.4 The Americans of this era’s transatlantic weddings were not barbarous Western men but their cosmopolitan daughters; by 1907, the year of James’s revised preface, it was ‘estimated that more than five hundred American women had married titled foreigners and some $220 million had gone with them to Europe’.5 That same year, Frances Hodgson Burnett published The Shuttle, her most ambitious novel of transatlantic courtship. Like James, Burnett uses the courtship plot to fictionalise the cultural history of Americanisation at a crucial turning point in transatlantic relations. However, Burnett gets right what James got wrong. The Shuttle presents a fantasy of AngloAmerican union with the US as the engine of power. Burnett’s novel is not merely a case study of the rich American women whose fortunes finance the British aristocracy they married into, but a way of narrating one of the most dramatic geopolitical changes of the previous century: ‘The dominant nineteenth-century Anglo-American imaginary unfolded from a distinctly skittish to a much more amicable, albeit still

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guarded, mutuality as the United States rose toward world power status, even as the British Empire neared its own ultimate extension.’6 Simultaneously transforming the conventions of the courtship plot and the international theme, Burnett represents the rise of Anglo-American mutuality in the union of the American New Woman and the English lord she weds.

The Atlantic Loom Born in Manchester in 1849, Burnett moved to the US when she was sixteen. The death of her father and the collapse of Manchester’s cotton-dependent textile industry in the 1860s forced the Hodgsons to sell their failing ironmonger business and emigrate to Tennessee, where Burnett’s uncle owned a successful dry goods store.7 Burnett helped to support her family by writing and made her reputation in 1886 with Little Lord Fauntleroy, an instant bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic.8 Like James, Burnett sustains an outmoded abhorrence of American in-laws in this early novel; the powerful Earl of Dorincourt cuts off his youngest son for marrying an American woman. Once all the Earl’s heirs die, however, he reunites with his worthy American grandson, showering riches on Lord Fauntleroy and his shabbily decent friends in New York. In the context of the US’s booming economy and the British aristocracy’s decline, the Earl’s great wealth is as anachronistic as his anti-American snobbery. Although Burnett is known today primarily for children’s classics, such as A Little Princess (1905) and The Secret Garden (1911), her early novels earned critical acclaim and by 1896 she was earning more from her writing than any other contemporary author in either nation.9 Two years later, she and her husband, the American doctor Swan Burnett, divorced, making international headlines; they had spent little time together since their eldest son’s death from tuberculosis in 1890, but the papers blamed her ‘advanced ideas regarding the duties of a wife and the rights of women’ for the split.10 Although Burnett denied interest in the ‘woman question’, her works often depicted women excelling their male counterparts, and her divorces and professional successes earned her both respect and opprobrium as a New Woman.11 In 1900, the year she began writing The Shuttle, Burnett married the Englishman Stephen Townsend, a likely inspiration for the novel’s abusive villain. It was, according to one biographer, ‘the biggest mistake of her life’.12 He was ten years her junior and, she believed, after her money; she later claimed that Townsend blackmailed her into marriage, and she completed the novel after they divorced in 1902.13 The Shuttle begins with an image of destined union: Fate’s shuttle drawing England and the US together with the threads of commerce, literature and art.14 The double meaning of ‘shuttle’ connects the weaving goddesses of classical antiquity to the transatlantic steamships that revolutionised nineteenth-century travel: ‘the Shuttle, having shot to and fro, faster and faster, week by week, month by month, weaving new threads into its web each year, has woven warp and woof until they bind far shore to shore’ (S 2). Both genders cross the loom of the Atlantic, but women are the primary weavers in this novel. Whereas war and male pride lead to ‘the gulf of a bitter quarrel deepened by hatred and the shedding of brothers’ blood’, women can reconnect the nations, ‘twinning the cord of sex and home-building and race-founding’ (S 1, 2). Weaving belongs to a long history of domestic production and female virtue, from

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Homer’s Penelope onwards, but Burnett’s usage claims Anglo-America’s geopolitical destiny as women’s work as well. The shuttle embodies the paradox of transatlantic domesticity, a homecoming continually in motion across the thickening web of the Anglo-American world: ‘As America discovered Europe, that continent discovered America . . . international marriages ceased to be a novelty’ (S 52–3). Moving back across the Atlantic, American brides reverse the androcentric and exceptionalist conventions of US literary traditions: Burnett replaces the American Adam with a transatlantic Eve in a myth of mutual discovery. The New York heiress Bettina Vanderpoel, the novel’s heroine and an ideal New Woman, has the money to be mobile.15 When Bettina comes of age, she embarks on a solitary adventure to rescue her older sister, Rosalie, from captivity as the wife of an abusive English lord. Instead of setting off for the territory – Bettina has already ‘swooped across the American continent’ (S 61) with her doting father to visit mines and railways – she finds nature in rural Kent and restores her sister’s vast gardens at Stornham. Aided by her New York fortunes, Burnett’s New Woman settles land that has reverted, through bankruptcy and neglect, into wilderness. Bettina does eventually marry, but her heroic confrontation with a new land – the traditional narrative of American (male) Romance – takes precedence over her courtship plot: ‘I have a little monomania . . . for not taking a bargain from the ducal remnant counter’ (S 67).16 Determined to avoid the conventional exchange of cash for coronets, she falls in love with the British landscape first, and then with one of its owners. Deferring her debut to restore the garden, Bettina enacts what Leslie Fiedler wryly termed ‘the flight of the dreamer from the shrew’, an evasion of heterosexual commitments that distinguishes, in Fiedler’s account, the US novel from its European counterparts.17 Yet Burnett’s novel replaces male frontier narrative with a female heroine setting off in the other direction. Bettina evades the society that would view her power as shrewish by establishing an ideal household in rural England that topples conventional hierarchies of gender and nation: The American Eagle spread its wings and flapped them sometimes a trifle, over this new but so natural and inevitable triumph of its virgins . . . America ruled the universe, and its women ruled America, bullying it a little, prettily, perhaps. What could be more a matter of course than that American women, being aided by adoring fathers, brothers and husbands, sumptuously to ship themselves to other lands, should begin to rule these lands also? (S 53) Burnett seems, in this passage, to exemplify Amy Kaplan’s notion of ‘manifest domesticity’, which treats ‘narratives of domesticity and female subjectivity as inseparable from narratives of empire and nation building’.18 With the aid of adoring male relatives, American women can expand the reach of domestic ideals from the household to the nation to the world. Kaplan argues that domesticity, rather than serving as ‘a feminine counterforce to the male activity of territorial conquest’, unites the separate spheres in a ‘mobile’ imperialist discourse: ‘When we contrast the domestic sphere with the market or political realm, men and women inhabit a divided social terrain, but when we oppose the domestic to the foreign, men and women become national allies against the alien.’19 Although The Shuttle uses the domestic sphere as an allegory

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for idealised civilisation, it replaces nineteenth-century nationalism with a transatlantic vision of Anglo-American mutuality. Whereas Kaplan presents a centripetal empire exercising power in a single direction, Burnett, even at her most jingoistic, imagines American triumph as the achievement of equality with Britain, albeit an equality with Anglo-Saxon heritage at its core. Moreover, Burnett updates the ideal of domesticity with an emphasis on women’s equality rather than their spiritualism or virtue. A pretty bully rather than an angel, Bettina stands up for herself and her nation against her villainous brother-in-law, Sir Nigel Anstruthers. Instead of bullying the Briton into submission, Bettina marries Lord Mount Dunstan, her match rather than her master, suggesting that the US and Britain could reunite on equal terms. Yet Rosalie’s alternative plot line of shrew taming links the hierarchies of early modern conquest and early modern marriage through the language of domestication, ‘conquering and taming the wild, the natural, and the alien’.20 Nigel calls his meek wife a ‘little spiteful shrew’ and prides himself on his misogynistic ‘theories’ on bullying women into ‘submission’ (S 158, 303). The virtues of domesticity – maternal love and religious virtue – only make Rosalie more vulnerable to Nigel, who forces her to sign away her inheritance by threatening to separate her from her son and blackmailing her with an innocent correspondence with a kind clergyman who helped her find God. By modelling Nigel on early modern shrew-tamers, The Shuttle not only highlights his villainy but also offers a framework for the national and gender hierarchies he promotes. Read as a heroine, Bettina exemplifies the ideal popularised by Sarah Grand’s ‘The New Aspect of the Woman Question’, which defines the New Woman as a moral superior of the morally degenerate men unworthy of her.21 Bettina’s disgust for Nigel proves Grand right; no longer as innocent as her older sister, the fin de siècle woman will not overlook male vice or turn a blind eye to the syphilis he contracts from prostitutes. However, Nigel’s efforts to tame Bettina as thoroughly as he tamed her Victorian sister echo the assaults on the New Woman in the popular media.22 The threat to the dream of transatlantic mutuality is not the shrew, in Burnett’s romance, but the shrewtamer who denigrates the rise of the New Woman and the New World as symptoms of a household – and society – turned upside-down. Although the novel presents an arc of progress – from wilderness to paradise and from bullied bride to New Woman – the resurgence of Gothic melodrama in the novel’s final scenes exposes the precariousness of women’s authority and, with it, the limitations of American international clout. Whereas the pastoral representation of the British landscape promises a new frontier for American progress that unites natural beauty with Old World culture, the Gothic barbarity of Sir Nigel’s mercenary marriage to Rosalie and attempted rape of Bettina undermines the conventional allegory of America’s coming of age. Purchasing power may prove advantageous for Americans in the marriage market, but only if they are not, ultimately, the property exchanged. ‘Married or single’, Cathy N. Davidson writes, an American woman before the end of the nineteenth century ‘had virtually no rights within society and no visibility within the political operations of government, except as a symbol of that government’.23 British women had even less power. Although Britain and the US underwent the same ‘evolution from “feudal” husband-headed households to “modern” companionate, relatively egalitarian, marriages’, the US abolished the common-law practice of coverture, under which the husband controls the wife’s property, decades before Britain.24 The two sisters expose, in their transatlantic matches, a generational shift towards

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equality in matrimony and in Anglo-American relations. Yet the Gothic melodrama complicates this narrative of progress, exposing the consequences of mercenary marriage and the vulnerability of both the New Woman and the new world power she represents.25

Transatlantic Courtship In 1902, the English journalist William Thomas Stead announced the ‘Americanisation of the world’: ‘The advent of the United States of America as the greatest of world-Powers is the greatest political, social, and commercial phenomenon of our times.’26 Although he concedes that his countrymen resent this development, Stead celebrates American power as an extension of British influence and of the AngloSaxon race and hopes that the consolidation of corporate power might take place on a larger scale: ‘Is there no Morgan who will undertake to bring about the greatest combination of all – a combination of the whole English-speaking race?’27 The combination that grabbed the popular imagination was a matrimonial one. Although the history of such unions and their extensive coverage in the press certainly played a role, the popular fascination with rich American heiresses restoring British stately homes – persisting even today in the bafflingly popular TV series Downton Abbey – suggests an appetite for narratives that make the alterations of global power legible through the social hierarchies of the courtship plot.28 In The American Invaders: Their Plans, Tactics and Progress (1901), Fred A. McKenzie quipped that Britain had nothing left to export but its human elite: To-day it is literally true that Americans are selling their cottons in Manchester, pigiron in Lancashire, and steel in Sheffield. They send oatmeal to Scotland, potatoes to Ireland, and our national beef to England. It only remains for them to take coals to Newcastle. In fact, the time seems coming when, as an American wittily put it, we shall find our chief export across the Atlantic to be scions of our nobility, whom America cannot produce on account of the limits imposed by her constitution. And, even there, the balance of trade will be in America’s favor, for she sends us her gracious daughters to grace our ducal homes.29 The gracious daughters did more than grace England’s ducal homes. The dowries and dollars made from industrial land in the US subsidised the pastoral estates of Britain and the Continent. Nature’s nation produced enough to fund the unproductive parks and pleasure grounds of an increasingly impoverished aristocracy. This was due in large part to the railway network, which opened access to the vast resources of the American interior. Initially aided by government land grants, the railways expanded rapidly because of international labour and capital, which poured into the United States more than into any other developing country.30 As tracks linked the east and west coasts, innovations such as the steamship and the submarine telegraph made international travel and communication quicker and cheaper than it had ever been. ‘Europe is fed from day to day by the produce of American wheatfields and the slaughter-yards of Chicago,’ Stead explained.31 Instead of producing the pastoral golden age hyped by the previous generation, America’s abundant land produced a Gilded Age of unprecedented wealth.

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‘Millionaires are a recent growth in the Republic,’ Andrew Carnegie wrote in The Gospel of Wealth. ‘Multi-millionaires were unheard of before our day.’32 By 1906, when Carnegie wrote these words, he and his peers were celebrities, icons of America’s meteoric rise. Newly flush with cash, Americans flocked to Europe with unprecedented buying power. Shopkeepers, cabbies and hoteliers delighted in rich American clients, who set up households in European hotels and routinely paid $20,000 (over half a million dollars today) on a single season’s wardrobe from Paris designers on the Rue de la Paix.33 As the profusion of American museum collections from the Gilded Age attests, acquiring European art was a common practice; Henry Clay Frick and Isabella Stewart Gardner both used the money made from Pennsylvania’s industrial mining economy to purchase seemingly priceless masterpieces for museums that still bear their names.34 The transatlantic novels of the day reveal not only the clout of American capital but also the persistence of the US’s cultural insecurity, purchasing tokens of the Old World power the US seemed to have surpassed. When James introduces us to Daisy Miller, his most famous heroine, she is absorbed in fixing the flounces and ribbons of her Paris dress; despite her dubious morality, the details of her wardrobe fanned the flames of America’s passion for sartorial consumption. In The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain affectionately mocks less wealthy American pleasure seekers, who pride themselves on sceptical savvy in the face of European history but eagerly consume worthless souvenirs. The figure of the art collector in these novels is more discerning but no less extravagant. In The Golden Bowl, James’s Adam Verver plans to start a museum back home in ‘American City’. Elmer Moffatt, Edith Wharton’s self-made ‘billionaire Railroad King’ in The Custom of the Country, earns esteem as a collector.35 However, in these novels of cosmopolitan life, the ultimate status symbol is the aristocratic estate itself rather than the objects it contains. Although some Europeans sold or rented encumbered estates to make ends meet, others incorporated American money into the family through marriage. There was no shortage of Americans desirous of either option. Carnegie purchased Skibo Castle in Scotland ‘to enjoy the simple life’, but many other multi-millionaires gained a foothold in Old World estates by becoming in-laws.36 Shunned by Mrs Astor’s New York as arrivistes, ‘dollar princesses’ married brilliantly abroad.37 Winston Churchill’s mother was Jennie Jerome, the daughter of a Wall Street speculator; Chicago’s Mary Leiter, whose money came from dry goods, married George Curzon, First Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, and became Vicereine of India; as Duchess of Marlborough, Consuelo Vanderbilt, heiress to the Vanderbilt railway fortune, paid to restore Blenheim Palace, one of the largest stately homes in Britain. Any European title would do but, as explained in the introduction to Titled Americans: A List of American Ladies Who Have Married Foreigners of Rank (1890), ‘English titles enjoy greater consideration, both at home and abroad, than those conferred by any other State.’38 Compiled by Marguerite and Frederick Cunliffe-Owen, an English couple who relocated to New York and ‘traded on their supposed insider status as aristocrats’, Titled Americans recorded the matches between American women and European noblemen.39 Primogeniture, Titled Americans explained, prevented the British ‘peerage from becoming overcrowded’.40 For ambitious heiresses, the Cunliffe-Owens also offered an unabashedly frank list of still-eligible British peers, detailing the age, financial details and, in some cases, reputation of the bachelors: ‘Lord Devon’, we are told, has a heavily mortgaged estate and ‘has sown wild oats extensively’.41

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However, despite their relative scarcity, British peers were losing wealth and power precipitously between 1880 and 1914.42 As the US swept the commercial marketplace, its women swept the marriage market and offered, in the popular imagination, the perfect allegory for the reversal of Old and New World power. The ‘Carefully Compiled List of Peers Who are supposed to be eager to lay their Coronets, and incidentally their Hearts, at the feet of the all-conquering American Girl’ delights in the success of the New World upstarts: If one should give full credit to the bitter cry of the British-Matron-With-A-Lotof-Marriageable-Daughters, he would imagine that . . . Belgravia was an Adamless Eden, and Mayfair suffering from a modern version of the Rape of the Sabines, with that part of the Sabines assumed by the British Young Man and that of the Romans by the American Girl.43 To imagine the American Girl as the Roman vanquisher of helpless British men reverses the idea both of gender and of conquest. The Sabines are women abducted during a festival while their families, shepherds native to Italy, helplessly flee.44 The joke not only feminises the most powerful men of Britain, but also treats the most powerful empire in the world as a conquered tribe in the face of US expansion. The image of the Adamless Eden, moreover, recalls the myth promoted by New World writing of a vacant landscape with the potential to be paradise for European settlers. The passage transforms a promise of pastoral settlement with a nightmare of depopulation for the unmarried women of Belgravia. Hyperboles of American advantage in manufacture and the marriage market not only upend Britain’s material supremacy but also threaten to undo the myth of Western civilisation itself.

Pastoral Domesticity Despite the economic liability of estates, the Old World rusticity appealed to Americans because of its association not only with the upper echelons of society but also with the pastoral ideal. Imagining the Old World countryside as timeless and unchanging, Americans left the rapidly developing landscape at home for European retreats. Burnett claimed that the descendants of the English preferred the British countryside to London, Paris or Rome, because of their shared literature and shared kin. Fancy, she writes, ‘always led the traveler to the treading of green, velvet English turf’ (S 52). In The Shuttle, penny-pinching tourists spend their savings on the transatlantic journey to see the Old World countryside rather than the great cities of Europe: ‘A New England schoolma’am, who has made a Cook’s tour, will almost have tears in her voice as she wanders on with her commonplaces about hawthorn hedges and thatched cottages and white or red farms’ (S 95). G. Selden, the lowly typewriter salesman from New York, gravitates towards bucolic scenes ‘because I once had an old grandmother that was English, and she was always talking about English country, and how green things was’ (S 225). When Bettina first sees fields full of embowering trees and young lambs in Kent, she declares it ‘England – England’, the pastoral landscape of ‘Constable and Morland, of Miss Mitford and Miss Austen, the Brontës and George Eliot’ (S 100–1). These transatlantic cultural exchanges – even second-hand accounts and common cliché – generate a love of British landscape intensified rather than lessened by geographical distance.

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Finding ‘some literary parallel’ for the land, Americans experience Britain by saying ‘that things remind us of pictures or books – most usually books’, a pastoral synthesis of literary convention and concrete place (S 101). ‘I have claimed my heritage – my castles and ruins, abbeys and cathedral towns and thatched cottages, my lakes, the homes of my poets, my dramatic landscapes, my English mists, my purple heather,’ the Bryn Mawr President and suffragist M. Carey Thomas wrote as a young woman travelling through the English countryside in 1881.45 Transatlantic literary culture made the land described by simple grandmothers and pastoral writers a shared heritage for Americans to claim. Idyllic fantasies of Old World retreats were nothing new, but the power to buy them outright was. Americans could purchase European paradise, invading the British countryside and taking over their castles and manors. ‘They can get them by paying for them,’ Mount Dunstan observes, ‘and they know how to pay . . . They buy our land and our homes, and our landowners, for that matter – when they don’t buy them, they send their women to marry them’ (S 78). Yet Mount Dunstan proves his worth by his willingness to work in the more lucrative landscape of the US. He tries to restore the family estate by labouring on a sheep ranch in the American West, ‘working hard and using his hands as well as his brains’ (S 76). Too late to profit as a frontiersman, Mount Dunstan returns empty-handed after two years, and meets Bettina on the steamer from New York. Conversely, Bettina’s merits shine through in her English pastoral labours. With her omnipotent capital and business savvy, she flawlessly restores Stornham Court for the sake of her sister’s child, to whom the property is entailed. These decaying homes present a new frontier for pastoral cultivation; reversing the American narrative of progress from wilderness to garden, time turns English landscaping back to ‘wildernesses’ (S 401). The only obstacle in the courtship plot is contempt for the exchange of American money and British land, a cliché so obvious that both characters explicitly refuse to conform. Burnett sets up the conventions of the transatlantic courtship and then follows them to the letter while insisting that pastoral beauty rather than money motivates the exchange. A practical businesswoman, Bettina resents the falsehoods of these marriages: ‘Let it be understood that he is property for sale, let her make sure that he is the kind of property she wants to buy’ (S 66). Despite the clarity of this exchange, Burnett sustains a fantasy of an English idyll immune to commercial forces. Bettina’s love for village life rather than luxurious manor houses suggests the disinterestedness of her marriage and enhances her worthiness for a happy marriage: ‘I shall be quite happy in no other place than an English village, with a Norman church tower looking down upon it and rows of little gardens with spears of white and blue lupins and Canterbury bells standing guard before cottage doors’ (S 451). As the indefinite articles suggest, Bettina has fallen in love with the English ideal rather than Mount Dunstan’s estate. The distinction implies that she does not love Lord Mount Dunstan for his land. The hero shares her contempt for the arrangement, though he recognises that ‘American fortunes had built up English houses, which otherwise threatened to fall into decay’ (S 78). He denounces the ‘Englishmen who brand themselves as half men and marked merchandise by selling themselves and their houses and their blood to foreign women who can buy them’, and he swears never to marry for money (S 353). He falls in love with Bettina anyway because he is ‘moved by the dower nature had bestowed on her’ (S 368). Her beauty – the gift of superior genes and bountiful nature – exonerates him from mercenary motives. Conveniently, Bettina

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has an actual dowry to bestow on nature, and together the couple reclaim the wilderness that his land has become. When Mount Dunstan and Bettina dance at a ball, an onlooker compares them to Adam and Eve (S 324). Bettina’s erotic charisma helps Mount Dunstan develop from a sullen but noble failure into a superior order worthy of her love, emulating her heroic initiative when the hop-pickers fall ill and an epidemic sweeps the village. When he succumbs after nobly nursing his tenants, she calls him back from death through prayer, proving the power of their love in a mystical denouement reminiscent of the Brontës. Although The Shuttle celebrates Bettina as an exemplar of the American spirit of enterprise, pastoral representations of her wealth cover an underlying queasiness about money and trade. Unlike the ‘unnatural . . . monstrous fortunes’ that rise out of the West, the Vanderpoel money is, in American terms, old (S 171). The first Reuben Vanderpoel ‘traded with savages for the pelts of wild animals’ and his thrifty Northern English wife cunningly exchanged her own petticoat for an ornament that would allow her to obtain a valuable skin from a squaw (S 3–4). These early trades warrant more narration than the commercial dealings of the next three generations of Vanderpoels combined. We learn only that the fortune grows under the second Reuben, who deals with white men, because ‘the rapid growth and increasing capabilities of the country gave him enlarging opportunities to acquire’ (S 4). The nation becomes the agent of the increasing fortune and, by the next generation, nature takes over: ‘Nature itself compelled them to collect wealth as the load-stone draws toward it iron’ (S 4). Bettina accompanies her father when he goes to see mines and railways in which he presumably invests, and men in their circle discuss stocks and speculation, but details of these investments remain vague, emerging only in asides (S 6, 61). The villagers around Stornham seem equally confused. ‘Where’s the money coming from?’ Joe Buttle, the carpenter, asks one day in the local taproom. Tread the blacksmith, who reads newspapers, answers: ‘It’ll come from America. How they manage to get hold of so much of it there is past me’ (S 207). How Englishmen get hold of so much money is clearer: they marry American women. Nigel’s great-aunt advises him to go to the US to acquire ‘something more practical than buffaloes. You had better stop in New York. Those big shopkeepers’ daughters are enormously rich, they say, and they are immensely pleased by attentions from men of your class’ (S 8). The comparison between hunting buffaloes (an echo of the original Reuben’s self-making) and hunting heiresses suggests the continuity of the two pursuits. The contemptuous reference to ‘big shopkeepers’ daughters’ not only obfuscates social distinctions between people in trade but also chillingly dehumanises the big game of New York. However, the great-aunt gives good, if heartless, advice. For an aristocrat, heiresses are as plentiful and easy to catch as buffalo and worth far more. Working on the pastoral frontier – whether trading pelts, hunting animals or, as Mount Dunstan learns, herding sheep – is not nearly as lucrative as playing the stock and marriage markets of New York City. Even in the marriage market, the Vanderpoels invest well: ‘feminine good looks appeared and were made the most of,’ the narrator explains. ‘The Vanderpoel element invested even good looks to an advantage. The fourth Reuben Vanderpoel had no son and two daughters’ (S 5). The investment in good looks, presumably, pays off in the production of daughters (where looks are most advantageous) rather than sons. Bettina applies Vanderpoel enterprise to a paradoxically new frontier: the revitalisation of Stornham and its village economy. ‘If you

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had been a boy’, Bettina’s father tells her in a letter, ‘I should have been quite willing to allow you your flutter on Wall Street . . . This is your “flutter” ’ (S 222). Barred from business in the US, Bettina find the perfect outlet for her ambitions in the British estate. ‘Perhaps New York has found it wise to begin to give young women professional training in the management of English estates,’ an English lord reflects as he admires Bettina’s restorations (S 254). With the Vanderpoel fortune invested in a beautiful generation of daughters, the future of America lies in a union with Britain.

Gothic Domesticity The Gothic marriage plot of Bettina’s sister Rosalie exposes the folly of the Vanderpoel investment in daughters. Instead of prettily bullying other lands as an American woman, aided by an adoring father, Rosalie becomes the victim of domestic violence at the hands of a manipulative brute. Both sisters experience the same physical space in Stornham, but the rural retirement of Bettina’s pastoral adventure is, for Rosalie, a Gothic isolation. The remote house has only a ‘few far-distant neighbors’ and Nigel’s control of their mail prevents communication with the outside world (S 13). She longs instead for the crowds of New York, and remembers her final glimpse of the city as a cheerful pastoral: ‘the wharf was like a flower garden in the blaze of brilliant and delicate attire worn by the bevy of relatives and intimates who stood waving their handkerchiefs and laughingly calling out farewell good wishes’ (S 19). The novel begins with the transatlantic reversal of Old and New Worlds not as sites of pastoral but as sites of primitive horror. Whisked off to ‘a new, unexplored world’ in rural Kent, Rosalie does not find paradise but is ‘dragged by a gaoler to a prison from which she did not know how to escape’ (S 28). Her aristocratic husband and mother-in-law are such ‘stony, unpleasant creatures’ that they might have been ‘two savages’ (S 34). She invests them with complete supernatural and financial power: ‘it might be that they could take possession of one’s money as they seemed to take possession of one’s self and one’s very soul’ (S 41). Instead of a potential paradise, the new world of rural England proves howling wilderness for the imprisoned Rosalie. Although Rosalie suffers physical abuse at Stornham – Nigel strikes her so hard while she is pregnant that her son, Ughtred, is born deformed – most of the abuse is inflicted through language. Her gender makes her especially susceptible to embarrassment; Nigel ‘had seen women trained to give into anything rather than be bullied in public, to accede in the end to any demand rather than endure the shame of a certain kind of scene made before servants’ (S 21). However, he also uses national shame to bully her. On the transatlantic journey to England, he reproaches his new bride for overdressing: ‘In New York it always strikes an Englishman that the women look endimanché at whatever time of day you come across them.’ Her formal attire displays not only her gauche wealth but also, he insinuates, a shameful sexuality. Her expensive wedding gifts, he says, ‘look as if they belonged to the dressing table of a French woman of the demi-monde. I feel as if I had actually walked into the apartment of some notorious Parisian soubrette’ (S 23). His familiarity with such apartments becomes clear in his absence; for most of the novel, he is on the Continent pursuing the very women with whom he rebukes his innocent wife. Too ‘clean-minded’ to fully understand the implications of his speech, Rosalie simply blushes and cries.

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Eager to assimilate into her new nation, Rosalie is continually ‘overpowered’ by the ‘introduction of the international question’ (S 31): That she was an American and a New Yorker was being impressed upon poor little Lady Anstruthers in a new way – somehow as if the mere cold statement of the fact put a fine edge of sarcasm to any remark. (S 22) Despite Rosalie’s moments of patriotic retaliation her status as an American makes her weak. When she finally understands that Nigel’s cruelty comes from mere greed, she scoffs, ‘to think it was all because I did not give you money – just common dollars and cents that – that I daren’t offer to a decent American who could work for himself’ (S 50). His mother counters by maligning Rosalie and her family as ‘vulgar sharpers. They had trapped a gentleman into a low American marriage and had not the decency to pay for what they got’ (S 49–50). Rather than an allegory of America’s ascent, this transatlantic marriage plot proves the vulgarity of the Americans who must pay for a title. Old World snobbery effectively cuts Rosalie off from her family as well. Nigel interferes with Rosalie’s mail and lets the Vanderpoels believe that she is too ashamed of them to keep in touch. Although they are known as ‘a royal house of New York’ and the ‘nobles’ of America, they accept this account, understanding that even the upper echelons of American society rank below the titled Englishman scorned by his compatriots (S 200, 230). The American inferiority complex allows rank to trump even the greatest fortune in the world. Although Bettina’s rescue of Rosalie suggests her nation’s emergence as a world power, the Gothic conclusion of The Shuttle unsettles the omnipotence of Bettina and the US. Instead of progressing from American insecurity to power, the novel ultimately reverts to the mode with which it began and casts the New Woman as a helpless victim. Pastoral remoteness becomes Gothic isolation when Nigel tries to rape Bettina, contradicting Bettina’s bold claim as she sets out to rescue her sister: Whatsoever I find at Stornham Court, I shall neither weep nor be helpless. There is the Atlantic cable, you know. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why heroines have changed. When they could not escape from their persecutors except in a stage coach, and could not send telegrams, they were more or less in everyone’s hands. It is different now. (S 75) Convinced that female vulnerability is a relic of novels in a new era of travel and telegrams, Bettina tells Rosalie that they have nothing to fear. Bettina reassures Rosalie that ‘modern people in modern days’ do not need to bolt the doors, but Bettina wakes one morning to find Nigel lurking outside her bedroom door, ‘haggard and unseemly, with burned-out, sleepless eyes and bitten lip’, proving her sense of safety false (S 114, 447). ‘We are not living in the Middle Ages,’ she tells Rosalie. ‘There is a policeman even in Stornham village and we are within four hours of London, where there are thousands’ (S 114, 151). Bettina’s rebuttals of Gothic dread update Henry Tilney’s famous antiGothic rebuke in Northanger Abbey when he learns that Catherine Morland suspects General Tilney of murdering his wife: Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you – Does our

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education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing; where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay every thing open?46 Although Austen’s novel satirises the Gothic tropes that inspire Catherine’s macabre fears, male cruelty, from John Thorpe’s caddish driving to General Tilney’s greed, justifies her anxieties by exposing the horrors of everyday villainy. To marry for money is evil enough; Tilney need not kill his wife to hurt her, and his mercenary priorities threaten to blight his children’s happiness as well. Northanger Abbey is not haunted but expensive, and its high costs require a sacrifice of civility. Burnett’s use of quotidian greed and bullying in Rosalie’s marriage plot applies the form of Austen’s subtle Gothic – the ruinous expenses of a pastoral estate – to a transatlantic union. Even in eras of enlightened scepticism and technological sophistication, brutal exploitation and oppression remain real threats within a marriage. The confrontation of American innocence and European sophistication occurs as a prehistory to the narrative; Bettina comes to England with a seemingly flawless understanding of the culture and economy. The plot of American disillusionment ends with Rosalie’s generation: ‘We are not as innocent as we were when this sort of thing began,’ her father admits. ‘We are not as innocent as we were when Rosy was married’ (S 64). However, loss of innocence proves no guarantee of protection. Mr Vanderpoel uneasily contemplates the possibility that Bettina might choose a mate as bad as Rosalie’s: The memory of that marriage had been a painful thing to him, even before he had known the whole truth of its results. The man had been a common adventurer and scoundrel, despite the facts of good birth and the air of decent breeding. If a man who was as much a scoundrel, but cleverer – it would be necessary that he should be much cleverer – made the best of himself to Betty – ! It was folly to think one could guess what a woman – or a man, either, for that matter – would love. He knew Betty, but no man knows the thing which comes, as it were, in the dark and claims its own – whether for good or evil. (S 387) Although both men and women can make bad decisions in love, the women run a greater risk: the thing which comes in the dark is not only foolish love but the villain love can lead a woman to marry. The metaphor of unexpected love is imagined as a ‘thing’ which comes in the dark, an implication of the sexual violence he fears for his daughters.

More Shrew Than She For such a powerful man, Reuben Vanderpoel does little for his first daughter, leaving her rescue entirely to Bettina until the very end. He learns about Mount Dunstan from a typewriter salesman, G. Selden, who brings news of Kent back to New York. The two stories Selden tells offer two versions of Bettina’s courtship. First, he describes meeting Mount Dunstan by chance while listening to the birdsong of ‘an English robin – a little fellow not half the size of the kind that hops about in Central Park . . . calling for his lady friend to come and go halves with him’ (S 392). The bird courtship offers a

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vision of gender equality, an invitation (by a distinctly British robin) for a fair division of song and, by extension, resources. Next, Selden describes how, after a bicycle accident, he finds himself taken in by Bettina and introduced to her circle: ‘When I came to myself . . . I felt like that fellow in the Shakespeare play that they dress up and put in the palace when he’s drunk. I thought I’d gone off my head. And then Miss Vanderpoel came’ (S 394). The Shakespeare play he alludes to is The Taming of the Shrew. The ‘fellow’ is Christopher Sly, a drunk tinker tricked into believing he is a nobleman for the amusement of a Lord; the Lord’s players then perform the play-within-a-play for Sly. Selden is not, like Sly, an uncouth drunk, nor does Bettina deceive him; his lucky accident results instead in a big career break. With a letter of introduction from Bettina, Selden can make a sales pitch to Mr Vanderpoel, earning a ‘territory’ by winning a new client for the company (S 397). The entrepreneur of a modern-day and socially mobile world, Selden capitalises on sales territory rather than land and, by the end of the novel, is a rising star in Mr Vanderpoel’s employ (S 511). In the meritocracy of New York, The Shuttle implies, rags to riches stories come true. Bettina is no shrew, but nor is she a son. She cannot, like Selden, enter her father’s business or make her own way. She spends, speaks and acts freely, but like her sister, and like Shakespeare’s Bianca and Katherine, Bettina’s main purpose is to marry. Nigel tells her she ‘must always be regarded as gilded chattel, whose cost was writ large in plain figures’ (S 309). Like the sisters of Shakespeare’s play, she brings property to the marriage but she also becomes property through marriage. Although The Taming of the Shrew centres on the power of speech, the plot begins and ends with property: ‘I come to wive it wealthily in Padua,’ Petruccio famously proclaims.47 The wealth that empowers the US makes the women on the international marriage market more vulnerable. Rosalie resembles the mild Bianca far more than the feisty Kate, but her money makes her Nigel’s victim. Once married, it is the power he wrests from her: ‘Your money ought to be in proper hands . . . If you were an English woman, your husband would control it’ (S 26). Although he is physically abusive, Nigel, like Shakespeare’s Petruccio, manipulates women primarily through language: ‘You made love to them,’ he reflects, ‘you flattered them either subtly or grossly, you roughly or smoothly bullied them, or you harrowed them with haughty indifference – if your love-making had produced its proper effect – when it was necessary to lure or drive or trick them into submission’ (S 303). Bettina resists these methods but still proves vulnerable to barbaric violence that can wipe away centuries of progress: ‘We’ve gone back five hundred years,’ Nigel tells Bettina before he tries to rape her, ‘and we’ve taken New York with us’ (S 482). Nigel is defeated not by the telegram or by the police but by Mount Dunstan, imagined, in his vengeance, as a chivalrous enemy to feudal villainy: ‘the blood which had surged in Red Godwyn’s veins was up and leaping’ (S 494). The pretty bully requires not merely a male champion in her distress but a distinctly English one, tied by blood to an ancient ancestor and resembling, in his vengeful determination, a more contemporary British icon: ‘his jaw was set like a bulldog’s’ (S 493). Taking Bettina’s riding whip, Mount Dunstan whips Nigel like ‘a vermin’ (S 494). Mount Dunstan’s choice of weapon echoes David Garrick’s Catherine and Petruccio (1754), a popular adaptation of Shakespeare’s play that popularised the convention of granting Petruccio a whip as a sign of his domination.48 Nigel ends the novel ‘more shrew than she’,49 raving hysterically until he dies from a combination of syphilis and wounds. When Bettina’s father, Reuben Vanderpoel, arrives in England,

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he even denies Nigel’s national identity: ‘Anstruthers isn’t exactly what I should call an Englishman’ (S 507). Yet ending with the image of Bettina’s future husband Mount Dunstan, descendant of Red Godwyn, as a bulldog with whip in hand undermines the Anglo-American harmony the novel seems to promote. Although Bettina escapes the villainous Nigel, she disappears from the narrative as soon as she and Mount Dunstan embrace. After speaking more than any character in the novel, Bettina speaks only twice in the final two chapters. First, she greets her father and introduces him to her fiancé: ‘ “Father! Father!” she bent and kissed the breast of his coat . . . “This is Lord Mount Dunstan, father” ’ (S 509). Second, she reunites her sister and mother by observing: ‘You have not seen each other in so long’ (S 510). Denied Bettina’s conversation and consciousness, the reader learns of her happiness only through the observations of the men around her. Reuben Vanderpoel takes his daughter’s place as the focalising consciousness for the final chapters, conversing at length with Mount Dunstan and meeting the prominent villagers. The vicar has the last word on Bettina’s future: ‘ “She will live here and fill a strong man’s life with wonderful human happiness – her splendid children will be born here, and among them will be those who lead the van and make history” ’ (S 511). The pretty bully will be a mother after all, leading through her children rather than her work. The Shuttle holds out the promise of a union on more equal terms than nineteenthcentury domesticity, but ends with nothing more than the hope of change in the next generation.

Notes 1. Henry James, The American, ed. Adrian Poole (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 13. 2. James, The American, pp. 45, 48. 3. James, The American, p. 13. 4. Eric Rauchway, Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), p. 12. 5. Ann Thwaite, Waiting for the Party: The Life of Frances Hodgson Burnett (London: Secker & Warburg, 1974), p. 192. 6. Lawrence Buell, ‘Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic (Mis)Understandings from Washington Irving and Frances Trollope to Mark Twain and Lord Bryce’, in Robin Peel and Daniel Maudlin (eds), Transatlantic Traffic and (Mis)Translations (Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2013), p. 1. 7. Gretchen Holbrooke Gerzina, Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unexpected Life of the Author of The Secret Garden (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), p. 24. 8. Anna Wilson, ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy: The Darling of Mothers and the Abomination of a Generation’, American Literary History 8.2 (Summer 1996): 232–58. 9. Francis J. Molson, ‘Frances Hodgson Burnett (1848–1924)’, American Literary Realism, 1870–1910 8.1 (Winter 1975): 36–7. 10. Gerzina, Frances Hodgson Burnett, p. 202. 11. Gerzina, Frances Hodgson Burnett, p. 179. 12. Gerzina, Frances Hodgson Burnett, pp. 214–15. 13. Anne Sebba, ‘Hearts and Heaths’, History Today 57.9 (September 2007), p. 3. 14. Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Shuttle (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1901), chapter 6. Further references to The Shuttle are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text as S.

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15. With the term coined in 1894, the ‘savvy, statuesque’ New Woman differed from her somewhat naive predecessor: the American Girl of Trollope’s and James’s novels. Martha H. Patterson, Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895–1915 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), p. 15. 16. The ‘melodrama of beset manhood’, as Nina Baym terms it, ‘narrates the confrontation of the American individual . . . with the promise offered by the idea of America . . . in this new land’. The confrontation of man and nature functions, in this traditional account, as distinctly American and distinctly male, with women representing the society the hero must flee. As Baym notes, the struggle can ‘be taken as representative of the author’s literary experience, his struggle for integrity and livelihood against flagrantly bad best-sellers written by women’, predecessors, certainly, to Burnett’s own popular fiction. Nina Baym, ‘Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors’, American Quarterly 3.2 (Summer 1981), p. 131. 17. Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Criterion Books, 1960), p. xx. Great work has countered this characterisation, from Annette Kolodny’s revision of the frontier myth to Gillian Brown’s enlistment of both individual dreamer and wife as products of nineteenth-century domesticity. See Annette Kolodny, The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), and Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 18. Amy Kaplan, ‘Manifest Domesticity’, American Literature 70.3: No More Separate Spheres! (September 1998), p. 584. 19. Kaplan, ‘Manifest Domesticity’, pp. 583, 582. 20. Kaplan, ‘Manifest Domesticity’, p. 582. 21. See Ellen Jordan, ‘The Christening of the New Woman: May 1894’, Victorian Newsletter 63 (Spring 1983): 19–21. 22. See Thalia Schaffer, ‘“Nothing But Foolscap and Ink”: Inventing the New Woman’, in Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis (eds), The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-deSiècle Feminisms (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 39. 23. Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 120. 24. Hendrik Hartog, Man and Wife in America: A History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 3. New York’s Married Woman’s Property Act of 1848 became a model for other states; Britain offered women no protection of property before 1870. See also Nancy F. Cott, ‘Marriage and Women’s Citizenship in the United States, 1830–1934’, The American Historical Review 103.5 (December 1998): 1,440–74, and Mary Lyndon Shanley, ‘Suffrage, Protective Labor Legislation, and Married Women’s Property Laws in England’, Signs 12.1 (Autumn 1986): 62–77. 25. For a discussion of the representation of economics through Gothic tropes in Victorian fiction, see Gail Turley Houston, From Dickens to Dracula: Gothic, Economics, and Victorian Fiction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 26. William Thomas Stead, The Americanisation of the World; or, The Trend of the Twentieth Century (London: Mowbray House, 1902), p. 5. 27. Stead, The Americanisation of the World, p. 13. 28. In addition to many examples from Wharton and James, popular novelists regularly churned out tales of American women marrying European nobility. See, for example, A Transplanted Rose (1882), Altiora Peto (1883), Miss Bayle’s Romance (1887), An American Duchess (1891), An American Girl in London (1891) and His Fortunate Grace (1897). 29. Fred A. McKenzie, The American Invaders: Their Plans, Tactics and Progress (New York: Street & Smith, 1901), p. 12. 30. McKenzie, The American Invaders, p. 18.

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31. Stead, The Americanisation of the World, p. 348. 32. Andrew Carnegie, The Gospel of Wealth and Other Writings, ed. David Nasaw (New York: Penguin, 2006), p. 66. 33. See Gail MacColl and Carol McD. Wallace, To Marry an English Lord: Tales of Wealth and Marriage, Sex and Snobbery (New York: Workman Publishing, 2012), p. 72. 34. As Alan Trachtenberg argues, the museums of the era established an idea of ‘culture filtered downward from a distant past, from overseas, from the sacred founts of wealth and private power’; The Incorporation of America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), p. 145. 35. Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country, ed. Linda Wagner-Martin (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), p. 358. 36. Louise Whitfield Carnegie, ‘Preface’, in Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie (London: Constable & Co., 1920), p. v. See Elisabeth Kehoe, The Titled Americans: Three American Sisters and the British Aristocratic World into Which They Married (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2004), p. xvii. 37. Anne Sebba, American Jennie: The Remarkable Life of Lady Randolph Churchill (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007). 38. Marguerite and Frederick Cunliffe-Owen, Titled Americans: A List of American Ladies Who Have Married Foreigners of Rank, ed. Eric Homberger (New York: Old House Books, 1890), p. 24. 39. Cunliffe-Owen, Titled Americans, ‘Introduction’. 40. Cunliffe-Owen, Titled Americans, p. 26. 41. Cunliffe-Owen, Titled Americans, p. 170. 42. See David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 11, 19. 43. Cunliffe-Owen, Titled Americans, p. 156. 44. Titus Livius, The History of Rome, 1.9. 45. Cited in Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Era (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 40. 46. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, Lady Susan, The Watsons, Sanditon, ed. James Kinsley and John Davie (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 145. 47. William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew: The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997), I, ii, 72. 48. Frances Dolan, The Taming of the Shrew: Texts and Contexts (Boston: St. Martin’s Press, 1996). Interestingly, Dolan links Burnett’s The Secret Garden with the tradition of shrew taming, arguing that the spoiled Mary Lennox belongs to a tradition of shrewish women who must be subordinated. See ‘Mastery at Misselthwaite Manor: Taming the Shrews in The Secret Garden’, Children’s Literature 41.1 (2013): 204–24. 49. Shakespeare, Taming of the Shrew, IV, i, 85.

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19 Music, Language and (Latin) American Grains: William Carlos Williams’s VOYAGE TO PAGANY and ‘The Desert Music’ Daniel Katz

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L FAUT QUE JE prenne a little pildorito,’ William Carlos Williams quotes his mother as saying in Yes, Mrs. Williams: A Personal Record of my Mother.1 ‘Record’ is indeed the word for this short memoir, of which the greater part is given to Williams’s largely unannotated and fragmentary jottings of things his mother said while living with him and his family in her infirm old age. The phrase above, if not entirely typical in its degree of compression, is wholly representative in its mixing of the three languages used by Raquel Hélène Rose Hoheb Williams to say, in her son’s translation, ‘I have to take a little pill’ (80).2 This trilingualism, and the many other effects of linguistic interference which Williams notes, stem from a fact which Williams himself was careful to stress throughout much of his life but which has only come to the forefront of the criticism relatively recently: Williams’s parents were both immigrants from Puerto Rico, his English father having settled there as a boy with his mother who had left England under mysterious circumstances, and his mother descending from families with a much longer history in the colonial Caribbean. His maternal grandmother’s European connections were largely French, but on the side of his maternal grandfather the ancestry is much more mixed and complex, though, as Williams himself readily acknowledged, his grandfather Solomon Hoheb descended at least in part from Sephardic Jews. As Williams notes in several places, Spanish was spoken in his childhood home at least as much as English, and much of his father’s work as a salesman was based in Latin America, where his native proficiency in the language was essential. But his mother’s relationship to language, more complex and more heavily invested due largely to her intense Francophilia, is in fact the origin of the project into which Yes, Mrs. Williams evolved: ‘For she speaks three languages with considerable ease – English the least perfectly, but for that very reason what she says in English – with Spanish and French words and sayings intermixed – fascinated me the more’ (26).3 If this is a text, then, explicitly concerned with the poetics of multilingual interference – and hence the disruption of the effects of localised idiom for which Williams is so famous – Yes, Mrs. Williams is also a central work for consideration of Williams as a Puerto Rican writer, given its frequent emphasis on his mother’s childhood memories. Although this is an identity Williams might not have explicitly claimed, there can be no

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question that his parents’ origins, his familiarity with Spanish, and his mother’s vivid memories left him extremely well placed and apparently well disposed to take the Caribbean into account in his literary and cultural geographies, which he does in extremely important ways. In her groundbreaking Against the American Grain, Vera Kutzinski analysed how deeply Williams broke with prevailing (North) American exceptionalism in In the American Grain simply by adopting an expanded hemispheric sense of the ‘new world’ rather than accepting the familiar Puritan and English colonial history as the template for his mapping.4 More recently, Lisa Sánchez González has claimed that Williams can be seen as belonging to what she dubs ‘Boricua Modernism’ – the modernism of the Puerto Rican diaspora – and has provided an acute reading of In the American Grain in the context of ‘Williams’s migratory family history in the Caribbean, as well as his bilingual, bicultural formation in the States’.5 Following many critics, Sánchez stresses Williams’s contrast in In the American Grain of a brutal North American Puritan colonial violence, seen as predicated on the rejection of sexuality and therefore of the lives and bodies of the colonised peoples, with a broadly Latin, Catholic, colonial carnality, which he writes through tropes of contact, ‘touch’, seduction, surrender, fecundity and hybridity, all opposed to Puritan ‘sterility’. Despite the appeal of such an assault on Protestant sanctimony, as Sánchez argues unanswerably, Williams’s alternative is an appalling mystification of the catastrophic legacy of murder, rape and dispossession in Latin America, not to mention the concomitant slavery throughout the New World, which, as Sánchez also stresses, is underplayed in Williams’s account. But going beyond such widely shared criticisms, Sánchez’s most important contribution lies in placing these specific tropes and distortions within the context of ‘twentieth-century U. S. Latino poetics’ (53), reading Williams’s troubled turn to a romanticised Latin American colonial history as part of a ‘distinctively masculinist Boricua’ double-bind (53), one arising in part from conflicted responses to the racist stereotypes of the passionate, over-sexed Latin. Several years before Sánchez, Julio Marzán touched on similar questions in his The Spanish American Roots of William Carlos Williams, a book that reads Williams, often powerfully, through the lens of verbal play and resonances as inflected by the Spanish language, along with Williams’s own conflicted identification as ‘Spanish’, to use the term he preferred.6 Marzán has shown that such a perspective can also fruitfully complicate considerations of Williams’s position with regard to ‘nativist’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ strains of US modernism, as well as broader mappings of the relationship of language to idiom and locale. While Williams’s upbringing was entirely comfortable economically, including private schooling in Switzerland and France as a teenager, his slight displacement from the standard middle- and upper-class white Anglo-Saxon Protestant background typical of many of the major American modernist poets of his generation – Eliot, Stevens, Moore, Pound and H. D., for example – forms a crucial context for understanding much of Williams’s writing practice and intellectual positioning, well beyond his aggressive middle-Americanism, which Pound had read symptomatically from early on.7 It is in this context that I would like to look at Williams’s European travel novel, A Voyage to Pagany, as well as the ghostly return of many of its questions and instigations in the late poem ‘The Desert Music’. Voyage was first published in 1928, and very largely derives from a ‘sabbatical’ period of about six months that Williams and his wife Flossie spent in Europe in 1924. Given Williams’s increasing identification of himself throughout the 1920s with a particularly American poetics, in rebuke to the betrayal of the imperative to address the ‘local’ which he saw in Pound and

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above all Eliot, Williams’s excursion into the territory of the American expatriate encounter with Europe has been seen as fraught, both by himself and in the criticism. The danger was never that Williams might fail to distinguish his identity from that of the ‘European’, but rather that he might reveal himself as too close to a certain kind of specifically American writer – the Europhile, uninterested in and blind to the particularities of his own circumstances, subject to a symptomatic fascination with Europe that might screen her off from the truth of her own position. This is a danger that Harry Levin is eager to ward off in his 1970 introduction to the New Directions reprint of the novel, for example, assuring us that Williams ‘need not have worried’ that his book might have been influenced by James, ‘who was never one of his favorites’. Referring to the novel’s exalted final pages, which recount the return of protagonist Dev Evans (a doctor and writer, Evans is close to Williams biographically in many ways; he is not, however, a husband and father, as Williams was at this time) to American shores, Levin opines: ‘no Jamesian personage would have made the westward crossing so happily, or found so much that was genuinely poetic in the American scene.’8 In truth, Levin here merely repeats the novel’s own assertions: the final plot point, to which we will return, is Evans’s ultimate decision to come back to America, despite the many inducements the story offers for him to stay in Europe. Concerning the Jamesian precedent, however, Ezra Pound knew better, titling his review of the novel ‘Dr Williams’s Position’ – the last word a term which is central to James’s entire project – and guardedly placing the work in the context of ‘the Jamesian problem of the U.S.A. v. Europe, the international relation, etc.’9 even while acknowledging that its very loose construction ‘has not very much to do with the “art of novel writing,” which Dr Williams has fairly clearly abjured’ (396). Pound has various ‘positions’ in mind in the article – intellectual, poetic, social, psychological, geographic and cultural – and sees the last of these divided three ways in Williams’s case, in what the father of psychoanalysis, whom Pound invokes, might have termed a reaction formation. ‘Carlos Williams has been determined to stand or sit as an American. Freud would probably say “because his father was English,”’ Pound suggests, before noting that his mother is a ‘mixture of French and Spanish’ and also mentioning a ‘remote Hebrew connexion’ (390). So Pound’s lay analysis is trinational, as it were: it is a reaction against the father’s presumed ‘Englishness’ that forces Williams to assert his Americanness, while the truth of the situation is that he is very powerfully a ‘Carlos’, more deeply distanced from an ‘American’ essence by his Caribbean, Latin, Catholic, Spanish background than the English one (as Pound slyly stresses by omitting the English first name by which he habitually addressed his friend, in favour of the Spanish middle name).10 In this way, Pound lines up Williams with an absolutely foundational Jamesian ironic reversal: Williams writes so well about America because of his distance from it, and thanks to the acuity his foreign perspective gives him: ‘One might accuse him of being, blessedly, the observant foreigner, perceiving American vegetation and landscape . . .’ (391). For Pound, Williams ends up in the ‘position’ that James affected for himself when writing Pound’s great favourite, The American Scene: ‘One might say that Williams has but one fixed idea, as an author; i.e., he starts where an European would start if an European were about to write of America’ (392). Williams’s kinship with James is seen, then, not in how he views Europe, but rather in how he writes about America – as with James, in Pound’s eyes, his auto-ethnography benefits from its very estrangement from its object.

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If this is not an analysis Williams would have happily endorsed, as Peter Brooker astutely points out Williams certainly felt that the uniqueness of his position(s) had clear implications, which go a step beyond the dichotomies of Pound, Levin or James, ironic or otherwise: the possibility to reflect on ‘what it meant . . . to be an American or European author, or a third thing somewhere in between’.11 The question that Brooker’s helpful formulation leaves unanswered is the topology of this third thing: is it ‘in between’ like a midpoint on a straight line, or like a third point creating a triangle? And what if this third ‘thing’ is not really a thing, but rather a non-selfcoincident zone of conflict, at once ‘English’ and ‘Spanish’?12 One obvious implication is that if Williams comes to ‘America’ in some ways as a foreigner, he does the same in Europe, though as a different sort of foreigner than his American precedents and peers. Can Williams emerge as the hyper-Jamesian modernist, whose attention to the ‘local’ derives precisely from his estrangement from both the dichotomous locales – broadly speaking, ‘Europe’ and ‘America’ – between which he and his American peers mapped possible identifications? This would go some way to explaining a curious element of In the American Grain, itself largely written during the same trip to Europe which gave rise to A Voyage to Pagany, in keeping with the long American tradition in which the confrontation with European difference gives rise less to pseudo-ethnographies of that ‘country’ than to reflections on the structures of American identities and identifications. Indeed, it is that very tradition that Williams claims within the book, when he argues that the nineteenth-century American author most closely tied to the ‘local’ and ‘American’ conditions is Poe – certainly not the writer most concerned with ‘representing’ America in his works. Williams’s argument, however, is that Poe is ultimately more ‘American’ than Hawthorne precisely because he refuses Hawthorne’s task of depicting local conditions, an enterprise Williams sees as a servile imitation of European practice, in favour of absenting himself in order to create the wholly new: Poe succeed[s] in being the more American, heeding more the local necessities, the harder structural imperatives – by standing off to see instead of forcing himself too close. Whereas Hawthorne, in his tales, by doing what everyone else in France, England, Germany was doing for his own milieu, is no more than copying their method with another setting; does not originate; has not a beginning literature at heart that must establish its own rules, own framework.13 By virtue of this reasoning, no abandonment of the local whatsoever is implied by Williams’s European contact. Of course, by the same token, the grounds for the famous disparagement of Eliot also potentially disappear. For Williams, if Poe was ‘the astounding, inconceivable growth of his locality’; if ‘American literature is anchored, in him alone, on solid ground’ (American, 226), it is because rather than try to capture the local through representation he strove to ‘invent that which is new’ (226). And if he went unrecognised by his fellow Americans, Williams explains this according to a logic familiar to James and to Pound: ‘It is only that which is under your nose which seems inexplicable’ (226). A Voyage to Pagany is a project in absenting oneself from what’s under one’s nose, in the interest of new explications. These explications begin with nothing other than the unfolding of the familiar and the family as well as the nation, in a manner that can easily recall the James from whom Harry Levin was eager to distance Williams. The novel begins by stressing Dev

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Evans’s eagerness to leave the daily tedium of his doctor’s life in New Jersey and give himself the space to put his commitment to writing to the test, partially by connecting with literary and artistic friends in Paris. Yet the artistic and medical callings are not simply in opposition; the travel plans include a sojourn in Vienna, where Evans plans on getting abreast of some of the latest developments in medicine. If America is troped as ‘behind’ in terms of the arts, it is so too in some respects with regard to medical practice and theory, and Evans suffers from ‘provincialism’ in both his callings. This is important, because if the literary and artistic scene in Paris offers one temptation for expatriation, so too does the sojourn in Vienna. In both cases, the question of cultural and geographical appurtenance and loyalty will be overlaid with personal, affective, erotic commitments and relationships. Evans’s first important encounter in Paris is with his old American friend Jack, now a successful writer based in Paris, whose brash confidence is an implicit reproach to Evans’s apparently diffident choice to remain in the United States.14 But if Evans ‘felt uneasy with Jack’, it is not only because of the pressures he represents or indeed applies. It is also because, as they are both men, Evans cannot find the grounds for the love he feels. ‘How the devil do you love a man anyway?’ (20–1) Evans asks himself, before worrying about the ‘connotations of his affection for Jack’ (22) and suggesting ‘You might as well pick up a sailor’ (23) in meditating on the impossibility of love between two men outside of a sexual relationship. ‘If you love a girl, you want to have a baby. If you love a man, you want to have – what?’ (24). Evans finds this question impossible to answer. Crucial to the structure of the novel, however, is that he moves from this thwarted relationship with Jack immediately to a similar one with his own sister, the considerably younger Bess. Her frankly incestuous attraction to Evans mirrors the previous account of the friendship with Jack, in that in both cases a certain form of love is barred by the impossibility of a sexual relationship, leaving a completely uncertain terrain in its place.15 But just as important as Bess’s forbidden desire is her response to its frustration – she asks Dev to pretend to their family that he is travelling with her, so as to give her cover to abscond with a lover instead, which serves to make him actively involved and present in the very relationship which is meant to help Bess break with him. Dev, meanwhile, has plans to consummate a budding affair with an American lover he will meet in the south of France and does so, only for her to decide to leave him for a wealthy man she meets at their hotel. From there Dev continues his travels in Italy – here the novel draws extensively on the travel diary – before he arrives in Vienna, where he becomes romantically entangled with an American expatriate, whom he ultimately decides to leave for the mother country to which she refuses to accompany him, but not before a final passionate encounter with Bess, who begs him to stay with her in Europe so they can raise a baby together. What this capsule summary of the novel’s plot reveals is a surprisingly Jamesian undercurrent to it, as Dev is nothing if not the protagonist of the ‘false positions’ so central to Jamesian fiction: the position of ‘friend’ is inadequate in relation to Jack, that of ‘brother’ uncomfortable with regard to Bess, in a falseness itself falsified by his agreeing to play the part of the ‘beard’ in her amorous escapades. The question to be asked is what role this plays in a novel that asks early on ‘What does this land produce? What does any land produce?’ (11) in a reflection that not only weighs the relative merits of America and Europe for Dev Evans but, beyond this, ponders the very relevance of the idea of culture or ‘place’ themselves for artistic production. That is

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to say, at stake is not only the question of where ‘home’ is or could be, but the importance of the notion of home at all for Evans’s concerns. For example, in relation to the surprisingly foregrounded incest theme, Walter Benn Michaels writes the novel into a long line of American works that use incest as a figure for national purity, once the family has asserted itself as the foundational model of nation: ‘incest saves the family from marriage’16 and, as Michaels argues, this novel could not be more explicit about the ‘point of that [potential] coupling’ (156). As Bess puts it to Dev, the child she hopes for would be ‘our baby, a pure American’ (242). While this is true, however, the novel also pushes the trope in precisely the opposite direction: Bess’s plan to produce the ‘pure American’ baby is predicated precisely on Evans staying with her in Europe, and if she shows herself willing to compromise on this point, the ‘pure American’ incestuous project is one she imagines as taking place abroad, which means that ‘American’ is something other than a relationship to place, or at the very least becomes a quality that can survive transplantation. Similarly, meeting his sister in Geneva, Evans remarks, ‘Now he was no longer in a foreign country. The hotel was redolent of Bess’ (233), which implies not so much that the ‘family’ is a trope of the nation, but that the proximity of incestuous exchange allows one to dispense with the grounding familiarity of ‘national’ identity altogether (for Bess is not a stereotypically ‘American’ character, and the phrase cannot be read as suggesting she is a synecdoche for Evans’s home nation). Even more important, many characters in the novel in addition to Bess suggest that Evans does not ‘belong’ in America, and his return is portrayed just as much as an acceptance of novelty and estrangement as an Odyssean return ‘home’. Bess’s last words to her brother are ‘Give my love to the New World’ (255), and Evans’s thrill on crossing the Atlantic, which Levin noted as decisively different from James, is figured not as that of the returning native but rather as the exaltation of the discovery of the entirely new. It is in light of Bess’s words that we need to read Evans’s use of ‘Vinland!’ (256) as epithet for the coast of Newfoundland as his ship approaches, or the novel’s last words: ‘So this is the beginning’ (256). A Voyage to Pagany ends with the inverse voyage – that of Eric the Red, which also constitutes the first chapter of In the American Grain – and America becomes the new beginning, the grounds of a quite literal defamiliarisation in the context of Pagany’s thematisation of incest. Pagany’s America is therefore a place whose ‘pure products’ will be born from forms of mixing, as ‘To Elsie’ proposes, and Bess’s incest is a trope for everything that ‘America’ is not, as ‘new’ against ‘old’ rather than ‘American’ against ‘European’ becomes the operative opposition, with exogamy placed quite clearly on the side of the former in each pair. Meanwhile, the book’s ending off the Atlantic coast of America (albeit to the north) is hardly coincidental: it suggests a nod to Williams’s ancestral Caribbean location.17 If the novel allegorises Dev’s final commitment to ‘America’ as a separation from the endogamous unit, then, rather than as an extension of it, a crucial moment for this element and the novel as a whole also involves the question of language, reference, music and translation. This is in Vienna, when, near the end of his stay, Dev attends the opera with the American Grace Black, with whom he has entered into a passionate love affair, now threatened by his imminent departure. Prefiguring the subsequent exchange with Bess, Dev and Grace also project possible lives together and, like the other couple, come up against Grace’s refusal to return to America, and Dev’s to stay in Europe. Grace also senses a powerful rival in Bess without ever having met her, which makes the opera they are about to see – Die Walküre – an especially uncomfortable prospect: ‘It is a brother

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and sister against the world’ (203), Grace puts it rather mildly to Dev, when he confesses to not knowing the plot. The tension between the two increases when Dev pushes the matter by insisting on finding the libretto at the theatre in order to follow the story as closely as he can. Grace, harbouring obvious ulterior motives, but also a professional musician, insists that the libretto is irrelevant because opera in essence is ‘music’ and ‘Nothing else’ (203). Dev takes the opposite view, that opera is a story ‘set to a tune’ (203) – ‘I want to know what’s going on, what the meaning of it is anyway’ (203) – and he continues to read the libretto throughout the performance, despite Grace’s annoyance and her scepticism as to whether Dev can read German well enough to understand it. The novel devotes four full pages to Dev’s experience of the performance, charting his attempts to read the libretto in the theatre’s darkness and his reflections on the relationship between the music and the story, and, more broadly, between non-mimetic and representational modes of art. Dev’s position is complex and ambivalent. He holds that the ‘words’ are crucial – ‘He had heard Walküre before but idly – not with the words in his mind as this time. They increased the enchantment’ (204) – but he also thinks they are wanting and incomplete on their own: ‘The music raised the words, Which are after all, very bad, he said, the music piles up the feeling on the words, a feeling which isn’t there in them’ (205). Further on, however, he suggests just the opposite, proposing that music in some ways neutralises the words and their meaning: ‘of course you couldn’t write a libretto to an opera and have it mean anything. The music saps the sense out of the words’ (206). The stakes of Dev’s argument with himself largely boil down to two questions: first, that of how important the incest story is to the success of the opera, and second, that of the relative merits of writing and music as forms. Clearly, both have direct bearings on his personal situation. Is his appreciation of the opera anything other than the ‘personal debauch’ (206) Grace suggests it might be, and, second, what is the task of the writer that Evans takes himself to be? Evans posits that the music can capture the generic passion of the erotic, but of course cannot convey the specific brother-sister relationship without the intercession of language: ‘But you can’t put into music the brother and the sister of this. You don’t hear it at all, it isn’t there. They’re just lovers’ (206). He goes on to tell Grace that language’s referential capacity is why ‘writing seems to me far superior to good music; a much finer instrument’ (206). On the other hand, Grace responds that the incapacity of the music to embody the specifically incestuous relationship is ‘why we can listen to it’ (206). Throughout the performance, Dev alternates between focusing on the libretto, as he reads it with a pocket flashlight, and turning his attention to the music and orchestration instead, as a self-sufficient object removed from the meanings which the libretto contains. The importance of this scene is how it writes several different concerns over each other: the incest theme, itself related to the question of cultural and national belonging and the question of home; the explicit question of whether Dev is to stay with Grace in Vienna or return to America; the problem of the specificity of meaning and reference in art, here figured as an opposition between music and language; and the question of linguistic difference itself, as the libretto, if a piece of written expression, is written in a language which Dev might not fully master, robbing it of the referential specificity that Williams repeatedly mentions here. It is in the context of these questions that I want to turn to one of Williams’s late works, which again mobilises ‘music’ in a complex meditation on language, nation, sexuality, identity and poetry: ‘The Desert Music’.

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If A Voyage to Pagany is a classic travel novel, ‘The Desert Music’ is entirely a desert poem, albeit one far removed from Europe: it is placed in Texas, and very specifically on the Ciudad Juárez-El Paso border, which is also that between Mexico and the United States. The poem begins as Williams (the fiction of the poem is to present itself as memoir and the poem’s speaker is addressed as William Carlos Williams; when I say ‘Williams’ henceforth it is to that textual instance I refer, and not a presumed