Capital Letters: Authorship in the Antebellum Literary Market

c api tal l e t t er s U U c apital le t ter s Authorship in the Antebellum Literary Market By David Dowling u n ...

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c api tal l e t t er s

U

U c apital le t ter s

Authorship in the Antebellum Literary Market

By David Dowling

u n i v e r s i t y o f i o w a p r e s s â•‡ ::â•‡ i o w a c i t y

University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242 Copyright © 2009 by the University of Iowa Press www.uiowapress.org Printed in the United States of America Design by Omega Clay No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to reach. The University of Iowa Press is a member of Green Press Initiative and is committed to preserving natural resources. Printed on acid-free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dowling, David. â•… Capital letters: authorship in the antebellum literary market / by David Dowling. â•… Includes bibliographical references and index. â•… isbn-13: 978-1-58729-784-7 (cloth) â•… isbn-10: 1-58729-784-1 (cloth) â•… 1. American literatureÂ�—19th century—History and criticism.â•‡ 2. Authorship—Economic aspects—United States—History—19th century.â•‡ 3. Authorship—Social aspects—United States—History— 19th century.â•‡ 4. Authors, American—19th century—Economic conditions.â•‡ 5. Authors and publishers—United States—History— 19th century.â•‡ 6. Literature and society—United States—History— 19th century.â•‡ I. Title. â•… ps201.d69 2009 â•… 810.9'003—dc22 2008041458

For Caroline, Jackie, Eveline, and Eddie

Contents

Acknowledgmentsâ•‡ •â•‡ ix

Literature Now Makes Its Home with the Merchant The Transformation of Literary Economics, 1820–61â•‡ •â•‡ 1 p a r t 1 â•‡ Crusading for Social Justiceâ•‡ •â•‡ 25

1. Other and More Terrible Evils Anticapitalist Rhetoric in Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig and Proslavery Propagandaâ•‡ •â•‡ 27 2. Alert, Adventurous, and Unwearied Market Values in Thoreau’s Economies of Subsistence Living and Writingâ•‡ •â•‡ 44 p a r t 2 â•‡ Transforming the Marketâ•‡ •â•‡ 63

3. Capital Sentiment Fanny Fern’s Transformation of the Gentleman Publisher’s Codeâ•‡ •â•‡ 65 4. Transcending Capital Whitman’s Poet Figure and the Marketing of Leaves of Grassâ•‡ •â•‡ 82 p a r t 3 â•‡ Worrying the Woman Questionâ•‡ •â•‡ 107

5. Dollarish All Over Rebecca Harding Davis’s Market Success and the Economic Perils of Transcendentalismâ•‡ •â•‡ 109

6. Satirizing the Spheres Refiguring Gender and Authorship in Melvilleâ•‡ •â•‡ 127 Dreams Deferred Ambition and the Mass Market in Melville and Kingâ•‡ •â•‡ 145 Notesâ•‡ •â•‡ 173 Works Citedâ•‡ •â•‡ 199 Indexâ•‡ •â•‡ 213

Acknowledgments

This book has many debts, the first of which is to the vision, passion, and gleeful abandon of the late Frank McConnell, who inspired me to no end at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in the mid-1980s. Also at that time, Giles Gunn’s charismatic channeling of the White Whale converted many souls, mine included. My more immediate debts are to Mary Klages, who mentored this project in the mid-1990s and enlightened me to the power of primary source documentary research for a brand of literary history reaching into the cultural, intellectual, and popular dimensions of American life. She brought me in touch with the work of William Charvat, who revolutionized the very questions literary critics pursued, planting the seeds a half century ago for the burgeoning field of literary economics at a time particularly resistant to such an approach. Marty Bickman stands behind this project as well, as he guided my immersion into Melville. Mark Pittenger’s enriching historical perspective led me to R. Jackson Wilson, who played a crucial role in the completion of this book, making a herculean effort to support it at a time when his own physical health was compromised. I am humbled by the magnitude of Professor Wilson’s generosity, especially as it comes from a scholar of his caliber under such trying circumstances. I am also indebted to the archivists of the American Antiquarian Society, who kindly granted me access to their treasure trove of artifacts that animate the diverse economies of the antebellum literary marketplace that form my subject. Ed Folsom, David Blake, and Daniel S. Malachuck read portions of early drafts, and my colleagues Michael Hill, Matt Brown, Bluford Adams, Claire Fox, Phil Round, Loren Glass, Jon Wilcox, and Brooks Landon all provided valuable support in various forms. Finally, the two people who truly weathered the seasons of this book with me are my partner, Caroline Tolbert, and my editor, Joe Parsons. I offer my deepest thanks for their faith, humor, and wisdom, which invigorated and sustained this project to fruition.

c api tal l e t t er s

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liter at ure now make s it s home with the merchant The Transformation of Literary Economics, 1820–61

Surges in the production, distribution, and consumption of consumer goods, including printed material, during the two decades before the Civil War in America were so significant that economic historian Charles Sellers has identified the transformation as nothing less than a “market revolution” (Sellers 4). What did it mean to approach literature when literature itself was becoming a mass phenomenon thanks to ever more efficient mail delivery, the growing bourgeoisie, and the double-cylinder steam press? How did authors refigure the social and moral dimensions of their work given the movement of economic activity from the domestic to the public sphere of specialized divided labor? What literary and professional responses did the commodification of print culture elicit, particularly in light of the erosion of the patronage system and the financial security it once offered? Self-promotion became essential for survival in the antebellum book trade, as authors increasingly shared the same hope for financial success and fear of Â� bankruptcy—the “quiet desperation” and “perpetual striving” Thoreau and Tocqueville respectively Â�observed—as did other entrepreneurs (Thoreau, Walden 10; Tocqueville 254). With the same vulnerability to financial ruin, yet gazing toward a future of unprecedented riches, writers responded to their new predicament alternately with horrorâ•fl“dollars damn me,” Melville would Â� complain—and hope in the “romance of trade,” according to the rosy optimism of the first best-selling U.S. author, Washington Irving (Melville, Letters 191; Irving 38). In 1847, in The Literary World, Charles Fenno Hoffman remarked on the professionalization of authorship and its transformation of the work of writing, noting: We live in the greatest commercial era that the world has yet known. And Literature,â•flwhich has been alternately the companion and foster child of the Augustan warrior, the convent religionist, and the feudal landowner,â•flnow makes

::â•… Literature Now Makes Its Home with the Merchant its home with the Merchant, and already begins to assail its old protectors amid the new associations it has formed. The seat of commerce is, therefore, the centre of literary power. . . . [T]he metropolis of our book world, on this side of the Atlantic, will still remain where Commerce congregates the mass of the wealth and intelligence of the country, from every point of the Union; and where the author from the far interior will seek his most available mart. (qtd. in Fink, Prophet 3)

As literature moved away from “its old protectors” into the business world, some writers refused to work within the public economic setting of the literary marketplace,1 like Emily Dickinson, who denounced publication as “the auction of the mind” (Complete Poems 709). Rebecca Harding Davis vilified the author’s tendency to become a “mere shopman of literature,” worrying that cash advances might make her own writing seem “dollarish all over” (“Anne” 241; Harris, Realism 58). Authors struggled to reconcile their own professional demands with the fashionable antimaterialism in the dominant culture that pitted sentiment and romantic poetry against capitalism. The binary was not always the debilitating conflict authors often made it appear to be, as money and art were frequently happy companions. Thoreau, ever the voice of contrarian irony, quipped that writing during this period of development in industrial capitalism forces a certain honesty about the profit motive and artistic inspiration: “Who will not confess that the necessity to get money has helped to ripen some of his schemes?” ( Journal 3 282).

Authorship This introduction provides an overview of the commercialization of literature to frame the breakdown and reformulation of the concept of “authorship,” the erosion of the patronage system, and the onset of writing as an entrepreneurial Â�pursuit—a result of several key historical forces at this crucial phase in the development of industrial capitalism. At the height of the American Renaissance in the 1850s, authors exemplified through their lives and works the strain between the individualism of the romantic artist and the possessive individualism of the market. The free market gave rise to a sense of individualism necessary for survival in the marketplace: the Ferns and Whitmans in this system exaggerated their own powers to sell. Authors were individualistic entrepreneurs, while their names

Literature Now Makes Its Home with the Merchantâ•…

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became commodities to be consumed by a mass audience. Yet the romantic notion of the divinely inspired genius that emerged in late eighteenthcentury Europe persisted in scores of writings in the 1850s, popular and otherwise. The changing cultural construction of authorship reoriented writers toward their own work.2 This new orientation, or disorientation, toward their own occupations elicited capitalist critiques, transformations of the market itself, and insights about women’s economic roles that were unique to the era. Thus the biographies and works of Harriet Wilson, Henry David Thoreau, Fanny Fern, Walt Whitman, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Herman Melville help answer central questions most writers of the era Â�faced—questions the destabilization of authorial conceptions sets up: What rhetorical forms did capitalist critiques take, and to what extent were they self-reflexive of the author’s own professional predicament? How did the new market conditions create unique opportunities to exploit the culture’s moralistic antimaterialism for profit? How did authors perceive the fate of women in this new world of fierce competition that seemed to threaten values of friendship, sympathy, and domestic warmth? This book brings together authors usually treated separately according to categories of race, gender, and popular or canonical status to explore their responses to the market revolution given their new professional predicaments. Authorship’s connection to the thriving urban center, the marketplace of ideas, necessarily was economic. The early nineteenth-century model of authorship was fashioned by the patrician elite. The American Academy of Fine Arts, for example, fostered the goal in 1816 of improving the general level of taste and culture in the city of New York (Bender 126). This was not an unusual goal at the time, considering that politicians and lawyers in public positions of power had concerned themselves with advancing America’s political reputation through the arts. When we consider that the vast majority of American writers of the first half of the century (and even earlier) had been trained in law or politics, it becomes clear that “art, commerce, power were all part of a single moral equation” (Bender 126). As Benjamin Franklin’s example shows, writing at this early stage was a social enterprise, the larger goal of which was to improve America’s national reputation and make the country more respectable. Indeed, James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Sedgwick, Charles Brockden Brown, and Washington Irving shared in this widespread desire “to provide for America a literary competence to match its political heritage” (Dauber

::â•… Literature Now Makes Its Home with the Merchant 40). The more local desire of this sort of American author (who was often a lawyer who also wrote, the amateur man of letters in image, if not in fact) was to reduce the authority of authorship to a sort of holiday world, dominated by the dilettantish genres of the literary “miscellany” and the “sketch”â•flgenres formed by their affiliation with the leisure class’s conception of “culture” as a means of filling spare time amusingly. As it became more and more apparent that these lawyers who also wrote were making vast fortunes from publication rather than legal settlements (Irving garnered over $200,000 from his writings alone), more and more writers entered the fray of the publishing industry. Prior to 1830 in New England, only the independently wealthy could pursue literature as their primary vocation (Buell, New England 57). But by the 1850s the examples of many success stories in the profession of authorship encouraged new writers to take up the pen in the spirit of the local entrepreneurial shopkeeper. Vocation, independence, material wealth, and fame were the prominent aspects of the national reputations of successful literary figures like Harriet Beecher Stowe, who had become her family’s chief breadwinner, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who made a comfortable living from literary lecturing. Journals, both popular and elite, publicly dueled with each other to lure in salable literature. Peterson’s published bold advertisements in the late 1850s bragging that it offered its contributors the highest compensation of any American periodical in print. Highbrow magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly frequently offered up to $100 for a prose piece and $50 per page for poetry in the 1850s. Compare this wage to that of the New England Magazine in 1835, which offered poets a mere $35 per page. Book publishers such as Mason Brothers paid authors lucrative sums, virtually guaranteeing sales with breakthrough advertising campaigns, prototypes of modern marketing techniques. Publishers themselves were becoming self-made men. Robert Bonner, a penniless European immigrant, broke into the newspaper business as a writer and later became one of the richest men in America after founding the New York Ledger in the 1850s. By midcentury, a pattern developed in which “the man who had made himself rich” and the literary artist increasingly became the same person: “the man of genius” could now be someone who acquired his wealth through the work of writing. In some ways, no one more than Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (besides Irving from the prior generation) embodies the moneymaking potential of literature in the nineteenth century. His popularity exploded with The


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Song of Hiawatha (1855), and with it came international fame. The stage version of Longfellow’s Native American epic packed theaters as it quickly grew into one of the century’s most popular plays, with box office earnings to rival the ultimate top earner, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Fans stalked him much in the way they currently stalk J. D. Salinger, rendering encounters equally awkward and often downright hostile. One woman approached Longfellow’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, home in 1879, enquiring if it were the place of his birth, which it was not. “Did he die here?” she persisted, not knowing her interlocutor was Longfellow himself. “Not yet,” he said dryly, to which she responded, “I thought you died two years ago” (qtd. in Irmscher 7). Such hot pursuit of Longfellow, even by the comically misinformed, was indicative of the extent to which his name and works permeated the culture. The most famous race horse of the era, winner of thirteen races including the Saratoga Cup, was even named Longfellow. A steamship was christened Minnehaha for Hiawatha’s protagonist; a drink called the Hiawatha promised “to make the imbiber fancy himself in the happy hunting grounds” of the tale (qtd. in Irmscher 7). Spinoff merchandising of the epic poem was as ubiquitous as Star Wars T-shirts in the late 1970s. Particularly popular was the “Hiawatha Sleigh,” complete with a scene from the poem emblazoned on the back. The global phenomenon that was Longfellow far surpassed even Stowe herself: he was not only “big in Japan,” as the saying goes, but if the translations of his works are any indication, he was also a hit in France, Italy, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Holland, Sweden, Denmark, China, and Iceland. On 4 July 1868, he was Queen Victoria’s honored guest at Windsor Castle (Irmscher 11–2). Success of the magnitude of Longfellow’s was only possible once authorship had evolved into free-market enterprise. Authors became entrepreneurs who faced reviewers, audiences, and publishing houses as independent agents, separated from the protective enclave of a wealthy network of patrons. The new competition in the literary world for financial success in the market encouraged writers to look to each other for support, as they often formed circles of peers and coteries of like minds. Melville clung to the ever-distancing Nathaniel Hawthorne for professional support. Thoreau’s career evolved almost entirely under the wing of his literary father figure and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson. Fanny Fern capitalized on her connections to the newspaper industry to turn herself into a successful author while also retaining vital relationships among her literary friends, who in-

::â•… Literature Now Makes Its Home with the Merchant cluded her lawyer and her financial advisor. Rebecca Harding Davis married Clarke Davis based on his interest in her writing. His position at Peterson’s ladies’ magazine proved instrumental in the publication of Davis’s work in this journal, which includes some of her most profitable writings. These literary networks and partnerships were based on both common artistic visions and commercial objectives, on both literary and economic interests. Thoreau, for example, gravitated toward the Concord transcendentalist literary circle out of a desire to forge a career from his artistic vision. The established circle that published the Dial included influential and powerful figures in the literary world such as Emerson and Margaret Fuller, who represented connections vital to the success of a fledgling writer like Thoreau. Fuller and Emerson were not replacements for the traditional patrician patron of the arts in their support of Thoreau. Instead of wealthy, leisure-class genteel amateurs, Fuller and Emerson were literary professionals themselves. Their aid to the young Thoreau was not by means of large financial donations. They were instead exemplars of how to attain success in the field, providers of solid personal references, and mentors of his craft. Simply because Thoreau stayed at Emerson’s house most evenings while he purportedly was sleeping in his self-made cabin at Walden Pond does not make him the recipient of eighteenth-centurystyle patronage. Indeed, the cultural context and the nature of the literary vocation had changed so that Thoreau would venture into the Philadelphia and New York markets, albeit unsuccessfully, to try to find work as a writer. Thoreau’s relationship with Emerson testifies to how, by the 1850s, established authors had less power to force their disciples onto publishers than they had in the 1810s because of the proliferation and diversification of the market; Walter Scott figures who could strong-arm publishers to sign whomever they chose were a thing of the past. No longer could one figure dominate the literary market and publishing decisions the way Scott did in Europe as he paved the way to success for the first American international best-selling author, Washington Irving. This was because more writers had attained comparable degrees of popularity, generating a larger and more diverse field; the antebellum book market developed more open laissez-faire competition by midcentury as the code of the gentleman publisher and its accompanying monarchy of power relations showed signs of erosion.


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The Antebellum Literary Market The American Antiquarian Society Book Trades Collection, 1848–1868, is virtually a time capsule of the antebellum literary market. One of the most telling clues to the development of the book trade can be traced in the growth of Norton’s Literary Gazette and Publisher’s Circular, renamed in 1855 American Publisher’s Circular and Literary Gazette. Before 1855, the Gazette was primarily a literary magazine and secondarily a publishers’ trade journal. Because of rapid expansion and development of the book trade as an industry, the retitling of the periodical prioritized its market function as a barometer of the book trade and the publishing industry. The Gazette’s development into a publishers’ trade journal featured ever more elaborate and ostentatious advertisements, including gaudy full-page ads for big sellers like the one John P. Jewett ran in 1856 for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (fig. 1). Booksellers, printers, and publishers subscribed to the journal, so it was in the publishers’ best interest to promote their books as potential best sellers before they were even released in print. The proliferation of publishers’ advertisements in the mid-1850s marks a significant surge in the growth of the book trade. A telling sign that print culture was reaching a previously unimaginable peak in production and marketing is seen in the emergence of Poole’s Index of journals in 1853. The sheer quantity of journals on the market called for this index, which was the first of its kind compiled in America. Jewett’s full-page advertisement is the closest thing to the original marketing blueprint of contemporary newspaper advertisements for debuts of blockbuster films, complete with snippets from glowing reviews. Popular films today function much in the way popular fiction and poetry did in the mid-1800s. Popular literature was the first form of American entertainment to become a business, as no other trade magazine for the arts was in existence at midcentury. Film technology did not exist, and singers, musicians, and dramatic productions were not promoted through such a developed market as the one reflected in this trade journal. The 15 April 1854 Gazette featured large, half-page advertisements for the Newsboy (fig. 2) and The Lamplighter, in which Jewett trumpeted in huge block letters, “A GREAT BOOK IS COMING” (American Publisher’s 209). Both novels rank among the best sellers of the period. Interestingly enough, the selection of authors on display in the Gazette’s own full-page promotional drawing

1. 1856 advertisement for Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.


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(fig. 3) shows no women authors on the banner at all (though there are womÂ� en as muses and figureheads) and no currently canonized American Renaissance male authors either. By the 1850s, the market had come under the control of publishers. Upstart publishing companies cropped up and competed for the best-known authors. Many, like Thoreau’s first publisher, failed to compete with houses that used the latest production technology, and went out of business. The Adams steam press was invented in the early 1830s and was in full use in many publishing houses by the 1850s. Robert Hoe’s cylinder press emerged in 1847. The double-cylinder press debuted in late 1846 and was featured in the December issue of Scientific American (fig. 4) as a new breakthrough invention. Both of these machines advanced literary production, allowing for mass publishing at an unprecedented wide scale and low cost. Not only books, but also newspapers, costing as little as a penny per copy,

2. 1856 advertisement for The Newsboy. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

3. 1855 solicitation for advertisements in Norton’s Literary Gazette. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.


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4. 1846 cylinder printing press. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

now were cheaper and more widely available than ever. The reading public was stimulated by the wide circulation of books and newspapers, both steadily on the climb from 1840 to 1860 (fig. 5). Most successful newspapers escalated in circulation from tens to hundreds of thousands (Zboray 31). There was a significant correlation between some of the early masscirculation newspapers and the publication of books. Cheap newspapers stimulated literary interest and widened the circle of American readers. By 1850, population growth (from 10 million in 1820 to 32 million in 1860) and enhanced opportunities for education meant that the audience for literature had substantially increased in size. The literacy rate in 1850 was 90 percent among adult whites in the United States, making for the largest literate public in history (Tebbel, History 207, 257). Publishers of both newspapers and books could realistically expect to make a profit in a market of this size. Many newspapers were directly linked to the production of fiction in two ways: first, cheap papers like the Yankee Blade and Flag of our Union devoted much of their space to fiction. Second, newspaper publishers like Frederick Gleason of the penny paper Flag of our Union often undertook the publication of books at very low prices. Gleason actually issued more works of American fiction than any other publisher, Harper and Brothers included. The cheap costs of production no doubt allowed him to publish

1 2 ::â•… Literature Now Makes Its Home with the Merchant

5. Growth of a literate population as illustrated by circulation of newspapers in America, 1840–60. From Carl Bode, ed., American Life in the 1840s.

more than 177 American novels. The nature of the works he published seems also to explain why he is often overlooked by American literary historians and publishing history scholars: most works aimed for the masses, offering tales of sex, violence, adventure, and romance. An advertisement for Benjamin Baker’s The Nymph of the Ocean; or, The Pirate’s Betrothal (1846) indicates the kind of subjects featured in works bearing Gleason’s imprint: “The book contains 50 pages, with an excellent engraving illustrating the scene where the Lieutenant by force seized the beautiful Â� Mina—while at the same time receives a blow from a hand spike” (qtd. in Zboray 31). Works of this nature sold briskly at the low retail price of $0.125 per copy, less than a tenth of the price of most midcentury hardcover novels, which ranged from $1.25 to $1.50. The prices of the books produced by four of the six authors of this study, for example, are shown in table 1: notice the direct correlation in Melville’s case between price and popularity for Typee ($0.875) and Moby-Dick ($1.50). The former was a mass phenomenon, the latter an attempt at high art that failed at the time, as was Mardi, also of high price ($1.75) and lofty aesthetics. Fern’s work could command its high price since she had established herself in the papers prior to the release of her fictional autobiography, which capitalizes on her journalist authorial persona as discussed in chapter 3.

Table 1. Book Prices Date of pricing

Amount

1852

$1.00-r

1863

$1.25-tf

1865

$1.50-tf

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

1863

$1.50-tf

Excursions in Field and Forest

1865

$1.50-acb

The Maine Woods

1865

$1.50-acb

Cape Cod

1865

$1.50-acb

Letters

1865

$1.50-acb

Author

Book

Publisher

Henry David Thoreau

Walden

Ticknor and Fields

Walt Whitman

Drum Taps

“The Author”

1865

$1.00-r

Herman Melville

White Jacket

Harper and Bros.

1856

$1.50-h

Fanny Fern

Redburn

$1.00-h

Mardi

$1.75-h

Omoo

$1.25-h

Typee

$0.875-h

Pierre

$1.25-h

Moby-Dick

$1.50-h

Fern Leaves

Miller, O & M

1852

$1.25-r

Ruth Hall

Mason Brothers

1856

$1.25-acb

Rose Clarke

$1.25-acb

Sources: r = Roorbach, Orville A. Roorbach’s Biblioteca Americana: A Catalogue of American Publications, Oct. 1852–May 1855. New York: O. A. Roorbach, 1852. tf = Ticknor and Fields Catalogue of Popular Books, 1861–1866. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866. acb = Kelly, James. The American Catalogue of Books. 1861–66. New York: John Wiley and Son, 1866. h = Harper and Brothers Book List. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1852–56. All sources cited in this table are courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society. Note: All prices listed are for cloth-bound, hardcover books. Multiply the above prices by 18 for the approximate prices in twenty-first century dollars. From James M. Volo and Dorothy Daneen Volo, “Costs in the Antebellum Period,” The Antebellum Period (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004), 369–70.

1 4 ::â•… Literature Now Makes Its Home with the Merchant The cheap book market did not develop without serious resistance, however. An 1829 publisher’s book list, Popular Works Recently Printed by J & J Harper, for Sale by the Principal Booksellers in the U.S., praised an entry by Mrs. William Parkes entitled Domestic Duties; or Instructions to Young Married Ladies. The first review passage beneath the entry lauded the book for its moral superiority to the popular romance novel: “Were the sentiments this book inculcates but understood and practiced by our ladies, it would be of more real advantage to them than all the fine theories to be deduced from the collective wisdom of all the novels since the days of chivalry,” wrote Mrs. Hale in Boston’s Ladies Magazine (Popular Works). A far more venomous attack on cheap novels ironically appeared in the cheap newspaper the Yankee Blade. In the 29 September 1849 issue, a piece titled “The Light Literature of the Day” read, “[T]his infected literature [cheap novels] is poisoning the every breath of spiritual life with its malignant influence. . . . These yellow visaged pamphlets of the Ainsworth and Lippard School with ‘Outlaw’s Bride,’ or ‘Lady Ellen, a Moral Tale’ or ‘Blanche, the Victim of Misguided Affection’ are put into [the reader’s] hands by some unfortunate boy whose Ma uses them as murderous weapons to kill time” (“Light Literature”).3 Ironically enough, the two publications protesting against cheap literature aligned themselves, to some extent, with the popular book market. As a cheap daily, the Yankee Blade featured scores of short stories in its pages, many of them ripe with sensational romance and adventure. Likewise, J. and J. Harper’s book list ironically called its catalog Popular Works Recently Printed, knowing full well that, even as early as 1829, their business depended on the “popular” status of their products. Though they would have never admitted it, morally righteous and conservative papers like the Yankee Blade were starting to have more and more in common with the penny presses, considered by many to be the bottom feeders of print capitalism. Interestingly, as the gap between so-called high and low literature narrowed, the protests became increasingly shrill from the established book trade community, which struggled to dissociate the merchant from the man of letters. Obituaries of publishers resonate with anxiety about the encroaching capitalistic spirit of the book trade. The Boston Globe, for example, commemorated the life of Mr. Putnam, publisher of the wildly popular Washington Irving, by claiming that Putnam transcended the contemporary, competitive business sense of the occupation of publishing.


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“He was much more than a publisher,” the Globe journalist gushed. His authors were also much more than clients to Putnam, the obituary goes on, as “he was esteemed and cherished by them as a friend, advisor and critic,” a vestige of the old guard of gentleman publishing that was now giving way to the proto-corporate capitalism of the Robert Bonners in the trade (“Putnam Obituary”). The fact remained, as the Publisher’s Circular pointed out in an 1855 article entitled “Cheap Fiction,” that “the demand for fiction amongst the largest class of readers has forced upon every weekly periodical the necessity for introducing fiction in some form or other” (158). The result, they went on, was “a deluge of stories, that, to mention the least evil of them, abound with false representations of manners, driveling sentimentalities, and impossible incidents. And yet they are devoured with an earnestness that is almost incomprehensible” (“Cheap” 158). The Circular’s scorn was not limited to the content of this popular fiction that now turned up in the penny presses. The article also sneered at the new breed of authors who were producing the cheap fiction, whose numbers were rapidly increasing. It cast this new brand of hack magazine writer as “the meanest ‘slaves of the lamp’” (“Cheap” 158). Citing an embittered editor’s “Address to the Reader” in the last number of the Penny Magazine in 1846, the Circular article commented on the increasingly brutal competition among the cheap presses and the importance of fiction for the life of a journal. Mr. Knight’s Penny Magazine stopped production because “[w]ithout a large supply of fiction it necessarily ceased to be popular” (“Cheap” 158). The scapegoat in this failed editor’s lament of the book trade’s growth, however, is the figure at the root of the production process, the “scavenger writer” who heartlessly fuels the industrialization of literature: “‘There are manufactories in London whence hundreds of reams of vile paper and printing issue weekly; where large bodies of children are employed to arrange types, at the wages of shirt-makers, from copy furnished by the most ignorant, at the wages of scavengers. All the garbage that belongs to the history of crime and misery is raked together, to diffuse a moral miasma through the land in the shape of the most vulgar and brutal fiction’” (“Cheap” 158). Penny presses produced not only fiction-centered magazines at low cost but also cheap novels of the sort Gleason published, as noted earlier. Gleason is a sterling example of the new era of midcentury publishing, with its potential for inexpensive production, thorough distribution, and

1 6 ::â•… Literature Now Makes Its Home with the Merchant a low-priced product. His books’ cheap format and popular appeal earned lucrative profits not only in eastern urban centers but also in midwestern communities. Like many other publishers, Gleason utilized the growing railway system to expand his business by sending books to western outlets, such as Cincinnati. In fact, R. E. Edwards of Cincinnati claimed to have sold up to $6,000 worth of Gleason’s issues each year. Cheap book publishers as well as larger houses like Harper and Brothers and Mason Brothers all benefited from the transportation revolution. The massive growth in rail development in the 1840s and 50s widened book distribution considerably. New rail lines encouraged publishers to send their stock to a wider network of cities (Zboray 31). Publishers had every incentive to exploit the railroad lines and aggressively distribute their products. Under the new commission system, publishing houses received remittances (their profit from the sale, or retail price minus the bookseller’s cut of 25 percent, commonly called the “discount”) from a greater number of sources. The rail system, therefore, was instrumental in enriching the publishing industry because book sales increased in cities that trains accessed. Ticknor and Fields were commission system publishers whose cost books are filled with orders to print more copies or to redistribute returned, unsold ones. Market demand is easy to trace for Ticknor and Fields, as they continued to feed the book-buying public with rapidly selling stock: orders to printers for an additional run of one or two thousand books like Longfellow’s Kavanagh are common entries in Ticknor and Fields’s records (Zboray 58–9). For booksellers, the commission system naturally gave them incentive to sell their stock: the more they sold, the more they would profit. But, by the same token, they would suffer no loss if they failed to sell the books. They merely sent the overstock back and the publisher absorbed the financial weight of the unsold books. Many of the unsold books simply went to other markets as the expanding railroad made more diverse locales reachable. Booksellers also benefited from the expansion of newspaper distribution because publishers commonly preceded a shipment of stock to a retailer with an announcement of the book’s arrival in the local paper of its destination. Publishers’ advertisements are revealing since advertising increased in direct proportion to distribution: publishers only took out ads in papers where they could send their books. As the number of places where one could send books increased, so too did the number of ads


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placed. In 1856, Harper and Brothers had 844 notices in local papers. They spent $500 per month on advertising and over $7,000 per year. This is twice as much as they spent in 1849, suggesting the profound effect upon advertising of the completion, in the mid-1850s, of the northern rail network (Zboray 60). In addition to booksellers and publishers, authors stood to gain from the technological developments in transportation and bookmaking. In the 1820s, for example, Americans published only 109 works of fiction by U.S. writers. By the 1840s, the number escalated to nearly 1,000. The value of all books including fiction manufactured and sold in America reached $12.5 million, a fivefold increase since 1820 (Gilmore 4). Figure 6 illustrates the increase in the literary publication of fiction, drama, and poetry from the beginning of the century to 1830. The significant rises in the literary output of Philadelphia and New York over this early stage of development correspond with the industrial growth in each city. As the graph shows, Boston’s publications rose at a much slower rate. This is attributable to its slower economic growth throughout the antebellum era in comparison

6. Growth of the literary marketplace, 1801–30: American fiction, plays, and poems published in book form in America. From William Charvat, The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800–1870. Data for Boston and for the years 1821–30 include fiction and plays only.

1 8 ::â•… Literature Now Makes Its Home with the Merchant to New York and Philadelphia. The business of printing and publishing so dominated New York that by 1860 it was the city’s leading industry. This fact should not be underestimated considering that New York was the largest industrial center in antebellum America, and its biggest industry was the manufacture and sale of newspapers, magazines, and books. Charles Hoffman’s 1847 comment in the Literary World clearly applies: “The seat of commerce is, therefore, the center of literary power” (qtd. in Fink, Prophet 3). The relative size of the publishing industry is better understood when seen in comparison with the manufacturing and farming industries. As figure 7 shows, the value of books increased at a faster rate than other manufactured products. The urban center clearly was dominated by the publishing industry, while agricultural enterprise certainly took off into a cosmopolitan world market after 1850. The provincial yeoman farmer producer had all but died as his trade grew more complicated and sophisticated with the changing economy. Likewise, publishing and manufacturing expanded, but not at the same rate, as figure 7 indicates, between 1840 and 1860.

7. Growth of the publishing industry in relation to manufacturing and farm industries, 1840–60. From Carl Bode, ed., American Life in the 1840s.


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Capital Letters As literature became a business, the paradoxical tension between the realities of authorship’s new commercial identity and the popularity of antimaterialist sentiment generated unique anxieties about the craft. Categories of authors normally separated by gender, race (Harriet Wilson), popularity (Rebecca Harding Davis, Fanny Fern), and canonicity (Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau) are united in this book by their professional and literary engagement with this paradox. This book extends previous studies on the crisis of inner authorial self-Â�definitionâ•fl Â�how these authors explicitly addressed or figuratively encoded their economic anxiety and professional concerns into their Â�texts—toward authors’ exuberant outward engagement with social issues raised by the commercialization of letters and the authorial role. Specifically, conceptions of authorship shaped writers’ responses to the book market and their roles in the triangulated reciprocal influence between authors, publishers, and readers. (This theory frames the influential 1999 book edited by Steven Fink and Susan S. Williams, Reciprocal Influences, which pays homage to and updates the work of William Charvat.) My book looks at three ways that authors engaged the market: as critics of capitalism, agents of change in the publishing industry, and prognosticators of women’s future in the business world. I treat each writer in a separate chapter, pairing Wilson (chapter 1) and Thoreau (chapter 2) in part 1, “Crusading for Social Justice,” Fern (chapter 3) and Whitman (chapter 4) in part 2, “Transforming the Market,” and Davis (chapter 5) and Melville (chapter 6) in part 3, “Worrying the Woman Question.” Authors engaged, and actively transformed, the larger social structures that their shifting professional predicaments brought to light. These conceptual pairings deliberately transgress generic categories to show that a writer like Thoreau overlaps significantly with a seemingly unrelated author like Wilson. Further, the pairings reflect the diversity of antebellum responses to new market conditions, from attacks on its principles, and transformations of its ethical codes, to speculation about its future; these case studies reflect the variety of aesthetic and professional channels authors used to voice their reactions to the market revolution. The chapters on Whitman and Fern pair two aggressive entrepreneurs to-

2 0 ::â•… Literature Now Makes Its Home with the Merchant gether, suggesting that their imaginative response to the market change was not just an issue of economic tropes ironically played out in their texts, but the result of complex relationships between those tropes and the publishing codes they transformed. Their writings functioned to support their innovative career tactics that deliberately reformed old ethical codes dictating literary business practice. I finally examine how Melville and Davis point toward the future pitfalls of the market for women in ways that reconfigure separate-spheres ideology; literature’s movement into the seat of commerce inaugurated the new prominence of women authors, raising ethical questions at the time about the compatibility of the professional literary Â�life—especially as a romantic or realistic Â�pursuit—with maternal demands. Wilson’s situation as a “free” black woman gives her a unique perspective on the racism of the northern wage labor system, while Thoreau’s selfimposed disaffiliation from market institutions is portrayed in his view of New England economy from the vantage point of Walden Pond. I address the paradox of how Wilson’s and Thoreau’s capitalist critiques respectively employ rhetorical strategies of proslavery and market society, camps ideologically hostile to the central aims of their major works. Such strategies nonetheless function effectively to bear out their political and aesthetic goals of combating capitalism. One of the least understood areas of Wilson criticism is the extent to which she employs proslavery anticapitalist tropes in her novel, Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859). Thoreau’s economic philosophy has not yet been understood as the key to his conception of creative writing, one he formed in opposition to surplus capitalism, yet based upon what he believed were the highest virtues of the “alert, adventurous, unwearied” business world (Walden 118). While Wilson and Thoreau position themselves in opposition to capitalism, Fern and Whitman transform business ethics in the literary marketplace through the management of their own careers. Specifically, they engaged in forms of publicity and self-promotion that anticipated modern standards, rejecting inherited, outdated economic relationships and business practices. Whitman’s well-documented entrepreneurial self-promotion,4 for example, has not yet been linked to the antimaterialist poet figure who paradoxically functions as the selling point, or true commodity, of the first two editions of Leaves of Grass (1855–6). Fern also masterfully weds seemingly contrary forces in Ruth Hall as new market values combine


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with the fashionable appeal of sentiment to reject the prior era’s code of the gentleman publisher for a more open, competitive model. Both authors celebrate themselves and transform the book market in the process; they not only fully embrace the new commercialized publishing industry, but also represent the avant-garde in publicity and trade courtesy innovation. An opposite pattern emerges in the preceding chapters on Wilson and Thoreau, whose unorthodox professional choices and reluctant participation in the exigencies of book publishing couple with their forceful rejection of certain market principles. Fern provides a transition to the discussion in part 3 of Davis and Melville, who envision the future of women’s economic roles. Fern’s successful transformation of the gentleman publisher’s code particularly points to women’s new power to effect profound change in the business practices of the literary market. Melville and Davis were acutely aware of women’s success, like that of Fern and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and took very seriously the moral effects of the transgression of women’s work into the public sphere; Melville would debunk separate-spheres ideology in several of his works, while examining the market revolution’s displacement of sites of male literary labor and transformation of women’s roles in the home and factory. In their consideration of women’s new prominent position in the literary market, Davis and Melville both assault transcendentalism, unmasking its romantic notion of creativity as dangerous and socially irresponsible. With women active and successful in trade and particularly in the literary market, what are the ethical gains and losses? Davis registers the reprehensible moral fallout, both personal and familial, for women who enter the artistic professions based on egocentric Emersonian notions of genius. She promotes a more realistic sense of craft reflected both in her invention of the literary genre of social realism and in the example of her own wise, pragmatic career management, a link not yet established in Davis criticism. Melville also rejects outdated notions of romantic authorship, particularly in “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” while advancing female figures with progressive relationships to the market that undercut the confining rigidity of separate-spheres gender roles. The concluding chapter considers literary labor in terms of the global market for American authorship by expanding the chronological and national scope to include a discussion of the six authors’ successors current-

22 ::â•… Literature Now Makes Its Home with the Merchant ly writing today. I examine links between Melville and Stephen King in terms of their dreams of canonicity within what they perceive as a restrictive, prohibitive mass market. I conclude with a discussion of postcolonial and transnational writers Hanif Kureishi and Douglas Coupland and their orientation toward the global market, drawing connections in our postmodern world between their work and the three parts of this book: capitalist criticism, market transformations, and speculation about the economy’s future impact on gender roles. My understanding of the six authors diverges from the master narrative, which assumes that canonical males opposed the literary market, while females’ attitudes toward authorship were complicit with it. My pairings of men and women writers who share similar market orientations attempts to reach beyond gender dichotomies. I approach Fern and Whitman as self-invented personae, written into existence for consumption in the literary market and with a self-conscious awareness of the profit potential promised by the new market revolution. I consider Whitman’s biography in conjunction with his carefully crafted poet figure and the antimaterialistic tropes in his understanding of creative writing as critical dimensions of his self-promotional strategy. While the salability of the authorial persona shapes part 2, my method in treating Davis and Melville in part 3 emphasizes the new literary market’s impact on the thematics of antebellum fiction. Each of the three parts of this book deals directly with how the authors responded to the new economic conditions in which they wrote; I pay attention to how canonical writers5 faced the same circumstances as their popular peers, yet focus more on how they responded with many of the same rhetorical strategies to support similar agendas, especially as they attacked capitalism (part 1), and in their marketing and self-promotion (part 2). Publishing history plays a significant role in the overall approach of this book. The literary Â�market—like most of antebellum society, from its pubs to its Â�pews—was closely monitored for violations of unwritten codes and gentleman’s agreements, such as trade courtesy, which I cover in the Fern and Davis chapters. These codes had profound sway over business practices that governed tactics between competing publishers. The ethos of the wildly popular guidebooks governing manners that influenced public behavior in the business world6 was especially destabilized by the market revolution. Like other citizens, authors and publishers were increasingly forced


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to choose between economic or genteel priorities, Â�decisions—particularly in the hands of Fanny Fern and Walt Â�Whitman—that would rewrite the business ethics (and thus practices) of the publishing industry into and beyond the Gilded Age. Etiquette also impacts part 1 in terms of the role of sympathy in Wilson’s attack on justifications of barbaric inhumanity in the free market; Thoreau works the other way against accepted forms of gentility, especially domestic ones, to advocate a subsistence lifestyle that parallels his ideals for deliberate living and writing. Part 2 intersects with social constructs of class gentility and notions of propriety and manners as Davis and Melville dissect the culture’s fetish with regulating and restricting women’s work to the home. Authors and publishers frequently rewrote accepted constructs of manners to justify a laissez-faire condition that would later come to characterize the free market in its current corporate, postmodern identity, a situation King, Kureishi, and Coupland grapple with, as I discuss in the conclusion. My book reaches beyond the question of occupational anxiety and struggle for identity as encoded in the text7 toward an understanding of the authors’ dialogic relationship with the market in parts 1 and 3, and how they functioned as radical professional activists in part 2. Indeed, the chapters on Whitman and Fern explore their conceptions of the work of writing in the market itself to see precisely where and how these radical capitalists reinvented business practices. Further, I significantly revise Melville’s portrait as an antifeminist reactionary interested only in perpetuating male images of authorship over and against women (Newbury 55, 59). Rather than pitting him against women, as critics have done repeatedly since the early 1990s, I highlight his seldom-mentioned progressive feminist visions, like those of Davis, voiced through cautionary fables about the future of women’s roles in the market, and satirical deconstructions of separate-spheres ideology. Women’s distance from the market was not necessarily created by women authors but was a condition of one’s labor status, especially in Wilson’s case, which made her lash out at the corruption of the free market. As Fern shows, no uniform, overarching female response or orientation toward the market or professional authorship existed, as Fern, unlike Wilson and so many of her contemporaries, successfully exploited and even rewrote its code of business ethics toward a more corporate, laissez-faire model. Lori

24 ::â•… Literature Now Makes Its Home with the Merchant Merish’s understanding of the sentimentalization of possessions in terms of race is particularly useful for the Wilson chapter, however. Her assertion that not feelings but things came to represent female subjectivity, particularly as seen in the culture’s promotion of women’s affective link to consumerism as their chief democratic choice (Merish 23), has profound implications for Wilson’s status as an owned possession of the Bellmont family, who employs her as a “free black” indentured servant in antebellum New England. As Merish argues, “sentimental ownership” links “market capitalism and middle-class personal life” (4). With the power to own property, the white women of Wilson’s fictional autobiography reflect Merish’s sense of how a “racialized symbolic structure” (19) is the basis for white ownership and female identity in which “[t]he identification of capitalism as a realm of white entitlement is central to the structure of liberal subjectivity and the political unconscious of white racism” (20). Much of this recent scholarship, including my own, is inspired to some degree by Michael Newbury’s Figuring Authorship in Antebellum America and Richard Brodhead’s Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America, a work that usefully defines a “scene of writing” as moments when “writing orients itself in or against some understanding of what writing is, does, and is good for that is culturally composed and derived” (8). My subject builds on those books’ definitions of authors’ understandings of the function or role of writing. As such, my focus is on the ways in which authors decried, reinvented, and looked into the future of the newly transformed market and the social impact of literature’s new home among the trades. We now turn to the complex critiques of the market in Wilson and Thoreau.

p a r t 1 :: Crusading for Social Justice

U1

U

other and more terrible e vil s Anticapitalist Rhetoric in Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig and Proslavery Propaganda

Zora Neale Hurston once said, “slavery is the price I paid for civilization” (216). Hurston honors rather than degrades the slave labor of her ancestors by refiguring work’s relation to race. She finds dignity in labor, not for its own sake, but for the ennobling and enlightening dimensions of the “civilization” it helps build. Yet a resonance, and thus a sense of uneasiness for today’s readers, remains between Hurston and antebellum southern defenses of slavery as essential for the construction of civilization. The challenge is to see how she replicates their argument while not only maintaining racial dignity, but also asserting robust pride diametrically opposed to southern ideology. Such surprising convergences of thought on black labor and its honorability are as important to understanding Hurston’s bold claim as they are to Harriet Wilson’s fictionalized autobiography, Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, In A Two-Story White House, North. Showing that Slavery’s Shadows Fall even There (1859). Framed in the context of the prominent anticapitalist arguments of its time, Our Nig shocks much in the way Hurston’s quote does, and not just for the rare glimpse it offers into the northern “free” black experience. Much more than a straightforward document supporting black uplift and condemning northern racism, showing “that slavery’s shadows fall even there,” the novel replicates the anticapitalist rhetoric common to proslavery propaganda of the era. This chapter examines the uncanny continuities between Wilson and the peculiar institution’s most prominent apologists, who depict northern economic conditions, especially for free blacks and women, as cruel and uninhabitable. Certainly, Wilson never intended to defend southern slavery and never embraced the presumed domestic warmth of its purported benevolent paternalism. Yet when placed next to such proslavery works as George Fitzhugh’s Sociology for the South (1854) and Cannibals All! Or, Slaves

2 8 ::â•… c r u s a d i n g f o r s o c i a l j u s t i c e without Masters (1857) and Caroline E. Rush’s The North and South; Or Slavery and Its Contrasts (1852), Our Nig’s antimarket tropes stand out, particularly those that attack capitalism’s excessive individualism, which prioritizes exploitation and domination over human sympathy. This rhetorical pattern, in both Wilson and proslavery writing, depicts such savage self-interest as yielding to godlessness, neglect, physical abuse, Â�and—the biggest Â�threat—severe poverty and death by starvation. This chapter aims to answer the difficult question of why the abolitionist press failed to promote Harriet Wilson’s autobiographical novel, Our Nig; or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black. Abolitionists did not overlook her, as many critics have assumed, simply because her story did not fit the parameters of the slave narrative and thus failed to fuel their propaganda factory. Her anticapitalist sentiment in the novel about her life as an indentured servant in Milford, New Hampshire, would have appeared particularly repellant to abolitionists given their appropriation of tropes common to proslavery writings at the time. I examine Wilson’s exposition of the evils of capitalism, its coldness, cruelty, excessive individualism, and willingness to sacrifice the values of sympathy and warmth so commonly associated with domesticity. Her attack on capitalism, I argue, is part of her larger goal of locating northern racism precisely in the gross inequalities of its industrial system, and its unfair labor practices that make a mockery of “freedom” for northern blacks. Such tactics were common to proslavery rhetoricians like George Fitzhugh and Caroline E. Rush. Wilson writes for her own Â�survival—her novel is a solicitation of charity to save her dying Â�son—and for her “black brethren,” exposing the limitations of individualism and the rampant corruption of the northern market (41). My aim is not to discredit Wilson, but to cast her in a realistic light by showing how resourceful she was in appropriating for her own antiracist polemical purpose the most potent argument the South had against the North at the time.1 I situate Our Nig in the history of economic commentary Â�beside—paradoxically Â�enough—figures racially and politically averse to Wilson’s plight who nonetheless wielded the same rhetorical weapons against capitalism. (Wilson even overlaps with profeudalist arguments that resonate with socialists and communitarians like Orestes Brownson and even the transcendentalists, whom I discuss later.) Arguments with repellent racist or hierarchical components can contain highly persuasive analyses about the limitations of capitalism and individualism. Such ar-

Other and More Terrible Evilsâ•…

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guments highlight aspects of the United States that more mainstream narratives were afraid to recognize; Our Nig provides a window into the constellation of anticapitalist thought2 in the antebellum United States. The main rhetorical modes available for a New England mulatta indentured servant like Wilson to discuss the issue of northern racism in antebellum America were the slave narrative,3 proslavery/anticapitalist writing, and the domestic novel.4 Significantly, these three genres treated race at the time almost exclusively in terms of the system of organized slavery in the South; Wilson’s preface to Our Nig attempts to situate itself with respect to slavery by claiming “my mistress was wholly imbued with southern principles” but quickly allows that her attack on racist northern labor conditions may potentially play into the hands of proslavery arguments (3). Her grisly portrait of free life in the North, she admits, could appear “unfavorable in comparison,” thus reflecting “shame in our good anti-slavery friends at home” that might “palliate slavery at the South”â•flwords so clearly confessing to the pattern of proslavery argumentation that they are heartbreaking in their attempt to distance themselves from it (H. Wilson 3). George Fitzhugh would have relished the opportunity to exploit Wilson’s testimony for his propaganda in this regard5 (carefully avoiding, as one might imagine, the novel’s evidence of black educational and spiritual potential in the process). Thankfully enough, the book remained mainly in the hands of schoolchildren and others in and around Milford, New Hampshire, safe from southern exploitation. The Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and the American Anti-Slavery Society were only two blocks away from the offices of Rand, Avery, which printed Our Nig. These organizations regularly solicited writings for their publications; the Liberator also operated out of this address in 1858.6 Most of all, Rand himself was an active and committed abolitionist. Instead of broadcasting Wilson’s story, Rand chose to produce the book, given its low cost, as a gesture of charity to enable her to overcome the impoverished circumstance to which she alludes in the preface. Either Rand did not exploit the avenues to introduce the text to the abolitionist community he clearly had access to or his attempts failed. The novel appears to have been purchased and read as a children’s book, as it treats the individual and spiritual development of Frado, Wilson’s protagonist and fictional counterpart (Gardner 232–3, 238). Wilson’s novel received no attention in Boston or elsewhere because,

3 0 ::â•… c r u s a d i n g f o r s o c i a l j u s t i c e most obviously, abolitionists were focused mainly on the problem of slavery in the distant South; Wilson’s free status and the location of her narrative diminished its didactic force; and the wicked Mrs. Bellmont was a mother of the North, as Eric Gardner notes (243–4). While all these factors likely contributed, a more compelling answer to this historical riddle lies in Mrs. Bellmont’s role as the ferocious face of the free market, part of the novel’s larger anticapitalist rhetorical configuration so repellant to northerners versed in southern sophistry. Not only does this posit a potential answer to abolitionists’ glaring neglect of the book, it serves to refine the assumption that the marketplace was Wilson’s salvation, when in fact it was a living hell precisely because she was an economic slave in the North.7 Economic necessity is Wilson’s cross to bear, an evil that continues to plague her, as her diction makes clear: “I am forced to some experiment which shall aid in maintaining myself and child” (3; emphasis mine). The tone is beleaguered and downtrodden, matching the impoverished, desperate condition of Frado’s mother, Mag Smith, in chapter 1. Indeed, Wilson does not present herself in the preface of Our Nig as an entrepreneur as much as a solicitor of charitable donations;8 she does not promote her novel as a highly crafted, appealing product but as a humble attempt at survival. Her apology, for example, to well-educated readers for her aesthetic “inability to minister to the refined and the cultivated” is self-promotion through self-effacement rather than self-aggrandizement (H. Wilson 3). She instead appeals to fellow blacks who might sympathize with her suffering at the hands of a northern racist economy and lend support. An extreme contrast to Wilson’s stance here is reflected in Walt Whitman’s many prefaces to Leaves of Grass, especially after the 1855 edition, in which he openly courts celebrity status and literary credibility (self-penned glowing reviews, the famous letter from Emerson) in gestures of self-aggrandizing authorial entrepreneurship. Wilson’s mere request for money does not make her an entrepreneur; certainly black stories of abuse brought fame along with real political change, as Frederick Douglass’s career attests. But the black life story in Our Nig that truly establishes its “status as product for sale” in a commercial sense is Samuel’s: “his illiterate harangues were humbugs for hungry abolitionists” (Ernest 424; H. Wilson 128). Samuel’s peddling potentially disempowers Wilson’s project by fueling the skepticism of her potential supporters. His profit motive, significantly, is a per-


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fect match for the gluttony of “hungry abolitionists,” who seem more financially than morally driven, more interested in the show business of lurid fascination than in moral reform. The corrupting influence of the market on black autobiography is part of the larger antimarket sentiment of Frado/Wilson’s life story in Our Nig, designed to show that the brutal northern capitalist system has claimed another victim. This sounds very much like the proslavery accounts of the evils of capitalism employed by Fitzhugh and other southern advocates. Such accounts were pervasive in the antebellum era; the number of northern authors that felt the need to respond to attacks on their economic system indicates the scope of influence this southern argument had. Chapter 37 of Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, chapter 15 of William Wells Brown’s Clotel, and chapter 19 of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin all refute the proslavery claim that northern economic conditions were less humane for blacks and whites than the benevolent paternal order of the slaveholding South. St. Claire represents southern sympathies as he argues with Miss Ophelia, the northern advocate, in a scene of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. St. Claire argues that “slaves are better off than a large class of the population of England” because a slave owner he knows “takes a sort of pride in having his slaves comfortably fed and accommodated” (Stowe 341). The “vicious” “capitalist and aristocrat of England”9 become the enemy for St. Claire. He calls “your northern folks cold-blooded; you are cool in everything” (Stowe 333). Fitzhugh’s 1854 Sociology for the South asserts that “the competitive system is a system of antagonism and war; ours of peace and fraternity” (25). The North’s advocacy of “separate individual action” in its free-market economy is less productive, preventing “that association of labor without which nothing great can be achieved” (25). It is more barbaric and inhumane because “man isolated and individualized is the most helpless of animals” (Fitzhugh, Sociology 25). Like Wilson, Fitzhugh’s appeal against northern industry tries to draw sympathy for the exploited woman worker who “fares worst when thrown into this warfare of competition” (Sociology 24). Wilson herself fits Fitzhugh’s image of how the woman “and her children are starving, and the employer is growing rich by giving her half what her work is worth” (Sociology 24). The appropriately named Mrs. Hogg is one such figure of greed, gluttony, and economic domination in Our Nig. Fitzhugh locates the evil of northern capitalism in the exploitative self-

32 ::â•… c r u s a d i n g f o r s o c i a l j u s t i c e promotion of free trade. In such a system, he argues, one “takes advantage of the follies, the improvidence and vices of others, and makes his fortune out of the follies and weaknesses of his fellow-men” (Sociology 24–5). Unlike Wilson, his logic rests on the superiority of slavery by contrast to the northern marketplace. But how he arrives at the conclusion that northern capitalism is inherently predatory and anarchic remains the same as Wilson. Like Fitzhugh, Wilson emphasizes the market’s dearth of sympathy throughout Our Nig, showing its direct correlation with Frado’s suffering, down to the presence of her dog Fido, which, like her other sympathizers, provides a balm she starves for but is neither consistent nor reliable: all her supporters, James, Mrs. Moore, Jane, Jenny, and even her own mother and husband, habitually abandon her, or Â� circumstances—usually associated with money Â�matters—conspire to separate her from them. The cold northern market conditions prevent most of these sympathizers from realizing the full warmth their portrayals suggest is inherent in them and thus keep them from staying with Frado in any permanent capacity. Such a savage world of greed run amok at the expense of human sympathy was a theme proslavery commonly developed into apocalyptic scenes of social disorder. The 1822 Refutation of the Calumnies Circulated against the Southern and Western States Respecting the Institution and Existence of Slavery among Them “by a South-Carolinian” laments labor conditions of the North. The author bashes the free market for the way “one grows rich by the labor of the hundred. The hundred human beings like himself, as wonderfully fashioned by Nature, gifted with the like capacities and equally made for immortality, are sacrificed, body and soul” (Refutation 60). Aside from “being deprived in childhood of all instruction,” the workers’ health, physical and moral, is alike destroyed. They die of diseases induced by unremitting task work, by confinement in the impure atmosphere of crowded rooms, by the particles of metallic or vegetable dust which they are continually inhaling, or they live to grow up without decency, without comfort, without hope; without morals, without religion, and without shame; and bring forth SLAVES like themselves to tread in the same path of misery. (Refutation 60)

The “hopelessness and despair” of the industrial worker make for a “life of misery” and a “mockery of humanity” (Refutation 60). Without the social order and cooperation brought about by southern slavery, industrial, working-class slaves like the ones characterized above will proliferate and


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cause economic chaos, the South Carolinian argues: “Our roads would swarm with paupers, and every wood be infested with banditti [sic]” (Refutation 82). However hyperbolic, such imagery nonetheless shows a concern for the bleak social consequences of capitalism, thus bearing more in common with Wilson than with the other source of prominent anticapitalist rhetoric at the time issuing from New England.10 New Englanders were mainly assaulting institutions antithetical to romantic notions of the artist, a project not as relevant to Our Nig as that of the proslavery propagandists since, as Xiomara Santamarina reminds us, “Our Nig refused to reinscribe the exceptionality of the individual whose survival was predicated on the romantic exempting of himself or herself from relevant structures” (99). As such, Wilson is trying to “teach” her “black brethren” (whom she appeals to for aid in the preface) that the servility and dependence of menial labor are not inherent to race, and skills can be learned and used by blacks from within the system for upward Â�mobility—race does not permanently fix one’s position on the occupational hierarchy. Wilson’s belief that the market holds “possibility,” despite its ongoing hardships, situates her efforts and sense of identity, both positive and negative, firmly within economies of labor, unlike romantic renunciations thereof. Unlike Fitzhugh and Wilson, Melville’s and Thoreau’s attacks on the market, for example, have no interest in the future of the northern free black citizens. “Who ain’t a slave?” Ishmael rhetorically asks in defense of his indentured servitude aboard a whaler in Moby-Dick, arguing that all labor is some form of slavery given the inescapable compromises industrial capitalism demands (Melville 24). In Walden, Thoreau says “it is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one” (49). This pattern of anticapitalist rhetoric minimizes and distances the very real predicament of free blacks by universalizing the shackles of labor; Wilson’s critique is instead specifically focused not on the plight of free northern blacks, but on that of women, both black and white. Though Wilson/Frado’s literary effort does reflect some strains of Dial contributors like Theodore Parker, who locates the panacea from the industrial economy in the power of the mind (“The head saves the hands”), most of these northern critiques of capitalism represent the work of writing outside of market exigencies (qtd. in L. Marx 201). Wilson writes to survive, not to save her aesthetic sensibility.

34 ::â•… c r u s a d i n g f o r s o c i a l j u s t i c e White New England writers were less concerned than proslavery authors and Wilson with the very real labor conditions in the antebellum North, especially those shaped by racist views of abolitionists. As Barbara White points out, even Harriet Beecher Stowe’s family exploited the labor of black girls as indentured domestic servants.11 Leon Litwack notes that “[a]s late as 1855, some 87 percent of the gainfully employed Negroes of New York City worked in menial or unskilled jobs, and this appears to represent this economic condition in other northern cities” (155). Wilson’s exposure of the hegemony of this northern occupational hierarchy from the perspective of a free black worker put her in an odd position to support black uplift without tarnishing the domestic sphere so revered by the mass of the reading public: hence the vilification of Frado’s mistress, Mrs. Bellmont, the “She-Devil,” and her daughter Mary as profaners of the sacred hearth. The novel locates the free market’s evils in its racism and sexism, but still more important for antebellum rhetoric, especially as employed by the proslavery South, the market is portrayed as cold. The question of where Frado/Wilson can find warmth is intimately bound to her economic plight and has her returning to the safety of her confidantes, particularly James and Mr. Bellmont, throughout the novel. This socialistic sense of safety is a trope played on in Fitzhugh as well as in Our Nig, in which Mrs. Bellmont comes to represent northern capitalism’s worst traits: selfishness, greed, cruelty, and the will to dominate. Mrs. Bellmont’s anti-Christ role as “She-Devil” is linked to her dramatically underdeveloped faculty for sympathy, echoing the then popular theory of “faculty psychology” promoted by the Scottish common sense philosophers Archibald Alison and Thomas Carlyle. “Faculty psychology” would infamously branch out into quack psychology such as phrenology, the charting of inner character through the exterior shape of the skull (Lauter 2065). Fitzhugh’s attack on the North was essentially aimed at its lack of socialization and its “unnatural,” wanton, rampant greed fueled by radical individualism, all representing perverse and distorted market traits visible in “exacting and greedy landlords, bosses and other capitalists” (Cannibals 201). Wilson suggests that such overdeveloped avarice encroaches into the domestic sphere, as Mrs. Bellmont and Mary’s self-interest, always racially inflected, is precisely what motivates them to prevent Frado’s assimilation into the family. “Capital of so-called Free Society,” Fitzhugh similarly argues, “begets irreparable injury. . . . It invades every


:: 35

recess of domestic life, infects its food, its clothing, its drink, its very atmosphere, and pursues the hireling, from the hovel to the poor-house, the prison and the grave” (Cannibals 201). Fitzhugh’s southern paternalism argued that blacks were part of the family that slavery always welcomed, provided for, and nurtured, only in a state of perpetual dependency without hope for political free agency, a level of power he assumed blacks incapable of handling. Fitzhugh supported a universal love of humanity as the source of his theory, arguing that essentialist views of blacks as intrinsically inferior lacked sympathy for blacks and failed to recognize the capacity for sympathy within them: The sympathies which have their range within the social Â�system—the emotions which form the ordinary cement of social existence, are found in the Negro, and they are to be taken into account in dealing with him. The master who ignores them and proceeds on brute principles, will vex his own soul and render his servants worthless and wretched. (“Plantation Life” 361)

Thus, an unsympathetic view of blacks, he insisted, was “the weakest position of defense we could possibly select” (“Southern Thought” 451). “Hatred to slavery is very generally little more than hatred of Negroes,” he claimed (Cannibals 200). He eventually would recant by 1861 in a review about Haitian “degeneration,” urging that when left to their own devices, “the negro is physically, morally, and intellectually a different being (from necessity) from white man, and must ever so remain” (“Black and White” 447). Drew Faust notes that “[h]is postbellum writings expressed a virulent racism,” which, I suggest, unmasks his professed love of blacks before the war as pretentious rhetoric (46). Fitzhugh leans heavily upon his grossly idealized domestic vision of slavery as shelter from northern free-market capitalism, a world of treachery and death by starvation that particularly ravages the weak and helpless, namely blacks and women like Wilson herself. His insistence that a “free Negro’s master . . . stand in loco parentis, and call him papa instead of master” has clear echoes in Wilson (Sociology 89). The motifs of loneliness accompany an unloved feelingâ•fl“once more alone,” Frado laments at Samuel’s departure toward the end of the novel, alluding to James’s earlier untimely Â�death—as her lack of a consistent, loyal parental figure continually leaves her to the ravages of labor exploitation, or dependence on charity (H. Wilson 56). Like Fitzhugh, Wilson insinuates that capitalism has

36 ::â•… c r u s a d i n g f o r s o c i a l j u s t i c e ruined domestic life in the North. George Fredrickson comments that FitzÂ� hugh’s emphasis on the contrasting domestic benevolence in the South, “for him, made the harsh, exploitative side of slavery disappear almost entirely” (56). Certainly Mrs. Bellmont and Mary are exploitative, but aside from the title’s assurance that “slavery’s shadows fall even” in the North, the predominant rhetorical pattern in the fiction suggests that wickedness in Frado/Wilson’s life issues from the North, as the tale of Frado’s mother, Mag Smith, establishes the novel’s keynote of neglect at the hands of the northern market. The northern market is the overwhelming cause of Mag’s sufferings and near starvation, personified by her first unnamed love interest, whose charm, “alluring her upward and onward,” deceives her into thinking “she could ascend to him and become an equal,” only to be swindled of her prize possession, “a priceless gem,” and left back in the condition in which she started: “unprotected, uncherished, uncared for” (H. Wilson 5–6). Her loss of faith in Godâ•fl“she entered the darkness of perpetual infamy,” the narrator makes clearâ•flstems from her economic environment, one totally hostile to Christian charity and sympathy (H. Wilson 16). The implication is that the market has conditioned her out Â�of—what antebellum readers would have understood Â�as—her natural maternal sympathies toward her own children and into a vicious and blasphemous mode of perverse individualism that could only arise from the desperate desire for self-preservation. The ethos of this economic condition matches Fitzhugh’s assault on such values he says emanate from Ben Franklin, which he finds “low, selfish, atheistic and material,” feeding on “the women, the children, the very weak, poor, and ignorant” (Sociology 91; Cannibals 200). On the brink of starvation, Mag rejoices at the death of her first child as she declaims, “no one can taunt her with my ruin” (H. Wilson 6). After her financial straits have wrung all traces of maternal sympathy from her and blackened her heart, she demonically seeks to abandon her mulatto children: “‘Who will take the black devils?’ snarled Mag” (H. Wilson 16). The traps Fitzhugh sees free blacks and single white women falling into are precisely those that ensnare Mag: “The competition of the world would be too much. . . . [T]hey would be cheated out of their property and debased in their morals” (Sociology 88). The market has not only produced a bad mother, but a woman doubly sinful, according to 1850s moral codes, in her marriage to a black man,


:: 37

Jim, Â�a nd—after his Â�death—her unmarried cohabitation with Seth. Both are more economic than romantic relationships. Jim’s pity for Mag’s financial straits endears her to him, while Seth, “a partner in Jim’s business,” becomes something of a business partner with Mag: “when both were supplied with work, they prospered; if idle, they both suffered,” riding the volatile waves of the free market together (H. Wilson 16). Money has supplanted love here, or at least transformed it into a coarse means of survival, resulting in apathy toward spiritual salvation. Fitzhugh also locates the corrupting influence of money precisely in its “human inequality of condition, of excessive wealth and luxury with the few, and of great destitution and suffering with the many, and of . . . corruption of morals,” concluding that “Christianity is impracticable in free society” (Cannibals 206). Such an image of human inequality that encourages unchristian behavior appears in the material comforts of “a large, old fashioned, two-story white house, environed by fruitful acres,” which tempt Mag into perhaps her biggest sin: leaving Frado at the Bellmont residence and setting up her life of abuse at the hands of Mrs. Bellmont. This act is clearly represented as a sin since Mag is fully aware of Mrs. Bellmont’s reputation for savagely beating domestic help: “‘She can’t keep a girl in the house over a week; and Mr. Bellmont wants to hire a boy to work for him, but he can’t find one that will live in the house with her; she’s so ugly [i.e., abusive] they can’t,’” Seth reports (H. Wilson 18). Frado’s dispositionâ•fl“a wild frolicky thing” with “an exhuberance almost beyond restraint” prone to “infantile pranks”â•flis a token of class rebellion,12 raising the question of whether a child of a godless impoverished mother, who branded her a black devil, is capable of spiritual salvation (H. Wilson 17, 14). Once at the Bellmonts’, Frado distinguishes herself through her domestic labor, which she finds rewarding. Mr. Bellmont grants her the privileges of literacy and education, and through her work, “she was quite indispensable” to the household (H. Wilson 30). The insinuation is that under the sympathetic, benevolent paternalistic control of Mr. Bellmont and Jack, the only barriers to her fulfillment are Mrs. Bellmont and Mary. Jack is cast as the good overseer, Mr. Bellmont as the just granter of rewards and recognition for Frado’s work; her labor is dignified under their guidance, and they encourage her assimilation into the family (H. Wilson 31, 37). Mrs. Bellmont and Mary conspire to thwart Frado’s ascent, and succeed only upon the passive neglect of Mr. Bellmont (H. Wilson 34). Work is not

3 8 ::â•… c r u s a d i n g f o r s o c i a l j u s t i c e bad, here, it is actually good; the villains are the racist women who are not up to the level of Frado’s domestic productivity, as Mary “congratulates herself upon her thorough house-keeping qualities” when Frado is actually doing all the work; Mrs. Bellmont later admits that “there was never one of my girls could do half the work” she does (H. Wilson 66, 89). She outdoes them and inspires their jealousy by winning the affection not only of Mr. Bellmont and Jack, but of the hired hands as well, through her good-natured, fun-loving approach to her work: “the men employed upon the farm were glad to hear her prattle; she was a great favorite with them” (H. Wilson 37). Good domestic labor, Frado’s work that enriches the household and distinguishes her, bears a close resemblance to that of the benevolent paternalism on the plantation. Such a system, according to the logic of the novel, would work effectively since it is fueled by sympathy, a trope FitzÂ� hugh also plays upon, as a kind of kinship and spiritual intimacy that has James calling for Frado to comfort him on his deathbed: “no one but his wife could move him as easily as Frado”; the sight of her after a beating has him resolve “after returning to health to take her under his protection” (H. Wilson 76, 72). But the northern labor condition, embodied by Mrs. Bellmont and Mary, drives sympathy out of the domestic sphere, thus transforming Frado’s honorable labor into drudgery. Her “spiritual condition,” as described in chapter 7 of the novel, has her complaining that “no one cares for me only to get my work,” commiserating with “her faithful friend Fido” given the “loneliness of her condition and want of sympathizing friends” (H. Wilson 75). Like her mother Mag, Frado’s spiritual condition is shaped by the larger economic ones that strip the dignity, comradeship, and contribution from her labor. Frado suffers more acutely given her race, however, as she battles Mrs. Bellmont and Mary’s ideology that blacks cannot rise with her precociousness, humor, good looks, valuable work, and endurance. Hazel Carby has asserted that the house in Our Nig represents a “southern plantation” signifying the “power of the South,” while Lois Loveen qualifies this notion to emphasize that the novel is not just an attack on the institution of slavery, but an “entry into debate on the status of the future of free blacks” (Carby 44; Loveen 570). Both are true but do not account for what antebellum readers would have read as the perversion of the domestic sphere that the imbalanced Â�psyches—overdeveloped ava-


:: 39

rice and underdeveloped Â�sympathy—of Mrs. Bellmont and Mary exhibit. Such flaws are depicted as all the more blasphemous given the dominant cultural view of women’s role in the domestic sphere as balancing agents mollifying the harsh forces of the market. Our Nig portrays such forces as running roughshod over society in the North, doing battle with the sympathy, warmth, and communal spirit of Mr. Bellmont, James, and the workers. Perhaps the most telling symptom of Mrs. Bellmont’s alliance with capitalism’s coldness emerges during the courtship of her daughter Jane and George Means. Mrs. Bellmont is hostile to sympathy not only in her failure to support her own daughter’s preference for a marriage partner, but in her disrespect and trivialization of the intimacy between George and Jane. The attraction is so strong that Jane knew instantly “he could not long be a stranger” (H. Wilson 57). Mrs. Bellmont’s ideal suitor for Jane is Henry Reed, whose “sinister eyes” immediately give him away as the clear villain, as he views Jane as a property investment, putting money well before love: “He would sacrifice everything but his inheritance to secure his betrothed” (H. Wilson 59). Even the diction of his summative statement in his fight for Jane makes him sound more frustrated over a failed financial transaction than a jilted lover: “The business is settled between us; there it will remain,” and he expresses his “disappointment by a few hundreds” in his final letter to Jane (H. Wilson 59, 60). Mrs. Bellmont’s capitalist aggression is expressed as excessive self-interest and opportunism, as she values Henry precisely by counting “the acres which were to be transmitted to an only son; she knew there was silver in the purse,” explicitly resisting warmth and love: “she would not have Jane too sentimental” (H. Wilson 56). The sacred marriage ritual that the market prompted Mag to forgo (and thus go to the devil) is echoed by Mrs. Bellmont’s willingness to supplant cold cash with “sentiment,” a blasphemy reflected in her “lengthy tirade upon . . . the satanic influence” of Aunt Abby, the kindly and thoroughly Christian confidante who provides Jane with a ready solution by predicting her father’s sympathy. The triangle of sympathy between Jane, Aunt Abby, and Mr. Bellmont that supports George, who is not wealthy, functions as a kind of sacred alliance that operates in opposition to and ultimately defeats Mrs. Bellmont’s satanic capitalism in this case. It is only Mr. Bellmont’s superior capacity for sympathy and economic disinterest that prompts him to leave the decision to Jane, and she chooses George.

4 0 ::â•… c r u s a d i n g f o r s o c i a l j u s t i c e That it takes such a concerted effort in this segment of the novel for the powers of sympathy and love to overcome the formidable forces of greed indicates that the northern market is unnaturally bent against cooperation and mutual aid, factors that describe a more horizontal, communal, and socialistic economic model than the laissez-faire capitalism of the North. Fitzhugh similarly finds it “natural for men to love one another. The ordinary relations of men are not competitive and antagonistic as in free society; and selfishness is not general, but exceptionable. . . . Man is not naturally selfish or bad, for he is naturally social” (Cannibals 219). Indeed, Wilson shares this view of the benevolence of human nature since neither Mrs. Bellmont’s sins nor those of Frado’s own mother are portrayed as intrinsic to their characters, but instead derive from external corrupting market influences. Such love expresses itself in the domestic sphere, precisely in the sort of warmth and care that Frado hungers for, embodied by a “kind mistress” exuding “domestic affection,” the very antithesis of Mrs. Bellmont, “like a guardian angel [who] provides for” her dependents “in health, tends to them in sickness, and soothes [the] dying pillow” (Fitzhugh, Sociology 85). The market aversion to such domestic love and affection, of course, is speciously deployed here to support slavery by Fitzhugh, yet it strikes exactly the chord that Nina Baym has identified in popular sentimental fiction of the time, which plays so prominently in Our Nig. She asserts that the novelists “abhorred and feared poverty,” noting that their social commentary, like that in Wilson’s novel, targeted “‘the predominance of marketplace values in every area of American life’”; the story of Jane and George, in particular, showcases a common pattern in which “male control,” in this case, Henry’s, “and the money economy are simultaneously terminated” (qtd. in Gates xlii–xliii). The binary that sets sentiment against capital in such popular fiction shares proslavery’s focus on white women, the plight of whom Wilson represents not only in Mag, but in Jenny’s courtship with Jack. In this way, Wilson “deliberately and forcefully conflates the economic situations of working-class whites and . . . blacks,” as Mag is a white woman displaced in the job market by “foreigners who cheapened toil and clamored for a livelihood” (Ernest 431; H. Wilson 8). Jenny is a poor white woman whose marriage to Jack Mrs. Bellmont attempts to ruin through gestures designed to humiliate the new bride by highlighting her inferior social status. “This coldness was felt by Jack’s worthy wife”; Mrs. Bellmont “wished to make


:: 4 1

her feel her inferiority” through salacious rumors, the interception of her letters, and false imprisonment on the grounds of social class, as Jenny is informed “that new clothes would be necessary, in order to make her presentable to Baltimore society . . . and she must stay till she was suitably attired” (H. Wilson 112, 114). Frado, significantly, is the only one to “steal up into Jenny’s room” and sympathize with her based on their shared suffering “and tell some of her own encounters” with the “She-Devil” (H. Wilson 115). In this instance, Frado’s suffering is clearly coded as white, female, and working class, like Mag’s story. Jenny and Mag would fit perfectly in Caroline E. Rush’s proslavery propaganda novel, The North and South. Such “white bondage” for Rush becomes the “more real and degrading slavery” and “infinitely more deplorable cruelty” than the southern variety in a market that transforms “respectable white females” into “white wearied, worn out daughters of toil” (21, 31, 22, 23). Rush depicts a procession of scenes following the Harley family’s seven children’s struggle for survival after the untimely death of their father, a drunken, ruined businessman. The novel portrays poverty as a child killer, both pathogenically and psychologically. Ida dies of an infant fever, and Ellen is so abused that she drowns herself in the Schuylkill River at the age of ten. The fates of all the children are grim except for that of Harry, who becomes a sea captain after the farmer who severely overworks and beats him is exposed in a trial in which he falsely accuses Harry of horse stealing. Rose and Ida II are happily lodged in southern plantations, while Lily is embittered for life by the whipping she received as a child, a scene at the heart of the novel, complete with illustration. Lily’s whipping is the centerpiece for The North and South just as Frado’s physical abuse is in Our Nig, and both bear a special relationship to economics. Lily, like Frado, is beaten not out of Mrs. Anson’s sadism, but her greed for more work and thus profit from the child laborer. The scene showcases the cruel consequences of the profit motive, a target so central to Rush’s didactic purpose that she even accuses Stowe of lying for profit (Rush 4). Greed also drives Mrs. Bellmont: “‘I’ll beat the money out of her, if I can’t get her worth any other way’” (H. Wilson 90). Greed seems to fuel not only violence, but also anger in these scenes, directed specifically at the child workers’ failure to realize their productivity as capital investments. This doubly desecrates the cultural ideal of feminine character by inflecting anger with ruthless capitalism in a woman. Displays of anger

42 ::â•… c r u s a d i n g f o r s o c i a l j u s t i c e alone in women were blasphemous to antebellum readers: “to abandon oneself to a fit of temper however righteous, was strenuously to be avoided by both men and women,” yet “when a man succumbed to anger he lost dignity; when a woman succumbed, however she betrayed her very femininity,” John Kasson reports (161). The Young Lady’s Own Book (1833) calls “an enraged woman . . . one of the most disgusting sights in nature” (qtd. in Kasson 161). Further, C. Dallett Hemphill’s history of manners at the time is particularly revealing: “What is noteworthy is the lack of suggestions” in guide books “that servants, or any other youth, be beaten,” cautioning that “flogging was to be timely, moderate, and never done in passion,” used only as a last resort; parents were told to “be free and easy with children” and to avoid “the display of anger in their faces” (96, 97). Frado and Lily are both children and servants, making their employers/guardians fall within the guidelines of the codes of behavior they so flagrantly violate. Further, whipping, as a key image testifying to the barbarity of southern slavery in slave narratives, now works in the hands of anticapitalist didactic novelists to expose the viciousness of northern labor conditions. Interestingly, The North and South is part of a small wave of novels that refuted Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin by arguing that blacks received better treatment enslaved in the South than they did while free in the North. Chapter 15 of The Cabin and Parlor; or, Slaves and Masters (1852) by Charles Jacobs Peterson (pseudonym of J. Thornton Randolph) specifically contrasts the southern plantation society with northern cities to demonstrate that blacks’ financial independence was undercut by their scant earnings. Likewise, Frado’s life, and Wilson’s by extension, after leaving the Bellmonts’ is an odyssey of piecemeal work: learning the needle trade under Mrs. Moore, soliciting for charity given the absence of her traveling huckster husband Samuel, selling hair dye, and finally writing her book, an appeal to the reader’s sympathy for her individual spirit of endurance in such a cold, inhumane economic climate. In the wrong hands, Our Nig might have inadvertently fueled proslavery propaganda. Such was never her intention, but neither was Marxist revolution. Her inspirational endurance does not make her an apologist for or hero of the free market either. Wilson’s harrowing life story does prove that proslavery’s depictions of northern working Â� conditions—particularly for free blacks like Frado but also for white women like Mag Â�Smith—were not exaggerated, as she exposes how oppressive many of those “liberators” re-


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ally were who so closely resembled the dominating and exploitative northern capitalists Fitzhugh imagined. It is fully understandable, therefore, why the abolitionists deliberately chose not to publicize Our Nig. One must search both high and low for early socialist thinking in the United States. Fueled by an acute sense of urgency, writings from the margins provide some of the most telling evidence of northern labor conditions commonly kept from view. Survival motivated Wilson to expose the grim realities of class inequality and crushing toil in the North. Fitzhugh and Rush also wrote with survival in Â�mind—only theirs was the survival of slavery as a token of a collective regional and cultural identity under threat of extinction. Desperate times are indeed what inspired the desperate writings of both Wilson and the proslavery writers, and their urgency and fearlessness has produced some of the more vivid portrayals of economic oppression of the entire era.

U2

U

a l e r t, a d v e n t u r o u s , a n d u n w e a r i e d Market Values in Thoreau’s Economies of Subsistence Living and Writing

In 1837, Henry David Thoreau delivered the honors graduation speech at Harvard College on the commercial spirit of his times. The contrarian, archly ironic, often obtuse public literary persona that would later shape the narrative voice of Walden’s first chapter, “Economy,” and much of the rest of his career, was born that day. In the speech, he extolled the virtue of the simple life, suggesting that a week should consist of one day of work and six days of rest (“Commercial Spirit” 117).1 In Thoreau’s life, “rest” would actually consist of studying natural history, examining nature, and Â�writing—the most basic functions, ironically enough, of his own professional career as an author.2 Fellow New Englanders Henry David Thoreau and Harriet Wilson offer scathing critiques of northern industry and its erosion of values. While his privileged professional situation could not have been more different from Wilson’s, Thoreau nonetheless shares the same target: avarice. To Thoreau, it threatens the sanctity of the individual soul, something he roots in the rhythms and practices of living deliberately, not acquisitively according to an obsessive desire to amass surplus capital. In this chapter, I argue that Thoreau borrows some of the market’s Â�values—its “alert, adventurous, unwearied” Â�traits—to define his alternative economy of living, a lifestyle that parallels his sense of effective writing (Walden 118). For Thoreau, the business of deliberate living is to be embraced with the imaginative innovation, energy, and fearlessness often seen in the best entrepreneurs, yet with that entrepreneurial drive directed precisely toward the antimaterialistic Portions of this chapter, particularly on physical and literary labor and the ethos of deliberate living in Thoreau, appear in David Dowling, “ ‘Hard as a Diamond’: Running and Living Deliberately in Parker and Thoreau,” Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature 24.2 (2007): 113–30.

Alert, Adventurous, and Unwearied

::â•‡ 4 5

goal of subsistence living for self-culture, an objective that takes as its major premise how to “avoid the necessity of selling” and avoid working more than necessary to achieve transcendence (Walden 19). A surge of energy at the time was bent on rescuing the inner self from industrial labor. Thoreau was not alone in his urge to express a new understanding of the dynamics of labor and leisure in terms of self-culture in the face of the market revolution, as other cultural critics like Ellery Channing and Catharine Beecher also tried to articulate this new relationship (Gleason 674). My purpose is to reexamine this “new conception” of the relation between leisure and labor through Thoreau’s literary personae to show that the market gave him some of his best ideas not only for self-culture and the art of transcendental living, but for the art of writing, especially in achieving an economic prose style. His professional frustrations are also assumed to have fundamentally shaped his ideals for writing as a private, noneconomic activity, but such ideals, though less mature, were already present in his 1837 graduation speech. Thoreau’s paradoxical concepts of authorship reach beyond a simple renunciation of capitalist concerns. Although his images of literary labor were cast in opposition to the market’s objective of amassing surplus capital, they nonetheless borrowed its ethical framework of ambition, drive, and toil to construct a transcendental method of living and writing rooted in industriousness. His labor, ironically, is divided to produce a desired result, either beans or words, and even becomes routine, much to his dismay, as the rut of his daily tasks are worn into the earth between his hut and Walden Pond. Thoreau’s redefined economic metaphor applies directly to his aesthetic of creative writing. Specifically, I am concerned with his struggle to reconcile the playful leisure of writing he Â�loved—making a pastime of punning and word Â�play—with the work demanded by his own high standards for quality and craftsmanship. Refinement in the composition process, like a lapidary’s labor, is evidenced by the seven drafts of Walden. The objective, ironically, was to make such strain invisible, thus raising the value of his finished literary products through a smooth, natural appearance. The first section of this chapter provides the professional context relevant to these elements of work and play that form the basis of Thoreau’s understanding of the writing process as he himself wanted to engage it, and as he thought all writers should. I locate Thoreau’s richly paradoxical use of work and play primarily in Walden and his journal to reveal how capitalist tropes

4 6 â•‡ :: c r u s a d i n g f o r s o c i a l j u s t i c e form the core of his antiprofessional sense of subsistence writing within his larger alternative economy of living.

Professionalism and Unsalable Baskets The failure of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, published in 1849, delayed Walden’s publication for five years. During this time, Thoreau considerably expanded the Walden manuscript. In 1852, he added an anecdote about an Indian who had industriously woven baskets only to find that no one wanted to buy them. The passage is an apt allegory for Thoreau’s unsuccessful attempt to market A Week. He self-effacingly described in his journal how the book’s failure was a physical, as well as a professional and economic, burden to bear. After hauling the 706 unsold copies from the publisher into his house, he jibed that “[t]hey are something more substantial than fame, as my back knows, which has borne them up two flights of stairs to a place similar to that to which they trace their origin. . . . I have now a library of over nine-hundred volumes, over seven-hundred of which I wrote myself” ( Journal 5 459). The Indian’s unmarketable baskets represented A Week, raising the question of the value of labor for the production of commodities for sale. The Indian had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth the other’s while to buy them, or at least make him think that it was so, or to make something else which it would be worth his while to buy. I too had woven a kind of basket of delicate texture, but I had not made it worth any one’s while to buy them. Yet not the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth men’s while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them. The life which men praise and regard is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of others? (Walden 19)

This famous passage coheres with the ironic use of the language of commerce in Walden’s “Economy” chapter. He repeats the phrase “worth . . . while” exactly five times in as many sentences, concluding with a pun on the word “expense.” The passage contributes to Thoreau’s challenge to narrowly materialistic and utilitarian values. The basket could refer to Thoreau’s failure in the marketplace of New York before going to the pond, as well as to the failure of A Week.3 The language, a “kind of basket of deli-


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cate text ture,” corresponds to both this particular work of writing and the outing in the New York literary market. The passage is widely recognized to represent, in Gilmore’s words, “the failures” not only of A Week but of “Civil Disobedience” as well, which “strengthen his antimarket resolution, but at the same time force him to retreat from his ambition to reform the polity” (50). Although the Indian anecdote rebukes the occupation of producing writing for sale as a social reformer in a literary market, Thoreau grudgingly continued to work at his career by actively engaging in the lecture circuit as well as turning his attention more fully to the private writing of his journal. Thoreau’s lecturing shows that he never fully withdrew from the literary marketplace after the failed publication of A Week, despite setting aside his Walden manuscript and not publishing anything for three years between 1849 and 1852, when he inserted the Indian basket passage into Walden. Significantly, the Indian basket anecdote was among the very first of two years of additions and alterations Thoreau would make in four drafts of the Walden manuscript until its 1854 publication. As such, it marks Thoreau’s initiation of his return back to the literary marketplace. Ironically, in these two years his sentiments in Walden and his journal reveal that he aimed to be a subsistence writer, as it were, reaping the immediate, noneconomic benefits of self-culture from his literary efforts. He lectured and wrote in his journal, increasingly avoiding the necessity of writing for money. Yet he did publish as much as possible later in his career to support his own mother and sister. His career embodied the paradox that subsistence writing and living always had a market imperative.4 Such a withdrawal did not disconnect Thoreau entirely from the commercial world, for we see him give full voice to the elements of desire, motivation, energy, and utterance so often associated with the energetic professions in the market, interestingly enough, behind his urgings to himself to keep writing and thinking, even in the absence of an audience. Giving up on reaching readers made him even more acutely aware of the value of his own voice, a writer’s voice, whose currency he would let expire in the marketplace, but not within himself. He rejects the necessity of a paying audience as a necessary component to the condition of writing in two particular journal entries, turning inward to his private mind away from his outward, marketplace literary activity. Yet he still advances a method of literary creativity borrowing heavily from the language of commerce, even

4 8 â•‡ :: c r u s a d i n g f o r s o c i a l j u s t i c e if it is only for himself. The first entry shows how Thoreau reaffirmed the value of his private inspiration, regardless of public influence, rediscovering the literary value of the journal form. He wrote, in an affirmation of his writer’s voice as a kind of affirmation of life itself, on 25 December 1851: “Do not speak for other men; speak for yourself. . . . Though you should not speak to one, but only utter aloud, that you may more completely realize and live the idea which contains the reason of your life, . . . Â�speak—though your thought presupposes the non-existence of your Â� hearers—thoughts that transcend life and death” ( Journal 4 223). While the exhortation to “not speak for other men” may literally mean “to other men,” its richer resonance as “on behalf of, as a spokesman for” complements the Indian basket anecdote’s lesson that says that writers ideally create for their own spiritual benefit, rather than for a body of consumers; the point of writing is to “completely realize and live the idea which contains the reason of your life” for private stimulation rather than public marketability. In this vein, Thoreau wrote on 27 January 1852: I do not know but thoughts written down thus in a journal might be printed in the same form to greater Â�advantage—than if the related ones were brought together into essays. They are now allied to lifeâ•fl& are seen by the reader not to be far Â�fetched—It is more Â�simple—less Â�artful—I feel that in the other case I should have no proper frame for my sketches. . . . Whether the flower looks better in the nosegay than in the meadow where it grew and we had to get our feet wet to get it! ( Journal 4 296)

Another richly textured meaning beyond the immediate denotative ones attached to the journal and reader emerges in this passage. The journal comes to stand for writing outside of the marketplace, with the resistance to publication highlighted by the image of the flower in the meadow as superior to the flower in the nosegay. His impulse is to leave the writing where it grew, and not transport it to the marketplace for framing, primarily because he lacks a “proper frame” for the sketches. It is not so much that he lacks a frame, but that he refuses to make one; he would prefer not to package his writing for public consumption. But he still shows an inclination toward a product, albeit a product of subsistence writing for the sake of self-culture, as he imagines the journal “printed” with an eye toward its comparative worth in a competitive market reflected in the phrase “to greater advantage.” These tropes from market discourse inform the complex paradox at the heart of subsistence writing, or writing containing


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only what is necessary for self-culture. Comparative value and quality are priorities that drive his realization that a frame can be eschewed, just as courage and motivation inspire him to do the same with his audience in the previous passage. In both cases, market methods yield self-cultural, transcendental results. Thoreau’s objective of subsistence writing is very much in keeping with his rejection of the set of methods in the marketplace not associated with real measures of comparative quality (“a greater advantage”) or motivation and courage (“speak for yourself”), but rather that which mitigates and potentially deceives readers into valuing packaging (“frames”) over the substance of the writing. His rejection of frames and audiences in these two passages signal an aesthetic of writing for self-culture that refuses to overcodify, to make “artful,” that which makes sense to the self. A frame connects texts to readers and is necessary to make a sketch salable because it identifies the work’s literary genre and thus alerts specific readers of that category (romance, travel literature, biography, and so forth), that the text is available for purchase. Framing, in a larger sense, can also refer to advertisements and announcements for the book. Thoreau despised the packaging of texts for public consumption through literary advertisements, proclaiming that “the next time the novelist rings the bell I will not stir though the meeting-house burn down. ‘The Skip of the Tip-Toe-Hop,’ a Romance of the Middle Ages, by the celebrated author of Tittle-To-Tan, to appear in monthly parts; a great rush; don’t all come together.’ All this they [the readers] read with saucer eyes, and erect a primitive curiosity” (Walden 105). As he claims he should run for his life if he knew a reformer were coming to his door, he also turns a deaf ear toward the popular sway of literary advertising in 1840s New England. He makes readers out to be so many sheep going to the slaughter of the literary marketplace, victims of the commercialization of “celebrated authors” and the second-rate product for which they have a base, “primitive curiosity” and hunger. In opposition to what he believed was hucksterism in the literary marketplace, Thoreau opts for “more Â�simple—less artful” journal writing. He conversely sees marketplace writing as more artful in the sense of artificial, manufactured, and less simple, characteristics contrary to subsistence writing. However distanced from industrial labor images of creativity tend to be in Thoreau,5 he did not sweepingly dismiss all things commercial. The privileged status Thoreau ascribes to private, unpackaged journal

5 0 â•‡ :: c r u s a d i n g f o r s o c i a l j u s t i c e writing paradoxically corresponds with the work of writing in Walden he describes as a transaction of “some private business with the fewest obstacles” for the transcendental harvest of self-cultivation for liberation from marketplace intervention or mediation (62, emphasis mine). Thoreau’s notion of self-culture and what I call “subsistence writing”â•fl of writing without the necessity of customers/readers to thrive spiritually much in the way he would farm without selling to subsist Â�physically—was defined in opposition to what he felt were fundamentally incompatible relationships between artists and economics, writers and publishers. In an 1853 journal entry where Thoreau vented anger at the professionalization of authorship, he asked, “How can a poet afford to keep an account with a bookseller?” ( Journal 6 280). The unaffordable “cost” to the poet in working with a bookseller is that he must share his profits in a monetary sense, and sell his soul to the devil of capitalism, as it were, in a metaphysical sense. His antimarketplace stance toward writing resists this commodification of the spiritual inner life, and crucially for my argument here, the fruit of his own labor and process of production, however personal and isolated it might be.6 Of this constant drive to transform the author’s interior world into exterior, physical merchandise for profit, Thoreau exclaims, “[H]ow many there are who advise you to print! How few who advise you to lead a more interior life” ( Journal 3 420). But that “interior life” would demand “printing,” as it were, in the form of transcription of Â�inspiration—a kind of deep breath prior to profound and demanding Â�utterance—and observation onto the written page. The subsistence farmer and house builder of Walden provides crucial insight into exactly how much writing Thoreau felt was enough. He looked upon writing the same way he looked upon hoeing beans, with the hand functioning as the key instrument, the intimate conduit of expression for his style of labor in writing, building, and farming in Walden’s first line: “When I wrote the following pages . . . I lived alone . . . and earned my living by the labor of my hands only” (Walden 3). Exactly how much writing does the transcendental diet require before the soul is sated? Only what is necessary to reach, in Richard Prud’homme’s words, “a truth beyond the power of language and theory (including his own) to observe it” (111). The hand communicates through writing what the head perceives of where the feet have taken it: “My head is hands and feet” (Walden 98). As such, the hand does the work of the head, whose goal is transcendence through


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immersion as “an organ for burrowing” into nature (Walden 98). Writing is different from building and farming, since it does not directly aid in the creation (the ingestion of food) and retention (shelter) of bodily heat (Bromell 217–8).7 According to a strict reading of his economy, it is a nonpurposive kind of labor that he should not do at all. The caveat that some “love labor for its own sake” and not for the return or result it brings leaves a loophole in his economy of living that accommodates the work of subsistence writing (Walden 70). As divine energies are reached through Thoreau’s writing, or thinking with his hand, it is fascinating that this is precisely the moment in which writing stops. Language is useful for Thoreau only insofar as it provides access to higher truths, feeding the spirit and thus maintaining the objective of self-culture. I do not mean to suggest that there is an exaggerated abruptness to Thoreau’s style. Though not exactly an elliptical stylist, his prose should nonetheless not be mistaken with the manic excesses of a Melville, whose windy gusts of Moby-Dick are a decidedly different articulation of authorial ambition, in which words seem an infinitely renewable resource. For Thoreau, words are energy, and as such are produced materially in order to access divine energy that is not self-generated, but always already present in nature. In Walden’s conclusion, Thoreau finds no solace in words themselves, in the act of writing itself for its own sake, allowing that “the volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement” (325). Rather than offering a pessimistic account of the futility of language to grasp higher truth of our being, Thoreau shows that language is not totally bankrupt. There is hope that words, like the beaten path to the pond, can lead to higher truths, but they must be continually patterned anew and refreshed to effectively lead to, and orient the self toward, enlightenment. The desire to refresh language, like the urge to leave the pond and abandon theory itself, has interesting implications for theories of labor, particularly the elements of routine and dehumanization in the industrial process of production. The hand is his mode of labor and self-expression, his means of living and working only as much as he must to stay alive and feed his soul. A profoundly intimate tool for self-expression, the hand creates the beans, the shelter, and the words he writes. (Its opposite, “abstraction,” according to Marx’s theory of worker alienation, will be discussed later.) Laboring “under a mistake” is linked to false uses of language, and

5 2 â•‡ :: c r u s a d i n g f o r s o c i a l j u s t i c e expressions of the self, in the form of abuses of literary labor for the sake of financial profit (Walden 5). Hence Thoreau targets farmers and bankers who are drowning in the material attachments in “Economy” as much as he does print culture. Fashion, Thoreau believed, was an expression of the culture’s excesses, of rapid development in the industrial economyâ•fl“this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century”â•flthat would have embarrassing effects on the work of writing, taking it far from the transcendental subsistence writing he extolled (Walden 329). It is equally true, however, that Walden is actually very social (it wakes the neighbors) and interested in winning the market success that A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers failed to earn. The construction of an author, as Fink reminds us in Prophet in the Marketplace, emerges from public and economic concerns predicated on authority, something whose function is quite different from merely an imaginative survey of the woods by an amateur. There was a fruitful tension between Thoreau’s notions of private and public authorship throughout his later career, particularly in 1854 when he decided not to accept speaking engagements in Akron, Ohio, and in Canada due to his inability to schedule other dates to make his trip worthwhile (Correspondence 347, 352). This was not a decision to withdraw from the market so much as it was a decision to make a virtue of economic necessity and tour the New England speaking circuit. From 1854 to 1860 he mainly delivered three lectures, “The Wild,” “Moonlight,” and “Getting a Living,” later published as “Life without Principle.” Of these, he delivered the latter more often than the others and invested considerable time revising it. Its subject was the materialistic ethos of the very audience he had in mind when he wrote “Economy”: his Concord neighbors and the self-imposed quandaries and afflictions unique to lives dedicated to surplus capitalism. Ironically, this was also the very audience who paid to hear the lecture that Thoreau selected as the most popular of his talks, “a fact that captures his profound ambivalence toward his role,” Fink notes (Prophet 269). Beyond the lecture circuit, the paradoxically fruitful tension between subsistence writing and writing for money would emerge in his later attempts to publish as much as possible to support his mother and sister. Interestingly, money was a means to deeply humanitarian ends both on the lecture circuit and in his later scramble to feed his mother and sister. The profit motive as played out in Thoreau’s career, in other words, should


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not be confused with amassing lavish wealth for the purchase of a palatial mansion and all the fineries of the sort garnered by Washington Irving, for example. The glaring conspicuous consumption behind Irving’s profit motive, particularly evident in his sprawling New York estate named “Sunny Side,” should never be confused with Thoreau’s professionalism toward the end of his life. Thoreau’s search for market success between 1854 and 1860 was very different from the type of commercial success Irving pursued and won. Irving’s light, crowd-pleasing tales flattered readers; Thoreau bore the much harder objective of challenging the very core of his audience’s ethos. Thus the lectures serve economic necessity and not the surplus capital he deplored while also enlightening his listeners (waking the neighbors) to the untapped potential of their lives. To be thus well employed for the good of his community, for example, is precisely what was missing from his teaching stint, which he deemed a failure since it was “not for the good of my fellow men, but for a livelihood” (Walden 69). When the necessity of selling became no longer avoidable, Thoreau did his best to avoid the sort of unsatisfactory employment he described in a journal entry from 7 August 1853: If the laborer gets no more than the wages his employer pays him, he is cheated—he cheats himself. Those services which the world will most readily pay for, it is the most disagreeable to Â�render—You are paid for being something less than a man. The state will pay a genius only for some service which it is offensive to him to Â�render—Even a poet laureate would rather not have to celebrate the accidents of royalty. ( Journals 6 288)

Without the political constraints of a poet laureate, Thoreau likely saw lecturing as the least “offensive,” alienating, “disagreeable” service he could perform for money. His political individualism never served a consumerist ethos of self-gratification; writing to support his family bespeaks an understanding of authorship based not on gluttony but on subsistence. (Irving’s portly frame in his later years set against the ever-lean Thoreau is particularly telling of their economic relationships to their authorial roles.) Thus, winning market success, in the end, was never for himself alone. It represents the strand of subsistence writing that reaches outward to serve family and community and not overfeed himself. Both required earning money; the point, therefore, is not that Thoreau was wholly unconcerned with the literary marketplace. On the contrary, his very anxiety about the necessity of employment as a professional author encouraged

5 4 â•‡ :: c r u s a d i n g f o r s o c i a l j u s t i c e his construction of writer figures as creators working to produce a spiritual good and not a marketable commodity. Their distinctly industrious methods he ironically borrowed from the market itself.

The Bustling, Trivial Nineteenth Century Thoreau’s subsistence economy has been accurately identified as a reaction to the economic developments of the time in commerce and industry that transformed America’s social and cultural conditions. Advancements in the mode of production for literature8 shocked Thoreau to the extent that he took great pains to erase the tracks of his own literary labor that gave evidence of his engagement with a process of marketplace production and manufacture9; he yearns for a bygone era in which the literary vocation is not defined as a marketable profession. He embraces a preindustrial notion of authorship linked with the tendency Leo Marx finds in romantic pastoralism as an escape to a simpler past. Subsistence writing, however, was not just an escapist romantic reaction, but a subtle mirroring of the very ethos he refuted. He never went so far as to live the values he despised, I would argue. Instead, he envisioned subsistence writing as spiritual selfculture outside of the condition of the marketplace, while nonetheless appropriating its view of the physical, outdoor working life as essential to the production of effective transcendental prose. Thoreau’s “simpler past” of the work of writing, therefore, is more his own invention than one we can readily identify in history.10 Instead, Thoreau uses physical, agrarian labor as a metaphor that creates and conditions his ideal author’s work. Thoreau’s association of writing with physical labor stems from his response to Concord’s economic development, which gives rise to an increased level of abstraction in its citizens’ labor, including greater volumes of distribution and divided labor. Thoreau’s representation of subsistence writing champions its inalienable relationship to the laborer as well as its direct links to, instead of abstractions from, the physical world (beans, houses, snow) and the essences therein. The “abstraction” that fueled Thoreau’s sense of subsistence writing is better grasped in view of Karl Marx’s theory of worker alienation. Marx posits that the worker is alienated when he is denied the fruit of his own labor, either by his assignment to a narrowly defined, repetitive aspect of


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production (that is, divided labor) or by the swift removal of his product (that is, distribution) to an alien region for sale to anonymous consumers. The more developed an economy becomes, like Concord of the 1840s, the more technology takes over the process of production, whether completely supplanting the human worker or turning him into a machinelike cog in the apparatus of production (K. Marx 515). Thoreau writes that an obsession with productivity creates a condition in which “Man has no time to become anything but a machine” (Walden 6). Thoreau was geographically and historically in an ideal position to witness these social consequences (which Max Weber calls “Iron Cages”) of economic transformation taking shape in the town of Concord. The changes Thoreau observed in Concord drove him to embrace an agrarian ideal of physical, self-directed labor in association with his work of writing. Thoreau saw that forms of exchange were increasingly becoming dominated by monetary transactions. History through the lens of ThoÂ�reau’s Walden portrays Concord in the 1830s and 40s as a place where wealth was increasingly centralized, mobility and immigration rates escalated to those common of larger cities, and a new market culture brought inequality and frustration as well as success to many. Indeed, Concord at this time was transforming from an agrarian village outpost to a suburban Boston satellite through its proliferating agricultural industry (Buell, New England 330). Among the most noteworthy of the “tangible signs of economic development” were the rapidly developing regional and national transportation Â�networks—the most encroaching of which would have to have been the railroad, as in 1844, many residents, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, characterized its introduction to Concord as a noisy and irritating sign of the times. Even as early as 1820, shoe and lead pipe factories were established near Concord (Taylor 23). Unprecedented technological advances brought an increased division of labor, prompting Thoreau to ask, “where will the division of labor end?” (Walden 46). Concord’s economic networks expanded with greater specialization and interrelatedness of commercial, financial, and industrial activities. Land development boomed, as did corporations and their investors and investments. Society began to measure progress economically: corporations, companies, and entrepreneurs applied laissez-faire principles to promote economic success and prevent

5 6 â•‡ :: c r u s a d i n g f o r s o c i a l j u s t i c e fiscal disaster. In a word, “People were led as they had not been before by visions of money making” (Neufeldt 26). Thoreau’s concern for the semantic and cultural transformation of “liberty” can be better understood when we consider that “[l]iberty became transformed into laissez faire. A violent, aggressive, economic individualism became established” (Neufeldt 26). These economic shifts significantly affected the occupation of writing, prompting Thoreau to link the work of writing not with profit-motive enterprising, but with the simple virtues and spiritual purity associated with subsistence farming (Jefferson). It is important to note that he was no apologist for what had become of the Jeffersonian ideal of the yeoman farmer in Walden. He urged that Jefferson’s yeoman farmer had been corrupted by the antebellum economic developments I have described. Thoreau sardonically asked whether the farmer truly owns his farm or vice versa: “But lo! Men have become the tools of their tools. The man who independently plucked the fruits when he was hungry is become a farmer; and he who stood under a tree for shelter is a housekeeper” (Walden 37). He also criticized the transformation of farming into free-market enterprise when he derided his neighbor near Walden for viewing the leaves on his crops as dollar bills. The art of living deliberately fed the art of writing for Thoreau. Subsistence through the cultivation of crops and the building of a house represented the independence in the ideal of the yeoman farmer, not his increasingly materialistic values. Indeed, keeping one’s self nourished and sheltered were among the most poetic of human experiences to Thoreau, convincing him “both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship, but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely” (Walden 70). Ceaseless toil is not necessary for such simple living, Thoreau goes on to say, claiming it “is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do” (Walden 71). Thus to maintain one’s self is a pastime, rather than a necessary evil; it is something we should view, according to Thoreau, as enriching for the self and the soul. The pastime of self-sustenance was also a gesture looking backward to a preindustrial economy of a “past-time”â•flnamely the self-reliant subsistence of the yeoman farmer. Subsistence farming, a thing of the past by 1840, fitted Thoreau’s ideal for pastime work.


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Physical and Literary Labor Thoreau’s reconception of the acquisition of life’s Â�necessities—his revival of the art of maintaining oneself in the most basic sense of gathering food and building a shelter as the art of living Â�life—was his metaphor for writing. Thoreau frequently recorded in his journal sentiments to the effect that the best writing draws from the experiences of life, not in general, but particularly experiences that echo the “deliberate living” he recorded in Walden. A variety of entries gravitate into a cluster, which postulates that one cannot pretend to write well unless one has engaged in the “craft” or art of living. (While Thoreau’s concept of “morning work” appears to undermine this concept, it functions more as a general metaphor for awakened senses and heightened awareness without bearing directly on the relation between physical outdoor labor and writing that Thoreau described in his journal.) He asserted that vigorous physical activity is not only compatible with but virtually prerequisite to effective, deliberate, forceful writing that speaks honest truth: “Hard and steady and engrossing labor with the hands, especially out of doors, is invaluable to the literary man and serves him directly” ( Journal 4 195). The deliberate, honest labor for selfculture and sustenance in this sense is not only an abstract, metaphorical representation of Thoreau’s standard for excellent writing, but also one that, he believed, serves “the literary man” directly. He used the term “directly” here as the antithesis to the “indirection” associated with labor in the market. The rewards of market labor do not directly go to the worker, but return to him only after they have enriched the employer (whether factory owner, publisher, or otherwise) and have been taxed by the government. To Thoreau, the good writer, like the self-employed laborer, is a straightforward figure of honesty precisely because he does not deal in the convoluted, duplicitous channels of the marketplace. Thoreau’s link between the production of quality literary prose and the body has roots in the transcendental philosophy that views the material world as the vehicle to universal, divine energies: in this way physical labor is the material vehicle for a heightened sensibility to the more ethereal muse that speaks to spiritual sensibilities that, once properly aroused, create literary texts.11 Thus the literary product becomes a part of the spiritual and divine world, much less a commodity for mass consumption in the material world. The text nonetheless has its roots in physical nature

5 8 â•‡ :: c r u s a d i n g f o r s o c i a l j u s t i c e because the ideal writer, to Thoreau, takes up the pen only after he has just finished physically bonding with nature. Thoreau showed a certain adherence to the Protestant work ethic, which promises spiritual rewards for material good deeds, when he said that without a vigorous round of chopping wood, or “surveying in woods,” the sedentary author becomes bland and dry. “The writing which consists with habitual sitting,” Thoreau warned, “is mechanical, wooden, dull to read.” Physical labor performed in the material world stirs the capacity for metaphysics, as Thoreau fancied that the “moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow, as if I had given vent to the stream at the lower end and consequently new fountains flowed into it at the upper” ( Journal 3 378–9). This importantly glosses Thoreau’s link between deliberate living and good writing. The muses are more likely to be heard, according to Thoreau, after active, physical engagement in nature; the poet, like the transcendental truths he seeks, must pass through the physical channel before engaging “higher laws” that require “finer senses”: Here I have been six days surveying in the woods, and yet when I get home at evening, somewhat weary at last, and beginning to feel that I have nerves, I find myself more susceptible than usual to the finest influences [i.e., the metaphysical, transcendental ones], as music and poetry. The very air can intoxicate me, or the least sight or sound, as if my finer senses had acquired an appetite by their fast. ( Journal 3 379)

The work of writing appears as a leisure activity here, done only when the day’s worldly, economic work is finished; writing appears a leisurely activity associated with consumption and “appetite.” Literary musing is very different, according to the representation above, from economic work; writing is not both physical and the stuff of the finer senses. Although writing for Thoreau comes after physical labor, in leisure, nonbusiness hours, as it were, he was careful to distinguish his work of writing from domestic fiction (he derided it as an “indoor” activity) and the British literature he associated with excessive stylistic claptrap and, ironically, overworked labored sentences. Domestic fiction, to Thoreau, includes romances like “the nine thousandth tale about Zebulon and Sephronia, and how they loved as none had ever loved before, and neither did the course of their true love run smooth,â•flat any rate, how it did run and stumble, and


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get up again and go on!” (Walden 150). Such tales, in Thoreau’s view, are contrived and thus artificially “worked up,” as the awkward stumbling image of the romance plot implies. The tracks of literary labor and the mode of production, Thoreau believed, should not show in good writing. A vigorous day of physical labor will, according to Thoreau, effectively erase the traces of manufacturing evident in a “too studied” prose style. He found “that incessant labor with my hands, which engrosses the attention also, [is] the best method to remove palaver out of one’s style” ( Journal 1 358). To Thoreau, motives should be direct and clear in writing and labor, not duplicitous and elusive. Thoreau echoes much of Emerson’s rhetoric about plainness that belies a style that is anything but.12 He even went so far as to extol the mode of expression utilized by farmers, whose sentences are strictly utilitarian and not overworked to dazzle or deceive. Thoreau celebrated the farmer as a kind of original companion of nature, whose language lays bare the wholesome truth reflected in the yield of his labor: I often have been astonished at the force and precision of style to which busy laboring men, unpracticed in writing, easily attain when they are required to make the effort. It seems as if their sincerity and plainness were the main thing to be taught in schools,â•fland yet not in the schools, but in the fields, in actual service, I should say. The scholar not infrequently envies the propriety and emphasis with which the farmer calls to his teams, and confesses that if that lingo were written it would surpass his labored sentences. ( Journal 1 358–9)

“Propriety and emphasis,” “force and precision of style” characterize the mode of expression of the farmer whom Thoreau privileged and idealized as the most effective model for “the literary man.” He castigated book learning in the above passage, maintaining that fields, not schools, provide a better setting for teaching composition. Like the farmer, the “forcible writer stands bodily behind his words with his experience. He does not make books out of books, but he has been there in person” ( Journal 4 326). Indeed, the virtue Thoreau found in the farmer’s “calls to his teams” is linked to the material consequences for which his language is employed. Abstraction into the “higher laws” associated with the farmer’s diction follows, rather than precedes, what is originally a utilitarian, precise, forceful, physical, and linguistic fact. Because the farmer’s work is intimately connected with nature, it follows that his deliberate language provides a vehicle toward transcendental, divine energies. Thoreau’s work of writing

6 0 â•‡ :: c r u s a d i n g f o r s o c i a l j u s t i c e sought a physical heft as a point of access to divine Â�energies—a weight reflected in the agricultural image of “sentences that pass over the ground like loaded roller, and not mere hollow and wooden ones, to press in the seed and make it germinate” ( Journal 1 358–9).

Thoreau’s Natural Commercial Method While Thoreau suggested that he would rather have the inner impression of an observation than the money it could demand as a text, he nonetheless emphatically endorsed the enterprising bravery of the business world. He urged that the methods necessary to good business are the same ones necessary to good living. Thoreau allows that our ways and means, our energy and industry are not bad, they are simply misdirected, and that the spirit of capitalism is valid if and only if it makes life (in a fascinating echo of Emerson’s reference to his own progeny) or heat to maintain life, instead of property. Thoreau’s sense of industry as organic energy becomes, therefore, a naturalized trope akin to the industry of bees, whose meaning is owed to Virgil’s “tintinnabulum” (Walden 329). The transformation of such natural industry into literature, through subsistence writing, gives the economy of living a measurable gain and solid credit on the transcendental ledger. Thoreau is committed to the methods of commerce, but not its ends: “I have always endeavored to acquire strict business habits; they are indispensable to every man” (Walden 20). He again uses the language of the market here (“acquire,” “business,” “indispensable”) to show that its means are admirable. This is a rhetorical figure that aims to appear like a shockingly flat contradiction to his anticommercial stance, a sarcastic statement about life as quantifiable. He qualifies this by explaining that it is not the exploitation of life for money, but “[w]hat recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery” (Walden 118). He writes of “[c]ommerce unexpectedly confident and serene, alert adventurous, unwearied. It is very natural in its methods withal” (Walden 119). The moral entrepreneur is a shining example of the kind of sound methods Thoreau recommends to anyone wanting to strike out not only for the life of transcendental discovery, but for a life of subsistence writing, however antiprofessional, which is every bit as intense and demanding, for it is the work that sustains the soul. In a 22 March 1853 journal entry, Thoreau is at his most inspirational,


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as his exhortation for inner success echoes the rhetoric of bravery extolled in the energetic professions of his time: “Whatever your sex or position, life is a battle in which you are to show your pluckâ•fl& woe be to the coward. . . . Despair & postponement are Cowardice & defeat. Men were born to succeed not to fail” ( Journal 6 23). Thoreau’s admiration for “the good businessman” also characterizes, I would argue, such an ideal author: he is, in Judith Saunders’s words, “responsible attentive, accountable. He keeps careful records; he knows what comes in and what goes out. He is bold, energetic, ingenious; he takes risks; he is industrious and enterprising in the best and broadest sense” (63). Enterprising is profitable to Thoreau if it involves venturing into the soul. Thoreau is distinctively busy at Walden Pond with his “morning work,” his bean field, the building of his house, and most importantly, the keeping of a journal to fulfill his vocation as a writer. Plumbing the depths of the pond, for example, functions as a metaphor for the exploration of his inner life beneath the surface of the storefront facades that line the everyday life of downtown Concord. Unlike the endless labor of his neighbor farmers, Thoreau imagined that the work of writing, if done right, would have this divine realm as its distinct, although renewable, end. Despite his ostensible rejection of the currency of material capital for immaterial, transcendental divine energies accessed through nature, Thoreau’s enterprise in subsistence writing adopted aspects of the business Â�world—its energy, ambition, motivation, and Â�courage—while rejecting its fraudulence, triviality, and desire to deceive. He championed an economy of style that extolled concision and simplicity while betraying those ends with language complex enough to express his vitally cultivated soul. The economy of living informed his economy of writing, an aesthetic designed to keep literature from the market, paradoxically, to increase its value even more, and to give it the effort and intensity of nothing less than his life’s work. Nothing could have been more natural for the Concord Saunterer, who lived as deliberately as he wrote.

p a r t 2 :: Transforming the Market

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c a pi ta l se n t ime n t Fanny Fern’s Transformation of the Gentleman Publisher’s Code

For as much as Wilson and Thoreau excoriated the corrupt strands of the value system of northern industry, Fanny Fern gloated about her success in the literary market, brandishing a $10,000 check at the end of her autobiographical and best-selling novel, Ruth Hall. Far more than an uncomplicated celebration of opportunity in the free market, however, Fern actively asserted her influence to rewrite publishing industry ethics and thus change its business practices into a more modern, even corporate model. In this chapter I explore how Fern reshaped the market to her own advantage and that of other women Â�writers—and there were many in the Â�1850s—capable of commanding such massive popularity. Specifically, Fern transformed trade courtesy, or the system of prior claims on authors, a holdout of the prior era and a token of male control over the marketplace, by advocating open bidding for authors’ services, which gave authors a distinct advantage. She fictionalized the process in Ruth Hall as the morally superior, ethically preferable manner of doing business, particularly with “lady authors.” Fanny Fern’s meteoric rise to fame occurred during a crucial stage in the development of capitalism in America. The changing market conditions that met with seismic ideological shifts regarding work and gender are at the heart of Fern’s writing. Fern capitalized on the sudden rise in demand, and thus profit potential, for printed material that followed production and distribution advancements, making literature among the most lucrative industries of the 1850s. Publishers scrambled to meet this unprecedented spike in demand, in part, by pursuing popular authors Originally published in ATQ 22.1 (March 2008). Reprinted by permission of the University of Rhode Island.

6 6 â•‡ :: t r a n s f o r m i n g t h e m a r k e t more aggressively than ever, often abandoning old notions of collaborative, collusive business ethics for new levels of individualistic competition. The new demand for authors broke down the gender barrier in the market, at least partially, as publishers had a financial incentive to seek out women writers. Before this time, women rarely found themselves in highstakes business relationships with men. Thus male publishers and female authors patterned their Â� interactions—with key Â� modifications—after the separate-spheres domestic ideology, the most accessible code of gender conduct available in their culture. Before women claimed their stake in the U.S. industrial economy through professional authorship, they were never widely associated with public paid labor of any sort, other than the “needle trades” or school teaching. Fern earned among the highest wages of her gender in the history of the American free market, and in the process was uniquely positioned to change the publishing industry’s business ethics, the subject of so much of her writing.1 Fern’s success transformed the gentleman publisher into a prototype of a corporate entrepreneur, from True Flag publisher William Moulton to Robert Bonner, whose success paradoxically depended on his adherence to certain gender codes of behavior and moral virtue, particularly altruism, advanced in the 1850s domestic novel. Thus Fern’s writings about her relationships with publishers and editors form the subject of this chapter. I examine moments in her fiction and nonfiction where she casts judgment on certain publication practices and how that judgment is inflected by the portrayal of herself as professional or mother. Most importantly, I am interested in how the interplay between domestic and professional codes altered accepted definitions of the gentleman publisher.2 Fern’s career and writing profoundly shaped the book trade’s future toward a more corporate model by mixing advanced capitalist tendencies with romantic feeling; her revision of the model publisher in Ruth Hall exemplifies how, in Charles Sellers’s words, “romanticism’s loving heart, mustered in service of liberalism’s selfish head, muffled calculating competition . . . in . . . domestic sentimentality” (365).

Refiguring Trade Courtesy Fern’s fiction and career signaled the end of the old era of the gentleman publisher, initiating key changes in the business that enabled her to maxi-

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mize profits as a professional author. Her reformulation of the publisher’s role broke away from the eighteenth century’s and the early national period’s unwritten, yet widely recognized, constraints on free trade. In particular, trade courtesy, or respect for a publisher’s prior claim to an author, was routinely violated, though vestiges of it remained among some presses. Middle-class values were transforming consumption patterns in the 1850s, especially those for novels, as their sales escalated. Fern’s financial power, amassed through popular literature like Fern Leaves from Fanny Fern’s Portfolio (1852) and Ruth Hall, encouraged publishers to overlook trade courtesy by openly bidding for authors like her to write for Â� them—a gesture she openly champions in the pages of her fiction. The practice of trade courtesy among American publishers regarding American works, like international copyright in the United States, was wildly variable in the years leading up to 1850. Written copyright law and actual business practices differed significantly. Dickens famously railed against the widespread violation of copyright codes in the United States, yet there is evidence that rampant pirating of English novels was not the only way publishers did business in America. Many booksellers did not pocket all profits but actually sent money overseas “to establish or confirm their claim in British works” (Winship, “Transatlantic” 102). Indeed, this gesture was considered a courtesy, not a requirement, as so many publishers openly violated copyright law. With widespread unauthorized reprinting, trade courtesy offered a “kind of gentleman’s agreement not to infringe on the initial publisher’s right to reprint the work” (LaFavour 133). But the true meaning of “courtesy” is tenuous, unstable, and contested in this capitalistic context: money shipments were not made out of gentlemanly gratuity as much as self-interest, functioning like territorial markers of “prior claim” for literary products. Once a token of business etiquette and civility, trade courtesy amalgamated into an economic sign of exclusive rights by 1850, a kind of self-proclaimed and informal copyright code that stood in place of a written one. Trade courtesy worked, in part, to ward off competitors with designs on stealing readers and siphoning profits. Thus, money shipments that seemed to give an unselfish nod to the exploited British author and publisher had a second, perhaps more pressing, function: to provide financial documentation and issue fair warning of prior claim to rival publishers and would-be pirates (Winship, “Transatlantic” 101–2).

6 8 â•‡ :: t r a n s f o r m i n g t h e m a r k e t Of course, prior claims on book titles, if recognized by competitors, established more control of the market by discouraging illegal production and distribution while also encouraging communication and respect for “property.” Trade courtesy functioned the same way for prior claims on authors, and not just their books. Fanny Fern was a name brand in the 1850s, a fiercely sought-after commodity whose demand was so high that her first publishers’ prior claims on her services paradoxically sparked a feeding frenzy of rival bidding that ran roughshod through the flimsy protective gates of the trade courtesy code. As openly aggressive bidding for her services escalated, her salary skyrocketed with each new job. This open bidding not only drove up her value in the market, but was used as an advertising tool itself, and maximized profits for both Fern and her entrepreneurial publishers, Oliver Dyer and Robert Bonner, who “stole” her in succession from her previous employers. While Dyer and Bonner represented the avant-garde in 1850s publication practices, vestiges of rearguard cultural values still stubbornly clung to the trade. These values maintained the literary industry’s distinction from other trades as civilized and genteel. This association with literary art (that nonetheless aimed to sell) attempted to distance authors and literature from sharkish business practices and silence or mask all references and connections between literature and the vulgar business streets of the marketplace. For this reactionary set of publishers, trade courtesy was recognized as an unwritten gentleman’s agreement designed to discourage vicious bidding wars over the right to publish popular writers. For example, publishers like Daniel Appleton withdrew their intention to publish an author when another house pointed out its prior claim (CoultrapMcQuin 37). After a publisher announced that he had signed an author, other publishers, unlike Dyer and Bonner, agreed not to bargain for that writer’s future work (Coultrap-McQuin 30). In contrast to the new wave of corporate aggression, some competitors frequently respected the first rights of the original publisher to the author’s name and did not attempt to woo the writer away with a higher wage (Winship, American Publishing 135–9). Adherence to first rights kept authors’ wages down and seemed to promise to keep publishers’ profits from falling due to a flooded market full of reprints that would drive cost and demand down. Paradoxically, what appeared a safe haven from pirating and thus profit protection only kept profits from increasing sharply as a result of open bidding, especially

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in the case of a rising literary star like Fanny Fern. Breaking trade courtesy enriched authors and publishers alike with unprecedented windfall profits. With it came a lack of security and continuity dictated by fewer trade restrictions. There was vulnerability and risk, if not for the author whose wage kept increasing with each new bid, then certainly for the publisher who stood to lose his franchise writer with a gaudy offer from the next enterprising publisher. Fanny Fern’s fictionalization of her own career development set the new standard for the practice and violation of trade courtesy as a business ethic. Ruth Hall’s seemingly conventional domestic scenes are liberally peppered with diction associated with the ethics of trade courtesy. Ruth responds to the prospect of her husband’s illness putting her own life in peril by invoking the language of prior claim, “My husband was the first claim,” to say that her main loyalty lies with him (Fern, RH 53). He is the first of a series of males with claims to her labor; his death makes her a free agent in the narrative. Ruth finds work at Mr. Lescom’s Standard, the fictional counterpart of Fanny Fern’s employment as a columnist for the Olive Branch. These were the publishers who had the first rights according to the unwritten code of trade courtesy. The entrances of Mr. Walter into the novel and Oliver Dyer into Fern’s life marked important turning points in both the real and fictional careers. Walter blatantly violates trade courtesy by refusing to recognize Lescom’s claim to first rights over Ruth. Likewise, Oliver Dyer outbid the Olive Branch and True Flag editors and successfully convinced Fern to write for the New York Musical World and Times. Interestingly enough, the novel does not question, but presents as entirely unproblematic, the ethics of Walter’s business maneuvering that echoes the corporate takeover and consequent monopolization of Ruth Hall, the most popular and profitable weekly columnist of the day. Lescom’s first rights are powerless under the aggressive, high-bidding economic dominance of Walter. Does Ruth Hall fail to indict Walter in order to celebrate the emergence of a truly unrestricted, free market for literature and competition among publishers and editors? The evidence of the text suggests not. Instead, Ruth portrays Walter’s takeover as an act of sympathy and kindness. Ruth is all but jailed by the cold, impersonal Â�Lescom—who certainly offers less commission to his Â� writers—of the Standard. Ruth, however, recognizes and acknowledges the rules of trade courtesy and is content to write four

7 0 â•‡ :: t r a n s f o r m i n g t h e m a r k e t pieces per week for a modest salary knowing that no other publisher has the right to steal her from Lescom. So the gentleman’s agreement is neither gentlemanly nor courteous to the laborer or producer, but only to the other gentleman publishers. Hence, the novel portrays Walter’s breach of trade courtesy as a necessary form of chivalry. Therefore, the injustices of the conditions of her labor, as they are portrayed in the text, outweigh the trade courtesy infraction Ruth inspires Walter to make to flee Lescom’s tyranny. Likewise, Oliver Dyer breached the trade courtesy precisely because he felt that Fern was being exploited by her two current publishers, for whom “she was writing several columns a week for two dollars a column, two columns for the Olive Branch and one for the True Flag, for a total of six dollars a week. To earn this amount, she had to write between five and ten articles a week” (Walker, “Introduction” xv). Fern liberated herself from this low-wage literary labor by agreeing to Dyer’s offer of double the combined payments for the Olive Branch and the True Flag for one article per week. What excused him from violating the unwritten gentleman’s law of trade courtesy was that he did not pretend to retain exclusive rights to his author’s work when her original publishers came back with a higher offer. Dyer not only had gentlemanly trade courtesy rights over Fern (because, ironically, he had stolen them out from under William Moulton of the True Flag ), but he had a written contract signed by the author that legally cemented his exclusive rights over her. Nonetheless, because he was originally the one to break the rule of publisher’s first rights dictated by trade courtesy, he felt obliged to overlook their contract and “graciously release her from the exclusivity of their agreement” (Walker, “Introduction” xv). The older business ethic in this case yields to the new tacit understanding that openly bidding for and thus “buying out” writers is an acceptable, tolerated practice. The violation of trade courtesy by Dyer, followed by his own refusal to hypocritically uphold the same courtesy in his name, indicates a crucial mutual understanding among publishers that the literary marketplace functioned according to unrestricted free trade much like that of other industries in the 1850s. Although the concept of trade courtesy was systematically violated and reviolated in the case of Fanny Fern so much that it became virtually meaningless, a code of the gentleman publisher paradoxically authorizes such violations of the ethic in Ruth Hall. For example, Lescom’s exploitation of Ruth Hall is cast as villainous and evil precisely because he fails

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to live up to the part of the code that demands him to be congenial and companionable with his author. His sins are not merely economic. What legitimates Walter’s victory over Lescom is the latter’s uncaring approach toward his woman writer. Lescom asserts that “friendship has nothing to do with business” (Fern, RH 147). Indeed, his biggest flaw lies in his refusal to love his writer/worker like a sibling, while instead unemotionally dealing with her in a cold and “business-like logical way” (Fern, RH 147). Walter responds to Lescom’s letter by arguing that the Standard’s success has ridden solely on Ruth’s writings. Walter critiques and scolds LesÂ� com for this, but we know what his success will ride on once he signs Ruth Hall to his publication. Why is he so aggressive about signing Ruth if he could do without her? His aggression, finally, is not portrayed as that of a profiteer looking to line his pockets from the work of the latest literary sensation. Instead of material extravagance, Walter’s objective is portrayed as economic necessity played out in the melodramatic key of a gentleman publisher rushing to the aid of a lady writer. His very introduction has him welling up in tears3 at the sight of Ruth’s impoverished living conditions, with the signs of her struggle to feed her children triggering his sympathetic overflow of sentiment: “Mr. Walter’s keen eye glanced about the room, noting its general comfortless appearance, and the little bowl of bread and milk that stood waiting their supper. . . . [H]is eyes were glistening with tears” (Fern, RH 162). The ensuing conversation speaks volumes of Walter’s contrast to Lescom, as little Nettie innocently approaches and says, “I don’t know you,” to which Walter replies: “But you will, my dear, because I am your mamma’s friend” (Fern, RH 162). According to this ideal of the gentleman publisher, business has everything to do with friendship and sympathy. Fern’s portrayal of Walter’s business ethics signals a new code of behavior in the literary marketplace. His breach of trade courtesy that promotes free, unrestricted trade is acceptable in Ruth Hall as long as he continues to embrace the gentleman publisher’s emotional care for his writer. Put another way, Fern endorses sympathy and altruism in her publishers as long as the sentiments are directed inward toward the woman writer, and not outward toward fellow tradesmen in honor of prior claims. This amounts to an amalgamation of gentility and unfettered capitalism to produce an unprecedented business ethic that retains the premium on the publisher’s emotional contact with the writer for the function of humanizing labor

7 2 â•‡ :: t r a n s f o r m i n g t h e m a r k e t and thwarting the sense of worker exploitation and alienation. Significantly, the breakdown of trade courtesy helps the writer even more. It allows the writer the best of all possible publishing contracts because she can freely go with the highest bidder. Literature becomes more of a writer’s market without trade courtesy4 because the unwritten code actually “disadvantaged authors more than publishers by discouraging authors from seeking competitive bids in the marketplace” (Coultrap-McQuin 34). Its absence, therefore, gave an advantage to writers like Fanny Fern. And Fern’s alignment of trade courtesy violation with benevolent patriarchs enabled her to stage the drama of her career with clearly defined heroes and villains in Ruth Hall, employing a method of characterization that would update older business ethics while still accommodating sentimentality and domestic care as its defining features. As such, Fern redefines the code of the gentleman publisher in her novel to reflect the new prototype of publication practice embodied by Robert Bonner.

Refiguring Publication Practices While trade courtesy appeared to be vanishing altogether in the case of Fern’s career and in the 1850s in general, the sentimental culture still clung to the genteel moral codes that threatened to exit with the gentleman publisher as the entrepreneurial capitalist model encroached. The separatespheres ideology that situates women in private, domestic space and men in public space complicates radically in light of the business practices of the male publishers involved in Fern’s career: one can see that separatespheres ideology was never so simple or crisply dualistic as this. The gender codes of Fern’s publishers (and their fictional counterparts) provide revealing clues about codes of business ethics either endorsed or rejected in the sentimental fiction of the time and in Ruth Hall in particular. Sentimentality indeed represented a rearguard action against an encroaching realist worldview,5 but its reaction was more complex than simply sheltering females from harsh realities while rooting males in them. Instead, the culture sought to instill civility in the realistâ•fland, at its worst, savageâ•fl business ethos of an otherwise cutthroat capitalist world. Fern’s ideal gentleman Â�publisher—a man of manners, taste, good breeding, and domestic Â�charm—epitomized this ethos, reserving his civil, moral, loyal, and protective sensibilities for his signed female author while

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unleashing corporate ferocity on rival publishers in the marketplace. This characterizes Walter, the good, brotherly publisher of Ruth Hall and the embodiment of the (then) new literary business ethos that retained the sentiment of old gender ideology (he truly cares for his writer in a domestically sympathetic way while promoting her publicly) while rampantly violating another inherited gentleman’s Â�code—prior claim trade courtesy. The evolving climate of the 1850s book market also had its villains, for which the inverse pattern of the heroic Walter follows through perfectly in Ruth Hall. Rather than eschewing prior claims to authors, these villains cling desperately to the fading vestiges of trade courtesy, not out of respect for fellow publishers according to its original intent, but as a tool for robbing Ruth of the fruit of her labor. For example, Tibbetts and Lescom incarcerate their author by implicitly forcing the issue of their prior claim, using the trade courtesy code, particularly in Ruth’s eyes, to hoard her talents for themselves and keep her from the “free” market. The patriarchal control of female sexuality echoed in scenes where Ruth walks out on these exploitative relationships, which critics have noted, takes on a decidedly economic twist here: it is female wage-earning power, in this case, that Lescom particularly fears. The injustice lies precisely in Tibbetts’s abuse of trade courtesy to trap his author; he is vilified for being out of step with the times, for being blind to the new profitability of professional authorship seen in best-sellers such as Stowe and Dickens, and for his greatest Â�sin—blocking the “natural” flow of his writer out into the market (“‘Stay!’ exclaimed Mr. Tibbetts, placing his hand on the latch”) to meet with the highest bidder (Fern, RH 157). Audiences would likely have recognized the sexually charged dynamics of this scene in other melodramas. Tibbetts’s blocking the door to prevent Ruth from leaving his office, and his paper, would have led to a rape scene on a Bowery stage or in a Richardson novel (S. K. Harris 121). Further, Tibbetts is the bad capitalist, the sexual opposite of the gentleman publisher whose aggressions are directed outward toward rival publishers in the marketplace and not inward toward his own author. The standard plot of sentimental literature, according to Baym in Novels, Readers, and Reviewers, is driven by the heroine’s quest to free herself from constraints, especially social ones, unnaturally imposed on her by unjust and restrictive patriarchal authority figures whom Tibbetts epitomizes. Like Tibbetts, Lescom is aware that he is unfairly locking Ruth into

7 4 â•‡ :: t r a n s f o r m i n g t h e m a r k e t writing for him. He is portrayed as evil because he knows that times have changed and that trade courtesy is an illegitimate means of keeping an author. Ruth asks him rhetorically: “[T]hink you my publishers will tamely fold their arms, and see their rights infringed? No sir, you have mistaken both them,” implying Walter, “and me” (Fern, RH 157). She is defending Walter’s right (rather than her own) to her work based not on legal code, but according to Fern’s feminist revision of conventional antebellum marriage patterns in which women had little say over an insistent, however unsavory, suitor. Fern’s sense of propriety instead defends a lady’s (Ruth’s) prerogative to choose her suitor, as the scene echoes a love triangle, nonetheless in an economic context. Male power is embodied by the higher bid, which Walter possesses in the novel, and as such, Ruth alludes to his right to her in a purely economic sense. Of course, Walter’s chivalry and tender treatment of Ruth combine with his economic dominance to firmly establish his Â�right—according to these unwritten, but powerful and, to Ruth, righteously enforceable Â�codes—to her work over Lescom’s. Lescom loses his right to Ruth’s work, therefore, due to his flaccid finances and his rudeness, faults that most antebellum readers would have viewed as unpardonable and far more damning, especially in the context of this melodramatic scene, than abstract legal code. Lescom senses that he will eventually be outbid: he resolves “to retain her at her present low rate of compensation, till he was necessitated to raise it by a higher bidder from a rival quarter” (Fern, RH 131). His self-interest, which spills over into greed, sharply contrasts with Walter’s altruistic vow: “I seek your benefit more than my own” (Fern, RH 143). However, Fern admits that Lescom is only operating in self-interest according to “the same view that almost any other business man would have taken” (RH 90). But this does not stop her attack on him. Lescom’s vilification typifies Fern’s blanket abhorrence of stingy business practices anchored in a lack of domestic sympathy. In the extreme, her diatribe takes on anti-Semitic intonations both vengeful (“those Jews will be brought back to their senses”) and spitefully envious (“the Jewish owner reaped all the profit”) (RH 145, 90). These characterizations interestingly gloss the code of the gentleman author as not only genteel, but gentile. This view of Jewish business practices, of course, was not unique to Fern, but in fact was widespread and had a long past prior to 1850s America. The vast majority of Fern’s readers were, in fact, Christian and likely would have endorsed her ethnic prejudice.

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In the literary marketplace that Fern constructs as her ideological locus in Ruth Hall, there is a primary site of contradiction between “gentlemanliness” and the realities of the market. Hyacinth (Fern’s satirical figure of her real brother N. P. Willis)6 is a prime example of the contradiction between his gentlemanly advice and his lack of familial ties. Fern’s critique of the idea of the pseudo “gentleman” hinges on the opposite forces of market relations and family relations. Through her critique of this gentleman villain, Fern challenges the genteel ideology that would mask or silence all references to a “vulgar” marketplace. The ideal publisher and true gentleman in Fern’s schema can manage both a market and a “familial” relationship with his writer. He not only craftily markets her work for significant profits, but he is kind, caring, gentle, and devoted like a family member. Here is yet another case in which Fern overturns domestic and sentimental conventions and replaces them with marketplace versions. Walter is the benevolent patriarch who protects Ruth from employers like Lescom who pay low wages and demand high levels of production. He is also the brother figure to Ruth that Hyacinth never was. Whereas Hyacinth refuses to offer aid in her most desperate time of need, Walter is loyal and responsible. Fern emphasizes the filial love Ruth has for Walter, describing him as supplying everything missing in her biological brother. The exact opposite of Hyacinth, Walter is a “real, warm-hearted, brotherly brother such as she had never known” (Fern, RH 144). While Hyacinth may wear the clothes and pantomime the manners of a gentleman, he lacks the love and loyalty that Walter provides. This villain adds a new dimension to Fern’s definition of true gentleman and ideal publisher: Hyacinth is an effective foil to Walter because a domestic villain (family member), and not just a public one like Lescom, heightens by contrast the value of Walter’s domestic sympathy. The domestic elements in Walter’s character that tie him to Richard Willis, Fern’s good brother, is lost on flat, one-to-one correlations between Walter and Robert Bonner, Fern’s “breakout” publisher who signed her to the New York Ledger in 1855 at a hundred dollars a column. Richard Willis was the editor of Oliver Dyer’s New York Musical World and Times when Dyer wooed Fern away from her initial double deal with the Olive Branch and the True Flag. Although the good brother, Richard, would appear to be the benevolent patriarch behind Fern’s signing with Dyer, it was clear that Richard had no part in the deal: “To his amazement, Dyer found that

7 6 â•‡ :: t r a n s f o r m i n g t h e m a r k e t the columnist was his editor’s sister” (Walker, “Introduction” xv). Interestingly, Richard did not “discover” Fern’s talent like the fictional Walter does, nor does he play a key role in advancing her career. We can assume, however, that Richard did contribute a real domestic element to the “good brother” pattern of behavior and support found in Walter that was so clearly at odds with Fern’s anger toward N. P., which is voiced through Hyacinth. Further, as it seems that Fern only stood to lose from her slanderous representations of the greedy and foppish Willis, she actually benefited handsomely from her connection to him. It is rarely noted, for example, “that the publicity resulting from Fern’s obvious caricature of N.P. Willis . . . accomplished the same ends that his promotion of her would have affected” (Tonkovitch 35). Interestingly, the opposite view appears in Ruth Hall through the fictional editor of an English paper who, “disgusted with Hyacinth’s toadyisms, fopperies, and impudence while abroad, took occasion to cut up [Ruth’s] book . . . because the writer was said to be [Hyacinth’s] sister. That is the way his reputation has helped her” (Fern, RH 179). Susan Coultrap-McQuin has shown that gentleman publishers actively cultivated long-term relationships with their writers “like marriages, close friendships, or intimate professional associations” (36). They were indeed paternalistic in the sense that they took care of their writers, much in the way Walter cares for Ruth and her children’s well-being with “warmth” that personalizes their otherwise predominantly economic relationship.7 The ethics of loyalty in author/publisher relations, however, become unstable in Ruth Hall through the suggestion that women authors should entertain better offers. Fern’s own commitment to Mason Brothers may have appeared long-term and permanent, brokered as it was on an exuberant advertising campaign promising readers “one of the most popular works ever issued from an American press . . . destined to make a sensation” surpassing “any other work whatever” (qtd. in Walker, Fanny Fern 123). But her eventual signing with Bonner signaled that the scale of her popularity had eclipsed outmoded concepts of loyalty to publishers, redefining the notion of popularity itself as not just a measure of Â�consumption—of whether it is “well liked” or “widely read”â•flbut specifically “production into a certain market status through the commercial management of a book’s life” (Brodhead 57). Ruth Hall’s laissez-faire vision of lady authors and gentleman publishers abated the production of popularity, but not without care-

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fully drawing on domestic tropes to justify its protagonist’s professional and public self-definition.

Refiguring the Domestic Novel Fern rewrites the genre conventions of the domestic novel and thus rewrites important assumptions about women, work, and the marketplace within gender ideology. The novel begins as a domestic, sentimental tale and transforms into a rags-to-riches success story. Although the novel is subtitled A Domestic Tale of the Present Time, the protagonist spends less than one-third of the story in a traditional domestic setting. The independent struggle for survival that normally precedes the heroine’s marriage in domestic fiction here takes place following that marriage. Ruth’s endeavors outside the domestic sphere are not done only in service of preparing her morally to be a better wife. Instead, her activity outside of the domestic sphere sets her on the path to a professional career (Walker, Fanny Fern 46). Through Ruth, Fern establishes both a career and a fulfilling brotherly relationship with Walter, transforming the marketplace from a site of labor only into a place that also offers emotional support and moral encouragement. Her public self actively creates and casts the publisher in his supporting role; her seeming dependence on him veils her true power to define and assign his role in the first place. In the process of rewriting and thus authorizing the publisher’s role in the pages of Ruth Hall, she manipulates sentimentality to validate her heroine’s uncommon power. Fern’s revision of the domestic novel that relocates the heroine from the home to the marketplace radically subverts the antebellum cultural ideology of the woman’s domestic novel.8 The domestic novel stresses the home as the locus of moral influence and the woman as central to the maintenance and transmission of values. The crucial difference is that the trajectory of Ruth’s life is not toward home and family but toward a public, autonomous existence. Ruth Hall only turns to writing as a last resort to earn a living for herself and her children. Her success is justified because she has children to feed and house. The money she earns is a token of her morality and goodness precisely because it is not spent on excesses and lavish indulgences, but for the food, clothes, and shelter of her family (Cutter 37). Furthermore, her money does not come too quickly. She has to endure trials and tribulations in other trades before turning to writing. The only

7 8 â•‡ :: t r a n s f o r m i n g t h e m a r k e t labor available to her initially is in the “needle trades,” which failed to earn enough to support her two children. Failing to find a job as a teacher, Ruth finally tries her hand at writing. Writing is her last option, as virtually no others remain; beyond it is life on the street. Fern thus emphasizes the fact that women were all but shut out of the marketplace as producers, as paid employment available to women at the time was extremely limited. Once she actually ventures into the market for print media, Ruth finds her applications for editorial column writing at several newspapers roundly rejected. The Daily Type office is her first encounter in the literary marketplace. She does not want to be a beat journalist, but rather desires an editorial column, as it is closer to literary journalism. The Daily Type tells her they “already have a full drawer” of articles. The newsroom is depicted as profoundly incompatible to Ruth, as she found herself amid all this racket and bustle; and pushing the door ajar, she found herself in the midst of a group of smokers, who, in slippered feet, and with heels higher than their heads, were whiffing and laughing, amid the pauses of conversation, most uproariously. Ruth’s face crimsoned as heels and cigars remained, in status quo, and her glance was met by a rude stare. (Fern, RH 120)

It is the antithesis of Walter’s gentleman publisher’s world of fine manners and genteel surroundings that are congenial with a woman writer according to dominant antebellum gender ideology. Bantering, rushing reporters who dirty the room with cigar smoke and ash create a “male only” locker-room atmosphere in the Daily Type newsroom, which appears repulsive and anything but literary. Even before Ruth enters the establishment, all signs clearly say this is no place for a woman. A printer’s boy, for example, is anything but genteel and accommodating as “the little ruffian” responds to her question as to the location of the office by saying, “‘All you have to do is ask, mem. You’ve got a tongue in your head, haven’t ye? Women folks generally has’” (Fern, RH 120). Ruth even worries that her gentle knock at the door will be too soft for the loud men to hear: “‘I shall have to walk in,’ said Ruth, ‘they never will hear my feeble knock amid all this racket and bustle’” (Fern, RH 120). So the transgression into the “male” coded marketplace begins. Such gender obstacles blocking Ruth’s journey into the market intensify her struggle. The market is initially cold and uncaring; she must make

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her own opportunities in it. Once she finally does get her own column, she puts in long hours of writing in the middle of the night for wages that leave her on the brink of starvation. These hardships justify the riches she will ultimately earn. Like the writers of guides for aspiring young men before the Civil War, Fern shows that her heroine is morally worthy of her wealth. For example, Freeman Hunt’s Worth and Wealth (1856), an antebellum self-help guide for young entrepreneurs, is consonant with Ruth Hall’s assumptions about good and bad money: “Money tied to work and gradually accumulated by the sweat of one’s brow was deserved,” according to Hunt, “but money amassed without commensurate labor was not; and what was not deserved was not kept for long. . . . Wealth had to be matched by effort, and when it was not, justice balanced the scales. . . . Only gradual gains were natural, and rapid accumulation was contrary to God’s law” (Weiss 37). Ruth’s climb to the top of the literary market is hampered not only by gender conflicts, but by incompatible moral ethics in certain publications as well. For example, the atmosphere at the Parental Guide proves to be the exact opposite extreme of the Daily Type. Its philosophy is far too self-righteous for Ruth. Its prim asceticism and hypermorality contrasts with the Daily Type’s bantering and smoking. It seems as though there is no smiling allowed at the Parental Guide, a publication extremely rigid and disapproving. Ruth applies to the Parental Guide after being rejected by the Daily Type. Ruth is not well suited to the “daily type” of men who work for a daily newspaper that has little interest in literary journalism. Their rowdy, insensitive character would be wholly unappreciative of the kind of column she wished to write. The impression Fern gives of a daily is sweaty, busy, and shirt-sleeved. In contrast, the American magazine at the time was genteel, serious, sentimental, and sedate. The Parental Guide, on the other hand, is too humorless for Ruth Hall, a reference to the dry wit and sharp sense of humor Fanny Fern herself would develop in her columns. Ruth looks back on the rejections of the Daily Type and the Parental Guide not as signs of her own weakness, but as the foundation of her business education. Because she was in a state of economic desperation, entirely new to the literary market, she was unaware of just how incompatible she and these journals were. In this way, her rise to success is actually aided by these “failures,” which function as crucial stepping-stones to the top. The two rejections as well as the thankless labor she puts in for Lescom’s publi-

8 0 â•‡ :: t r a n s f o r m i n g t h e m a r k e t cation, the Standard, are, in effect, her “punishment” for leaving behind the domestic sphere; the unpleasant struggle justifies her success at the end of the novel. Lescom’s offer bears the assumption that he is employing a neophyte, a fledgling writer beginning her first professional venture. This, in fact, is exactly what Ruth Hall is at this stage in her career. Lescom’s cruelty is actually only financial prudence in the beginning. Ruth not only has to endure a low wage for her article in Lescom’s Standard; she also has to wait until the piece is published before she is actually paid. This humble stage in Ruth’s career echoes Benjamin Franklin’s low wages and humble beginnings in another literary business, the printing trade. In every American success story, it seems that there is a benevolent patriarch, a rich and successful man who takes the protagonist under his wing and becomes the chief patron of his or her financial coming of age. Walter plays the role of the good and generous patriarch with the power and funds for Ruth Hall to realize her full potential. “Through Walter, Fern shows that without the protection of influential male publishers, female writers may never achieve financial stability,” argues Martha Cutter (37). Walter’s protective actions are “honorable, but a bit overbearing” in the control he seeks over her finances and housing (Cutter 37). But such paternalistic charity disguises that Ruth is the true source of his wealth; Walter manages but does not produce. In the process of constructing her own popularity, Ruth profoundly reshapes Walter’s business method for greater immediate returns at the cost of long-term loyalty. By signaling the death of trade courtesy, Ruth Hall heralds that women authors are not beholden to any particular Â� publisher—no matter how domestically Â�endearing—as long as the potential for a more lucrative contract exists. The work of writing for “Floy” (Ruth’s pen name) is vitally bound to the goal of economic independence and self-reliance, her highest aim (Fern, RH 127). Though she has “only a crust” to show for her writing, “God be thanked” she earned it (Fern, RH 125). Such an emphasis on economic autonomy as the key to female empowerment anticipates Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own of the next century. Financial self-sufficiency would prove to be a crucial feature in the evolution of feminism, since it moved well beyond simply eschewing the superannuated notion of marriage as the sole objective for a woman’s success to engage the capitalist apparatus for liberation. Fern’s own life overturns romantic, passive portrayals of authorship, money, and success. Her tough-minded realism brought to

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light the potentially disempowering effects of sentimentalized portraits of a writer’s work and in the process formed a new active paradigm for women’s roles in a capitalist culture. Fern explicitly writes about her own money, and her right to spend and save as she pleases, in a New York Ledger column entitled “Men Wanted.” In the piece, she attacks the public’s assumption that they should have the right to know about her private accounts: “Time was when a lady could be a successful authoress, without being obliged to give an account to the dear public of the manner in which she appropriated the proceeds of the honest labors” (“Men Wanted” 262). In the nineteenth century, the public would have especially desired knowledge of her negotiations with publishers (“the manner in which she appropriated the proceeds of the honest labors” of writing) precisely because women lacked a significant measure of public authority in both business and politics in the 1850s (“Men Wanted” 262). How Fern earned her money is what still fascinates readers, as both historical and fictional accounts of her rise to fame refigure domestic codes to fit the rapidly changing publishing world where the emergent Bonners of the trade replaced the fading Moultons, where the marriage ending was replayed, in Ruth Hall and in Fern’s life, in the key of financial freedom. Fern’s relationships with her successful publishers, like Bonner, would become typical of the way big literary business was conducted in the Gilded Age and on into the present day. Authors, especially best-selling ones, continue to hold their publishers to a higher standard than that of merely cold business associates, but they also realize the competitive nature of the business means that warm relationships could be severed with a rival publisher’s higher bid. Given tighter budgets, today’s more modest publishing companies tend to pamper their authors less. Fern’s experience was unique since she was in such exclusive company among the nation’s highest-paid writers of the entire century. Competition among publishers for her was fierce, so the ethical code of trade courtesy was more routinely violated than among her peers. As the intensity of capitalistic competition has steadily risen in the book trade since the 1850s, the ethos that governed the relationships behind Fern’s success prevails in today’s publishing industry specifically for best-selling authors. Fern capitalized on an industry in flux, extending the leading edge of literary business practices.

U4

U

t r a ns ce nding c a pi ta l Whitman’s Poet Figure and the Marketing of Leaves of Grass

Fanny Fern was monumentally influential in launching the career of Walt Whitman, a poet she admired for many of the traits she herself became known for, such as a spare, direct style and an ardent belief in the unpretentious democratic character of the nation. After meeting Whitman early in 1856, she would write one of his finest early reviews several months later in the 10 May New York Ledger, the magazine with the largest circulation in the United States. The review, penned by the highest-paid and most famous weekly columnist at the time, was the best publicity he could have hoped for. In it, she is partial to his feminism, citing his celebrations of “The Â�wife—and she is not one jot less than the husband, / The Â�daughter—and she is just as good as the son, / The Â�mother—and she is every bit as much as the father” (qtd. in Fern, RH 277). Fern saw Whitman as her truth-speaking counterpart, one “who dared speak out his strong, honest thoughts, in the face of pusillanimous, toadeying, republican aristocracy” (RH 275). Their relationship ended as quickly as it began one short year later, however, when Whitman refused to pay off a loan he had received from Fern’s husband, James Parton, of funds she herself had earned from her lucrative writing (Warren, “Subversion” 60). In some ways it is fitting that their relationship ended over a financial dispute, for both were tough businesspeople. Fern refused Bonner four times to drive up her starting salary to its highest potential before signing with him; her prenuptial agreement with James Parton, a trophy husband nearly a decade her junior, was unprecedented for a woman at the time. Likewise, Whitman was an aggressive entrepreneur who exploited the new rhetoric of advertising and self-promotion in Leaves of Grass, particularly in the 1855 and 1856 editions.1 The “I Walt” of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass is a vastly different figure than Walter Whitman, the businessman, bookmaker, and self-promoter whose name appears on its copyright page. This

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chapter accounts for that difference to demonstrate that the antimarket sensibility of Whitman’s poet persona is much more extensive and multidimensional than has been previously acknowledged. I trace the multiple layers of the poet figure’s evasion of the capitalist exigencies of the process of literary production, particularly within the social matrix of authorship, not only to show how aggressively differentiated “Walt” was from Walter, but also to access a truer glimpse of Whitman’s promotional strategy than has been previously observed. That promotional strategy, I argue, was driven by the antimarket poetics of Leaves of Grass, which is the initial focus of this chapter and the foundation for the subsequent discussion of Emerson’s influence on the economic orientation of Whitman’s ideal poet; Whitman’s evasions of marketplace work through a “divine style”; and his conjoining with the reader in an unmediated union that transcends capital exchange. I focus mainly on the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, and therefore my general statements about Whitman’s poetic persona allude to it and not to later editions in which he takes on a variety of other dramatic identities, such as the wound dresser, the good gray poet, and the venerable but neglected patriarch. Whitman uses the fundamental lexicon of capitalism to undermine many of its basic assumptions, as noted by Richard Pascal (141). This pattern was integral to Whitman’s method of engaging the market, rooted at once in competitive self-promotion and communal coexistence. While he is the quintessential entrepreneur in the preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass, justifying and defending the indispensability of his sense of the poet’s social role in the American democracy, on the other hand he portrays a relationship with his reader that erases the dehumanizing effects of monetary exchange. He empowers the reader and offers his work as a gift and not a purchase, encouraging her or him to leave behind the market’s unsavory and regrettable aspects, especially the dehumanizing effects of labor and alienation, and encounter him in an idealized world defined in opposition to such flaws endemic to economic relations. Whitman’s utopian world is not completely fabricated, however; he wants to find the vitality and humanity in real market exchange and release its magic. As such, Whitman’s well-documented aesthetic Â� innovations—the larger-than-life poetic persona and close reader Â�intimacy—mirror the self-aggrandizement of producers’ courtship rituals for potential customers and are the keys to his landmark innovations in the marketplace for poetry in antebellum

8 4 â•‡ :: t r a n s f o r m i n g t h e m a r k e t America. The book’s success hinged upon his humanized, warm (re)vision of the cold, uncaring market forces that Wilson and Thoreau (chapters 1 and 2) so accurately identified. Sorting out the economic ethos behind Whitman’s construction of his ideal poet illuminates Whitman’s overall scheme of self-promotion that was so well attuned to the market revolution. He anticipates modern commercial methods that romanticize products through metanarratives of escape, mystification, and Â�transcendenceâ•fl Â�available of course through cash Â� exchange—of the very economic world both producer and consumer inhabit. For Whitman, aesthetic decisions were professional decisions, and artistic choices were financial choices. Whitman’s poet figure’s sensuality, connection to natural, organic processes, and celebrations of marketplace scenes and spectacles have obscured readers from a complete understanding of the reach and persistence of his efforts to transcend capital and markets, hiding what I unmask here as a profound distrust of industry’s growing claim on American authorship in the 1850s. The dimensions of industry he particularly evades are connected to labor and production and their accompanying liabilities of self-commodification and subservience to bosses and buyers. Whitman’s own anxiety and ambivalence toward the professionalization and commercialization of literature in the 1850s led to the marketing strategy he included within the pages of Leaves of Grass itself, a book that promotes itself not as a material commodity, but as an encounter with a poet, an experience that purports to transcend all market value while celebrating markets themselves as the ultimate commodity and consumer experience. Whitman claims victory for his poet figure, whom he places in direct competition with other market figures, relationships, and even products. Despite his efforts to represent himself in his poetry otherwise, Whitman was the quintessential producer. The bohemian pictured on the frontispiece of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass represents one of Whitman’s Â�many—now Â� famous—poses, a mask carefully constructed to sell. Whitman’s poet figure and mask for Leaves of Grass is one of the very “disguises” the speaker says he throws off at the beginning of “Song of Myself,” the very token of commercial and material values he so vehemently opposes throughout the volume. In a later edition, a phrenological chart of his own head, proving with scientific “evidence” his physiological propensity for verse writing, testifies to Whitman’s obsession with assembling and displaying the details of the ideal poet’s character. Like an aesthetic market-


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ing campaign of sorts, the characterization of that poet persona in many ways was the great ongoing project of Leaves of Grass, as Whitman attached fashionable trends like phrenology to the poet figure to enhance his popular appeal and charisma: if readers loved him, they would also love Leaves of Grass. Whitman was obsessed with the commercial potential in his own “masks.” The wide array of characters he portrays in the photographs he posed for throughout his professional career attest to this obsession. Like the engraving on the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman’s marketplace product, the “made image,” represents in some ways the sort of artificial token of identity he abhors. Even more ironic is the figure’s tendency to universalize and dehistoricize himself, the reader, and his world while also functioning as a product of and for the historically specific 1855 literary marketplace. This author image, then, becomes the commodity for potential buyers to fetishize; as such, it is the true literary merchandise in Leaves of Â�Grass—a book of poetry that denies its own textuality in favor of its authorial persona as its selling point.

Selling the Antimarket Poetics of Leaves of Grass Whitman likely knew that antimaterialist sentiments were fashionable in antebellum America and that most of his readers were anxious about the fate of art in the emergent industrial context. But he also was acutely aware of the national pride citizens were taking in technological progress, including advances in printing and bookmaking. While placing the mystical, idealistic poet figure in the spotlight and relegating “Walter” and his real-world commercial enterprise to the wings, he was careful not to squander the commercial potential in celebrating the market, if only to mystify the process of production within it and extol the singer, body and soul, as the ultimate commodity for sale. The poet figure, I would suggest, does create an alternative romantic world to the industrial capitalist one, insomuch as he tries to outdo it by emphasizing the self as an organic creation and thus miraculously free from specialized divided labor and economic exchange. He is the loafing, singing version of the John Henry myth, as it were, that brings humanity in direct competition with emergent industrial technology and the labor that surrounds it. Whitman rooted the poet figure’s appeal and charisma in his heroic rescue of art from the en-

8 6 â•‡ :: t r a n s f o r m i n g t h e m a r k e t croaching industrial complex, a world in every way hostile to the timeless aesthetics of the bodies and voices of poet and reader in Leaves of Grass. His use of commercial discourse in the process, especially its tropes of competition and self-promotion, consistently funnels into a celebration of the soul in such a way that it becomes a kind of commodity itself, purchasable, of course, for the price of his book. Whitman was unlike other romantic poets in the business of selling their work while also renouncing crass Â�materialism—after all, poetry has always seemed naturally distanced from monetary concerns. But that very sense of romantic poetry’s “natural” affinity with the anticommercial is itself a manufactured or “made” distinction, an artificial cultural construct, and in Whitman it takes on unique, distinctive dimensions that separate him from most other romantic poets (Longfellow and Wordsworth in particular) who do not readily embrace and recast commercial relationships in their work. Whitman makes it clear that he differs from other entrepreneurs in degree, but not in kind, when he shouts with Muhammad Ali bravado and abandon that he will be “[o]utbidding at the start the old cautious hucksters” in the Â�competition—laissez-faire, to be Â� sure—for the reader’s heart, which in the context of capitalist America always already implies a sale (Leaves 45). But in Whitman, the promise to the reader is a level of satisfaction from the purchase that will transcend any other available in the market, for it will yield nothing less than the mystical union of souls with the larger-than-life poet figure. Indeed, what sets Whitman apart from Longfellow, and others like him, is his willingness to be the huckster of the soul through two distinctive, quintessentially WhitmanÂ� ian methods: by exaggerating the poet’s Â� powers—puffing his Â� product—and drawing in the Â�reader—luring in his Â�customer—promising nothing less than the closest degree of intimacy imaginable. The “I Walt” pictured in the engraving on the 1855 Leaves of Grass (“an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos”) is the visual representation of that poet figure’s soul for sale. The details of the figure’s pose renounce the literary marketplace as well as the process of production itself. His stance proclaims, rather brazenly, that work is of the remotest possibility. He is a man whose nature is to watch. His hands, which might produce something, are kept carefully out of view. The left hand is in his pocket, and the right is held out of view, hidden behind a fold in his shirt at his side. His demeanor and ensemble are not work-worn or soiled. They almost have a


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fresh, indoors look about them. The cocked hat, hip, and head renounce wage labor and other conventional modes of making a living. Their self-assuredness approaches cocky defiance. The image does not align itself with the leisured class as do some of his earlier daguerreotypes in which he dons a tie, hat, and walking cane. Instead, he aligns himself in the engraving with a loafing, bohemian working class. Whitman did not present himself as a nonworking artisan merely as a romantic escape from the rapid developments taking shape in capitalism around him. Instead, Reynolds posits that Whitman was self-consciously aligning himself with the “loafer” class that arose in the Bowery district in the 1840s. This type was associated with Jacksonian democrats, while the Whigs were identified with their economic opposite, acquisitive capitalists. The loafers, as Reynolds notes, were “mainly young working class men and women who had been impelled by hard times to reject normal capitalist pursuits and find other means of gratification” (Biography 64). Whitman himself acknowledged the studied lack of industriousness in the poet figure of Leaves of Grass. He described a “careless, lounging gait” in the character in a prose sketch he wrote in 1856, one year after the book’s publication. The figure waits and watches but does not work. This nonproducing persona stands in sharp contrast to the man whom the text identifies as the publisher, a figure responsible for transforming the poetry into a print commodity. The producer figure who is emphatically a creature of the literary marketplace appears appropriately on the copyright page in the line “Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1855, by WALTER WHITMAN.” While “Walter,” the producer/publisher, manages the business end of the text, his literary counterpart, “I Walt,” strictly sticks to the creative end. “I Walt” remains unnamed on the title page precisely to underscore his role as singer and seer. He is a creature of art, not the market, as he identifies himself only within the verse. He never entertains the slightest possibility that the two (art and the market) might occupy the same territory.2 Although the poet figure is assigned to the finer activities of conjuring up verses outside of the market, he nonetheless resists becoming an apparition, insisting on the importance of his tactile, tangible, flesh-and-blood existence. He asserts his own physicality as a way of joining in on the sensual liberation he sings of throughout the book. In the poem named “Who Learns My Lessons Complete” in later editions, he assures us that he is

8 8 â•‡ :: t r a n s f o r m i n g t h e m a r k e t not a disembodied voice, but a being who “was conceived in my mother’s womb” and was “not palpable once, but am now . . . and was born on the last day of May 1819 . . . / And that I grew six feet high . . . and that I have become a man thirty-six years old in 1855 . . . and that I am here anyhow” (Leaves 141). The physical presence of the poet figure comes to us, in the usual Whitman form, amid robust assertions of his (as well as all mankind’s) spiritual immortality. The biographical dates and details assign the poet a place in the real world, while his soul promises to outlive the real world and his own body due to its “immortality.” This gesture reinforces what Whitman noted to be the “[g]reat constituent elements of my Â�poetry—Two, viz: Â�Materialism—Spirituality” (Notes 55). Whitman’s poet figure, therefore, does not need to be an airy abstraction in order to renounce market production as part of his repertoire. Whitman’s physicality is balanced by his urge to avoid materialism; the 1855 edition asserts the matter/spirit dualism of Swedenborgianism that becomes even more pronounced in later editions. Further, the notion of the miracle in the commonplace can be linked to a progressive 1850s science called Harmonialism (Reynolds, Biography 327). In the context of Whitman’s greater commercial objective of marketing Leaves of Grass, Whitman’s Swedenborgianism and Harmonialism as framed by capitalism engage the fraught richness of the art/money dialectic driving both the poetry and the poet. Indeed, if we look back at his engraving on the frontispiece, we find a man whose isolation from social relations does not spring from a disapproval of the sensual. He is emphatically physical, though not a worker. (What he produces, however, is metaphysical, as we will see later.) An ungrounded rootlessness surfaces in the engraving of the poet figure. His feet, and in fact most of his legs, are left off the page. The figure seems to hover in the space of solitude and isolation, an effect heightened by the appearance that the poet’s body, from the thighs down, is submerged in the page. He seems to emerge out of the text from an unseen source. This is a figure that has renounced social systems of affiliation. He works for no one, and no one works for him. He is not bound to a specific, readily identifiable family (but rather a cosmic one), has no stake in any institutions, and owns no property. His self-reliance projects an imperial self, whose nature is to take in the world through his consuming, cataloging gaze.


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That carefully posed, self-reliant literary persona is a figure born out of Whitman’s aspiration to become a successful professional writer. Whitman eventually succeeded in selling his poetry through the persona of its narrator. Contrary to older scholarship,3 the 1860 edition sold well until his publisher went out of business. His market success was therefore not limited to the 1880s, which included the popular 1881 “banned in Boston” edition, and the 1890s, when he enjoyed fame in Europe. While Whitman cloaks the dramatic identity of the author figure with tropes from advertising culture, his usual gesture is to reject and rise above materialism, scorning it for threatening to alienate the sacred bond he wants to establish with the reader. The figure invites the reader to locate the poem’s essential, true meaning through him, ironically, by defining himself against the linguistic and cultural community of capitalism that produced him. Whitman was as much a creature of the literary marketplace as his poet figure was a renunciation of it. He promoted himself in the second edition of Leaves of Grass by including a letter of praise from Ralph Waldo Emerson, functioning as a kind of recommendation, a supporting document of authenticity and advertisement of the book. Such a gesture reveals that his anticommercialism is a mask, a persona of antimaterialism designed to sell books.4 Interestingly, Whitman fits both patterns of aesthetic response to the commercialization of authorship commonly found in authors of his period. Whitman exploits the language of the market in order to escape it through strategies that rescue it from the exploding print culture’s objectifying logic (G. Rice 9). Such an escape complicates dramatically, however, as the reader ultimately is encouraged to make such an escape based on his bond with the poet figure, a bond predicated on the Â�ability—the charisma, force, and Â�appeal—of that figure to sell himself. This messianic5 self-promoter is both pitchman and product of an escape fantasy from the worst aspects of industry with the prime objective of resurrecting the soul. As such, Whitman was forging an early type of book marketing that weds spirituality with consumerism, a pattern echoed in today’s unprecedented rate of Bible sales, enabled, in part, by American culture’s acceptance of faith as a consumer product, with volumes packaged and designed for a dizzying variety of niche markets that now include, among a rapidly growing list, Bibles for surfers, skateboarders, cowboys, teenagers, and executives. Whitman’s then-radical blend of faith and commerce has never been more visible in the book trade than it is today.

9 0 â•‡ :: t r a n s f o r m i n g t h e m a r k e t Whitman is well known for the creative energy he put into the packaging and promotion of his books. His method of penning his own reviews, although often critical and never as glowing as others he received, was designed to generate publicity, draw attention, and increase his cultural relevance very much like the poet figure’s exaggerations of his own powers, yet complicated by his distaste for print media and the literary marketplace. Whitman’s poetic representation of the work of writing was not just an artistic belief; it was crucially linked to his attempts at selling the poems themselves, to elevate them above competing literary products. Whitman’s open use of prevalent 1850s advertising techniques, particularly the imperative “step right up!” pattern, reinforces the built-in self-promotion of the poems. The mystical, transcendental side of Whitman’s literary persona was also designed to sell the poems, in this case by obscuring the process of literary production to present the text as a kind of ultimate supercommodity, so valuable that it transcends all market forces and values and vanishes, as it were, into Â�spirit—a kind of antimaterial embodiment of the poet’s living soul. Whitman’s own depiction of authorship has led many readers to take the poet at his word, accepting the romantic, unconscious inspiration model as the whole story behind the composition of the poem. However much inspiration and divine energies possessed him, the sources of Whitman’s aesthetic choices can be explained. While the poet is both “sage and the huckster,” who “touched the gods with ink smudged fingers” and “was concerned as much with sales and reviews of his books as with the state of the human soul,” it is crucial not to underestimate Whitman’s antimarket leanings, even in his professional approach to literary business (Folsom and Price 25). Indeed, the romantic view of spiritual illumination is mutually dependent on, rather than opposed to, the pragmatic view that Whitman’s verse was executed according to a calculated, disciplined strategy. That calculation and discipline, I suggest, was geared toward a representation of authorship that was enshrouded in a fantasy of Â�creation—however “ink smudged”â•floutside of economic exchange that spoke volumes about his own professional anxieties and failures. Ironically, the poet figure systematically suppresses the social and political institutions that give rise to his poetry; he may use the language of promotion for his product, but he mystifies the process of its production in the first place. In Leaves of Grass any advertising tropes or details from the publishing industry and


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the world of work are either portrayed organically or mystified if they are celebrated at all; otherwise they antagonistically oppose the poet’s special creative art. Whitman’s production of the poet persona, therefore, was dependent upon his assumption that his readership would favor such antimaterialism in a pattern of reciprocal influence6 shaping the text. Readers were supposed to reconcile these diametrically opposed Â�strategies—a text shaped by antimaterialist ideals in a book shaped by careful and even brazen marketing Â�strategies—through the frank, bold individualism in both. Readers would have enjoyed the reaffirmation of the market’s ethos of bold, vigorous individualism as well as sympathetic moments of relaxed intimacy in the text that were offered up as the subject of poetic inquiry. Buying the book to find such antimaterialistic bliss would not have been construed as an act of hypocrisy or a complete rejection of the full value set of the market, but rather as a transposing of its most appealing features, individualism and the limitless nature of the self, in a tranquil setting. Indeed, this could be construed as a vision of how markets, which were increasingly bringing people together, might achieve greater intimacy and tenderness, and a broader scope of vision. Thus, the least appealing aspect of the market, its alienating drudgery, inspires Whitman’s concept of literary labor; it emerges in the text as anything but work, with the poetry as an extension of “I Walt” and the reader seeing and sharing experience with this persona. The poet figure’s alignment of himself with the “hucksters” (“[o]utÂ� bidding at the start the old cautious hucksters”) may openly appropriate promotional discourse, but only to drive home antimarket values (Leaves 45). If anything, his sense of “outbidding” the “hucksters” puts him on a competitive plane with the sideshow barkers, resulting in his victory over marketplace conventions, advertising (his irresistible appeal: “none shall escape me”), and value (his priceless, unique self). This capitalist language nonetheless is employed to distinguish him from other marketers, for he argues that his promotional techniques and product transcend theirs.7 Further, the “old cautious hucksters” are Kronos, Zeus, Jehovah, Buddha, Brahma, and Allah, embodying the ancient, formalized, and thus “cautious” religions that all have designs on his readers’ souls. Confident that he will outbid them with his unrestrained style, Whitman promotes his form of spirituality over theirs, bragging lustily about its superiority with his “barbaric yawp.”

9 2 â•‡ :: t r a n s f o r m i n g t h e m a r k e t Whitman’s biographers, interestingly enough, even reflect the influence of the poet figure’s resistance to emergent capitalist culture, especially the division of labor and specialization, in their portrayal of his total control of the publication process, from the writing to the typesetting, printing, and promotion of his verse: “He even took an occasional turn at setting his unusually long lines of verse into print” (Greenspan 84). This reflects an “artisan conception” of authorship that rebels against the emergent specialization, mechanization, and divided labor of the publishing industry that would compel Whitman not only to write the poetry, but to do his own Â�typesetting—rather than use a machine or specialized Â�labor—for the holistic “achievement of his aesthetic ends” (Reynolds, Biography 46; Newbury 151). Whitman’s capitalistic side always held sway in his professional life, however. After he first tried to find a commercial publisher for Leaves and failed, he turned to printer friends, who actually set most of the type; he employed binders and others to assemble the book. He jumped at any signs of interest from commercial publishers and later in his career had a long and fruitful relationship with David McKay, a capitalist massmarket publisher. He learned the printing trade through his work at various newspapers, which were deeply rooted in urban agoras. It is therefore ironic that Whitman’s sense of expansiveness takes him and his aggregate democratic populations all places but within real social relations, particularly those of specialized labor: “Song of Myself” imagines an America relatively untouched by market society, and establishes no relation among people except through the poet who sees, accepts, and celebrates the cohesion he finds in nature but not among citizens in a society (Shulman 143). But more specifically, if the figure of the poet is “capable of anything and everything but writing for money,” as R. J. Wilson notes, the question of what he actually Â�does—seeing and observing and/or Â�singing—and how those activities come to represent, paradoxically, the real “work” of the poet figure demands further exploration (279). The conditions in which the figure does his watching and observing, according to the first verse of the poem eventually titled “Song of Myself,” are decidedly pastoral. By loafing with ease, he situates himself far from a busy economic center, later vacillating back to the city. The lackadaisical mood of a summer’s day and a blade of grass contrasts sharply with the high-tension world of financial transaction and exchange. This image of the poet figure is reinforced toward the end of “Song of Myself” when


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a hawk swoops down to accuse the narrator of being an idler. The hawk highlights the poet figure’s aversion to industrious and constructive activity when “he complains of my gabbing and my loitering” (Leaves 85). The hawk speaks on behalf of work. This, coupled with the fact that he is also a predator, makes him a representative of the marketplace in which entrepreneurs “hawk” their merchandise. He accosts the poet precisely because the singer is not working for profit by “hawking” his wares but instead loiters. The materials of the poet figure’s activity (that is, the equipment of his “work”) also distinguish themselves in terms of their incompatibility for the market: they are the nonmaterial stuff of seeing and singing. The first and second verses describe that the poet’s work relies on two fundamental elements: sight for his visionary qualities and breath for his singing voice. He begins by “observing a spear of summer grass” (Leaves 25; emphasis mine). This is the first step in the poet’s process of creativity. The visual impression of a poetic subject, the spear of grass, is taken in by the narrator. He then leads us to the next phase of creativity: turning the impression into the breath of song. It is important to note that the poet figure transmutes the visual impression not into a print medium, but into breath and “the sound of the belched words of my voice” (Leaves 25). Whitman privileges the spoken or sung word over the written word because the human voice, given the absence of recording technology in the nineteenth century,8 resists objectification and commodification as merchandise for sale in the literary marketplace. But the 1855 Leaves also acknowledges the fact that his poetry is tangible, as I discuss later. Whitman does not fully erase the print and paper that mediate his relationship with the reader. Instead, he elevates their communicative power of intimacy, even imbuing them with magic, turning their coldness into a warm medium that conveys identity effectively. He rejects their Â�abuses—their potential for objectification and Â�commodification—in order to adapt and infuse them with new possibilities for human, and humane, vitality. As discussed in chapter 1, a common complaint about market relations in antebellum America, especially as it occurs in Wilson’s Our Nig, was the market’s pervasive coldness. Whitman suggests that if markets must bring us together, we should celebrate “the large amativeness” and the “ardor and friendliness and enterprise” in which we recognize the Â�poems—the Â�humanity—in ourselves and each other (Leaves 714).

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Whitman’s I and Emerson’s Poet Whitman seems to have drawn on Emerson’s sense of poetic texts as highly spiritual phenomena of expression that draw their inspiration from the material world. What makes a poet special, Emerson preaches in his 1844 essay “The Poet,” is his ability to transmute the material, biologically inevitable sensations of the world (such as sight) into expression (poems) breathed by poets. The poet for Emerson, as well as for Whitman, is therefore a kind of alchemist who turns sensual perceptions of the material world into speech, a kind of magical transformation of the base metal of everyday sights and sounds into the gold of poetry. Poetic speech, or expression, marks the higher spiritual, divine energies in Emerson’s transcendentalism. What the poet Â� produces—his wordsâ•flis therefore “above” other products of the marketplace. Emerson sees poetry as necessarily occupying a special, privileged place outside of economic networks of production. Poets also stand above the network of market relations, as Emerson deems them superior to other producers of economic goods, especially “those whose province is action” (1537). Unlike other producers of economic goods in the market, Emerson’s poet (most likely himself) is portrayed not as a producer of literary commodities and merchandise, but of timeless, universal human truths “for poetry was written before all time was” (1537). Thus, to Emerson, the poet deals in eternity and spirits, not time and money. He explicitly warns against framing the poet and his work in the marketplace, because economic relations advocate “materialism which assumes that manual skill and activity is the first merit of all men, and disparages such as say and do not, overlooking the fact, that some men, namely, poets, are natural sayers, sent into the world to the end of expression, and confounds them with those whose province is action, but who quit it to imitate the sayers” (Emerson 1538). Poets are not only better than men of business and labor; though they may publicly pretend to oppose the idle work of verse makers, Emerson adds with a paradoxical splash of social envy, entrepreneurs secretly admire poets. Although, to Emerson, “the beautiful rests on the foundations of the necessary,” poetry should not be thought of as business but something higher and more elevated (1540). Indeed, he urges in the same essay that books should never take on anything like monetary or market value, as “nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and ex-


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traordinary. If a man is inflamed and carried away by his thought, to that degree that he forgets the authors and the public, and heeds only this one dream, which holds him like an insanity, let me read his paper” (Emerson 1547). Emerson aggressively dissociates poets and their poems from the urban social networks of economic and political business:9 The poet “shalt lie close hid with nature, and canst not be afforded to the Capitol [i.e., politics] or the Exchange [i.e., banking]” (1551). Whitman’s poet figure also locates the source of poetry in nature and not in social, political, and economic systems that drive networks of transaction, exchange, and production in the urban center.10 Whitman’s poet instead “lies close hid with nature,” marveling at spontaneous acts of natural creation that he finds wonderful for the sheer mystery, and unknowability, of their mode of production. Regarding himself as a work of art, he roots his poetic vision in the physiological miracle of human sight. At one point in “Who Learns My Lesson Complete,” he exclaims that “my eyesight is . . . wonderful.” He goes on to elaborate on the natural wonders of human life with himself as the subject. Significantly, he chooses to recognize in conjunction with his wonderful eyesight how he “passed from a babe in the creeping trance of three summers and three winters to articulate” his first words (Leaves 141). Eyesight and the acquisition of language converge with vision and language, seeing and singing, to shape the poet figure’s sense of his work of writing. Whitman represents the work of writing through his poet figure as a combination of seeing, “observing a spear of summer grass,” and singing, “the sound of the belched words of my voice” (Leaves 141). This process of seeing is crucially linked to Whitman’s poetic process of turning the material into the spiritual, of transmuting the stuff of the sense into the metaphysics of expression, like Emerson’s poet: “The unseen is proved by the seen, / Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn” (Leaves 27). Witnessing the seen is the way the poet can express the unseen, begetting a chain in which “seen objects” become metaphysical. Under the poet’s gaze, material things do not remain as such, but take on “visionary” qualities beyond their physical existence so that they become part of the “unseen” ethereal stuff of the imagination.11 The poet’s process of seeing, then, systematically removes material things into the transcendent realm of the invisible, the ultimate goal of the poet’s vision. Although the poet habitually watches but does not participate in such

9 6 â•‡ :: t r a n s f o r m i n g t h e m a r k e t scenes, he nonetheless shows an obsession for immediacy in both vision and expression, metaphorically, sight and breath. Whitman’s obsession with unadulterated expression informs the kind of voice he gives his poet figure. It is a voice connected with an unmediated, primitive mode of expression, rather than well-chosen, calculated diction. His singing is antimarketplace precisely in the fact that it claims to be unpackaged, uncalculating, and wholly spontaneous. Elegance and polish clearly are not priorities for a singer who produces “belched words” and a “barbaric yawp.” The image of a child’s first words in “Who Learns My Lesson Complete” referred to above is closer to the ideal of pure, sincere, and spontaneous utterance the poet figure embodies. Indeed, one of the first verbal images of the narrator portrays him returning to a “state of nature,” naked at the river bank in the woods, in an attempt to regenerate the kind of spontaneity associated with a child’s first words. Such natural discourse, according to Andrew Lawson, offers reassurance in contrast to the poem’s anxiety-inducing economic discourse (19). I would suggest that the natural and spiritual reassurance contribute to the poet figure’s appeal in a pattern correspondent with the market society of its time. This pattern thus reaches well beyond the business of erotic exchange, where Lawson lets his insight come to rest, claiming the masturbation imagery in “Song of Myself” reflects a “spiritualized free market” through “the logic of spermatic economy” (19). The anxiety associated with the economic discourse emerges as a distinct resistance to planned, deliberate production upon close scrutiny. The poet’s “Lesson” is really an antilesson; it emerges out of a release from rehearsed convention and “lets down the bars to a good lesson” (Leaves 140). The “good lesson” is the one taught by nature “without argument,” embracing the correlation that the more primal, the better a thing is; the more contrived, the worse it is. He cites the “delicious globe” as an example of beauty in nature “moving so exactly in its orbit forever and ever without one jolt or the untruth of a single second” (Leaves 140). The true beauty of the globe is that it Â�wasn’t planned but, like his barbaric yawp, spontaneously emerged into existence without deliberation, forethought, labor, and most importantly, an arduous process of production. Indeed, he pinpoints the true wonder of the globe in the missing tracks of the process that produced it or brought it into existence. He gleefully expounds upon this visible absence in order to make a point about his own emergence into


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the world: “I do not think it [the globe] was made in six days,” unlike the working and resting God that so many Christians believe in, “nor in ten thousand years,” as proto-Darwinians would have argued. He says it was not built in “ten decillion years, / Nor planned and built one thing after another, as an architect plans and builds a house” (Leaves 140). Whitman seems to be insisting on a false binary of natural and artificial production that really did not exist; we know that he worked and reworked Leaves of Grass not only from all the drafts, manuscripts, and editions he painstakingly revised, but also from the title itself, which blends the natural leaves of grass with the leaves (pages) of the produced, bound book for sale. Whitman nonetheless expends considerable energy prying apart these two forces, calling for a division that is not really there, as he portrays the commodity organically in a way that merges the book trade with nature. We know his voice cannot, and in fact did not, emerge spontaneously from nature and therefore must be a created dramatic identity, as artificial as any other invention for sale in the marketplace. Whitman’s attempt to separate the artificial from the natural into either/or categories is his fascinating denial of their simultaneous (both/and) and highly paradoxical presence in his poetry. Reasons for his insistence on this binary can be found in his self-promotion, which hinged upon his notion of publicity.12 To present himself as the dominant, larger-than-life, celebrated American poet, Whitman deliberately sought ways to differentiate his poetic persona from other popular, polished styles and thus embraced the voice of miraculous, rather than worked-on, utterance in what he called “divine style.” Keeping Walter the businessman separate from the poet was, ironically enough, a marketing strategy designed to differentiate himself from his more commercially successful contemporaries. Byron, Wordsworth, and Longfellow, for example, may not have portrayed themselves as businessmen either, since the “business” of the poet is inspiration, as perhaps could be true for all poets. But Longfellow, for example, exposed his process of production and did not mystify it, as he was transparent about his borrowings from other traditions with no pretentions to originality and total autonomy. As Irmscher notes, Longfellow “did not depend on the mystification of the writer’s office,” but instead understood his work in terms of a “non-egocentric concept of authorship, [rejecting] the notion of the author as sole originator and promoter of his work” (3–4). Whitman could never have been so open

9 8 â•‡ :: t r a n s f o r m i n g t h e m a r k e t about the collaborative and derivative nature of writing, going to great lengths to separate those notions from his autonomous author figure. As such, he deliberately constructed his aesthetic based on transformations he saw dominating the economic climate of the market revolution, specifically resisting those tendencies he saw as divisive and alienating, while rescuing those worth preserving and cultivating. The resultant ethos is an antidote for market ills, Leaves of Grass, designed to sell in the literary marketplace.

The Divine Style The work of writing for Whitman’s poet demands a great amount of effort in appearing effortless and uncontrived. Of course, this Â�isn’t to say that the poet lacks or strives to cover up ecstasy and intensity in his verse. Quite the reverse, he wants to highlight the ecstatic dimension of his poetry, but only so that it seems wholly sincere. He wants his verse to seem like a truthful call from nature, rather than a deceptive, calculated sales pitch from the marketplace.13 To do this, he must erase the tracks of his literary labor and studiously avoid similes and illustrative rhetoric. He submits in the 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass that “great poets are also to be known by the absence in them of tricks,” unlike the chameleons of the marketplace, “and by the justification of perfect personal candor” (17). Whitman therefore strives for an unlabored, unstrained poetics that appears to speak raw truth rather than calculating persuasion that posits the reader as a potential purchaser. The real literary labor of his poet figure lies in his search for, and attempt to utilize, a poetic voice that seems “naked and undisguised,” like his own body at the river. Whitman’s distaste for “overworked” poetry is revealed in a passage from one of his notebooks. He dedicates himself to the appearance of “perfect personal candor” in “future [revisions] of Leaves of Grass. Be more severe with the final revision of the poem, nothing will do, not one word or sentence that is not perfectly Â�clear—with positive Â�purpose—harmony with the name, nature and drift of the poem” (Notes 55). He commands himself, in very strict and absolute terms, which he emphatically underscored, never to use “ornaments, especially no ornamental adjectives, unless they have come molten hot, and imperiously prove themselves.” His sense of urgency builds when he makes the same point with even more stress in the next sentence: “No ornamental similes at Â� all—not one: perfect transparent clearness


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sanity, and health are Â� wanted—that is the divine styleâ•flO if it can be attained” (Notes 55). His final phrase expresses hope in his powers to achieve this stylistic standard in his poetry. The voice that can only hope to attain the “divine style” responds to the one that dictates the rules for the concealment of duplicitousness. Whitman’s “divine style,” on the other hand, practices the subtler “trick” of appearing free of pretension. This paradoxically requires a great deal of labor to appear easy and effortless, like the real speech he tries to re-create in the passage above. He aims studiously to avoid revealing the tracks of his literary labor. The figure of the poet should sing with “perfect transparent clearness” that shows no trace of the fact that the poet “worked” to produce his poetry. He wants to avoid calling attention to his own role as a producer who forges his poetry with care and precision.14 His vigorous desire to leave out similes and adjectival ornamentation represents his aim to draw attention away from the sweat of the laboring poet in the wings off stage. Such stylistic excesses call attention to the presence of a working narrator,15 who shows his labor through his struggle to elaborate his point by piling on additional images and descriptive terms. The hero of the text who loafs and invites his soul is distinguished in the preface by his antimaterialism. What is remarkable about his argument is that he describes very little about his alternative to materialism, “higher notions of prudence.” Instead, he devotes most of his time to detailing the financial angst that governs the lives of Americans. He allows that money is a necessity but laments that the moneymaking life precludes the poetic life. He mourns the “abandonment of such a great being as man,” the stuff of poetry to Whitman, “to the toss and pallor of years of moneymaking with all their scorching days and icy nights and all their stifling deceits and underhanded dodgings” (Leaves 18). What is sacrificed in a life of financial concern is poetry: “the bloom and odor of the earth and of the flowers and atmosphere and of the sea and of the true taste of the women and men you pass or have to do with in youth or middle age” (Leaves 19). The implication here is that poetry (exhibited by the “divine style”) and moneymaking (or earning a living through work and material reward) are two separate, mutually exclusive entities profoundly and inherently incompatible and unsuitable for each other. The logic postulates that poetry cannot exist in the marketplace, for it is a setting wholly unfit for the “serenity and majesty” of literary art.

1 0 0 â•‡ :: t r a n s f o r m i n g t h e m a r k e t The moneymaking life precludes the poetic life for Whitman’s narrator. This principle is perhaps the most prominent feature of the poet figure of Leaves of Grass. He defines “prudence” in opposition to business success in the marketplace. Monetary success, he argues, fails to bespeak a “prudence suitable for immortality” (Leaves 19). Indeed, he professes that death for the market professional lacks the transcendent, poetic qualities that it would have for those, like himself, who live according to “higher notions of prudence,” above and beyond the marketplace and its ethos. He claims that a materialistic life brings on a “great fraud” of a death. His assumption is that one’s death echoes one’s life. Those who spend their lives in the deceptive, exploitative realm of the Â� marketplace—businessmen, lawyers, stockbrokers, and popular Â�authors—will be cheated out of “serenity and majesty” when they pass into the afterlife. Death, for the entrepreneur, is not a grand experience, but merely a shutting off of the senses, “a close of life without elevation” (Leaves 20). The poet figure’s rhetoric exudes great confidence in his knowledge of what it is like to die. Furthermore, he seems to have privileged information that suggests the experience of death is dictated by the presence or absence of professional interest in one’s life. He makes this clear when he asserts that “the prudence of the mere wealth and respectability of the more esteemed life appears too faint for the eye to observe at all when little and large alike drop quietly aside at the thought of the prudence suitable for immortality” (Leaves 21). To Whitman, death and birth are among the most poetic moments in the world. Too much attention to “mere wealth and respectability” deflates these moments of their poetry and their immortality. Thus the narrator argues for his own spiritual superiority because he is a singer for immortality (utilizing a “divine style”) rather than a writer for money, that is, “mere wealth and respectability.” Whitman’s narrator strives for permanent, noneconomic rewards from his literary efforts, as the title of his “divine style” suggests. He associates money with vanity, finding real value in the unfailing capital of human life. Value for him lies in the celebration of his poetic subjects, which revolve around the magic of life “that is vigorous and benevolent and clean. . . . [F]rom the first inspiration to the last expiration all that a male or female does . . . is so much sure profit to him or her in the unshakable order of the universe and through the whole scope of it forever” (Leaves 22). This “clean,” “sure profit” of the “order of the universe” stands in sharp


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contrast to the insecure, temporary, and dirty money of the marketplace. Value in the marketplace thus becomes characterized by “the attainment of gain by discreditable means . . . nastiness of appetite . . . greedy looks or malignant wishes” (Leaves 22).

Lamenting Cold Types and Cylinder and Wet Paper between Us “A Song for Occupations” repudiates emerging conventions of professional authorship in a variety of ways. The earliest instance occurs in the second verse of the poem when he describes his quest to contact the reader: “unfinished business with me . . . how is it with you? / I was chilled with the cold types and cylinder and wet paper between us” (Leaves 87). As elsewhere in this volume, Whitman’s narrator celebrates humanity and privileges the intimacy between the reader and himself by lamenting the fact that they must know each other through a commodity, a book. The material book and its mode of production in the marketplace (its “cold types and cylinder and wet paper”) threatens to chill the hot bond between reader and the “full blooded man” who is the narrative persona.16 The poet figure despises his incarceration within the pages of the book, confessing, “I pass so poorly with paper and types . . . I must pass with the contact of bodies and souls” (Leaves 87). This poet also regrets that, given the increasingly economic, entrepreneurial nature of literature in the mid-1850s, the mass market has transformed the identity of the poet persona into “paper and types” only. The irony here is instructive: the “paper and types” do offer a way to bring the poet into the reader’s presence, and it is precisely that persona’s definition over and against the machinery of the trade’s “cold cylinders” that will alchemically bring him into existence. By instructing the reader to imagine him not as book, but as man, the book functions as a necessary evil and physical stand-in for the real man: his affirmation in lines like “Comarado this is no book, / Who touches this touches a man” does not celebrate the “paper and types” themselves, somehow locating their intrinsic beauty and clarity in their physicality (Poetry and Prose 611). Instead, the “book” forges a conduit or medium, not in itself a human soul; the spirit of Whitman’s poet defeats the commodity, reaching past its limitations to the reader’s heart. The medium is clearly not intended to occupy the same space in the sacred epiphanic moments between reader and author, but instead disappears altogether: “this is not book.” Rather than

1 0 2 â•‡ :: t r a n s f o r m i n g t h e m a r k e t a bourgeois, sentimental pattern of consumption, I see this as a brilliant commercial strategy to imbue such value into the product that its material dimensions disappear altogether, a perfect wedding of self-promotion and romantic poetry. Verses 5 and 6 of section 1 of “A Song for Occupations” vigorously oppose the increasingly professional roles and settings that define and condition human contact and communication in a market society. That we must engage one another constantly through market relationships according to our “occupations” clearly irks the poet figure. The poet figure rhetorically asks what occupation the reader imagines him in. The exercise, of course, is meant to show how silly it is to attempt to reduce such a wondrous exemplar of humanity into the reductive and small role of a singular “occupation.” His lists, “Were I as the head teacher or charitable proprietor or wise statesman,” are punctuated with the monetary reference “what would it amount to?” (Leaves 87). His venom for the market takeover of human relations builds as he utters the unutterable position the poet might occupy, the pinnacle of vulgarity and exploitation in economic relations: “Were I to you as the boss employing and paying you, would that satisfy you?” (Leaves 87). Whitman strives to shock his reader in this line by showing how appalling the words “boss employing and paying” can be when they intrude on the quiet, communal intimacy forged with the reader in the earlier invitation to “[l]oaf with me on the grass . . . loose the stop from your throat, / Not words, not music or rhyme I want . . . not custom or lecture” (Leaves 28). The suggestion that the poet figure now wants labor and profit from his reader after his earlier refusal of any linguistic work and production (“not [even] words”) seems sheer blasphemy. This is clearly a violation of the relaxed, noneconomic relationship between the narrator and reader at the beginning of “Song of Myself.” Thus the hierarchical terms of power and exploitation in a capitalistic setting are intended to sound like obscenities in “A Song for Occupations.” Although the narrator claims in the ensuing lines never to deal in “the usual terms” of the marketplace, the readers transacted with the author in precisely these terms at the moment they purchased the book as customers. Whitman’s poet figure works to establish confidence with his readers by distancing himself from hucksters and con men who increasingly populated the marketplace. The 8 July 1849 New York Herald reported the “Arrest


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of the Confidence Man,” a notorious figure in the mold of Melville’s swindlers who prey on victims’ idealistic adherence to the moral principles of faith and trust. (The most effective con man preys on human insecurities and fears, especially manipulating the sense of moral guilt.) The Herald article describes the apprehension of “an old offender” known as “the confidence man” who would go up to a perfect stranger in the street, and being a man of genteel appearance, would easily command an interview [and] say ‘have you confidence in me to trust me with your watch till tomorrow;’ the stranger, at this novel request, supposing him to be some old acquaintance, not at the moment recollected, allows him to take the watch, thus placing ‘confidence’ in the honesty of the stranger, who walks off laughing, and the other, supposing it to be a joke, allows him so to do. In this way he has been duped. (qtd. in Parker 227)

Whitman’s assurance that he is no con man and wants nothing from the reader but the hum of his voice, not his money, signals that this is a wholly noneconomic transaction. In “Song of Myself” the poet figure also reassures that his song is devoid of didacticism or economic intent: “Behold I do not give lectures or little charity, / What I give I give out of myself” (Leaves 70). What he gives is wholly unmediated by public social conventions. He tries to disaffiliate himself from genteel rhetoricians who can coax the watch right off a man’s wrist with a noble appeal to the moral, Christian principle of trust. He does this to rid the readers of any skepticism inculcated in them from excessive exposure to the culture’s bombarding rhetoric that tried to reform their lifestyles, voting habits, and spending habits. The poet figure’s lack of concern with economics couples with his de-emphasis of the text as persuasive, duplicitous “lectures” to create a communal atmosphere in opposition to the intense competitive air of the market society. The narrator’s message in the opening section of “A Song for Occupations” is clear: I don’t profit from you, dear reader. He removes himself wholly from marketplace modes of relation by finally denying that he could ever be a worker or an employer: “Neither a servant nor a master am I” (Leaves 87). He makes clear his intention to distance himself from the professional authorship in which poets like himself inevitably engage when he says that he is no haggler, no stock adjuster: “I take no sooner a large price than a small price” but instead “will have my own whoever

1 0 4 â•‡ :: t r a n s f o r m i n g t h e m a r k e t enjoys me” (Leaves 87). The poet projects himself as a nonprofit singer here, whose verses do not aggressively sell themselves to target consumers, but offer themselves up to “whoever enjoys me.” His intention is to level out the otherwise hierarchical power relations between people in the marketplace, whether between “boss” and employee, or professional writer and book buyer. There will be no capitalistic jockeying for position, the narrator assures his readers, because “I will be even with you, and you shall be even with me” (Leaves 88). While he is so intent on leveling out experience in order to put himself and the reader on even footing, he never once sympathizes with the reader on the basis of common experience as workers in and for a marketplace, when he could easily have included a line like “you work and so too do I, you have a boss and so do I.” Indeed, his only reference to his own occupation in “A Song for Occupations” engages the work of writing for a fleeting moment.17 In section 5, for example, the narrator makes paper the subject in one particular sentence, not relationships between authors, readers, or publishers. The line begins with a self-reflexive focus. “The paper I write on” could potentially yield insights from a practitioner of the trade of writing. Instead, professional specificity breaks up for the sake of global universality, as it often does in Whitman, as the paper becomes something “you write on.” Anything like historical specificity usually gives way to a generalized, holistic, even mystical diffuseness. Even the poet himself diffuses at the end of “Song of Myself” when he departs “as air” returning to the earth through organic regeneration, both drifting in “lacy jags” and scattered in the soil beneath our boot soles (Leaves 88). The words are no longer those of a professional author, as the “we” indicates. These are all of the words that all of us write: “And every word we write . . . and every cross and twirl of the pen” (Leaves 94) makes up a universal ritual, not a specialized skill practiced by professionals in an economically defined market for letters. Authorship is represented by the narrator as a universally granted, democratic right and entitlement, not a privilege practiced by specialized professionals whose skill is measured in proportion to the market’s demand for their writing. This is one of the reasons why Whitman so vehemently resists commodification and exchange, and why he is driven to obscure his status as professional author. Making the layman an author of sorts is a gesture not without commercial appeal. Whitman attempts to grant universal authorship when he writes:


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“Because . . . you are no scholar and never saw your name in print . . . do you give in that you are any less immortal?” (Leaves 88). Whitman represented the work of writing as a nonmarketplace activity in his poetry because he knew that writing had become a lucrative profession in the ontological world. The professional “Walter Whitman” created his literary persona “I Walt” as an escape from the bustling urban market to “paths untrodden, / In the growth by margins of pond waters,” as an escape from his real occupation, from the life of publication, from the life that exhibits itself, From all the standards hitherto publish’d, from the pleasures,

profits, conformities . . .

Strong upon me the life that does not exhibit itself, yet

contains all the rest . . . (Leaves 1891–2 112, emphasis mine)

The true wonder of writing in an economic culture is summed up in a statement Thoreau made in his journal: “Who will not confess that the necessity to get money has helped to ripen some of his schemes?” ( Journal 3 282). Money “helped to ripen” Whitman’s poet figure, ironically enough, of “free” verse, escaped from the life of profit ( Journal 3 282). The commercial world of production and bookmaking was always already integral to Whitman the businessman, as we know from the effort and systematization of his aesthetic project to studiously avoid strain and artifice in his poet figure as well as his “leaves.” Despite crafting his poetic persona in a way that privileges “the life that does not exhibit itself” over the life of profit in his poetic persona, the two categories were never truly separate in his finished products, which engaged the “conformities” of self-exhibition and publicity in the mythologized market of Whitman’s imagination as much as they defiantly renounced it. Whitman, like all the authors that form the subject of this book, came to the work of writing then, as many do now, “stretched or crucified between the seemingly irreconcilable extremes of performance as self-expression and performance as self-commodification” (McConnell 92). It is precisely this dilemma that has driven each of these authors to engage the market as they did; the challenge to each was to find a way to make self-expression and self-commodification compatible, to make the work of writing a dramatic performance that speaks for the self as much as it sells the self.

p a r t 3 :: Worrying the Woman Question

U5

U

doll arish all over Rebecca Harding Davis’s Market Success and the Economic Perils of Transcendentalism

For Fern and Whitman, the antebellum market revolution inspired innovations in aesthetics to fit the leading-edge business practices of arguably the greatest self-promoters in the history of American literature. As they adapted the genre conventions of the domestic novel and the romantic poet to fit their radical marriage of art and laissez-faire capitalism, they reimagined gender roles in the business world. It was precisely those new gender roles in the new economy to which Davis and Melville reacted. This chapter examines their reactions to the market revolution in terms of its impact on Â�women—not as victims caught in a wildfire of economic change, but as free agents at the precipice of tremendous social and material advancement. Would such opportunity be squandered? What was the future of women’s roles in society and the workforce given the profound changes brought by the market revolution? Was there hope in factory work? Could maternal demands survive women’s movement into the public sphere? Were women encroaching on male territory, according to Victorian values, that could somehow be deemed justifiable and not “unladylike” or overambitious? As women moved into the professional art world, the question arose as to how their presence would engage and de-center romantic male notions of creativity. What promise did the market hold for women artists, and was its master narrative of self-reliant talent transcending the material reality of the publishing industry setting women up for exploitation, underpayment, or rejection from the cruel masses? Davis and Melville worry the woman question in the next two chapters of this book: Davis imagines the future of women artists in the market, warning that idealized, romantic notions of self-as-artist are particularly vulnerable at the dawn of the Gilded Age. Melville worries the woman question in terms of what he sees as an almost inevitable breakdown of sepa-

1 1 0 â•‡ ::â•… w o r r y i n g t h e w o m a n q u e s t i o n rate-spheres ideologies, yielding futures of freedom at the cost of exploitation for women, as he playfully de-centers notions of male authorship. The pulse of Rebecca Harding Davis’s professional life was strong, steady, and undeniably robust. “Life in the Iron-Mills,” the first publication for the thirty-year-old woman from Wheeling, Virginia, appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in April 1861, initiating a long and prolific literary career for Davis. In the next fifty years, she would publish at least 292 stories and serials in over twenty-five different journals. As a writer of magazine fiction and essays, Davis contributed to prestigious periodicals such as Scribner’s, Harper’s, and the Atlantic Monthly as well as to popular presses such as Peterson’s, the journal with the largest circulation in the country. She also took positions writing for the New York Tribune, the New York Independent, and the Saturday Evening Post. Of her serialized writings, twelve were published as books. She was a savvy businessperson, particularly wise in her negotiations with editors such as James T. Fields. Davis’s authorial persona of the anti-“money-getting” realist reformer complements rather than contradicts her role as literary entrepreneur. Her anti-Emersonian view of artistic production did not make her a rabid materialist in the literary market either. Instead she was aware of the fashionability of an antimaterialist stance toward the production of art, and utilized it in her best financial interest. Two different perspectives of authorship popular in the nineteenth century emerge: Davis’s anti-greed tales and her own clever capitalism appear to contradict each other but share a strong refutation of the divinely inspired artist. What obscures this connection is the misconception that Davis possessed weak business skills and the underestimation of the depth and breadth of her fictional refutation of idealized conceptions of artistic creation. The paradox at the heart of these competing images of authorship for Davis is her varying use of Emerson to justify each. “Marcia,” “Ellen,” “The Wife’s Story,” “Anne,” and “Life in the Iron-Mills” showcase characters who suffer the perils of transcendentalist views of authorship, especially when they try to conjoin them with the market. Aesthetic ambition becomes perverted into economic ambition in each of these cases; their transcendental leanings make them too capitalistic. Interestingly, in Davis’s own career, her ethic could not have been more capitalistic, as she regarded any divine sense of her own vocation with the guarded skepticism of a wily seasoned professional: she employed such romantic notions of authorship in her

Dollarish All Overâ•…

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dealings with publishers and editors only calculatingly and fully aware that the market was never so flush with sympathetic wealthy patrons as the Horatio Alger novels would lead us to believe. How can we reconcile these opposites then? Was Davis hypocritically mastering the free-market game of producing and selling fiction she so sharply moralized against as “dollarish all over” (Harris, Realism 58), scorning the “mere shopman of literature” (Davis, “Anne” 241)â•flphrases that might have come from Emerson himself, a man famous for lines like “things, not men, ride in the saddle of the nation” and “out of doors all seems a market” (qtd. in Gilmore 114)? Common to these competing models of authorship is Davis’s distaste for the transcendental artist. If her procapitalist career seems irreconcilable with her anticapitalist fiction, one need only look to Davis’s own deep respect of the market’s cruelty for answers. She was acutely aware of its coldness, anonymity, and ability to turn self-reliant aesthetes with stars in their eyes into paupers. In both her fiction and her career, Davis possessed a heightened sensitivity toward the prospect of professional failure, measurable as both Â� humiliation—particularly in “The Wife’s Tale”â•flfor the artist who bears his or her soul in the public eye, and financial ruin. In both, she believed transcendental notions of artistry could do no favors, functioning only as a blinding agent that could potentially transform artists into buffoons, whose failure becomes in itself entertainment to an audience she knew could swiftly turn savage. The key to these opposite notions of authorship, then, springs directly from Davis’s belief in realism as an aesthetic and work ethic preferable to transcendentalism, which not only produces bad art but also encourages bad business. Indeed, the biggest threat to Davis’s aspiring women (or heavily feminized male) artists and inept self-promoters (alternately conned and exploited by its tradesmen, or rejected by mocking audiences) in her fiction is the punishment of failing in the market, much as it was in her own career. Davis’s ethos was clear: the merciless punishment the market unleashes on its failed artists is elicited by a chain beginning with bad aesthetics and incorporating an egocentric sense of self, a bankrupt set of guiding career principles, incompetent business practices, and eventual ruin. Her cautionary tales embrace realism precisely as a tonic for misguided professional ambition and a corrective for aesthetically reaching beyond the material and social realities of one’s grasp.1 While Davis rejects the transcendental poet for an artist grounded

1 1 2 â•‡ ::â•… w o r r y i n g t h e w o m a n q u e s t i o n in material and cultural realities in both her anti-greed tales and the clever capitalism of her career, what problematizes her materialist, business-savvy situation in the nonidealist camp is her use of antimaterialist sentiment in her fiction. I want to move beyond the rather obvious explanation that she chose anticapitalist moralizing in her fiction because crass materialism did not sell (although it most certainly did when it was heavily moralized in sentimental rags-to-riches tales, particularly in the Gilded Age fiction of Horatio Alger). Instead, I argue that Davis’s rejection of romantic notions of artistry also signals her embrace of realism, both literary and as a guiding set of professional principles. She faults the transcendental artist figure in the fiction for displaced and inappropriately acted-upon ambition, the sin of aesthetic idealism that becomes greed, while she denounces the romantic model of literary production in her own career precisely because it hampers efficiency and limits profits by blinding the author to the social exigencies of readers and publishers: the transcendental poet conflates aesthetics with economics in both cases, neglecting the imperatives of labor for the family unit in the fiction and overlooking the reality of the literary market in her career. Realism, rather than hypocrisy, is at the core of this paradoxical advocacy of Davis’s contrasting views of authorship. The savvy and guile she exercised in her own career reflects this ethos, which was a perfect match for the zeitgeist of the emergent Gilded Age, one worried about the perils of venture capitalism as much as its economic impact on art and the roles of women. My argument makes a connection that has not yet been demonstrated in Davis scholarship. My sense of Davis’s rejection of Emerson and embrace of a realistic ethos that guided her career and ultimately led to her success springs from my reading of her letters to her son, her publishers, and her editors. Davis possessed an uncanny business sense that informed her shrewd negotiations with editors and her use of conventional sentimental plots, often featuring antimaterialistic themes and marriage endings. As her long and successful career showed, the domestic role and the artistic role were not in the debilitating conflict that one might have assumed.2 Maternal advice and sage literary wisdom are perfectly consonant, for example, in a letter Davis wrote to her son, Richard. Under Davis’s tutelage, Richard would establish himself as a famous public figure; he had his mother to thank for his literary work ethic. The recipe for success is quintessential Davis in its foregrounding of the importance of human sympathy,


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humor, and the sharpening of skills through real practice, all packaged with a pragmatic punch aimed at disabusing the young man of any pretensions to romantic notions of authorship: “It is not Â�inspiration—it never was Â�that—without practice, with any writer from Shakespeare down . . . real success takes time and patient, steady work,” she advised, signing off unsentimentally to roll up her sleeves and return to work: “I had to stop my work to say all this, so goodbye dear old chum” (qtd. in Harris, Realism 68). In this chapter, I reclaim Davis’s business Â�expertise—predicated on her particularly pragmatic approach to the authorial Â�vocation—at several key junctures in her career. I then examine how her understanding of the writer’s role that guided those business relations directly shaped her attacks on Emersonian notions of the self as foils to her grounded, politically engaged perspective, which Jean Pfalezer usefully describes as “deriving from her belief in human agency” and yielding prose with the ability “to refer, to typify, to depict . . . to connote, if not denote, material reality” (21). Davis’s first negotiations as an author appear on the surface to be the antithesis of the savvy author who would provide her son thirty years later with the hard truth that getting published “depends on the article’s suiting the present needs of the magazine, and also”â•flless nobly, yet true to the often arbitrary power editors hold over authorsâ•fl“on the mood of the editor when he reads it” (qtd. in Olsen 149). The arbiter of culture who helped launch Davis’s career was James T. Fields, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly. At the age of twenty-nine, Davis sent “Life in the Iron-Mills” in 1860 to the Atlantic Monthly, and in January 1861 she received a response. Years later she described in a letter to her son how she “carried the letter half a day before opening it, being so sure it was a refusal” (C. Davis 40). Instead, she discovered Fields’s eager acceptance and a check for $50. (This check echoes the one Mitchell writes for Hugh in “Life in the Iron-Mills,” as Hugh also carries it around until finally deciding upon his relation to it in a way that dictates his fate.) Davis replied in a letter that “Life in the Iron-Mills” was perhaps too dull a title and could be “more ‘taking.’” She suggested, “[H]ow would ‘The Korl Woman’ do? . . . However, I shall be satisfied with your Â�choice—whatever it may be” (qtd. in Harris, Realism 57). Davis’s response to Fields’s request for another story following the publication of “Iron-Mills” makes her appear, on the surface, to care little about money. Although noting its playfulness, Harris takes Davis’s antimaterialistic pose at face value, suggesting that the economics of authorship were

1 1 4 â•‡ ::â•… w o r r y i n g t h e w o m a n q u e s t i o n not a major concern for Davis. But at a closer look, Davis shrewdly employs an attitude that was highly salable among writers of the day: the author’s purpose was “higher” than merely commercial values might dictate. The persona that voices her extended metaphor of the shallowness of money is ethically opposed to monetary incentives, much in the way her anticapitalist reformer narrator is in “Iron-Mills.” Instead of bad business sense, I find the following stance consonant with the “Iron-Mills” Â�narrator’s—an anti-greed position highly sensitive to the power of money to ruin artists or at least “cheapen” their art. Davis knew the paradoxical salability of this stance as it commanded $50 from the Atlantic Monthly for “Iron-Mills.” She wrote, I receive the offer as frankly as you made it but you must pardon me if I decline it. Money is enough a ‘needful commodity’ with me to make me accept with a complacent smile whatever you think the articles are worth. But if I were writing with a hundred dollar bill before me in order to write on it ‘I have paid him’ I am afraid the article would be broad and deep just $100 and no Â�more—dollarish all over. (qtd. in Harris, Realism 58)

Davis goes on in the letter to ask for constructive criticism of her writing rather than money, suggesting that she valued artistic integrity over monetary compensation: “I will ask a favor of you instead of money. If any of your exchanges notice the story will you send them to me? That is a trouble, is it not? I would like to see them, partly from selfish notions and partly because it would please my father and Â�mother—I trust your kindness, to give me the Â�pleasure—provided any one likes the article as you do” (Harris, Kindred 62). Her insistence that she cares more about constructive criticism than money is the humble pose of a fledgling writer, a convention used in many of Emily Dickinson’s letters to Thomas Wentworth Higginson.3 Such a humble pose, further, simultaneously expresses that she values her work more than any one short cash advance, refusing to allow the carrot of a $100 bill before her to function as incentive. It would not only predetermine the scope and depth of her writing, but would suggest that it was a one-time freelance job without the dignity of a more permanent and ongoing material reward. The phrase “dollarish all over” is not a complete renunciation of capital so much as it is a rejection of definitions of her writing and career as ephemeral, which she appraised at a far higher value than the hypothetical $100 bill; she envisioned her writing career lasting


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well beyond the single job it would take to earn it. This position not only lends her more dignity than a single advance can reflect, but also appeals to the Atlantic Monthly’s association with literary rather than popular fiction and its sense of great literature as immortal, as opposed to the so-called ephemera of popular tales, like those Henry David Thoreau denigrates in the chapter “Reading” in Walden. Davis’s correspondence with Fields, furthermore, took place at a crucial juncture in the life of the Atlantic Monthly. Fields had recently taken over as editor in 1861, “eager to bolster the magazine’s subscription rate,” so he began including more fiction by women. His aim dramatically shifted by the middle of the decade, however, “to distinguish between high and low fiction, favoring work by Henry James and John W. DeForest to the stories of romance and domestic concerns by women,” as Anne Boyd observes (211). Davis nonetheless seemed a perfect fit, as she was a woman writer who could entertain, yet with a gritty realism that fit the new direction of the magazine. Davis knew she was an exception to the rule that “as literary tastes tended more toward realism, the kind of stories that many women were contributing were deemed less important” (Boyd 211).4 Davis displays strength in the letter given the vagaries of trade courtesy (publishers’ first rights to authors) then very much in flux. Refusing the advance kept her a free agent to market her wares to the highest bidder; acceptance of Fields would have been like a professional marriage vow of loyalty to him only, an unnecessary constraint to her future growth. Indeed, she wanted him to value her voice and vision above capital to establish the Atlantic Monthly as a continuing outlet for her work, yet she wished to remain free to accept higher bids should they arise.5 Thus she could avoid breaking a promise to him she did not want to keep. Davis consistently wrote for Peterson’s throughout her career, especially when she needed the money most. Her “dedication” to the Atlantic Monthly was anything but loyal as she continued to market her writing to the highest bidder in a free market of self-interested professional authors. In fact, Davis received a tantalizing offer of $300 from Peterson’s for a story she had written in two weeks in 1862, just one short year after her $50 debut publication of “Iron-Mills” in the Atlantic Monthly. She wrote her Atlantic Monthly editor to inform him that he had been outbid by the popular ladies’ magazine. In a bold business maneuver, she went on to explain that she had little respect for pieces commonly published in Peterson’s, urging Fields to increase his

1 1 6 â•‡ ::â•… w o r r y i n g t h e w o m a n q u e s t i o n payments because “[i]f I wrote stories suitable for other magazines I could make more” (qtd. in Rose 168). He responded by offering her $8 per page, to which she replied, “I accept your offer to write solely for the A. M.”â•fla promise she happily broke on more than one occasion shortly thereafter (within the following year) and throughout her career. Davis knew she could literally afford to employ antimaterialistic rhetoric in her initial negotiations with Fields because, at the time, she was living with her parents free from financial pressures. After she married and had children, however, her husband could not support her with two lowpaying part-time jobs as a legal assistant and postal clerk the way her father had as a substantial businessman and city official. But while at home, there was no real need for her to extract money from Fields immediately because Davis’s economic situation in her father’s household was comfortable enough for her not to work for money in any capacity during the thirteen years she lived there after graduating from the three-year Female Seminary in Philadelphia in 1848. Davis’s letters to Fields also appear deferential because they support the concept of the gentleman publisher, as Sharon Harris notes (Kindred 61). Yet it is equally important to remember that this is her first relationship with a publisher, and therefore she lacks the experience and accomplishments in the trade to force her will. Nonetheless, the core import of the March 1861 letter to Fields asserts her judgment over his, as she says “you over estimate” “Life in the Iron-Mills” because of “the novelty of the scene of the story” (Harris, Kindred 62). The realist in her would take over as her career progressed and her successes mounted. She gradually dropped any early deference to the code of the gentleman publisher. In these letters to her editors and publishers, Davis exhibits similar crafty maneuvering, yet with a decidedly different tone and tropes. This is particularly evident when reading her letters to publishers chronologically throughout her career. She becomes more assertive and powerful with her demands by the late 1860s, as the early coquettishness, so calculatingly employed as to call attention to its own artificeâ•fl“[I] accept with a complacent smile whatever you think these articles are worth”â•flall but vanishes (qtd. in Harris, Realism 58). In its place, we see the businesswoman take over, selecting her metaphors with the no-nonsense clarity and bluntness of a CEO directing an urgent deal. Witness the swift and severe way in which she dispatches F. P. Church and William Conant Church in her April 1868 letter address-


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ing their demands that she abridge Waiting for the Verdict to fit the reduced page size of their journal after originally promising no limits on length: “It would be the equivalent of asking Mr. Hennessy to cut off the heads of his figures because you wanted to alter the size of your page” (Harris, Kindred 66). The analogy of decapitating figures in fine art sets the tone for her demand, thinly veiled as a threat, to finish the story only under the condition “that you give me not less than 35 pages in each number after May 1st” (Harris, Kindred 67). The pragmatic focus on fundamentals of length and spelling, particularly with regard to silent edits of the slang in Margret Howth and length, combines with a self-effacing sense of her own craft that is more humor and swagger than it is meek, naïve, or fearful. She makes no pretentions to literary timelessness, reflecting on the contemporary relevance of her earlier writing in a letter to Charles Scribner written late in her career. He had asked her for a collection of her stories, eventually published in 1892 as Silhouettes of American Life. “I know that these stories are not at all modern nor at all ‘up to date,’” she confessed, “[b]ut are there not a few people still living who prefer a musty tang in their books as in their Madeira?” (Harris, Kindred 68). One cannot picture any of the transcendentalists, for example, Margaret Fuller, characterizing their life’s work as growing a funky “musty tang” to appeal to heartier readers. Davis’s business expertise was on display later in her career as she again successfully capitalized upon the erosion of the gentleman publisher’s code, the mutual recognition of editors and publishers of first rights to an author’s work. Using her pseudonymous authorship to her advantage, Davis published the same story for two different journals, generating double returns from her work. Of course, this raises ethical questions of professional integrity today, but the rules of the writer’s trade were not yet firmly established in the 1860s during the early commercialization of letters. Business ethics were in flux during this transitional period toward professionalized authorship, as the patron system gave way to a literary market in which writers worked as entrepreneurs with no loyal ties. This is especially true in Davis’s willingness to submit the same weird-but-true story to two journals. “Ellen” first appeared in Peterson’s by the author of “The Second Life” in 1863. Davis sent the Atlantic Monthly the same story two years later in 1865 when they solicited a true story about the war. The Atlantic Monthly published “Ellen” by the author of “Life in the Iron-Mills.” The

1 1 8 â•‡ ::â•… w o r r y i n g t h e w o m a n q u e s t i o n two manuscripts are almost identical, as Helen Woodward Shaeffer discovered. Peterson’s defended Davis by claiming that their story was fiction based on real-life events, while the Atlantic Monthly’s was “the bald facts” of “Ellen’s” history (Shaeffer 117). The cover-up worked and Davis profited. Ironically, Davis would publish an essay at the end of her career in 1902 for the Independent called “The Disease of Money-Getting”: apparently her own entrepreneurial guile was not part of this hampering illness.6 The double publication of “Ellen” blurs the boundaries between popular fiction and “serious” literature in the Davis canon. Tillie Olsen’s suggestion that Davis abandoned artistry for money and acquiesced to financial pressures by writing popular trash as a “professional workhorse” (135) becomes dubious when an identical story was suitable to both the highbrow conservative tastes of the Atlantic Monthly editors and the pulpy sensationalism of the Peterson’s editors. Davis’s “serious” writing, such as “Iron-Mills,” employed the sensationalized “realism” of popular literary modes. “Ellen” typifies how Davis’s fiction straddled high and low literary tastes. Like “Iron-Mills,” “Ellen” is based on social realities, especially human suffering in a historically specific contemporary cultural context. Hugh Wolfe’s tale in “Iron-Mills” also might have been very suitable for Peterson’s given its sensationalism and the spectacle it makes of Hugh’s tragic suicide as well as the deformity and vile repulsiveness of the freak-show character Deborah. Peterson’s often published gothic and mystery stories, with which the rhetoric of “Iron-Mills” is consonant. The generic division between high and low, serious and potboiler is not so clear when we look at “Iron-Mills” in the context of popular writing. If one were to excise the philosophizing of Mitchell and the men on their tour of the mills, the story would have been extremely suitable for the popular ladies’ magazine given the presumed absence of the “intellectual” component for the educated, mostly male, elite Atlantic Monthly audience. Writing for money was always part of Davis’s conception of authorship, part of her realistic ethos that spread to other dimensions of her life. The promise of long-term financial stability from writing, I suggest, pulled her out of the biggest emotional and professional breakdown of her life. In 1863, she married Clarke Davis in Wheeling, Virginia, and moved to his sister’s home in Philadelphia. Clarke’s income was not enough for them to live on their own, so the new couple was forced to share living space with relatives. The lack of money, in fact, precluded any honeymoon. The


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living situation with Clarke’s sister, Carrie Cooper, and her husband and small children was not amenable to Rebecca’s plans for writing and/or caring for a domestic sphere of her own. All accounts show that there was no outwardly expressed animosity between the Davises and the Coopers. Davis responded by escaping the demands of the domestic sphere, of helping Carrie with what amounted to tasks for the betterment of the Cooper household. This situation had made domestic labor all the more alienating, since the children and the home itself were not Davis’s own. She sought refuge in the Philadelphia Public Library, where she could write in order to provide a much needed supplement to Clarke’s meager income. The struggle to produce profitable literature and have a baby in a home not truly her own contributed to a nervous breakdown in June 1863. Throughout the winter of her pregnancy, Davis’s physical and mental health fluctuated, sometimes incapacitating her. She spent much of her time bedridden, which she said was “like the valley of the shadow of death,” feeling “afraid of the end” (qtd. in Rose 158). Significantly, Davis’s physician advised her not to engage in “the least reading or writing for fear of bringing back the trouble in her head” (qtd. in Rose 158). This was part of the treatment prescribed for “hysteria” by writer/physician S. Weir Mitchell, whose prohibition of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s reading and writing inspired the horrifying story “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” Mitchell was a close family friend of the Davises in Philadelphia and commonly treated the mysterious female “hysteria” by severely isolating the patient and abruptly cutting off all literary activities. Of course, Davis was not rehabilitated by such therapy. What most likely returned her to health was the fact that she did write during this period despite her doctor’s orders. Unbeknownst to her doctor, she wrote during her pregnancy an extremely self-reflexive piece, “The Wife’s Story,” which was published shortly after the birth of Richard Harding Davis in April 1864. Her literary production, plus Clarke’s promise (which she reported to her close friend Annie Fields, wife of publisher James T.: “If I get well we are going directly to live by Â�ourselves—it is all clear now. You know what that means to me”), were tokens of future economic autonomy that buoyed her (qtd. in Olsen 128). Her sense of success both as a mother with the healthy birth of her child and as a writer with the completion of a publishable manuscript coincided with the end of her illness. By fall of 1864, the family of three moved out of the Coopers’ residence into a home of their own,

1 2 0 â•‡ ::â•… w o r r y i n g t h e w o m a n q u e s t i o n bringing Davis full reign over her domestic sphere as well as a less crowded writing environment for the first time since her marriage. After the move, Davis was still actively interested in gaining as much capital from her writing as possible, as finances continued to be tight. So she more vigorously cultivated her relationship with the editors at the popular magazine Peterson’s, for whom she had written a sensational murder mystery called “Murder of the Glen Ross.” Peterson’s, unlike the Atlantic Monthly, did not target the relatively small readership of the educated elite, but instead was designed for the masses, boasting “the largest circulation of any ladies’ periodical in the United States, or even in the world” with 140,000 subscribers (Peterson’s January–June 1863 350). Davis’s interest in publishing for the magazine was driven by its larger economic base than the Atlantic Monthly’s, promising to pay writers “more for all its original stories than all other ladies’ magazines put together” (Peterson’s July–December 1865 291). Such unprecedented financial rewards now available to women set up the ethical dilemma Davis placed at the center of “The Wife’s Story.” Davis knew this was a philosophical and cultural problem of immense importance to readers interested in the market’s impact on the domestic sphere. The subject was not only timely, it was worthy of producing passionate prose, since the issue had recently touched her life. The protagonist of the story, written during Davis’s pregnancy, dreams of becoming an artist. In the dream, the character Hetty writes an opera, only to watch its first production fail miserably, much to her public humiliation. At the low point of the dream, after having lost it all in the cultural market (including her husband to a heart attack during the performance!), she wakes up to embrace the security of motherhood with new zest. What looks like a rejection of public, professional writing for the safety and security of motherhood is more emphatically a rejection of the Emersonian myth of the divinely inspired artist, as her worst sin is the assertion of artistic egotism: “No poet or artist,” she says, “was ever more sincere in the belief that the divine spoke through him than I” (“Wife’s Story” 14). Hetty’s attempt to isolate herself from her immediate social network of her husband and child represents exactly the kind of disaffiliation and self-reliance in the name of artistry that Davis disapproves of. Like “Life in the Iron-Mills,” “The Wife’s Story” critiques this sort of blind, radical individualism that overtakes the character with artistic propensities: the delusions of abso-


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lute transcendence above the imperatives of economic and social relations are projected as deadly. This is not a conservative, antifeminist promotion of fawning female dependence so much as it is a warning against transcendental notions of artistic production.7 Davis herself showed that one could both meet the domestic responsibilities of antebellum motherhood and produce appealing literary merchandise as a professional because “The Wife’s Story” appeared in the June issue of the Atlantic Monthly following the birth of her son in April 1864. Davis showed by her own example that the production of art does not necessarily sever the writer’s social and familial ties. Davis’s 1876 story “Marcia” depicts yet another female writer protagonist who decides to reject marriage to fulfill her professional ambitions. The story’s dark conclusion advocates independence from male possession more so than “The Wife’s Story.” Marcia’s failed career sends her back under the command of her “owner” (that is, husband) who takes her back “in plumes, the costliest that her owner’s money could buy” (928). The narrator voices both sadness at Marcia’s failure and horror at her exploitation. What is important for our purposes is that Marcia’s writing career fails for the same reason Hetty’s attempt at professional writing does: both are tainted by idealizations of artistic production. While Hetty’s artistic egotism and conceit of divine inspiration are her downfall, Marcia’s flaw is her tragic naïveté about the work of writing: “The popular belief in the wings of genius, which can carry it over hard work and all such obstacles as ignorance of grammar or even the spelling book, found in her a marked example” (926). Just as Marcia overlooks the necessity of hard work and the fundamentals of spelling and grammar in her idealized view of writing, Hetty lacks the humility to see the power of the mass audience to turn an author out into the streets, failed and hungry. Both characters are reflections of the danger in the Emersonian divinely inspired poet of neglecting the basics of audience awareness and the skills of the craft, aspects of authorship on which Davis prided herself. In a letter to her son, she employs the language of the skilled tradesâ•fl“You are a journeyman, not a master workman”â•flto define his current phase of authorial development, noting that he must diligently practice the basics, such as the expression of “mood,” “tone,” and character through the descriptive detail of “looks” and “dress” (qtd. in Olsen 149). Her advice is to keep his dream from becoming a transcendental nightmare.

1 2 2 â•‡ ::â•… w o r r y i n g t h e w o m a n q u e s t i o n Gothic horror conventions express the nightmarish consequences of such delusional aspirations in “Life in the Iron-Mills.” Within the context of abusive labor conditions, the narrator assures us that the realism that describes Hugh’s working class will read like a gothic thriller, for “no Ghost horror would terrify you more.”8 Hugh’s story, like any shocking horror tale, promises the ghoulish details of “living death” and “soul starvation” (Davis, “Iron-Mills” 23). The realism of Davis, according to Sharon M. Harris’s useful definition, “insists upon reporting quotidian American life, abandoning the ‘rose tinted’ and homogeneous perspective of that life and rendering her material so as to give her readers an illusion of actual experience. . . . Davis was acutely interested in historical locales . . . and concerned with artistically recording the ‘accurate history’ of the present” (Realism 6–7). Davis registers the effect of the environment on Hugh through violent, grotesque imagery, which makes a spectacle of him and his sculpture; her aim is to reflect the artist in his economically oppressive condition in a way that draws attention to its superlative and sensational horror. His sculpture, for example, bears a “mad, half-despairing gesture of drowning” (Davis, “Iron-Mills” 23). Death, torture, and madness are the hallmarks of this artist figure; the “dirty canary desolately chirp[ing] in its cage” at the beginning of the story symbolizes Hugh’s longing for artistic expression in liberating conditions (Davis, “Iron-Mills” 12). The well-documented nineteenth-century practice of keeping caged birds in mines to indicate air toxicity evokes a sense of degradation and sullied dreams of freedom. Such gothic tropes actively work against what Jean Pfaelzer calls the “pastoral nostalgia of sentimentalism” to foreground the “class consciousness” of Davis’s social realist agenda (21). America inherited that pastoral sentimentalism’s attendant romantic myth of authorship from the late English romantic poets9 Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats, and Byron, in whose tradition artists are economically detached. The created dramatic identity of the romantic poet has little concern for labor and the poet’s ability to earn a material reward. Indeed, the problems of the economic world are represented by the American romantics,10 especially the transcendentalists, as mutually exclusive to the production of art. In writing primarily against romanticism, Davis makes Hugh the opposite of Emerson’s idealized poet in that she situates him within the social realities of the industrial world. The networks of economic relations shape Hugh Wolfe because he directly participates in them. This is the opposite of a transcendentalist


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literary persona, like Emerson’s,11 whose identity is formed in part by a negative relation to the economic world: in Thoreau we find catalogs of what socioeconomic factors do not affect him, while Emerson proclaims the supremacy of the ideal poet by how little money matters to him. Quite the contrary, Hugh, the writer figure, is a construct of industrial culture just as surely as his iron ore sculptures are. His demise occurs precisely when his vision of capital passes into a diseased version of pastoral transcendental idealism. Transcendental images of nature function in “Life in the Iron-Mills” to heighten by contrast the palpably oppressive mood of immediacy in the story. The narrator’s description of the scene outside his Â�window—smoke from “the iron-foundries . . . settles down in black, slimy pools on the muddy streets . . . clinging in a coating of greasy soot to the house-front, the two faded poplars, the faces of the passers-by”â•fldraws on the thwarted romantic vision of natural purity to enhance the incarcerating atmosphere (“Iron-Mills” 12). Both the soiled bird and the angel in the narrator’s quarters evoke the symbolic resonance of romance, especially the pastoral ideal that informs their “dream of green fields and sunshine [that] is a very old dream, â•fl almost worn out” (“Iron-Mills” 12). Hugh actively cultivates the “almost worn-out” romantic dreams12 of freedom from his oppressive working-class conditions. He constantly envisions a better life that Deborah endorses and pins all of her hopes on: “a pure life, a good-hearted life, full of beauty and kind words” and the pastoral “moment of free air on a hill-side” splashed in golden sunshine (“Iron-Mills” 41). The central conflict arises when Deborah conflates her dream of success, the very real need for money to transcend her class, with the pastoral romantic vision. Her conception of money marks the generic collision between realism and romanticism in the story, because “money” enables the oppressed workers “to go out,â•flout, I say,â•flout, lad, where t’ sun shines, and t’ heath grows, and t’ ladies walk in silken gownds, and God stays all t’ time” (“IronMills” 43). Material prosperity (“silken gownds”), pastoral purity (“where t’ sun shines”), and religious sanctity (“God stays all t’ time”) are all possible through the acquisition of money in Deborah’s view. So, understandably, she picks Mr. Mitchell’s pocket, for it contains not just money, but the stuff of transcendence, in a sympathetic version of Eve’s transgression in the Garden of Edenâ•flonly the sin in Davis clearly lies in the economic environment and not in the individual.

1 2 4 â•‡ ::â•… w o r r y i n g t h e w o m a n q u e s t i o n In “Iron-Mills,” the good hearts of the poor, such as Hugh, become spoiled and ruined by the introduction of capital into their world. Hugh’s art is presented as a longing for freedom from economic oppression; it is clear that this freedom, as Deborah assumes, cannot be attained without money. But the moment he appropriates Mitchell’s capitalist ideology’s dream of prosperity, Hugh begins his spiritual decline. The fusion of money and art, Davis tells us, is lethal because of the severity of Hugh’s economic oppression. He is starving for the cultivation of his art just as surely as he is starving for financial justice. But the desire to quench both his economic and artistic thirst all at once translates into greed in Davis’s lexicon. Once he trains his artistic imagination on colorful visions of plenitude and success with Mitchell’s stolen money clenched in his palm, he becomes intoxicated, and in the spirit of temperance reform literature, his death follows soon after. The drunken reverie the greed throws him into is a dangerous concoction of the imagination and unfettered, radically idealistic material ambition: There were times when soft floods of color in the crimson and purple flames, or the clear depth of amber in the water below the bridge, had somehow given him a glimpse of another world than this,â•flof infinite beauty and quiet somewhere. . . . Wolfe’s artist-eye grew drunk with color. . . . A man . . . free to work, to live, to love! Free! His right! He folded the scrap of paper in his hand. (“Iron-Mills” 47; emphasis mine)

The artistic vision, when drawn into the cycle of greed perpetuated by the factory owners, corrupts Hugh. The heavenly bliss of the floods of color in the “other world” quickly sinks into the vice of greed and immoral criminality, as Hugh decides to keep Mitchell’s stolen money. Davis uses a temperance reform trope (his “artist-eye grew drunk with color”) to describe Hugh’s deluded visions of class mobility (as he glimpses “another world . . . of infinite beauty”) (“Iron-Mills” 47). The religious and artistic allusions become a dangerous drunken reverie not because of some intrinsically bad quality in each, but because they become evil in the context of the temptation of greed reflected in the “folded scrap of paper” Hugh clutches in his hand (“Iron-Mills” 47). Hugh’s surrender to the deadly sin of avarice turns him into a radical individualist, drunk on his own power to reinvent himself through delusions of autonomy. Davis severely criticizes the myth of self-creation and the fulfillment of success via capital accumulation, portraying Hugh’s am-


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bition as leading to inevitable doom. The social irresponsibility of Hugh’s decision to keep the money, and therefore commit a crime, is not covered up by Davis; his decision is wrong and she shows it. But what prompts his sin is the money he grips in his hand, the essential source of his fall into evil. The language of reform, especially temperance writing, echoes through the description of Hugh drinking the money into his soul, giving way to false dreams of socioeconomic success: his “nervous fingers took it in, limp and blotted, so his soul took in the mean temptation, lapped it in fancied rights, in dreams of improved existences, drifting and endless as the cloud seas of color” (“Iron-Mills” 48). A starving artist imbued with transcendental reckless romanticism is set up to fail according to Davis. The two cultural forces she calls into question are the egocentric, socially irresponsible Emersonian aesthetic fueling that romantic recklessness and the industrial capitalism and class inequality responsible for that neediness. Herein lies Davis’s confirmation that art is an economically driven endeavor that requires an audience of consumers or a wealthy patron (which Mitchell would have been, ironically, as a check for Hugh was in the billfold that Deborah pilfered). Because the tragic victim of the story is an artist, the sadness and sense of waste in the lives of the working class become enhanced to make reform a more urgent necessity. Artists live here, the narrator tells us, within conditions where one would have never expected art to be produced, and feed their souls by producing art out of the most unlikely rubbish. Yet Hugh’s Â�discontentâ•fl Â�like the soul ache of Frederick Douglass shortly after his newly acquired literacy enlightens him to the true horrors of his Â� condition—escalates upon his realization that money is the root of his artistic frustration, driving him to the madness of a drunkard thirsty for capital. Severe economic disenfranchisement combines with romantic notions of the self and ambition, especially artistic, to lead to social disarray, discord, jail, and suicide in the story. Hugh is not just an anonymous laborer, but an artist, making his death all the more painful for middle-class eyes to watch. Hugh, Hetty, and Marcia all embrace distorted illusions of their craft riding on the “popular belief in the wings of genius” (“Marcia” 926). Davis was acutely aware of the dangers in carrying this sort of transcendental mythology into the professional era of authorship. Just as rosy visions of green hills doom Hugh, the impractical conceptions of artistry held by Hetty and Marcia are warnings about the work of writing in the Gilded

1 2 6 â•‡ ::â•… w o r r y i n g t h e w o m a n q u e s t i o n Age. Her fiction urged idealized conceptions of creativity to adapt to the practical demands of the increasingly economic and competitive country America was rapidly becoming. Davis countered Emersonian romanticism because she believed in the social responsibility of the authorial vocation, rooted in the ethos of sympathy she instructed her son, Richard, to cultivate. An entrepreneur with moral vision, she shared Cynthia Ozick’s sense of how in romanticism “‘the will becomes supernatural, and only consupiscence remains. . . . [S]omething more diametrically opposed to ethics than Romanticism would be hard to find’: what did it lead to? The self. What did it mean? Self-pride. What did it achieve? Self-delusion and delium” (“Youthful” 35). Transcendentalism was not inherently corrupt to Davis; it failed precisely because it was so ill suited, impractical, and potentially dangerous (especially in the hearts and minds of the working class and women) within the context of the increasingly capitalistic era. Davis’s pragmatic sense of authorship as practiced in her career, by contrast, was well adapted to the financial condition in which she wrote. Her professional poise gave her the insight to dramatize in her fiction the precise moment when healthy ambition transforms into self-destruction. To assume from her fiction that Davis did not believe women should harbor professional aspirations is to overlook her own ability to realize those very aspirations. The result lies in some of the most popular and incisive assessments of capitalism and the limitations of individualism of the entire era, an era ever more industrial, leaving the pastoral “dream of green fields and sunshine [that] is a very old dream,â•flalmost worn out” (“Iron-Mills” 12).

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satirizing the sphere s Refiguring Gender and Authorship in Melville

Like Davis, Melville was among the most astute critics of separate-spheres ideology at the time, tracking its erosion under the economic transformation under way by midcentury. Melville shared Davis’s acute awareness of the changes in gender roles the market revolution brought, as women increasingly found new employment in places ranging from factories to newspaper offices. Davis and Melville, with their uncanny capacity to perceive the dark consequences of even the sunniest developments, would consider very seriously in their fiction the liabilities of women’s movement into the market. While Davis decries the damage of Emersonian authorship for women, proving her realistic model fitter for the coming Gilded Age, Melville exposes the market revolution’s dismantling of separate-spheres ideology in a progressive and Â�sympathetic—yet not always Â�optimistic—vision of women’s future in the market. Melville has not long been associated with any innovative or progressive gender ideology in his writing. For all his Â�sins—conspicuously womanless fiction, swaggering male narratives dominated by male relationships, where homosexual desire wins the spotlight (Billy Budd) and women remain mere objects of exotic sexual gratification (Typee)â•flthere is ample, yet recently neglected evidence that Melville not only playfully inverted separate-spheres gender codes in Moby-Dick, he experimented with domestic adaptations of literary labor in “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” “I and My Chimney,” and his own sense of the work of writing. Melville’s conception of authorship after 1850 was bitter, tormented, and depressed, crucified between reaching an increasingly indifferent readership and writing the “Gospels in this century” (Melville, Letters 129). However accurate this portrait might be, it obscures a persistent strain in Melville’s understanding of his occupation that not only transgresses

1 2 8 â•‡ ::â•… w o r r y i n g t h e w o m a n q u e s t i o n masculine and feminine boundaries, but actively deconstructs conventional antebellum gender hierarchies in the process. The wife of Melville’s “The Apple Tree Table,” for example, aggressively violates the domestic ideals of submission, piety, and antimaterialism; her attitude is best described as executive and dominant, with no pretensions toward creating a harmonious family atmosphere: “She certainly makes no attempt to create such ambience, as she frequently speaks ‘indignantly,’ ‘contemptuously,’ with ‘high displeasure’ and refers to her family as a group of ‘fools,’” as Corey Thompson notes (41). Further, the wife’s reference to piety/formal religion emerges when she “vigorously opposes” calling in the neighbors about the mysterious ticking in the old table (it’s a bug, and not a spirit after all) in order to control the public (not private) rumor mill and thus avoid becoming “the laughing-stock of the whole town” (Melville, Short Works 378). To enforce the family’s privacy in the matter, she strictly forbids her loose-lipped housemaid “that week to go to confession, lest she should tell the priest” (Melville, Short Works 378). Albeit this is a humorous situation in which Melville plays a joke on established conventional religion and superstition, as well as on the wife’s controlling of public opinion of what goes on in the private sphere, she is shrewdly aware that rumors of the potentially supernatural table are likely to fan out of control, ironically enough, in a confidential confession within the context of organized religion. Yet another religious reference, tacitly endorsed by the tough-minded realist wife (“a female Democritus”1), emerges at the end of the story when their superstitious daughter Julia’s pious moral views of the 150-year-old bug’s survival as a token of “the glorified resurrection of the spirit of man” are dryly undercut by the narrator in the ensuing line: “it expired the next day” (Melville, Short Works 378). So much for immortality.

Loomings and Iron Rails The small example of the wife’s no-nonsense approach toward religion and superstition in this story only scratches the surface of Melville’s refiguring of public and private gender roles that extends to men. The husband narrator of “The Apple Tree Table,” for example, plays the more typically female role as depicted in antebellum fiction: he is irrational, driven by emotion, overly sensitive, Â�superstitious—qualities that render him paralyzed with fear and thus passive and powerless. While his wife fulfills more of the patriar-

Satirizing the Spheresâ•…

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chal role, he is prone to fits of passion and does not provide his family with a voice of reason. Instead he is virtually driven mad by the ticking sound in the table. She is all business to his superstition. He finds no solace in his pipe, an emblem of male domestic poise, peace, and above all, power. Deriving satisfaction from a pipe signified that a man’s business was in order, his work in the public sphere complete for the time being: the rational productivity of the market yielded to the reflective repose of pipe smoking if, according to the culture, unfinished business did not plague him in the quiet hours of the domestic sphere. Failing to unlock the mystery of the ticking table, the husband functions like a blocked writer figure, overstimulated and unable to proceed rationally or productively, which is precisely what his wife does. Romantic thought is burlesqued in the husband narrator’s paralyzed irrationality, while the woman’s progressive and pragmatic approach to the problem is admirably grounded in material and cultural realities. (The husband’s folly and the wife’s success send up the male romantic notion of authorship, which takes on more shrill and bizarre tones in Pierre.) Whereas the husband brings all his powers of mind to focus painfully on the singular ticking table, leading him to no productive ends (besides perhaps by implication the very story itself), Ahab is equally self-absorbed and vexed by his unfinished business of hunting the White Whale. The chapters “The Pipe” and “The Chart” in Moby-Dick reveal that Ahab’s disease is one suffered by professionals in the 1851 marketplace every day: his life has become dominated by all work and no play, all chart and no pipe.2 Ishmaelian moments of reflection (his loomings) commonly associated with domestic ease, unlike the iron-rails obsessing that consumes Ahab, are more provisional, contradictory, and momentary. Leisure pervades domestic reflection, and in Moby-Dick it is expressed through the capacity to take pleasure in nature. To Ahab, “out of doors all seems a market,” as Emerson said (qtd. in Gilmore 114). He has forgotten how to think reflectively much in the way he has forgotten the procedure by which to smoke a pipe on the windy deck of a ship: [T]his smoking no longer soothes. Oh, my pipe! Hard it must go with me if thy charm be gone! Here have I been unconsciously toiling, not pleasuring,â•flaye, and ignorantly smoking to windward all the while; to windward and with such nervous whiffs. . . . [W]hat business have I with this pipe? This thing that is meant for sereneness. . . . I’ll smoke no more. (Melville, Moby-Dick 134; emphasis mine)

1 3 0 â•‡ ::â•… w o r r y i n g t h e w o m a n q u e s t i o n The chase has robbed Ahab of this domestic pleasure. Significantly, the reflective thinking that eludes Ahab is associated with Ishmael’s reveries that lead to his playful inversions of separate-spheres gender ideology. Ishmael’s flights of fancy are characterized by broad divergent thinking, rather than the results-oriented, narrowly focused, often self-absorbed, convergent thinking demanded by the market. (Of course, Starbuck’s appeal to market imperatives functions as a foil to Ahab’s vengeance in “The Quarter Deck,” complicating Ahab’s alignment with business. Ahab’s obsession is nonetheless an exaggerated, imbalanced version of the reasonable, conventional acquisitive objectives for which Starbuck speaks.) Melville makes the connection between the pipe and the domestic sphere even more explicit by associating it with a wife in Mardi: “Like a good wife, a pipe is a friend and companion for life. And whoso weds with a pipe, is no longer a bachelor. After many vexations, he may go home to that faithful counselor, and ever find it full of kind consolations and suggestions” (qtd. in Delbanco 117). Associating leisure with the domestic may have been a fantasy for antebellum husbands, but this was obviously not the reality for their wives. The wife, the pipe, and the home are the locus of not only therapeutic counseling to undo the market’s damage, but of play and freedom from rigid public codes of behavior. In Moby-Dick, creativity and reflective thinking associated with leisure time on the piazza become decidedly domestic, feminine activities separate from the masculinized sphere of acquisition, competition, and economic productivity. Ishmael is the foil to Ahab due to his capacity for creativity and his distaste for business. In this vein, the novel’s narrator makes the neat and tidy, emphatically domestic, state of the ship come off looking different from the messy business of turning whales into merchandise (that is, the process of chasing, killing, and extracting marketable oil and spermaceti). The “business” end of whaling is portrayed in contrasting terms to the cleaning and decorating of the ship (feminine work in the domestic sphere), between kills and extractions (masculine work in the public sphere).

Of Penis Suits and Decorating Schemes The work of making money out of the whale is unmistakably male, as the mincer proudly wears the “Cassock,” the dried pelt of the whale’s penis, while performing his task of cutting blubber for the pots. His work is vital


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to the process of extracting capital from the whale. In this sense, the mincer’s activity is thoroughly public and male precisely because it is concerned only with monetary success in the marketplace rather than moral success in the spiritual realm of the home. For example, the male concern with markets and money is vividly, if not satirically, depicted in the fact that he performs his work in a penis suit, focusing exclusively on the aspect of his task that affects the price of the final product: he cuts “his work into as thin slices as possible, inasmuch as by so doing the business of boiling out the oil is much accelerated, and its quantity considerably increased, beside perhaps improving it in quality.” The mincer’s job is also described as an “office,” echoing the public nature of the position. Like any wise factory owner, he is concerned with speeding up the process of production, increasing quantity, and improving quality of the oil product for higher revenues. His work is linked to book production by the mates who cry, “Bible Leaves! Bible Leaves!” to encourage him “to cut his work into as thin slices as possible” (Melville, Moby-Dick 460). While the mincer’s penis suit is a burlesque3 of the notion that the public activity of producing merchandise for sale is strictly a male activity (he is literally a phallus working to make money), the ship itself becomes a hellish factory in “The Try-Works.” “To oversee the business” of stoking “the works” is to witness the ship’s function as “the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul” (Melville, Moby-Dick 462–3; emphasis mine). Ahab is to the ship as an owner is to his factory in this sense. Ishmael’s portrayal does not reflect well on the capitalist system, as he makes the ship out to be an image of a fiery and smoky hell. The scene develops into an image of a satanic ritual, in which the “smoke” that “rolled away in sullen heaps” can issue equally from a factory or hell. The dark portrayal of how the “ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea” in “The Try-Works” gives way to the light of the succeeding chapter, “The Lamp” (Melville, Moby-Dick 462). Ishmael makes a transition from the male spheres of the prior two chapters (which centered on the public economic labor of the mincer and the crew’s dark smoky business of the tryworks) to the decidedly brighter female sphere of domesticity with the illuminating, indoor subject of “The Lamp.” The importance of light is essential to effective domestic activities, for who wants “[t]o dress in the dark, and eat in the dark, and stumble in the darkness” (Melville, Moby-Dick 412)?

1 3 2 â•‡ ::â•… w o r r y i n g t h e w o m a n q u e s t i o n The domestic topic of the lamp receives a female image that Ishmael uses to reinforce the moral superiority of the feminine sphere over that of the masculine: “In merchantmen, oil for the sailor is more scarce than the milk of queens” (Melville, Moby-Dick 466). Without domestic enlightenment, Ishmael implies, men live in the dark, without the nourishment of the mother’s milk. But by the same token, without the publicly produced oil to burn lamps in the parlor, the domestic sphere remains in darkness, emphatically unenlightened. The transition from the ridiculous (the mincer) and hellish (“The TryWorks”) realm of public production and economic domination to domesticity becomes complete in the succeeding chapter. “Stowing Down and Clearing Up” makes more explicit the fact that we now are entering a feminine, domestic sphere. (Sarah Wilson’s study, “Melville and the Architecture of Antebellum Masculinity,” puts Melville’s gender play in this chapter into perspective, but not within the context of the development of industrial capitalism and its tropes of labor, leisure, and the work of writing as I do here.) Ishmael’s point is not to devalue the work of Â�men—on the contrary, he shows it to be essential in producing the oil that fuels the lamp as a vital part of the domestic tool of enlightenment. What he does do is portray the domestic sphere in a brighter, more favorable light than the gloomy, dark world of the masculine, public sphere of acquisition. Ishmael even suggests that public acquisition and merchandising threaten to taint the domestic sphere: he indicts the men atop the mastheads for ruining the ship’s domestic order by “spying out more whales, which, if caught, infallibly will again soil the old oaken furniture, and drop at least one small grease-spot somewhere” (Melville, Moby-Dick 469). But worrying about “one small grease spot somewhere” on a whaler is nothing short of laughable, as Ishmael seems equally interested in milking the silliness of separate-spheres ideology for its full comic resonance. On a whaling ship, the sphere of public production and the domestic sphere of private consumption are integrated and mutually dependent. Separating them out in the context of a whaler is the source of Ishmael’s playfulness. He makes fun of this rigid dichotomy by transforming the crew from male producers to domestic housewives reigning over their private sphere of consumption. After stowing down and cleaning up, the crew takes pleasure in the domestic bliss of their “scrupulously neat” surroundings, as though “new-leaped from out the daintiest Holland” (Melville,


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Moby-Dick 469). Their talk moves to decorations and the artistic arrangement of the items on the deck, providing a welcome creative and even spiritual activity. This is a domestic sphere well suited to imaginative activities, like writing, performed at home “in clean tabernacles of the soul.” The private economy of domesticity on a whaler encourages discussion of the artistic arrangement of “parlors, sofas, carpets, and fine cambrics; propose to mat the deck; think of having hangings to the top; object not to taking tea by moonlight on the piazza of the forecastle” (Melville, Moby-Dick 469). (It was Ahab who could not smoke a pipe on “the piazza of the forecastle.”) Indeed, to Ishmael, the mere mention of public marketplace business seems profane on the freshly cleaned ship: “To hint to such musked mariners of oil, and bone, and blubber, were little short of audacity. Away, and bring us napkins!” (Melville, Moby-Dick 469). Of course, the ironic joke in this scene is that these are a bunch of burly sailors (imagine a brutish cuss like Flask demanding napkins!) on a whaling ship, not middle-class American housewives clucking over decorations for a house. Indeed, there is no shortage of mockery and even sarcasm in the image of sailors planning “tea” on the forecastle deck and clamoring for “napkins” in place of “oil, . . . bone, and blubber.” Ishmael’s extended satire of separate-spheres ideology goes on as he longs for an antiseptic domestic situation (with buttoned “necks of clean frocks”) free from calls to chase the whale, an activity he believes makes us dirty physically as well as spiritually: “For hardly have we mortals by long toilings extracted from this world’s vast bulk its small but precious sperm; and then . . . cleansed ourselves from its defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul . . . Â�when—There she blows!” (Melville, Moby-Dick 469). Interestingly enough, Ishmael sings praises for a tidy ship in a way that integrates gender boundaries while simultaneously mocking the silliness of their rigid separation: remember, here is an all-male crew discoursing on the joys of decorating. Melville acknowledged the fact that his book did not fit into conventional gender codes.4 He knew this was no domestic novel, and thus understood that the feminine sensibilities and literary cross-dressing of Ishmael would be lost to the general reader. Despite such lengthy segments devoted to skewing gender lines as the one above, the maternal whale birthing in “The Grand Armada,” and Ahab’s tear drop in “The Symphony,” Melville discouraged a friend of the family, Sarah More-

1 3 4 â•‡ ::â•… w o r r y i n g t h e w o m a n q u e s t i o n wood, from reading Moby-Dick. In a 12 September 1851 letter, Melville advised the woman, Don’t you buy Â�it—don’t you read it, when it does come out, because it is by no means the sort of book for you. It is not a piece of fine Spitalfields Â�silk—but is of the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships’ cables and hausers. A Polar wind blows through it, & birds of prey hover over it. Warn all gentle fastidious people from so much as peeping into the Â�book—on the risk of a lumbago & sciatics. (Melville, Letters 138)

Among other things, this warning amounts to more of Melville’s epistolary posturing as a literary Â� outlaw—something he especially liked to do in letters to Hawthorne in which he spoke of his novel as a “wicked” book “broiled in hell fire” (Melville, Correspondence 212, 196). But more to the point, Melville seems to resist the marketplace premium set on domestic novels of manners read by “fastidious people.” He characterizes the book as a rugged, male, out-of-doors story only for readers as tough as “cables and hausers” able to endure “a polar wind.” No “napkins” and “tea” here.5 As much as Melville portrays Moby-Dick in this instance as a rough, chafing world in the great outdoors, he persistently was irritated by the intrusion of this male world into the domestic work of writing. He complains of the rugged outdoors burdening his writing in a letter to Evert Duyckinck dated 6 October 1850: after a lengthy pastoral sketch, he exclaims in frustration, “A hammer! Yes a hammer is before Â�me—the very one that so cruelly bruised the very finger that guides my pen. I can sentimentalize it [i.e., the rugged male world of the outdoors] no more” (Melville, Letters 114–5). Elsewhere in his letters he whines about the blisters on his hands that make writing so much more uncomfortable than it has to be. In his June 1851 letter to Hawthorne, he gripes about the encroachment of physical labor on his work of writing, allowing, “I’m rather sore, perhaps, in this letter; but see my hand! Four blisters on this palm made by hoes & hammers within the last few days” (Melville, Log 412). Melville would prefer not to have to labor and write, for he considers writing, at least in this case, not to be labor. Indeed, an economically driven day’s work for him is an impediment to, rather than a tonic for, good writing. He sees the ideal condition for writing to be leisurely, nonlaboring, and emphatically domestic. Ishmael’s complaints about the grubbiness of oil production parallel Melville’s complaints about the blisters on


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his hands in a way that favors the domestic sphere for reflective thinking on the piazza of the forecastle deck, and at the writing desk. This does not mean that Melville rejects the masculinity of the public sphere of production and acquisition. Quite the contrary, he dislocates masculinity from the sphere of production in the marketplace and tries to lodge it in a domestic setting. The clearest example of this gesture is visible in “I and My Chimney.”

Domestic Economy in “I and My Chimney” The narrator of “I and My Chimney” shuts himself up in his home in order to engage in reflective thought, presumably more appropriate for a domestic situation than the marketplace. In doing so, he does not transform into a female figure simply because he is a domestic creature. Instead, he deliberately endeavors to redefine the gender of the interior space of the home, making the chimneyâ•fla phallusâ•flits central icon and even a shrine worthy of worship. This and Melville’s other later stories move away from “the problematic realm of mythic symbol and moral ambiguity to the safer level of social irony,” as Reynolds notes, to which I would add that gender ideology was one of Melville’s favorite social ironies (Reynolds, Beneath 162). Melville’s inversion of gender ideology in these stories is no less problematic and “safer” than the subversive elements of Moby-Dick.6 The tension of “I and My Chimney” revolves around the narrator’s continual efforts to protect this space from two forces that threaten either to commodify or demasculinize his chimney and thus his space.7 The marketplace figure who comes to assess the number of bricks in the chimney to suggest that he sell it for a profit fails to appeal to the narrator’s unmoving dedication to his object of meditation that stands for his work of writing. His authorship will not be sold. His wife wants to tear down the chimney in order to open up the house more, and tear down walls, creating a more cohesive, communal atmosphere. Her floor plan is unmistakably Â� feminine—the entryway opens onto a wide hallway channeling visitors Â�inward—while the present arrangement features the chimney as a giant phallic symbol protruding through the middle of the house around which rooms are choppily divided and isolated. In clinging to his chimney, the narrator tries desperately to masculinize the domestic sphere in order to masculinize the work of writing.8 The chimney represents ideal condi-

1 3 6 â•‡ ::â•… w o r r y i n g t h e w o m a n q u e s t i o n tions for the work of writing. It is an object of meditation like the whale, unfathomable and incomprehensible from one vantage point within one field of vision. The aptly named Mr. Scribe is a representative not only of the commercial and business world, but, as his name suggests, of the literary marketplace.9 He is in the business of profiting from the removal of the chimney, the outward token of the writer figure’s (that is, the narrator’s) imagination. Removing the chimney means eliminating the narrator’s potential for financially disinterested thinking. This phallic chimney is noncommercial in contrast to the all-commercial phallus in Moby-Dick because it represents a gesture of male resistance to economic and social pressure to conform to the marketplace. The chimney is a token of masculinity that resists marketplace appropriation and thus neat pigeonholing within separate-spheres ideology that assign men to make their identities, careers, and profits in the public market and women to form theirs through moral teaching at home. In Melville’s fiction, “scribe” comes to represent the vulgar commodification of authorship for print capitalism, as seen in the occupation of the spiritually dead marketplace writer figure, “Bartleby the Scrivener.” Indeed, Mr. Scribe is an opportunist whose work has the effect of dislodging the amateur writer figure from his cozy surroundings, thereby unceremoniously throwing him into the marketplace of professionals. As a sign of the times in which authorship increasingly became enlisted as a trade and business, Mr. Scribe not only represents the historical inevitability of the marketplace appropriation of the writer’s imagination. He also stands to earn a handsome sum from his efforts as an exemplary 1850s capitalist: it was quite evident that “Mr. Scribe, for all his pretended disinterestedness, was not opposed to pocketing five hundred dollars by the operation [of removing the chimney]” (Melville, Short Works 347). Indeed, the sentiment of the narrator of “I and My Chimney” echoes Melville’s complaints throughout his letters about the interference of financial responsibilities with his writing. The confluence of Melville’s professional frustration with his waning control over the domestic sphere, the site of his authorial labor, is deftly combined with a critique of materialist values in the context of increasingly structured, even corporate schemes of production and consumption at the dawn of industrial capitalism in Â�America—schemes that are so pervasive as to rearrange gender relations in the home. The story satirizes the lazy male narrator who now clings to the


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domestic sphere as much as it mocks the acquisitive wife, who threatens to redesign him right out of his own living room in her new role as highstakes consumer aligned with Mr. Scribe, the figure of public commerce. The joke is not a one-way attack on the wife; it is a more progressive and humorous deconstruction (or unmasking) of the scramble for new gender roles within a changing economic context. The narrator is roundly mocked in his role as the stubborn, curmudgeonly, do-nothing husband,10 a self-effacing, humorous target for Melville’s own literary enterprise as foolish and delusional. In light of the wife’s new alarming behavior, the scene and tone do not bear out a conservative ideological import for the story as a whole, as it is closer to the antebellum equivalent of a subversive domestic situation comedy (a smart one nonetheless loaded with social commentary on the changing roles of the sexes).11 Melville critiques capitalism by showing that market demands not only inhibit the creation of art by appropriating the author’s imagination for mass consumption. Commercial values also potentially see beauty as a liability rather than an asset: “if my chimney was allowed to stand in that invalid condition, my policy of insurance would be void. This was a sort of hint not to be neglected. All the world over, the picturesque yields to the pocketesque. The mortgagor cared not, but the mortgagee did” (Melville, Short Works 332). The insurance company, in this case, represents the public sphere of the marketplace, not only as a place, but as a state of mind in every way opposed to what writers do: the implication is that the Scribes of the world would not hesitate to straighten the Leaning Tower of Pisa if there were money in it, eagerly sacrificing the picturesque for profit in service of the new aesthetic Melville mockingly calls “the pocketesque.” Interestingly, the narrator’s antimaterialism is consonant with women’s domestic roles, as Welter notes, which was thought to counterbalance the husband’s work in the public sphere through the avoidance of the pleasures and values of “materialistic society” at home (38). Along with his antimaterialism, the narrator shows piety in his pseudoreligious attachment to his totemic chimney and ultimately submits, silent and docile, to his wife’s will at the end of the story, echoing the conventional three-part female domestic role (antimaterialism, piety, and submissiveness). “Domesticity” is not merely a safe place for a male writer to forge an identity in a market that has designs on his “head.” Nor is it inverted and subverted for its own sake. Instead domesticity functions as a viable, culturally accessible discourse

1 3 8 â•‡ ::â•… w o r r y i n g t h e w o m a n q u e s t i o n through which Melville criticizes capitalism, which, interestingly, cannot be said to be embodied by the female in a simple inversion, invoking the Hawthornian resistance to what he called “that damned scribbling mob” of successful women writers at the time. Instead, the market transcends gender, as a man, Mr. Scribe, and a woman, the narrator’s wife, embody it. In short, Melville’s authorial grip on the domestic sphere provided him the best vantage point from which to dismantle and expose the market’s impact on women’s roles and priorities. In this sense, the wife, though not enlisted among the public economic ranks of Mr. Scribe and the “mortgagee,” is clearly an enemy and not an ally. This is because she stands for change and, albeit domestic, an economic order. Melville insinuates that his narrator’s private sphere of creativity has been infiltrated by female domestic economy, a force subversive to his ironically noneconomic, masculine space. He admits, “I have a little authority” in the domestic sphere. “[Because of] my wife’s ingenious application of the principle that certain things belong of right to female jurisdiction, I find myself, through my easy compliances, insensibly stripped by degrees of one masculine prerogative after another” (Melville, Short Works 336). Like Whitman loafing and inviting his soul, Melville’s narrator fantasizes about a life of reflective leisure free from economic necessity, only to find his wife busily planning to build a new barn: “in a dream I go about my field, a sort of lazy, happy-go-lucky, good-for-nothing, loafing, old Lear. Only by some sudden revelation am I reminded of who is over me” as he discovers timber stacked in the yard (Melville, Short Works 338). Melville mocks such resistance to the economic historical inevitability, as it were, that the wife represents; if the narrator shares the author’s values, then in this case the author is emphatically jeering at them in all of their pathetic defensiveness. Interestingly, in “I and My Chimney,” female “domestic economy” is aligned with materialism and against economically disinterested amateur creativity. In the segments of Moby-Dick discussed earlier, the domestic is a sphere of consumption, while the public aspects of the whale (his commodification) designate the sphere of production. It is not that my reading of Ishmael pegs him as noneconomic and feminine. Rather, I cast Ishmael as a figure aware of the separate-spheres ideology as a rigid cultural construct that gives rise to different roles according to gender, equally ridiculous in the way he portrays them: the “female” of the domestic sphere of


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consumption calls for napkins while the male works away industriously in his penis suit! “I and My Chimney” similarly does not define female as “noneconomic,” but indeed as mutually reinforcing to the public male sphere of Mr. Scribe. Separate-spheres in this story, as in Moby-Dick, are not separate at all; the narrator’s wife and Mr. Scribe work together just as publicly produced oil would be worthless were it not for its domestic consumption as the fuel for illuminating the parlor. The collusion between the two for materialistic ends is Melville’s main criticism in “I and My Chimney.” The wife wants to take down the chimney to increase the capacity for consumption (that is, to open up the house’s design so that it can more easily swallow up or take in people and things from the outside world, including publicly produced commodities), while Mr. Scribe wants to take it down to enhance his stock of production for public sale. The wife wants to develop the domestic sphere’s function as a site of consumption by increasing the house’s capacity to entertain guests with ample room for dancing, for example. Mr. Scribe’s impulse complements hers. He wants to exploit the chimney’s salability for production as bricks, later to become building material. The narrator and his chimney stand in the way of the two spheres’ pressures toward increased production and Â�consumption—a phenomenon designed to boost production and make consumption Â�easier—the economic dynamic that is at the heart of industrialization and capitalistic development. The wife of the story is a figure akin to the economically driven Dame van Winkle, contrasting with the narrator’s sleepy Rip, a figure of reflection and storytelling totally allergic to work for a material reward: The maxim, ‘Whatever is, is right,’ is not hers. Her maxim is, Whatever is, is wrong; and what is more, must be altered; and what is more must be altered right away. Dreadful maxim for the wife of a dozy old dreamer like me, who dote on seventh days as days of rest, and, out of a sabbatical horror of industry, will, on a weekday, go out of my way a quarter of a mile to avoid the sight of a man at work. (Melville, Short Works 336; emphasis mine)

The “sabbatical horror of industry” is the feature that I have drawn out in Melville’s fiction and biography. Because the alternative to work in the marketplace is always reflective Â� thinking—whether Ishmaelian philosophizing, romantic conjuring before the chimney, or gazing from the Â�piazza—Melville shows that he resisted the historical inevitability of the

1 4 0 â•‡ ::â•… w o r r y i n g t h e w o m a n q u e s t i o n professionalization of authorship and the commodification of the mind. Such resistance is the subject of his self-parody in “I and My Chimney.” Melville’s professional frustrations, in part, came from the fact that he never respected (and always distrusted) what he assumed to be an exclusively monetary measure of “success” in the business world. In addition, Melville’s portrait of himself as a woodcutter (a “hack writer” of sorts) suggested a sense of hopelessness in gaining financial prosperity from his writing. He felt trapped in the position of laborer, unable to ascend and reap the rewards of an industry that was making authorship an increasingly lucrative enterprise. Melville undoubtedly desired financial success from his writing, but felt excluded from it by a system that seemed to work to his disadvantage. He expressed these anxieties in an 1849 letter in which he berated “the class of wealthy people, in the aggregate, [as] such a mob of gilded dunces.” His philosophy matches Ishmael’s, the proud bearer of an empty purse, when he urges that “not to be wealthy carries with it a certain distinction & nobility” (Melville, Letters 97).

The Dark Side of Domesticity While “I and My Chimney” may have dark domestic inflections beneath its comic surface, gender play and inversion expose exploitation as the point of literature’s origin in “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” a diptych written two years after “Bartleby the Scrivener.” The process of literary production that eventuates in Bartleby’s exploitation as an author in the marketplace has its origins in the production of the paper he writes on. The factory in “the Tartarus of Maids” produces the commodity of paper, the sheets on which Melville inscribes his fiction and the readers read it. As Michael Gilmore observes, “The Massachusetts paper mill is the point of origin for the ‘dead letters’ of ‘Bartleby,’ the place where literature begins in an act of exploitation” (Gilmore 144). Melville reveals a strong conviction in the diptych that literature has been corrupted by privilege. Melville exposes how gender produces such privilege by transposing men into a domestic world of blissful consumption and women into a world of market production and factory toil, with resulting images as absurdly asinine as they are crushingly tragic. The more fortunate bachelors gorge themselves on a delightful dinner and pass their evenings exchanging stories. The privileged and dandified


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gentlemen of “the Paradise of Bachelors” fatten themselves upon the women’s labor of the paper factory in “the Tartarus of Maids.” Like the lawyer in “Bartleby,” the bachelors are the economic beneficiaries whose consumption and tale telling are directly linked through literary production to the oppression of the factory workers. Significantly, their “literariness,” as Michael Newbury calls it, is controlled and conditioned by domesticity. That domesticity, I want to emphasize, is absurd and ridiculous: the evening is organized around a codified, ritualized, culturally regulated multicourse dinner that pretends to be more about camaraderie than gluttony and inebriation, with the men refusing to take drinks unless another will join him and toast to his health (Melville, Short Works 61). (What sacrifice! What a bond!) They “suffer” great pains to keep their slumbering fellow bachelor’s sleep undisturbed in the room below their gathering; they proudly bear an association with the “Templars” (an order of knights), yet their only physical challenge is descending the stairs tanked on wine, and their only encounter with death is the end of the meal itself, which bears the Â�realization—delivered in maudlin, melodramatic Â�tones—that, like the evening, the bachelors too must die. Melville mocks their superannuation along with their decided lack of real risk or confrontation with death of the sort the Pequod’s crew encounters. The joke is that these men haven’t the slightest capacity for the physical bravery and daring of the Templars of old; they are softened and silly as they cluck over each other in an atmosphere of overdetermined safety and insulation from the world’s dangers, particularly economic concern. Gender inversions further surface as interior decoration is of the highest priority to the gentlemen in an echo of “Stowing Down and Clearing Up”: the “domiciles” and “smug cells” give way to the “dining room” with “furniture” that “was wonderfully unpretending, old . . . snug” and inviting, and not glaring or gaudy. The perfection of domestic taste stands for culture and literature itself; these author figures are consummate consumers, or “Mouths” (to the women’s “hands”), signifying one of the most basic domestic male roles of consuming (usually the wife’s) domestic productions made of food, fabric, and moral counsel (Melville, Short Works 205–6). Their cheeks flush with red wine, while the women workers increasingly pale and dye (and thus “die” as the homonym suggests) the paper they seem to produce with their own blood. The dark import of the playful gender inversion extends to “the Tar-

1 4 2 â•‡ ::â•… w o r r y i n g t h e w o m a n q u e s t i o n tarus of Maids,” a potential sexual paradise for Cupid stymied by the machines that metaphorically sterilize the virgins’/maids’ capacity for organic human sex and monopolize their maternal powers for synthetic, artificial productivity. The sexual (and economic) powerlessness of the men in the factory who helplessly stand by while machines seem to have taken their places leaves the narrator with a “strange emotion.” Other men who might produce progeny are the bachelors in their paradise. Their sexuality is potent, however, only in a self-indulgent, solipsistic, and decadent way; Melville associates their gluttony with anal sex, as Bruce Franklin and others have shown.12 However fecund with food and bonding, male erotic power is sterilized by its homosexual exclusivity. While the erotic is redirected through the conventions of an exclusive aesthetic club for the bachelors, sexual power is isolated and technologized for the maids. Progeny becomes paper. The narrator’s queasy feeling from witnessing this parasitical bloodletting, this slow Â�death—he blanches from Â�shock—cue the reader to also feel disturbed by the stark social injustice of the contrasting worlds as he does, and reenter social reality “wrapped in . . . meditations” not cozy and domestic, but shocking and stunning, like the “winter air . . . more bitter than elsewhere” that surrounds him as he departs (Melville, Short Works 222). The social activism of the story rides metaphorically on the gusts of chill Â�air—of the dehumanizing exploitation that lush domestic, literary life parasitically relies Â�upon—that chill narrator and reader alike. The bizarre and darkly humorous sexual separation accrues from the gentlemen’s pious platitudes and their “sublime obliviousness to the suffering on which they fattened. In this way, Melville mercilessly anatomized” his readers not to dismiss them as unchangeable, as Karcher argues, but to wake them to social consciousness by holding a most unpleasant mirror before them, in an almost Brechtian attempt to defamiliarize13 them from a benign sense of their roles in the capitalist system, exposing their systemic complicity with oppressive, exploitative labor (2404). The subversive import of the story’s narrative effect is not precluded by Melville’s own personal sense of hopelessness in the condition of professional authorship. The laughable outcome of such exploitative gender relationships conceals the darker truth that the economic inequities of the story are urgent and in need of immediate change. While not humorless, the diptych is the darker political exposé of the softer, more amiable and humorous call to arms found in “The Apple


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Tree Table,” which offers gentle encouragement to women to change their submissive, domestic roles and assume a different kind of power and demeanor in the home. In other words, the conflation of public and private roles for men and women still bears the mark of exploitation as a part of Melville’s assault on emerging industrial capitalism.14

Like Pierre and Bartleby, the women factory workers are significantly both book producers and victims of capitalism. Melville is not just concerned with criticizing market society in some generalized way in these works. Instead, he very specifically attends to the deconstruction of gender within the power structure of literary production and the economics of authorship. In particular, Melville presents the smug prosperity of the class of “gentlemen” in his diptych resting on the extorted labor of the workers they dehumanize. One of the nightmares Melville envisioned was a division of labor so pervasive that it would divide the sexes and sterilize humankind. Indeed, the “theme of bachelor,” as Loren Goldner notes, is “so pervasive” in Melville’s work, along with “the absence of real women characters . . . as to open up a whole perspective that would take [Melville criticism] far afield” (223). The diptych exposes that “the social division of labor” separates and thus sterilizes “the foppish bachelors and the blank factory workers” (Goldner 225).15 Such alienation has biographical echoes. Indeed, this phase in Melville’s career marked a distinct alienation from his wife and friends, most notably Hawthorne, yet his writing still questioned and challenged materialism and domestic gender roles; he never fully capitulated to the dominant ideology. If his mind never surrendered, his body did: the labor of producing literature for a wage took its toll, as he physically suffered the consequences of ill health from 1852 to 1858. His failing eyesight prevented him from finding solace through reading, while other symptoms appear to be related to his increasing alienation from his labor, paralleling those ailments suffered by Nippers and Turkey of the 1853 “Bartleby” story. He continued to write during this period despite these trying circumstances. We clearly see the turbulence that arose after the failure of Moby-Dick inscribed into the pages of Pierre. There is no question that professionally, mentally, and physically Melville suffered. Perhaps the most telling catastrophe of this period of financial anxiety occurred in 1853. Harper, his publisher, lost

1 4 4 â•‡ ::â•… w o r r y i n g t h e w o m a n q u e s t i o n the plates of his novel and almost all the copies of his book in a fire that completely destroyed their facilities. His books were put out again but had lost what little momentum they originally established. If there had been any hope for the sale of Melville’s novels, it was dashed just as certainly as reviewers had advised readers that Moby-Dick was “so much trash,” and “an absurd book” (qtd. in Parker, Herman Melville 19). Melville’s revelation of the work of writing as a professional endeavor that would significantly refigure gender codes in an economic condition controlled by exclusive privilege perhaps was apparently too combustible for literary markets to house.

U

U

dreams deferred Ambition and the Mass Market in Melville and King

Artists’ fame is the most monstrous of all, for it implies the idea of immortality. And that is a diabolical snare, because the grotesquely megalomaniac ambition to survive one’s death is inseparably bound to the artist’s probity. . . . [But] to write without that ambition is cynicism: a mediocre novelist who consciously produces books that are ephemeral, commonplace, Â�conventional—thus not useful, thus burdensome, thus Â�noxious—is contemptible. This is the novelist’s curse: his honesty is bound to the vile stake of his megalomania. Milan Kundera, “What Is a Novelist?” (2006)

This book’s threefold emphasis on capitalist critiques, transformations of the book market, and commentary about the new role of women pairs three ways in which authors responded to the market revolution. Underlying the larger themes of romanticism in the marketplace and the gender of authorship in all these case studies is the question of popularity versus greatness, of catering to the masses or writing for immortality. Indeed, the market corruption Wilson and Thoreau uncovered was driven, in part, by both authors’ frustrations with a market blind Â�to—and thus unwilling to support Â� financially—the higher truths they proclaimed: truths about nothing less than racial injustice; rampant, callow materialism; and soulkilling divided labor. Fern, Whitman, Davis, and even Melville early in his career all courted popular success, yet grappled with the formation of a mass market that seemed to threaten their achievement of literary greatness. Was it possible to write for immortality under economic conditions that increasingly commercialized the world of letters and set moral and financial ambitions at odds? All of the authors in this book wrote for money while openly assailing certain aspects of the market; even Fern frowned upon the uncouth business practice of “gentleman” publishers citing trade courtesy as a method of entrapment of lady writers. Did such moral objectives eclipse professional goals for sales and profits? How was

1 4 6 ::â•… Dreams Deferred this paradoxical, often fruitful tension played out in terms of authors’ reactions to the menacing tyranny of the mass market then and now? Anne E. Boyd addresses this question in Writing for Immortality, on popular women authors of the period. I use a similar approach to Melville and extend the discussion into the present day by applying it to Stephen King, Hanif Kureishi, and Douglas Coupland. These authors straddle such disparate categories of ethnicity, transnational identity, and status, both popular and canonical (Kureishi has recently risen to this status for the postcolonial anti-Thatcher political bent of his 1980s works), and point toward the significance of authorship’s definition within and against consumer culture in the global literary market. In the early 1850s, Herman Melville’s “career long conflict with his readers” dramatically escalated, according to William Charvat (Profession 204). Likewise, Stephen King issued his harshest attack on his readers in the early 1980s, surfacing a conflict seldom voiced in his career that arose out of his aspirations to serious literary fiction, if not the creation of the Great American Novel itself. While Melville was trying to disassociate himself from his reputation based on his early successful novel, Typee, as “the man who lived among the cannibals” in the early 1850s with Moby-Dick and Pierre, King harbored a strong desire to elevate himself above his popular readership beginning in the early 1980s, a goal he found profoundly difficult to achieve given the sheer force of his audience’s demand. This struggle to liberate himself from the clutches of his Constant Reader, ironically enough, is the focal point of his wildly popular 1987 horror novel, Misery. Similarly, Melville’s animosity toward a market blind to his serious fiction drives the oddest and angriest novel of his career, Pierre, or The Ambiguities, written during the nadir of Moby-Dick’s critical and commercial failure. Compounding Moby-Dick’s failure was the sheer effort that went into it: Andrew Delbanco calls it “the most ambitious book ever conceived by an American writer” (124). What we learn by placing Melville and King together in this conclusion is that their worst professional nightmares would be fictionalized in phantasmagoric, sensationalized visions that functioned both to confess their canonical dreams and to rage at themselves and their mass audiences for threatening the realization of those dreams. These two towering figures are known for opposite reasons, King for his commercial success and Melville for his enduring canonical status, yet they share in Misery and

Dreams Deferredâ•…

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Pierre an occupational anxiety at two analogous junctures in their careers, a sudden sense that their literary legacies were being cemented before their eyes by economic forces, especially a consumerist ethos that was swallowing up their readership, largely beyond their control. Coupland, a transnational Canadian novelist, currently struggles with canonical dreams in spite of his popular status, which he simultaneously courts and renounces through the anticonsumerist themes of his tales. In his new biography, Andrew Delbanco’s comments on Melville’s selfmockery in Pierre can equally apply to King’s frustration at creating such an obtuse, vile readership as that represented by Annie, his allegorical Constant Reader of Misery. King loathes himself for wallowing in the filth of low culture: if he created Annie and Annie likes Liberace and figurines, then he is (at his worst) a producer of kitsch, or so he is confessing, on par with garage-sale velvet portraits of dogs playing pool. On the other hand, in Melville “we have a parody of the Romantic author imagining himself as high priest charged by god to bring forth Truth,” as Delbanco says, whose embrace of the hermit artist role only rendered “a blocked and stupendously pretentious writer . . . indifferent to a world that generously returned the indifference” (196). Both men mock themselves in Pierre and Misery for their failures to achieve high culture’s crown of literary Â�statusâ•fl Â�one for aiming too high and alienating common readers as Melville does with Moby-Dick and the other for aiming too low and courting a crowd below himself and humanity in general. The dilemma of being caught between the high and the low, and the very real presence of a mass audience that could at once make an author wealthy and rob him or her of immortality, remains a concern among today’s transnational authors, as I conclude with a discussion of Coupland and Kureishi. King’s Misery was published during a decade defined by its materialism1 and widely associated with the film Wall Street, which informed viewers that “greed is good”; Pierre emerged during the decade in which Melville would pen his own “story of Wall Street.” Such times bore profound developments in the mass market hostile to popular authors (Melville was known for Typee’s success) with canonical aspirations (Melville achieved such status thirty years after his death): a sharp rise in mass readership, as the introduction shows, transformed authorship into a commercial enterprise in Melville’s antebellum America2 and made genre fiction writers richer than ever during the corporate power surge of King’s postmodern

1 4 8 ::â•… Dreams Deferred 1980s.3 When placed next to each other, Pierre and Misery, the writers’ most self-reflexive Â�novels—in which they hold their careers up to the closest selfscrutiny of all their Â�fiction—illuminate how their most acute moments of professional crisis arose from the collision of canonical dreams and the realities of consumerist literary markets, the “diabolical snare” of striving for immortality, when the “ephemeral, commonplace, conventional” is demanded (Kundera 42). Such a link prevents them from appearing “reared beyond the commonality of civilization; as if there was no recognizable thread” that could bind them, as Cynthia Ozick laments the current fear in criticism of crossing historical thresholds: “the key is indebtedness, the key is connectedness” (“Literary” 74). Hence, this chapter serves the purpose of expanding the scope of the study. The fictional origin of that thread is located precisely where Melville’s bitterness takes over midway through Pierre as he goes on the offensive against those who played a hand in the failure of Moby-Â�Dick—publishers, reviewers, and readers. He and King alike mock the literary marketplace as much as their own complicit roles in it. Annie is depicted as subhuman, a kind of murderous pig; contrast this with Melville’s villains in Pierre, who, while they bear the marks of genteel, privileged snobbery, are at least not painted as beasts or monsters. Robert Milder’s new and important addition to Melville scholarship, Exiled Royalties: Melville and the Life We Imagine, also acknowledges such self-mockery but emphasizes the Freudian implications rather than the professional and biographical situation: “Melville turned against himself early in Pierre through the mocking self-reference of the Glendinning/ Gansevoort parallels and the giddy delight his narrator takes in promising to topple Pierre from his ‘noble pedestal’ and strip him of all inward and outward complacencies” (130). Such evidence can situate Melville as a “Freudian melancholic,” but the “complacencies” he attacks in Pierre also speak volumes to Melville’s own sense of inadequacy at formulating a notion of authorship that might enable him to write Gospels without dollars damning him. His well known complaint to Hawthorne is relevant here: “What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,â•flit will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash and all my books are botches” (Melville, Letters 191). Like King’s Annie, Melville’s villains in Pierre arise out of his sense of being prevented by an unjust system from producing his very best work.


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Pierre’s “burning desire to deliver what he thought to be new, or at least miserably neglected Truth to the world; and the prospective menace of being absolutely penniless, unless by the sale of his book he could realize the money” are also Melville’s (Melville, Pierre 133). Emory Elliot has recently rejected a critical tradition of collapsing Melville and Pierre into one, by claiming that Melville’s humor at Pierre’s expense distances author from character, and that Pierre never resorts to spiritual or philosophical thought to rescue himself from despair (Elliot 194). Despite differences, the chief anxiety plaguing both was the prospect of writing “the Gospels of this century” only to “die in the gutter” (Melville, Letters 129). This is the dark, skeptical underside of Pierre’s sunny resolve “to give the world a book, which the world should hail with surprise and delight” (Melville, Pierre 333). Melville eerily foreshadows in the pages of the novel itself the rejection of Pierre he would receive from his London publisher, Bentley. Pierre’s letter, like Bentley’s, voices skepticism in the author’s capacity to produce a book for mass consumption “[u]pon the pretense of writing a popular novel” (Melville, Pierre 420). Pierre’s premature attempt “to write a mature book” is precisely the mistake Melville’s British publisher, Richard Bentley, suspected when Melville offered him the proofs of the new novel. Bentley distrusted that Pierre would perform any better than Mardi, Redburn, White-Jacket, and Moby-Dick for good reason: these novels had brought the publisher a loss of £453. Bentley could therefore not afford to pay a lump sum for the copyright and offered Melville the less-than-desirable deal of publishing his “new work [Pierre]” on a joint account with Melville, with payments of half profits as they arose. Even under such a deal Bentley could not hope to reduce his losses by more than £100. Bentley’s offer, sent on 4 March 1852, insulted and offended Melville not only because of its stinginess, but because his publisher had clearly lost faith in him as an author: “I fear,” Melville’s publisher told him, “your books . . . are produced in too rapid succession” (Melville, Letters 149). In April, Melville wrote back to his London publisher to renegotiate the terms. In so doing, he made the appeal to his publisher that Pierre was an entirely new work, like nothing he had done before, “treating . . . utterly new scenes & characters; . . . and very much more calculated for popularity than anything you have yet published of mine” (Melville, Letters 150). Like the character Pierre, who begins his book with the idea

1 5 0 ::â•… Dreams Deferred of reinventing himself both personally and professionally, Melville tells his publisher that the author of poor-selling books can be forgotten: “Let bygones be bygones; let those previous books, for the present, take care of themselves. For here now we have a new book, and what shall we say about this?” (Melville, Letters 150). With all the hopefulness and naiveté of Pierre, he attempts to deny and flee his past of public humiliation and rejection by asking, “If nothing has been made on the old book, may not something be made on the new?” (Melville, Letters 150). Melville even goes so far in this appeal to suggest that Pierre appear under a pseudonym, “‘By a Vermonter’ say, or ‘By Guy Winthrop.’” Such a new work warranted a new authorial persona, Melville reasoned, to disaffiliate Pierre from his now tarnished reputation. Pierre’s own escape into the anonymity of New York City is the fictional expression of this professional urge (Melville, Letters 151). Bentley’s reply terminated negotiations with Melville, citing that not only would publication under his imprint require the original half-profits deal he offered, but that the novel would be subject to substantial revisions without Melville’s consent; a policy of “silent editing” that is humbling to any writer, to say the least. Mardi and Moby-Dick would have been more suitable for mass consumption, Bentley told his author, “If you had . . . restrained your imagination somewhat and had written in a style to be understood by the great mass of Â�readers—nay if you had not sometimes offended the feelings of many sensitive readers you would have succeeded in England” (Melville, Letters 151). In Pierre, Melville lampoons such motives in the publishing firm of “Steel, Flint and Asbestos,” referencing the stuff of cold manufacturing and construction materials for mass production. The fire imagery in the firm’s Â�name—steel and flint make sparks for fire, and asbestos does not Â�burn—implies that their business is logically and intuitively oxymoronic, wholly antithetical to the heat and flame of serious literature. But Pierre was as much an attack on the mass book market as an attempt to capitalize on it; Melville knew domestic romances were selling in huge numbers at the time, and wanted to boost his declining income.4 Unlike Melville, King voices his criticism of the mass market, particularly his readers, from within the safety of the horror genre in which he had already achieved success. Pierre initially has no sense of the professional demands of authorship in the marketplace. He begins as an amateur, arrogantly assuming writing to be easy work, “and that it is not altogether impossible to receive a


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few pence in exchange for his ditties” (Melville, Pierre 305). Pierre naïvely looks at writing for money as a way of retaining his privileged past and avoiding a working class occupation like that of “the mechanic, the daylaborer, [who] had but one way to live; his body must provide for his body.” He instead gleefully embraces the idea of “letting his body stay lazily at home, send off his soul to labor, and his soul would come faithfully back and pay his body her wages” (Pierre 307). Pierre’s hubris is class bound. He naïvely believes his genteel background will exempt him from the work of “many a poor be-inked galley-slave, toiling with the heavy oar of the quill, to gain something wherewithal to stave off the cravings of nature; and in his hours of morbid self-reproach, regarding his paltry wages, at all events, as an unavoidable disgrace to him; while this galley-slave of letters would have leaped at Â�delight—reckless of the feeble seams of his Â�pantaloons—at the prospect of inheriting the broad farms of Saddle Meadows” (Pierre 307). Pierre’s arrogance is closely associated with Melville’s own self-awareness that in writing Pierre he finds himself in the middle of a project (writing for the masses) he has terribly underestimated, perhaps due to the privilege and consequent complacency following his relatively easy success with Typee. This combined with a new disrespect for popular fiction grown from his recent alliance with Hawthorne and the ruin of Moby-Dick, his high-art magnum opus (dedicated to Hawthorne himself, who famously denounced domestic novelists as “that damned scribbling mob of women”) (qtd. in Schocket 50). Melville’s realization that Pierre was bound to fail springs from his own idealization of his craft as romantically insulated from the reality of material necessity within the economic networks of production in the marketplace. Melville gives full voice to this naïve, immature, and impractical sense of literary business through his protagonist author. Far from sending off his soul to toil while resting his body at home, writing becomes nothing short of self-induced slave labor to Pierre. His writing chamber is a dismal, cramped, prisonlike place. It is hardly a parlor for lounging and soul searching, but is a “most miserable room” with “a plank, paper, pens, and infernally black ink, four leprously dingy white walls, no carpet, a cup of water, and a dry biscuit or two” (Melville, Pierre 355). The dismal scene makes Pierre regard the work of writing in disgust and reproach as “the most miserable of all the pursuits of a man, and say if here be the place, and his be the trade that God intended him for” (Melville, Pierre 355). Sig-

1 5 2 ::â•… Dreams Deferred nificantly, his anger springs from the economic pallor of “the trade that God intended him for” which casts the writer as a prisoner within “four . . . white walls” with his customary ration of bread and water (“a cup of water, and a dry biscuit or two”). King will also offer a writer’s captivity narrative of sorts, only with his antagonist, Constant Reader Annie Wilkes, lodging in the next room and making frequent preposterous demands on his manuscript in progress, which she has made him write in the first place. Both characters, like both authors, significantly, are the architects of their own authorial prisons. Such confinement takes the shape of unsympathetic and neglectful readers blind to (what the authors perceive as) their lofty literary methods. Melville thought of the reading public as ill-prepared to be weaned from its magazine and newspaper reading of cause-effect prose, a kind of writing that is the extreme opposite of the impressionist, patchwork narrative Melville was writing. Paul Lyons’s study of Melville’s sense of stylistic influence shows that Pierre’s egregiously self-reliant method reflects not a seasoned, balanced array of technique and allusion, but rather a quirky, limited set of works that struck his fancy (450). This method only alienated him all the more from his readers. King depicts his allegorical Constant Reader as the antagonist to his writer figure of Misery for similar reasons: she thinks the fiction she reads is real, cares nothing about the mechanism of its production or its indices and concordances, and regards the literature as only an object of her own consumption. King’s protagonist writer, Paul, will even criticize himself for straining too hard to escape Annie by winning another, better audience than her. He literally screams for academic praise, begging critics (us!) to notice: “Hey, guys! This stuff has got a sliding perspective! This stuff has got stream of consciousness interludes! This is my REAL WORK you assholes!” (Misery 287). King’s critical neglect in 1987 was far worse than it is now, especially with the emergence of Heidi Strengell’s scholarly work on his intersection with postmodernism, Dissecting Stephen King: From the Gothic to Literary Naturalism (2005). But in many ways, he is like Â�Longfellow—wildly popular and critically damned, the inverse of Â� Melville—in that we still have not forgiven him for his success. The one crucial difference from Longfellow, however, is that King was never canonized in the first place, while Longfellow was the first American enshrined in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. Longfellow’s dismantling at the hands of the modernists and fur-


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ther destruction by F. O. Mathiessen (who exhorted readers to “smash the plaster bust” of the “dead reputation” in 1950) he fortunately did not have to witness during his lifetime (qtd. in Irmscher 19). If he was America’s first canonized poet, he was also the first white male to be kicked out of the canon, a fate that never befell Melville (Irmscher 20). Melville has been critically respected for a century now, but incited more passion in critical hostility than praise during his career. So did King really have as much to complain about as Melville, for example, who suffered such a horrendous critical reception of Pierre? “The book is one of the absurdest and most ridiculous things that ever ink and paper were wasted on,” one reviewer proclaimed of Pierre (Hazewell 421). Another review conveyed the gravity of a physician delivering a bleak diagnosis: “it appeared to be composed by the ravings and reveries of a madman,” suggesting that “Melville was really supposed to be deranged, and that his friends were taking measures to place him under treatment.” The prescription? “We hope one of the earliest precautions will be to keep him stringently secluded from pen and ink” (Review of Pierre 420). King was hurt more by critical neglect than such fever-pitched abuse, as Misery marked the point in King’s career when he most achingly felt that, as Strengell points out, “more was required to satisfy his ambition than the sale of books” (263). Through Paul, King confesses “that the increasing dismissal of his work in the critical press as that of a ‘popular writer’ (which was, as he understood it, one Â�step—a small Â�one—above that of a ‘hack’) had hurt him badly” (Misery 286). Escaping the prison of an adoring and suffocating audience has taken nonfictional forms in King. For example, the preface of Stationary Bike (2006), King’s recent allegory of his struggle to be taken seriously by the academic community, directly taunts and challenges English professors to decode the novel’s profound symbolism. The posturing makes clear, at least to King, that he has really tied the keepers of the canon in knots with this one. The gesture interestingly echoes Melville’s dare in Moby-Â�Dickâ•fl Â�regarding the brow of the whale and the novel itself by Â� implication—to “read it if you can” (335). King’s most recent claim to literary distinction comes through an advertisement for Lisey’s Story (2006). The placement of the ad in the New Yorker and its glowing, enlarged praise from Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon indicate that King has tried to infiltrate the establishment in more subtle ways than the locker-room bravado of es-

1 5 4 ::â•… Dreams Deferred sentially calling out all English professors to a semiotic brawl behind the woodshed as he does in the preface of Stationary Bike. Chabon was heralded, after his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, as nothing less than the next Fitzgerald according to the New York Times Book Review, a publication that ranks among the most authoritative arbiters of culture and literature in existence. Not coincidentally, the New Yorker was also where Fitzgerald would get his start as a writer, publishing short and early versions of what would later become almost universally defined as world-class literature of the highest order, with an assortment of readers laying claim to The Great Gatsby as the Great American Novel. The New Yorker advertisement overtly places King in the same company as Chabon and, by indirection, Fitzgerald, representing another of King’s expressions of his desire to be canonized. King has been open about his desire for all the tokens of canonization: “I’d like to win the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize. I’d like to have someone write a New York Times Book Review piece that says, ‘Hey, wait a minute guys, we made a Â�mistake—this guy is one of the great writers of the twentieth century.’ But it’s not going to happen” (Goldstein 8). In 2003, when he did receive the Distinguished Contribution to American Letters Award from the National Book Foundation, the organization that adjudicates the National Book Awards, King discussed the relationship of his work to other culturally sanctioned forms of literature. Without naming him, his acceptance speech began with a barb against Harold Bloom, who spearheaded an outcry against the selection of King for the award. His speech goes on to dismantle his image as a “rich hack” perpetrated by the Bloom camp (King, “Acceptance”). In an attempt to align himself with literary royalty by quoting Frank Norris on authenticity in fiction, he asserts that he “never wrote for money” but “to tell the truth about the way people would behave in a similar situation” to his fictional scenarios (“Acceptance”). His spite is more convincing than his defense of his primary authorial role as truth speaker, as he assails pinning the profit motive on “anyone who writes genre fiction or any kind of fiction,” which he finds “still hurtful[;] it’s infuriating and it’s demeaning” (“Acceptance”). Even in receiving the award, King was wise enough to know that it did not seal his place in the canon, alluding to his fear of the “tokenism” his win might serve to shut out other popular writers from the award for years to come, which in at least the four years since, it clearly has


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(“Acceptance”). Thus it seemed highly unlikely that his win might bridge the gap, King suggested with strained diplomacy, between “the so-called popular writers of this country and the so-called literary writers [who] have stared at each other with animosity and a willful lack of understanding” (“Acceptance”). King openly acknowledged his jealousy of the literary establishment in the speech, admitting being “bitterly angry at writers who were considered ‘literary’” (“Acceptance”). Perhaps in an effort to placate the literary authors and critics who largely comprised the very audience before him, he confessed defeat due to lack of skill, “I knew I didn’t quite have enough talent or polish to be one of them so there was an element of jealousy,” mocking his own anger toward “these writers [who] always seemed to have the inside track in my view at the time” as sounding like the crackpot conspiracy theories of his “least favorite uncle who thought there was an international Jewish cabal running everything from the Ford Motor Company to the Federal Reserve” (“Acceptance”). This is clearly not the man who wrote the hostile preface to Stationary Bike. Almost happy to be outside of the canon, he associates Tabitha, who encouraged him to continue in the vein of his initial popular works, with his dedication to his early, unpolished genre fiction fueled by modest talent. Indeed, Tabbie takes on an Annie-like role, goading him on to write what sells, to “shut up and eat your eggs,” in the spirit of Ruth Younger (to whom King alludes in Misery), “to stop with the breast beating. She said to save my self-pity and turn my energy to the typewriter,” not presumably to write the Great American Novel, but, as Ruth admonishes Walter in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, to work the modest resources he has without indulging in grandiose, unattainable visions of professional potential (“Acceptance”). King’s characterization of Tabbie in the speech is consonant with this sentiment, as she is the gritty realistâ•fl“sarcastic” and Â�tough—to his romantic dreamer. If Tabbie was right that efforts to write literary fiction would be in vain, her advice also saved him from wasting such work on his least sophisticated fans, as Misery so aptly illustrates. Melville also shows his frustration with what he thought was the unsophisticated nature of his readers when he describes with scathing sarcasm the popular reception of his protagonist’s first publication by “the . . . applauses of the always intelligent, and extremely discriminating public” (Pierre 288). At Pierre’s writing desk, we can see that Melville was airing these frustrations about authorship, cast-

1 5 6 ::â•… Dreams Deferred ing himself as the victim of a sensationalized gothic torture scene. Like a prisoner serving a life sentence, Pierre the writer becomes a living corpse “[w]ith cheek rather pale . . . and lips rather blue” (Melville, Pierre 355). The idealization of literary culture and the work of writing as an activity of the “civilized” and enlightened sensibilities collapses when Melville sets it within its economic context as a trade to show how barbaric it is: “If physical, practical unreason make the savage, which is he? Civilization, Philosophy, Ideal Virtue! Behold your victim!” (Pierre 355). Indeed, the growth of the intellect is matched by the deterioration of the body and the loss of the soul. We see this image in King as well; the protagonist of Misery is a popular author whose physical condition deteriorates so drastically that he loses a digit on his hand (a punishment courtesy of Annie) as well as keys on his typewriter (thanks to dilapidated equipment supplied by the consumer-oriented Constant Reader, Annie, blind to the material conditions necessary for today’s professional author). As Pierre develops his authorial skills, he enervates himself economically and therefore physically, depriving himself of money for bread: “the wiser and profounder he should grow, the more and more he lessened the chances for bread” (Melville, Pierre 359). He never specifies which kind of romantic mode in particular (psychological? sentimental? domestic? adventure?) would be the path to success: “could he now hurl his book out the window, and fall to on some shallow nothing of a novel, composable in a month at the longest, then could he reasonably hope for both appreciation and cash. But the devouring profundities, now opened up in him, consume all his vigor” (Pierre 359). Pierre’s commitment to the “ambiguities” within him now prevent him from writing “entertainingly and profitably shallow in some pellucid romance” (Pierre 359). Interestingly, it is precisely this popular yarn-spinning style that King’s Paul uses to survive and escape Â�A nnie—thus satisfying the demand for popular Â�fiction—which Pierre (and Melville alike) refuse to resort to. Genre fiction readers tend not to tolerate “ambiguities” associated with a higher authorial calling. King complains through Paul that “the work, the pride in your work, the worth of the work itself . . . all those things faded away to the magic lantern shades they really were when the pain got bad enough” (Misery 29). He directly blames his popular readers, embodied by Annie, for taking away that sense of craft which transcends genre fiction, but is more angry with himself for allowing her to, like a bad addiction:


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“That she would do that to Â�him—that she could, when he had spent most of his adult life thinking the word writer was the most important definition of Â� himself—made her seem utterly monstrous,” as King ironically plays out his woe in precisely the generic melody of gothic horror, “something he must escape” (Misery 29). Her power promises wealth and death, and as such a powerful figure, “She really was an idol. If she didn’t kill him, she might kill what was in him,” namely his proud aspirations for literary fiction (Misery 29). Like King, Melville strained against the restrictions of genre labels. Genre’s tyranny over literary reputation and the celebrity system that helped produce famous writers emerges in his June 1851 letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Melville complained that “all Fame is patronage. Let me be infamous: there is no patronage in that. What ‘reputation’ H.M. has is horrible. Think of it! To go down to posterity is bad enough, any way; but to go down as the ‘man who lived among the cannibals’!” (Branch 249). Like King’s inability to shake the horror fiction label, Melville bitterly resists the public’s insistence on grouping him in the travel genre of literature, an association that began with his first novel in 1846, Typee, or a Peep at Polynesian Life. He wanted instead to be associated with weightier moral and psychological concerns. Being pinned permanently into the critical category of Typee meant for Melville that he would suffer a one-dimensional, even infantile reputation profoundly undeserving of his hard and serious work: “When I speak of posterity in reference to myself, I only mean the babies who will probably be born the moment immediately ensuing upon my giving up the ghost. I shall go down to some of them, in all likelihood. Typee will be given to them, perhaps, with their gingerbread. I have come to regard this matter of Fame as the most transparent of all vanities” (Melville, Correspondence 193). As the fiction dating from 1851 on attests, Melville confessed, “I did not think of Fame, a year ago, as I do now” (Melville, Correspondence 193). Regarding “Fame as the most transparent of all vanities,” Melville became acutely aware of how the authors he read, even Solomon, “managed the truth with a view to popular conservatism” (qtd. in Branch 250). The “popular conservatism” he mentions refers to the mass market of readers who expect particular genre conventions from particular authors. The Harper and Brother’s Book List persistently grouped Melville under the heading of “Travel and Adventure” beginning in 1852, which became “Voyages

1 5 8 ::â•… Dreams Deferred and Travels” from 1853 to the end of the decade. After the publication of Moby-Dick and especially Pierre, Harper felt the need to explain their classification of Melville under “Voyages and Travels” in their 1855 book list. They highlighted his glorious tenure at sea visiting and writing about remote tropical islands and “primitive social life.” By keeping him under the “Voyages and Travels” genre classification, Harper in effect decided that Melville would be most marketable as “the man who lived among the cannibals”: “The new path struck out by Melville in Typee and Omoo has led to a wide and brilliant fame in a short space of time. Few of the younger American Authors are more extensively read and more universally admired,” the glowing first lines of the sales pitch ran (Harper). The next segment more directly isolates his works as belonging to “Voyages and Travels”: “His pictures of primitive social life in the islands of the South Sea possess an irresistible charm. The works devoted to this subject are redolent of the spicy fragrance of the native forests, and glow with the splendid lights of a tropical sky” (Harper). The failure to break free from such genre definitions in the literary marketplace and fulfill the inner need to write the truth drives Pierre mad, reflecting the psychosis Melville endured after 1852. From 1852 to 1858, during and after the writing of Pierre, Melville suffered what some biographers, including Lewis Mumford, have described as a nervous breakdown or a “neurotic state.” Pierre’s sentiment echoes Melville’s: “I have wandered in my mind; this book makes me mad” (Melville, Pierre 363). The “random slips” from Pierre’s writing are much like Melville’s own. They glimpse the tortured heart of a character struggling in the “pursuit of the highest health of virtue and truth,” trying desperately to “explain this darkness, exorcise this devil” (Melville, Pierre 356). The nature of King’s misery in the early 1980s (Misery appeared in 1987) was a crisis that significantly linked alcoholism to authorship in a kind of double-epiphany. The thought “Holy shit, I’m an alcoholic,” struck him at precisely the same moment he realized The Shining was really about him, especially with its associations with writing as grinding labor leading to madness: the protagonist proclaims his insanity by writing in perfectly typed paragraphs and sentences, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” (King, On Writing 95). In a fit of writerly madness, Jack becomes a homicidal maniac who stalks his child with an ax. Out of King’s epiphany


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that The Shining was really about himself arose an awareness that much of his best work was coming from his own analysis of his suffering as a professional author and, in particular, as slave labor within the confines of the horror fiction genre. King would consciously pour himself into the project of self-analysis, with his professional angst mutually reinforcing the self-medicating that the protagonist Paul of Misery would take up, jonesing for his painkillers more and more as a way of getting back at Annie, carving some space away from her, and most importantly, killing the pain she had inflicted upon him. The horrifying paradox, of course, is that King himself created the monster of Annie, not just as a fictional character, but as a profoundly powerful dimension of his career. When we see Annie as an allegory of his own popular, mass readership that he himself created, the link between professional anxiety and addiction comes out in the open. King’s own interpretation of Annie in his memoirâ•fl“Annie was coke, Annie was booze, and I decided I was tired of being Annie’s pet writer” (On Writing 98)â•flis a drastic oversimplification designed to avoid offending and alienating the fan base that she so obviously represents. King allegorized the author-reader-publisher relationship in Misery, a writer’s nightmare of how a representative reader becomes a tyrannical editor forcing him to make manuscript changes under the threat of physical violence. “Work” implies struggle, negotiation, and pain. King’s own way of dealing with that pain in his real life was by first drinking, a pastime he openly associated with authorship, according to “The Hemingway Defense”: “As a writer I am a very sensitive fellow, but I am also a man, and real men don’t give in to their sensitivities. Only sissy men do that. Therefore I drink” (King, On Writing 94). Paul secretly dry swallows his medication, much in the way King gulps down bottles of Robitussin and mouthwash in the early Â� 1980s—not Listerine, but Scope: “It was tastier, had that hint of mint” (97). Humor aside, the substance abuse is really self-medication to kill the pain of Annie, the biggest of his horrors marked by the reality he faces when he sits down to write for his mass audience, increasing his popularity while simultaneously delimiting and restricting his claims on canonical literary distinction. King’s sense of guilt for his self-indulgent drug abuse, skyrocketing fame, and growth of his readership arises from his sense of proportional neglect of cultivating

1 6 0 ::â•… Dreams Deferred his talent, his artistry. Anesthetizing himself from Annie is essentially an escape from his own self-invention as popular fiction writer. “How else can I face the existential horror of it all and continue to work?” King asks (On Writing 94). King’s office was a kind of battleground on which he waged war with Annie in a struggle to come to terms with his increasingly fixed, permanent role of popular paperback writer. Strewn with tokens of equal parts power and self-destruction, the office he worked in during the early 1980s characterized his state of mind in the years leading up to Misery. His desk would signify hedonistic economic power through its size and centrality: “a massive oak slab that would dominate a Â�room—no child’s desk in a trailer laundry-closet, no more cramped kneehole in a rented house. . . . [I] placed it in the middle of a spacious skylighted study . . . [and] sat behind that desk either drunk or wrecked out of my mind, like a ship’s captain in charge of a voyage nowhere” (On Writing 100). The tracks of substance abuse littered the mighty desk. King’s wife (Starbuck to his Ahab?) collected it and dumped it out “on the rug: beer cans, cigarette butts, cocaine in gram bottles and cocaine in plastic baggies, coke spoons caked with snot and blood, Valium, Xanax, bottles of Robitussin cough syrup and NyQuil cold medication, even bottles of mouthwash” (On Writing 97). Such a display would make him second-guess his seemingly infallible authorial powers. “You have to be careful then, because if you fuck up,” he remembered thinking, he could roll his car or blow an interview on live TV (On Writing 97). The confrontation would inspire King to treat the problem in early 1986, and if not eradicate it as a form of therapy, to dramatize it as its own horror story in the pages of Misery. Bev Vincent’s recent study shows that King believed that “[t]he ‘serious’ novelist is looking for answers; the ‘popular’ novelist is looking for an audience” (307). Misery was King’s attempt to escape the audience he too generously welcomed in, to liberate himself from its tyranny, so that he could “look for answers.” The love/hate relationship would eventually go back to love, albeit masked and reserved in the dedication to the last book of his Dark Tower series: “Constant Reader, this final book in the Dark Tower cycle is dedicated to you. My books are my way of knowing you. Let them be your way of knowing me, as well” (Dark Tower 7; qtd. in Vincent 272). Careful to keep his distance by drawing the line between him and Constant Reader at the furthest point possible through the abstraction


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of the fictional story and the impersonal physical commodity of the novel itself, he says, “It’s enough” (Dark Tower 7; qtd. in Vincent 272). In Misery, King’s hate toward Annie, his Constant Reader, is palpable: she’s a glutton not only for Paul’s novels but kitsch art including figurines and Liberace, the aesthetic equivalent of the vanilla ice cream, Reddi-Wip, and Hershey’s chocolate syrup she gulps down hungrily. She wants him to read Danielle Steele; he wants to write Mailer and Cheever. His first try at serious fiction is discovered in his car that crashes near Annie’s secluded mountain home; under the pretense of taking him in to nurse him back to health, she realizes she has her favorite author captive, and forces him to burn his gritty realism and bring back the heroine of the romance novels she loves. Her editorial methods include confinement, “hobbling” (rebreaking Paul’s broken legs to prevent his escape), and thumb amputation. A gothic monster typical of King’s horror fiction, Annie becomes even more hideous by revealing that she killed a series of babies while working as a maternity-ward nurse. She seems flatly evil and thus serviceable for Paul’s final revenge: he feeds her hunger for his stories in a figurative rape in which he rams his burning manuscript down her throat, screaming “suck my book,” and delivering the death blow by smashing her skull with his typewriter, the object of his slavery (317). Kathleen Margaret Lant has expanded on this passage to argue that authorship for King is about phallic power, equating pen with penis, and that specifically it subjugates his female readership to victims of violent rape (113). But Annie is also the fruit of his own gothic imagination and reflection of the well of fear he regularly taps for his most salable tales, of his fear of being imprisoned and degraded by his own popularity. Strengell recently has treated this passage as Paul killing Annie the goddess, a kind of “Angel of Death,” tending to its gothic and incestuous undertones convincingly, but not to the killing of King’s readership and thus himself as popular author (50). The image of consumption dominates the passage; he is ramming her full of what she has been demanding all along, a kind of death by gorging on the manuscript pages, complete with the full weight of the typewriter on her head, the locus of a reader’s consumption. In Misery, the typewriter, more than the pen, corresponds with the creative process. Paul strengthens himself with it (lifting its weight physically to regain his muscle mass), and it becomes an object of contention between he and Annie, much like the marked-up manuscript pages he produces.

1 6 2 ::â•… Dreams Deferred Both of these, literally and figuratively, are the objects of his assault on Annie, a hideously desperate yet in some ways justifiable lashing out for freedom’s sake, like the distorted, perverse desperation of the incarcerated writer figure of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” who metaphorically kills her keeper at the end of that captivity narrative. Paul’s view of Annie should not be defined by the figurative rape scene alone, as it shares space in the novel with a birth scene of sorts. Paul cries out from his bed as he labors with the narrative, and Annie rushes in to lovingly lift him to his table (his legs are badly injured), her eyes wide at the emergence of the fruit of their author/reader relationship. In a fascinating gender role reversal, she plays the expectant father. “She was looking at him respectfully and not with a little awe,” nervously asking, “is it about the book?” to which Paul answers with all the focus of a woman delivering a baby, determined to bring his idea out into the world: “It is the book,” quite immanent and emergent. “Be quiet. Don’t talk to me” (King, Misery 165). Paul calls Annie in not to talk about their new creation, but to say that most certainly, even painfully, it is coming out right now in the form of a plot device, the seed of an idea she had planted in him, all but insuring the completion of the work. Not surprisingly, the outcome is “a good deal more gruesome than the other Misery books” of the popular romance series Paul is famous for (King, Misery 167). Though such hints at Annie’s redeemable qualities early in the novel are only Â�glancing—she makes him write, catches him illogically “cheating” his way through the plot in order to kill off characters, and as she says, “talk[ed] you out of a bad book you’d written and into the best one you ever wrote”â•flits conclusion brings King’s professional dependence on her into the open (King, Misery 272). Such dependence, I would argue, is further evidence that Annie is an externalization of Paul; she is his inner slave driver, the one to keep him honest, to keep him spinning a yarn, and a damn good one, for nothing less than survival. Her opinion of his “best book” King is satirizing ironically, of course. But his accomplishment, although a product of compromised ambition, is nonetheless quite clear in this passage. There is no shortage of swagger and cockiness in writing popular fiction well throughout the novel. Paul even reflects on dominating creative writing classroom games such as “CAN YOU?” which pits a character in a perilous situation and asks students to write his way to safety (King, Misery 203).


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After Annie’s death, King complicates her presence in Paul’s consciousness not only as a psychological force to be reckoned with in menacing night terrors, but by squarely situating her in the context of professional authorship through the image of Paul sitting down to write the Serious Novel that Annie, his popular audience (and his popular-fiction-writing self), prevented. Ironically, she provides the Â� muse—inspiration through Â�fear—for this new novel, a stab at the Mailer-Cheever school of gritty, urban realism so blasphemous to Paul’s army of romance readers. For as much as King voices hate for Constant Â�Reader—enough to figuratively rape and kill her with sadistic Â�vengeance—the sadder truth is that she is a part of Paul, occupying both psychological and professional parts of his identity, living beyond the novel’s conclusion and well into King’s own professional career, as the dark muse that forces him to remain a writer, nonetheless, in misery. Annie is both blessing and curse, for the alternative is to “cover the typewriter and study for my broker’s license,” a figurative death of his authorial identity, a pathetic and unacceptable form of professional suicide in the novel (King, Misery 352). In a 1980 interview with Paul Janeczko, King was careful to mask any aspiration to write literary fiction. King’s answer to the question of what he felt he owed his readers is telling. “A good ride on the roller coaster,” he again delimits with the phrase, “and that’s all,” thereby keeping his fans at arm’s length (Underwood and Miller 78). The genre expectations of that ride, of the precise, stylized nature of its thrills, which Paul/King builds up in the mind of Constant Reader, are precisely the source of tension in Misery between Paul and Annie. King worried about failing his readership and the violent consequences in a 1984 interview, just two years prior to penning Misery: “I didn’t write [horror novels] to make money. . . . [T]he money” and readers “came to me,” he said, in a turn of phrase that instantly amalgamates readers and money into one economic entity signifying profit, beneath which the ever present fear of losing book sales becomes one and the same with alienating readers from their genre expectations: “people who like my stuff will come along unless you shortchange them” (Underwood and Miller 176). Annie is shortchanged, and Paul suffers the consequences. Paul fears Annie as much as he needs her. After all, she calls his writing art and him an artist, ironically dignifying his hack writing as timeless literature through a staunch resistance to its association with money: she reminds him that “when you pervert the talent God gave you

1 6 4 ::â•… Dreams Deferred by calling it a business . . . you might as well call yourself a whore” (King, Misery 72). King’s conclusion, voiced through Paul, was to keep feeding Annie, to keep his popular readers occupied to allow for serious fiction, something we clearly see in the recent shape of his career, as his works range between genre departures (likely attempts at “serious” fiction) and standard horror money makers, in which innovations are not narrative, but media (re)packaging through outlets like Internet novels and made-for-TV screenplays. Melville’s solution was much more drastic and uncompromising: he chose to squander his early genre fiction success, unlike King, who continues to employ the “hard-hat and lunch pail” approach toward commercial fiction with several exceptions, the most noteworthy being his recent novel Lisey’s Story, whose protagonist, not coincidentally, is a popular novelist. Lisey’s Story, like Stationary Bike before it, is an attempt to enter the canon through a fictional self-examination of the perils of popular writing. Stationary Bike is King’s allegory of the meaning of the work of writing in his life, a popular effort that obliquely aspires for literary distinction while justifying employing his commercial, blue-collar creative construction crew (who take shape in the novel as alternately suicidal and homicidal) for most of his career, but not without a little regret and even guilt. Melville’s refusal to write for money, on the other hand, would cement his own personal form of misery, increasing his alienation from the professional circles in the literary marketplace as well as vital relationships in his personal life that would bring on what Andrew Delbanco calls “the quiet end” (288). Unfortunately for Melville, he would be late for the celebratory din initiated by D. H. Lawrence and other modernists upon his revival in the 1920s that has yet to end. Melville would speak not only to literary modernism’s aesthetic sensibilities but to the twentieth century’s perils of popular writing. Pierre anticipates Misery’s crisis of occupational self-definition that, as Jack Cady said of Melville, paints from “a palate of anguish” in which “personal pain translates straight across the story and displays itself as torment” (98). The collision between canonical dreams and consumer culture spark the professional rage and despair if not insanity that Melville and King fearlessly, viscerally unleash in a macabre dance of art and money.


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Authorship and the Transnational Book Market Questions of art and money persist in the work of Hanif Kureishi and Douglas Coupland, which reflects many of Melville and King’s concerns about popularity and canonization, yet with notions of authorship shaped by their prominent roles in the transnational twenty-first-century book market. Both authors straddle the line between popular and literary fiction, but they struggle differently with their reputations. Kureishi has fled racial politics in his work, while Coupland despises being mistaken for an American in his ongoing effort to foreground his own transnational identity as a German-born Canadian (“Strong and Free” 46). Coupland would prefer to be known as literary and transnational rather than popular and virtually American. Kureishi would prefer to be known as an artist and not as a representative of Pakistani Londoners. Kureishi, English born with ancestors from India, describes himself as “a funny kind of Englishman” (Ranasinha 4). He has received praise from the New York Times Book Review and other arbiters of high culture for most of his work. He has been canonized largely for his screenplay for My Beautiful Laundrette (1986) and his novel The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), and continues to win praise for his recent work, which includes Intimacy (1998). He is a force in popular culture, writing and producing for Channel 4, England’s public broadcast television station, and is supported by the arts council of England and the British Council (Ranasinha 121). He struggles to disaffiliate himself from pressure to be the spokesman for his Pakistani ethnic community in London.5 To Kureishi, the role of racial spokesman places an unnecessary constraint, even a form of self-censorship, on his work, effectively preventing it from ascending to the higher reaches of artistic greatness. Hence he has abandoned postcolonial racial politics for stories about interpersonal relationships and infidelity, subjects that have grown to dominate much of contemporary fiction. Kureishi’s defense of his artistic freedom stems from his awareness of the popular audience, this time not consumers of his fiction for pleasure, but those who attempt to make Kureishi a foot soldier for the antiracist fight on behalf of the black-Asian British. Kureishi’s Annie, as it were, is the force of racial politics that threatens to subsume his work and transform it into a source of “positive” Pakistani role models. Mahmood Jamal begins to sound like King’s Annie complain-

1 6 6 ::â•… Dreams Deferred ing about the gritty realism and profanity in Paul’s literary novel when he assails Kureishi for depicting Asians as “money grabbing, sex-crazed people” (qtd. in Ranasinha 46). Like Annie, there is a puritanical policing of artistic freedom here, and in the context of my argument, King submits to it, while Melville and now Kureishi reject it. Only here it is inflected with the piety of racial politics that operates according to realist assumptions of mimetic tokenism, which Kureishi’s technique of ironic distancing constantly thwarts. His response is clearly voiced through his view of Spike Lee’s refusal to show black Americans “doing drugs in his films” as a form of self-censorship to which he refuses to stoop and compromise his artistic integrity: “I won’t be tied. I can’t. . . . Otherwise, it is bollocks. It’s censorship. It’s just censorship. . . . I think it would be dangerous for writers to have too much of a sense of responsibility” (MacCabe 53). Such is his refusal to be caught in what Ella Shohat has called the “moralistic and essentialist traps embedded in a ‘positive-stereotype’ and ‘positive images’ analysis” (214). There is an echo of Kureishi in the mobster uncle Nasser of My Beautiful Laundrette, a ruthless capitalist who refuses to conflate his racial identity with his professional one, proclaiming, “I’m a professional businessman not a professional Pakistani. There’s no such thing as race in the new enterprise culture” of the Thatcherite London 1980s (41). Unlike Nasser, the focus of Kureishi’s “profession” that transcends race is art, not money. But the common thread of ambition uninterested in identity politics emerges. The disaffiliation from racial issues with the writing of Intimacy may have been sparked by Kureishi’s earlier distaste for racial exploitation in the arts. He is particularly appalled by the prospect of the majority culture’s insistence on transforming race into performance, and colonizing it for the sake of artistic production. Karim, the politically naïve protagonist of The Buddha of Suburbia, unwittingly submits to playing Mowgli (the loincloth-clad Indian boy in Kipling’s The Jungle Book) for his first theater gig in London, the racial equivalent of doing a blackface minstrel show in antebellum America. In another incident, Karim’s own racial ethics are called into question by his antiracist colleague, Tracey. She objects to him basing his improvisational comedic character on Changez, a recent Asian immigrant forced to marry Karim’s best friend, Jamila. Karim claims Tracey is censoring him, and he is right, yet he is blind to how he censors himself. Like Spike Lee in the earlier example, he allows the positive/nega-


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tive representational racial binary to dictate his artistic choices: Lee not depicting drug-using blacks bows to the tyranny of the white audience just as Karim plays to the crowd with a parody of his own people (as “irrational, ridiculous, hysterical”) (Kureishi, Buddha 180). Karim’s parody of Changez would have been perfectly acceptable were he to rescue something of Changez’s dignity in the process as Kureishi himself does in the novel itself (180). While these examples firmly reject race as performance for Â�money—as does the novel’s parody of Haroon’s phony performances of meditation and “enlightenment” that mystify and orientalize ethnic India for white consumption in London Â�suburbs—Kureishi is equally critical of characters piously renouncing the market. Omar’s father in My Beautiful Laundrette, for example, is an old left-wing holdout whose efforts to spread education and reform racist skinheads fail and land him in his dump of an apartment on a Tube line. A useless, self-defeating shut-in, this anticapitalist figure disapproves of Omar and Johnny’s entrepreneurial plans for their laundrette and encourages them both to quit and go to college. The depiction of Omar’s father indicates that Kureishi does not advocate a total renunciation of the market, or at least his method of doing so: he regales viewers with close-in shots of the old man vilely, even suicidally, swilling liquor and of Omar dutifully clipping the old man’s toenails, which resemble those of a weeks-old corpse. His only recourse is when the market figure, Nassar, takes pity on him at the end of the film. As an icon of market resistance, Omar’s father is pathetic and powerless, much like King’s Paul is at the beginning of Misery. Omar’s father does not gather strength and rebel heroically the way Paul does mainly because he is so detached from market culture, which Paul ultimately reenters and succeeds in. Kureishi’s complex view of his authorial role should not be confused with ambivalence. The common thread in his comments on authorship in interviews and his figurings of it in his fiction is a refusal to be pigeonholed: like every one of the authors in this book, he clearly is a creature of the Â�market—Omar’s business and Karim’s artistic career ambitions are portrayed sympathetically for all their naïve Â� blindness—who also rejects certain value sets practiced in its culture. Didactic or propagandistic writing is not real art, according to Kureishi, whose literary fame granted him the privilege of reinventing his career as an author of relationships and not transnational youth culture in racially tense postcolonial settings.

1 6 8 ::â•… Dreams Deferred Had his success been based on the best-selling popular mass following of his youth culture novels, he may have suffered from the same unshakable association with that genre as King’s association with popular horror fiction. While Kureishi enjoys the freedoms conferred to him via his canonical Â�status—three academic books, six chapters in edited books, and forty-nine scholarly articles have been published on Â�him—Douglas Coupland dreams of canonization despite his love/hate relationship with popular culture. Like Kureishi, he is a transnational author with a heightened global awareness. His works focus less on race than they do on consumerism, technology, and their bizarre dance with spirituality. On the one hand, much of Coupland’s work is focused on dismantling consumer culture; on the other hand, he panders to it, basing his appeal to readers on his hipness to all the latest technology in a kind of in-joke that only someone in love with popular culture could tell. His novels Microserfs (1995) and Jpod (2006) are especially illustrative of the latter, while the former, probably closer to his heart, is voiced in such laments for the hijacking of spirituality by mass production and technologized consumerism in such works as Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991), Polaroids from the Dead (1996), and particularly Life after God (1993). Coupland’s desire for canonicity and for creating timeless fiction is uncomfortably bound up in his knack for capturing the zeitgeist of generations, decades, and even half decades, as in Polaroids from the Dead, a time capsule of the first half of the 1990s. With such time-bound subject matter, Coupland is nonetheless self-consciously aware that the spirituality his novels try to rescue from the jaws of alienating mass production and consumption (“I hear God approves of various brands of cola competing in the marketplace for sales dominance”), of cubicle office culture (“veal fattening pens”), is popular culture itself (Hey Nostradamus! 72; Generation X 20). As such, his novels share space in the landscape of popular culture with Nostradamus and astrology, which he condemns for their materialistic bent but praises for their sympathy with the all-too-human desire to speak to the dead. In Hey Nostradamus!, Alison the astrologist is vilified for capitalizing on Heather’s grief for her lost husband, an act portrayed as a sin of rabid materialism. Interestingly, Coupland distances himself from such pursuits while also confessing some complicity with them: Jason, a survivor of a high school shooting, laments his coworkers’ mystification


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of his experience, catered to all too willingly by mass-market print media: “Soon enough, Nigel will learn my ‘story,’ and then he’ll go buy a cheapo massacre exploitation paperback in some second-hand bookstore. His behavior around me will change: he’ll walk on eggshells, and then he’ll want to discuss life after death, crop circles, gun laws, Nostradamus” (Hey Nostradamus! 66). Coupland’s distaste for the grubby literary market that would profane the solemn and sacred tragedy Jason endured is complicated by Jason’s admission that such reading would allow Nigel “to know more about me than anyone ought to know” (Hey Nostradamus! 66). Although Coupland wants to be associated with literature and religion rather than popular fiction and superstition, the hint is that Coupland’s own novel, even if condemned as a “cheapo massacre exploitation paperback” by the most savage of critics, might still hold the keys to self-knowledge and understanding of tragic events that conventional organized religion fails to explain. This can be read as a hyperbolic lament (in the space of the novel itself) for the novel’s popular rather than literary destiny. Coupland’s attempt in Life After God to work within popular culture itself to transcend popular culture echoes Whitman’s project in Leaves of Grass that I discuss in chapter 4. Coupland models the bestselling book of all time, the Bible, by mirroring its tropes, size, layout, and Â�contents—short stories that read like parables with a wide archetypical, even universal reach. Indeed, Coupland’s move toward a Whitmanian postmodern persona comes through his resistance to bureaucracies and technology and a desire for God (“my secret is that I need God,” he confesses) (Life after God 359). The book suggests that the global market has robbed us of our spiritualities and encourages us to find them again, in part, through the persona of the author, whose hushed, intimate, confessional tones—“Now—here is my secret: I tell it to you with an openness of heart that I doubt I shall ever achieve again, so I pray that you are in a quiet room as you hear these words”â•flimply that close relationships and a sharing of pain can lead us to rebirth, the final image of the book (Life After God 359). Interestingly, the cover art corresponds with this watery rebirth: a baby smugly floats on a raft in a sunny pool like a movie star, his face angled upward toward an unseen source of light, eyes closed to the sheer power of its brightness. The iconography is unmistakable: rebirth and discovery of God is ironically possible in the materialistic, self-indulgent trappings of our modern world. The role of the author, as Coupland understands it, is to commu-

1 7 0 ::â•… Dreams Deferred nicate how that rebirth might be accomplished by reconciling with our high-tech consumer world, rather than battling and rigidly disapproving of it as Reg does in Hey Nostradamus! Coupland’s movement, like Kureishi’s, is toward freedom from political and religious dogma, perhaps signs of growth toward a more complex, transnational multiethnic ideological milieu for the twenty-first century. Coupland comments that “it was through art that I ultimately came to learn that no history is, in itself, Â�history—possibly its most liberating and uncruel form. (You sentimentalize bourgeois consumption patterns; you must be punished)” (Polaroids 124). Thus they support laissez-faire politics, particularly freedom of artistic production from political constraints; we see strains of this in Fern’s revision of the gentleman publisher’s code, liberating it from the control of publisher and resituating increasing financial, and thus artistic, freedom in the hands of authors. Freedom from the shackles of northern racism and surplus economy informed part 1 of this book; the progressive feminism of part 3 concerned itself with liberation from the walls of separate-spheres gender ideology. Yet the need for a sympathetic reader, an audience, and a market drastically complicates such concerns for artistic freedom. Coupland has embraced rather than resigned himself to his popular status that continues to leave him on the margins of the Â�literary—only two scholarly articles have been published on him, one of which is in a literature and theology journal. This situation has only inspired him to use the basic vocabulary of popular culture to find solace in it, if not transcend it altogether. While Kureishi used his canonical status to flee from further transforming the literary market as his early fiction had, Coupland continues not only to reinvent the material forms of popular fiction, but to dignify and elevate its spiritual potential as well. The authors I have examined in this book all manipulated the conventions of the markets they inhabited, talking back to it, changing it, and forecasting its future. As Coupland’s, Kureishi’s, and King’s careers show, the global market of the twenty-first century continues to inspire attacks on consumerist ideology, while also prompting new methods of self-promotion and innovative forms of authorial reinvention, if not, as in the case of King, a sense of reconciliation with the role of mass producer. Thoreau even celebrated, like Whitman, the global reach of the market as a force capable of expanding his sense of self: “I am refreshed and expanded when the freight train


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rattles past me and I smell the shores which go dispensing their odors all the way from the Long Wharf to Lake Champlain reminding one of the foreign ports, of coral reefs, of Indian oceans, and tropical climes, and the extent of the globe. I feel like a citizen of the world” (Walden 119). The antebellum romantic notion of the divinely inspired artist has assumed new forms all apparently in opposition to capitalism’s basic values yet in full use of their basic Â�lexicon—artistic freedom for Kureishi, spiritual rebirth for Coupland, literary distinction for Â�King—that continue to shape modes of authorial agency and responses to today’s global market culture. Coupland and Kureishi carry on the legacy of questioning the corruption and inequality in the market; King carries on the innovative and successful self-promotional tactics that have transformed the market. Common to all of these responses is a love of market culture, along with an ironic distancing from or even outright assault on it. Even Thoreau’s embrace of the bold energy of the market echoes Coupland’s own love of the popular culture he deconstructs. Detachment notwithstanding, CoupÂ� land’s comment about Pop artists Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist applies: “I think all the Pop artists loved the subjects they painted. . . . [They] loved the machine that formatted the disk that was them” (Polaroids 124). If the “machine” is market culture and mass production, it is ironic indeed that the works of Warhol and Rosenquist, like Thoreau and Wilson, voiced some of the boldest, most penetrating anticapitalist statements ever. It is precisely a love of the market that would make Whitman and Fern want to make it better, and that prompted Melville and Davis to forecast its accommodations for women. This book has viewed authors as empowered, active agents who talked back to the market, stepped into it, changed it, and looked into its future. The glue holding together all these responses is a tacit understanding of the power of that market not only as a force that organizes definitions of society and self, but also one that changes the material condition of our lives. Indeed, such impassioned engagements with the market represent not merely an awareness and respect for its power to define us. Rather, such engagements with the market understand it as a large, furious, hopeful, and dangerous work in progress, a human construct that can be actively shaped and altered through literary art. The authors in this book all found their voices, in part, because they believed they could make a difference in the world of commercial exchange and in the very ways in which literature is produced and consumed.

Notes

Literature Now Makes Its Home with the Merchant 1. Leon Jackson’s The Business of Letters: Authorial Economies in Antebellum America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, forthcoming) argues that there was not a singular, monolithic “marketplace” into which authors produced literature. Instead, he characterizes writers’ professional activities as taking place through various “economies” of relationship that became increasingly isolated and less “socially embedded” (Jackson). This concept supports my understanding of the diverse ways authors assumed agency to alter radically plural market conditions. My uses of the terms “market” and “literary marketplace” bear on the uniqueness of the situation in which the author was engaged. Wilson’s market is northern and racist, for example, while Davis’s is inflected less with race than gender and class concerns. 2. Along with Newbury’s Figuring Authorship in Antebellum America, a generation of books emerged during the late 1990s on the literary marketplace. None truly cross gender boundaries the way I do, nor do they treat authorship as dialogic social criticism and agency of change as my book does. For example, Sheila Post-Lauria, a disciple of David S. Reynolds, boldly (if not recklessly) proclaims Melville’s popularity through what she claims was his pervasive embrace of popular generic forms in her 1996 book Correspondent Colorings: Melville in the Marketplace. Her project of contextualizing Melville to prove his connection to the popular market helps to revise old assumptions about his flat renunciation of it, assumptions nonetheless overwhelmingly substantiated by a host of textual and metatextual evidence. The book succeeds in showing the side of Melville that was engaged with the market, yet does not analyze his criticism of it, especially with respect to women’s roles as emphasized in chapter 6 of this book. Further, her single-author study too closely repeats the methodological orientation (and even findings) of her mentor David S. Reynolds and thus does not challenge established approaches to the literary market. Other books devoted to a single canonical male author from the era include Steven Fink’s Prophet in the Marketplace: Thoreau’s Development as a Professional Writer and Leonard N. Neufeldt’s The Economist: Henry Thoreau and Enterprise. 3. Italics in quotations are in the original except as noted. 4. Hopes for stardom and worries about the mass audience’s judgment are

1 7 4 ::â•… Notes to Pages 22–3 Blake’s concern in his book on Whitman’s interface with the culture of American celebrity, Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity. His chapter entitled “Publicity” is particularly relevant to my chapter on the poet, which seeks to understand the poet’s methods of self-promotion not only as received tactics he learned from the advertising culture around him, but as ones he advanced in the new context of literary promotion that would change the trade and anticipate today’s marriage between poetry and money as detailed in Goodyear, “The Moneyed Muse,” a recent article reporting the new openly corporate and commercial objective of the influential journal Poetry to market verses to the masses. 5. Studies that still serve the needs of the canon from the 1990s generation of literary marketplace scholarship include David Herreshoff, Labor into Art: The Theme of Work in Nineteenth-Century American Literature; Kenneth Dauber, The Idea of Authorship in America: Democratic Poetics from Franklin to Melville; and Stephen Railton, Authorship and Audience: Literary Performance in the American Renaissance. These works importantly gloss the thematics of economic concern in the canon, much in the tradition of Michael T. Gilmore, but do not intersect their findings with extended analysis of women or ethnic authors. The books from this generation that venture into this territoryâ•flNicholas K. Bromell’s By the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in Antebellum America, parts 3 and 4, and “Labor’s Gendered Body” and “Writing the Work of Slaves,” and Grantland S. Rice’s The Transformation of Authorship in America, chap. 7, “Authorial Coquetry and the Early American Novel”â•flonly do so in isolated segments rather than as foundational concepts for the entire book. By contrast, I have systematically united commonly separated writers under specific rhetorical categories to show their shared concerns, not to cover up or evade real differences in race or gender, but to reveal the pervasiveness of certain orientations toward the market that took up issues of race and gender in their very rhetoric. Thus, my study attempts to move beyond the politics of identity into the history of economic thought and professional business practice, which, during the years of the market revolution, were always already about race and gender politics, as they held so much sway over the book market. Ronald Zboray’s A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public similarly engrains issues of race and gender into its meticulous research, although its concerns are vastly different from mine. Zboray’s focus on reading in the everyday life of the era echoes my delineation of the literary market transformations in the previous historical overview, but my focus on authorial reactions to changing market conditions in the main chapters departs from his project. 6. See Hemphill, Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America, 1620–1860, and Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America. 7. Newbury’s study “insists on something other than an account of the ma-

Notes to Pages 28–9â•…

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terially observable conditions or the intellectual history that accompanied the professionalization of authorial work during the antebellum years.” Instead, his book “values as primary the cultural and personal consciousness of authorship as it is revealed in the figurative logic of the literary texts” (120–1).

Chapter 1. Other and More Terrible Evils 1. Our Nig’s resemblance to proslavery writings has received little attention other than Joy Jordan-Lake’s (2005) treatment of the novel as a reaction to Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). While her study does not share my focus on Wilson’s anticapitalist bent, its method of showing Our Nig’s confluence with proslavery has been critically underrepresented for similar reasons to my own. Obvious polarizing forces of politics and race make such a comparison “unnatural” and disturbing, one that potentially “frustrates our desire for empowering narratives,” a general tendency Lois Loveen finds in Our Nig (Loveen 580). 2. The years since the appearance of Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s 1983 groundbreaking second edition of the novel have yielded an abundance of scholarship on Wilson, however, most of it focusing on northern racism. The most recent works relevant to this chapter linking race with labor are by Xiomara Santamarina and R. J. Ellis. Santamarina argues that Wilson opposes black uplift’s assumption that the northern market was devoid of opportunity for free African Americans, but allows only tangentially that her antimaterialist sentiment “can be perceived as replicating proslavery anticapitalism critiques,” a point I wish to develop as a dominant feature of the novel (190n6). With regard to Wilson’s sense of domestic servitude as a condition far worse than independent entrepreneurial endeavors, Ellis establishes that the association of dependence with “servility” arose in sharp contrast to the wage laborer’s political and residential independence. Such independence built “virtue,” according to Thomas Jefferson, compared to the “veniality” of workers who lived on their employer’s land and served his political interests (Ellis 138). Although independence and uplift are championed in the novel, I would argue that the protagonist Frado never fully achieves independence after her departure from the Bellmont household and is forced to succumb to charity in a hostile and unreliable market. 3. Wilson’s sense of authorship is quite distinct from this genre. Frederick Douglass, for example, distinguishes his former “brutish” self as a slave from his current self as liberated author through his famous jarring contrast of images: “My feet have been so cracked with the frost, that the pen with which I am writing might be lain in the gashes” (Douglass 43). Authorship and the pen of the present self are elevated above the cracked-footed slave self. But in Wilson, authorship is slavery because it is another form of drudgery and labor with un-

1 7 6 ::â•… Notes to Pages 29–30 certain and scant material rewards. For Wilson, Our Nig is a token of her continuing struggle and not the trophy of her triumph over oppression. 4. Julia Stern has suggested that Wilson’s attack on northern racism bore a visceral violent edge that shaded the novel’s stylistic conventions in tones more gothic than sentimental (Stern 439–66). This mode better served Wilson’s agenda of what David S. Reynolds calls dark reform literature, which was so prominent in antebellum America (Reynolds, Beneath 54–91). The gothic mode so central to didactic labor reform literature foregrounds the grim realism of class conflict and horrifying working conditions in ways that support Wilson’s extensive anticapitalist rhetoric that I examine here. Yet it does not account for the collision between sentiment and capital that appears in so many domestic novels of the time and that drives so much of Our Nig, especially in the scenes I examine in this chapter. 5. Joy Jordan-Lake notes that “Wilson opens herself up to the triumphant cries from proslavery camps” in the preface (Jordan-Lake 129). Lake identifies other proslavery patterns in Our Nig’s use of a black con artist, Samuel, who pretends to be a former slave, and also Wilson’s more general project of supplying “devastating reports of free Northern blacks’ treatment at the hands of Northern whites” (Jordan-Lake 130). Jordan-Lake studies the mother figures in the novel, however, while I focus on how black and white female mistreatment springs from economic domination and neglect. 6. Eric Gardner’s historical data, if not his conclusions, directly support this view, suggesting “not only that abolitionists knew about the book but that they may have consciously chosen not to publicize it” (227). He explains that the printing of this novel by a black woman in 1859 Boston, the center of abolitionist reform, made it “virtually impossible” for it to have “escaped notice” (Gardner 228). 7. Wilson may seek salvation from her condition “by way of the marketplace,” that is, through the charitable donations her novel openly solicits (Ernest 425). But the suggestion that this appeal to charity necessarily “counters the proslavery accounts of the evils of capitalism” obscures the fact that Wilson/Frado’s world is a living hell precisely because she was an economic slave in the North (Ernest 425). The novel recounts Frado’s struggles against “the evils of capitalism” through her past so that her present writing of the book becomes a token of how her economic oppression continues (Ernest 425). 8. Wilson works the market to subsist, for she does not have the privilege of renouncing it altogether, the way writers like Henry David Thoreau did. Such a stand for her would mean very real starvation and death. She bitterly attacks it for incarcerating her, revealing the capricious nature of laissez-faire capitalism: the winners, like Fanny Fern, celebrate it as in Ruth Hall (1854), while the losers disdain it and either renounce it altogether or continue to apply their lives and


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labor to it. Wilson fits into the latter category, and in so doing does not merely complain about her labor as an indentured servant, or show universal spite toward it; at times she emphatically takes satisfaction and distinction from it (as I discuss later) despite her revelation that the North’s capitalistic “game” is tilted to the disadvantage of so-called free blacks. 9. Lucien Chase’s novel, English Serfdom and American Slavery (1854), also compares British society unfavorably with U.S. slave society. Not only drawing on nationalistic sentiment, this evasive strategy by way of false analogy, quite common among proslavery arguments, displaces the focus onto other sites of suffering far from the subject of slavery in the South. Such trickery, of course, is not Wilson’s motive, although her scenes of oppressed labor are also not set in the South. 10. Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden, section 3, “The Machine,” explains the anticapitalism in Schiller’s Letters upon the Aesthetical Education of Man, Carlyle, Emerson, and Thoreau. Marx traces sources of romantic thought in American literature opposed to a “mechanistic social system” that threatened to fragment the individual the way politics had been increasingly “splitting up into numberless parts” (169–70). Mass production, the thinking went, assaulted the imagination through stultifying, repetitive, industrial labor that was becoming increasingly divided. See also Lawrence Buell’s coverage of romantic reactions to industrialization in his introduction to New England Literary Culture: From Revolution through Renaissance. 11. It is reasonable to assume that Rebecca Hayward (who is the model for Mrs. Bellmont in the novel) had strong abolitionist sympathies. As an avid churchgoer, Rebecca (like Mrs. Bellmont) could have been influenced by her minister, Reverend Humphrey Moore. In fact, Moore presided at her marriage to Nehemia (Mr. Bellmont in Our Nig) in 1806. Moore was “such a strong abolitionist that he was elected by antislavery men to the House of Representatives in 1840 and to the New Hampshire senate in 1841; in both places he delivered stirring orations against slavery” (White 37). The irony that the most hateful character of the novel was likely an abolitionist is compounded by the fact that Milford, the site of Wilson’s oppression in Our Nig, was a station on the Underground Railroad. White points out that Wilson’s small attic chamber would have made a perfect hiding place for escaped slaves. Milford was noted for its abolitionist efforts: “If Milford is distinguished for anything,” one citizen stated at a centennial celebration in 1894, “it is for the unselfish and sublime work” of abolitionists (qtd. in White 38). 12. The text keeps Mrs. Bellmont’s potential role as surrogate mother as remote as possible, instead cementing her role as employer, and thus a representative of the racist northern market. There is significant evidence that mulattoes were perceived in the 1850s as a greater threat to whites than unmixed blacks, making them vulnerable to particularly virulent strands of racism, especially

1 7 8 ::â•… Notes to Pages 44–6 at the hands of employers. Frado’s characterization as recalcitrant signifies the threat of black rebellion, given Mrs. Bellmont’s extraordinary efforts to subdue her. The belief that mulattoes were more likely to rebel because they had the ambition of whites in them was in wide circulation, openly advanced by John Calhoun and others. According to one supporter of this doctrine, the “ultimate infertility of the mulatto” was the result of a complex biochemical “aversion to hybridity,” offering “scientific” support of white disdain for “amalgamation” (Wright 12–4).

Chapter 2. Alert, Adventurous, and Unwearied 1. Thoreau’s famous question, “Why do we labor the way we do?” has prompted critics to examine how his labor at Walden Pond is actually a parody of labor, as it reverses the dogmas of the predominant work ethic originally spawned by Ben Franklin in the new Republic (Neufeldt 16). This seemingly absurd one-tosix ratio of rest to work would, interestingly, evolve into his hyperbolic claim that he worked only six weeks in one year at Walden, since building his shack for $28.125 allowed him to live on only $0.27 per week (Thoreau, Walden 49). 2. Thoreau’s famous resistance to categorizing writing as work, interestingly, has shaped the methods of his biographers. While his life as a writer has received a great deal of critical attention focusing on his inner development, Nicholas K. Bromell’s By the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in Antebellum America (1993) and Steven Fink’s Prophet in the Marketplace: Thoreau’s Development as a Professional Writer (1992) effectively treat the biography in terms of literary business. Fink’s focus on the complexities of Thoreau’s spectacular failure in the literary marketplace is needed; he notes that the vast majority of works on Thoreau’s life as a writer are psychobiographies of some sort, such as Sherman Paul’s The Shores of America: Thoreau’s Inward Exploration and Robert D. Richardson Jr.’s Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind. William G. Rowland Jr.’s comment in the introduction to Literature and the Marketplace: Romantic Writers and Their Audiences in Great Britain and the United States (1996) is typical of this critical commonplace: “On the American side, I study Emerson, Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville rather than Thoreau because he was ultimately, I believe, a profoundly private individual who gave up the struggle to bring his art before the public” (5). Sharon Cameron, Writing Nature, and Howarth, The Book of Concord, emphasize Thoreau’s journal as a private mode of composition over its function as space for Thoreau to work out the myriad social roles of authorship and the process of literary production. 3. In 1843, Thoreau lived on Staten Island tutoring Emerson’s nephews, when he met New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, who helped place Thoreau’s essays in various periodicals. Greeley was his agent for eight months before Thoreau returned to Concord, homesick, in 1843. In 1844, Emerson would buy the


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tract of land that would become the site of Thoreau’s shack at Walden Pond that he moved into on 4 July 1845. 4. This significantly qualifies the standard notion of his linear, one-way retreat as voiced by Martin Bickman: “As the book and the years go on he seems to be less interested in social concerns than in the workings and moods of his own mind” (22). 5. Michael Newbury has identified Thoreau’s antimaterialist sentiments in his use of antiindustrial manufacturing tropes for writing, reading his constant attempts to escape work at his family’s pencil factory as the key to “the conspicuous absence of pencilmaking as a trope for writing (especially conspicuous in light of Thoreau’s willingness to use gardening, carpentry, and countless other forms of work in this way) . . . to distance the figuration of their literary work from emergent forms of industrial labor” (22). We should be alert to F. O. Matthiessen’s comment about, if not demonstration of, “the depth to which [Thoreau’s] ideals for fitness and beauty in writing were shaped, half consciously, by the modes of productive labor with which he was surrounded, or, in fact, by the work of his own hands in carpentry or pencilmaking or gardening can be read in his instinctive analogies” (173). 6. Leon Jackson’s The Business of Letters: Authorial Economies in Antebellum America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, forthcoming) is particularly useful here in its formulation of the transformation of authorship not so much as a simple shift from amateur to professional status, but in economies of authorship that move from “social embeddedness” to what Thoreau specifically complains about here, “more impersonal forms” (Jackson). Those impersonal forms would include the process of technological transformation of authorship to accommodate the emergent mass culture, which Thoreau saw as a direct threat to writing’s nearness to the inner soul, simultaneously alienating author from audience and self. Mass production and commercialization eventuate in such an impersonal, and thus fraudulent, form of authorship to Thoreau. 7. What Bromell does not pursue that I do here is the question of what limits there are to writing as a form of labor, just as there are limits to farming and building according to Thoreau’s desire not to work any more than is necessary. Bromell’s suggestion is that Thoreau’s transcendental project of observation and writing is “wasteful work” done for its own sake, implying that it is infinitely renewable, an activity that Thoreau would be happy to keep his hand busy at indefinitely (218). However, writing itself is a form of labor that also reaches its limit precisely at the moment language is transcended and the soul is satiated with divine energy. Thoreau’s statement that “I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than necessary” fully applies to the work of writing with a transcendental objective, as just enough hand work, as it were, for the soul to subsist upon (Walden 98).

1 8 0 ::â•… Notes to Pages 54–7 8. The literary marketplace became increasingly specialized after 1830 into a set of business relations between author and publisher. The publishing industry expanded tenfold in response to America’s steadily increasing levels of literacy, people’s interest in reading as an inexpensive form of entertainment, and the expanding railroad system that made the national distribution of books possible (Charvat, Profession 27). In Doing Literary Business, Susan Coultrap-McQuin notes that advances in printing technology, including the introduction of the steam-powered cylinder press, the use of stereotyped plates, and cheaper ways of making paper and bindings, made low-priced cloth and paperback editions of books available for the first time to customers (15). 9. Thoreau’s distancing of himself from the social networks behind his literary product hints at commodity fetishization, a process explained in Capital. “Marx insists that any division of labor is a social division that establishes social relations and creates a social product. Under a system of private property, such social interdependence is expressed only in the alienated form of commodity exchange, which obscures the social basis of value” (Albrecht 200). In erasing the tracks of his literary labor, and perhaps striving for Emersonian self-reliant individualism in his finished literary product, Thoreau seems complicit with the concept of “[m]arket value . . . as inherent in the product itself, not as an expression of the social labor costs of different products” (Albrecht 200). 10. See Grantland S. Rice’s chapter titled “Authorial Coquetry and the Early American Novel” in The Transformation of Authorship in America (147–72) for a useful analysis of how the revolutionary and early national periods were characterized by a civic rather than an artisanal model of authorship, made up of a cast (reminiscent of the professional men of Melville’s “Paradise of Bachelors”) that included “lawyers, Supreme Court justices, professors, clergymen, schoolteachers, prosperous merchants, and even the wife of a United States senator” (152). 11. It is important to note here a key distinction between my argument and that of Bromell in the chapter “The Making and Un-Making of Walden” in his book By the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in Antebellum America (213–39). He argues that the body is not celebrated because it is “the locus of man’s claim to private property,” a point I make in a different context earlier in this chapter regarding Thoreau’s distaste for the corruption of the yeoman farmer in his time (Bromell 224). Bromell does not treat the use of the body and labor as necessary preparation or a preliminary phase in the process of subsistence writing, as I do here. Instead, Bromell discusses the tendency in Thoreau to escape the body, which he locates in the Artist of Kouroo passage in the conclusion of Walden (326). Bromell’s insights on Thoreau’s urges to escape the body and thus the curse of trade do not nullify but rather complicate and enrich the paradox at the heart of those passages that ostensibly celebrate physical work. I would also agree with Bromell’s sense that Thoreau was not engaging in “the widespread


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antebellum tendency to romanticize labor,” but not so much because he wanted to escape the body (224). Instead, I suggest that he was actually constructing alternative modes of living, seeing, and creating, not for the sake of simple romantic escapist fantasy, but for spiritual sustenance that goes the other direction, burrowing into the body and earth for its nourishment. Subsistence writing is essentially about survival and the confrontation of life’s essential facts; subsistence writing means that a relatively commonplace geographical formation like Walden Pond is enough to become, with the right appetite and intensity, nothing less than the eye of the world, providing what is necessary for the soul’s subsistence as an object of profound meditation and contemplation. 12. Thoreau admires sentences that do not strain in a journal entry that nonetheless “makes its intellectual strength manifest” and seems itself to strain. Michael West remarks that “one wonders what the verbal gymnast who pulled off his full-twisting Tsukahara effortlessly in the privacy of his journal would consider a strained display of strength” (207).

Chapter 3. Capital Sentiment 1. Melissa Homestead, in the chapter “ ‘Every body sees the theft’: Fanny Fern and Periodical Reprinting in the 1850s” in American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822–1869 (150–91), has effectively explained Fern and the periodical copyright situation, especially in terms of the author’s “attempt to secure a stable authorial persona that could secure future proprietary claims,” but does not explicitly examine Fern, as I do here, through transformations in trade courtesy as a historically specific code of business behavior inflected by gender and antebellum notions of propriety (Homestead 153). For more comprehensive analyses of connections between women’s fiction and the developing American market, see Ann Douglas’s foundational work, The Feminization of American Culture, and Nina Baym’s Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–1870 (47–50) and American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790–1860 (164–5). 2. Women’s studies scholars like Joyce Warren and literary critics such as Gale Temple have astutely traced Fern’s individualism and engagement with capitalistic codes of both production and consumption in her career and her own success story fictionalized in Ruth Hall (1854). Book history scholars, however, have paid less attention to the fascinating case study in publishing history that Fern’s career provides, and specifically, to the transformation of publication practices from a patrician, genteel code of ethics to an open, unfettered economic scramble. 3. Margaret Fuller’s analysis supports the interweaving of gender codes depicted in the image of a grown man crying in a nineteenth-century novel: “There

1 8 2 ::â•… Notes to Pages 72–6 is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman. . . . [T]here should be no discordant collision but a ravishing harmony of the spheres” (qtd. in Elbert 116). She argues that it is important to “uncover,” as this scene does, “and show the commonalities . . . shared by men and women . . . thus dissolving boundaries between public and private spheres and questioning or challenging the stereotypical images of women as ineffectual or vulnerable,” and men as unfeeling and cold, “in nineteenth-century society” (Elbert 2). 4. While “publishing terms were rarely favorable to authors,” the exploitation factor loomed large (Fink, “Fuller” 67). Fink shows that “the literary marketplace in general was becoming increasingly commercialized (even as it exploited non- or anti-commercial conceptions of authorship)” (Fink, “Fuller” 59). But if “the writing is marketable, the publisher will only be able to exploit the artist for so long before a competitor offers the writer more attractive terms for publication. For a while, the pirating of foreign works unprotected by international copyright provided sufficient competition to stave this off, but the exploitation of unpaid [and poorly paid] writers broke down long before the passage of international copyright laws in 1892” (Fink, “Fuller” 65). Whereas capitalist markets constantly regulate themselves through ideological codes that temper full-out aggression for profit, the code that severely restricted authors’ earning potential in 1850s America was trade courtesy. 5. Susan K. Harris has convincingly revealed the reactionary impulse behind romantic and sentimental fiction of the 1850s. She argues that “since one function of the female icon in nineteenth-century literature was to represent a retreat fromâ•flor alternative toâ•flthe realist worldview, the sentimental language that engendered her served as a sign of her difference from male characters, who tended to be associated with harsh ‘realities’ and described in the language of commerce” (119). 6. See Linda Grasso’s “Anger in the House: Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall and the Redrawing of Emotional Boundaries in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America” for a useful discussion of how a woman’s public expression of anger toward family members was a strategic political tool. Elizabeth Cady Stanton suggested that “[i]f all tyrannical parents, husbands and brothers knew that the fantastic tricks they play at the hearthstone, would in time be judged by a discerning public, no one can estimate the restraining influence of such a fear” (qtd. in Grasso 255). “Because Ruth Hall reveals an intimate portrait of ‘tyrannical parents, husbands and brothers in the patriarchal house of woe,’ Stanton commends Fern for helping women recognize that their own anger at men is both justified and politically powerful” (Grasso 255). 7. E. D. E. N. Southworth’s publisher, Robert Bonner, exhibited these traits in the extreme. Joanne Dobson notes that “Bonner was not only employer to Southworth, he served also as friend, advisor, and banker, and to her son Rich-


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mond he served as a father, even to the point of offering to buy him a substitute if he were drafted to fight in the Civil War. . . . The many letters from Southworth begging Bonner humbly for some financial favor or thanking him fervently for his generous gifts reveal the paternalistic nature of Bonner’s patronage. . . . [Southworth] was far more comfortable,” in keeping with nineteenth century convention, “with a personal rather than a strictly commercial relationship and couched her financial dealings with him in the terms of friendship rather than of business” (xvii). 8. “Fern used sentimental imagery and language patterning” as a way of disguising her main purpose of evolving Ruth into “self definition and verbal power” (S. K. Harris 112). More importantly, as Susan K. Harris argues, Fern aimed to bring “the worldview implicit in the sentimental mode into doubt” by subverting “a rhetorical mode not only closely associated with women’s writing but also commonly held to be reflective of women’s nature itself, [thus] actively challenging the prevailing nineteenth-century view of ideal women” (112).

Chapter 4. Transcending Capital 1. Whitman has been understood in the context of his capitalist culture, however, as both renouncing and courting commercialism. Critics such as Buinicki and Francis have recently examined Whitman’s self-promotion and use of the language of commerce in a capitalist context, as have Jonathon Arac, Jay Grossman, Gay Wilson Allen, Justin Kaplan, Betsy Erkkila, and David S. Reynolds. The newest and most thorough contribution to Whitman in the market is David Haven Blake’s Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity (2006). I address precisely what these works do not explain: the extent to which these economic tropes position the poet figure outside the process of production, aesthetic or otherwise. These studies usefully link Whitman’s aesthetics to his business strategy, but the specific dimension of his poetic project that mystifies the process of literary Â�production—its capitalist networks and the relations among its institutions of negotiation and Â�exchange—does not receive the attention or sustained analysis I provide here. 2. Martin Buinicki’s argument about copyright taking on “broader democratic principles” as “a question of literature” significantly qualifies my point here: “The intersection of his artistic and business practices, therefore, reveals how Whitman worked to transform the copyright page of Leaves of Grass from simply a legal necessity to an integral part of his poetic project” (249). The synthesis of art, law, and democracy here supports my point about the poet figure’s resistance to professional models of authorship. Indeed, his idealism toward the issue of copyright intends to transcend petty self-interest much in the way his mystical sense of shared authorship and magical, spontaneous coloring of

1 8 4 ::â•… Notes to Page 89 the origins of his verse universalize rather than professionalize the work of the poet. But Buinicki’s argument differs crucially from mine in that he asserts that much of Whitman’s aesthetics were visible in his business relation, a point he supports through extratextual documents. I work the other direction, however, suggesting that Whitman’s business objective of maximizing the sales of Leaves of Grass found its way into his aesthetic project by shaping the character of his author figure. 3. The claim that Whitman’s initial failure was attributable to an extraordinarily high price ($2, equal to $44 today according to Volo and Volo [370]), objectionable content, and a market that favored fiction over poetry is easily refuted by the successful sale of the 1860 edition as established by John Tebbel (Media 110). Hart’s and Mott’s now outdated histories of Whitman’s professional life exaggerate the impact of poetry’s commercial inferiority to Â�fiction—if “sales were lower, its honor stood higher” in the eyes of book Â�buyers—and the dominance of Longfellow as the best-selling antebellum American poet (Hart 126). When Fowler and Wells took over the publication of Leaves of Grass, they cut the price in half; but the inference that “they could not force an unwanted product on their trade” as the author “eventually gave away a considerable part of the edition, and those that were left were ‘remaindered,’ doubtless for a few dollars” is specious (Mott 111). To dignify his reputation, Mott says that although Whitman’s eventual market success did not come until the late 1880s, his “persistence in publication as well as authorship, despite misfortune and discouragement of the bitterest kind, is something unique in the annals of literature” (Mott 112). 4. Jay Grossman points out that the Emerson letter seems like an unqualified endorsement, but it never mentions the word “poet” or “poetry” once, “an honorific title at the very heart of Emerson’s epistemology” (“Rereading” 93). The edition aggressively tries to cater to an audience that likely failed to see his radically eccentric brand of writing as “poetry”: the table of contents is revised to include the word “poem” in every title and as the first word of each piece (“Poem of Faces,” “Poem of Walt Whitman, an American”) (Grossman, “Rereading” 100). Grossman’s point differs from mine in that he concerns himself mainly with exposing the ambiguity in the letter to reveal that it contained less unrestrained praise than we may have supposed to support his conclusions about the uneven nature of the Emerson/Whitman relationship. Whitman’s exploitation of Emerson to promote his writing as poetry fits the same pattern of self-promotion I locate in the author figure. But unlike Grossman, I see less of a concern in Whitman with generic anxiety (the status of the writing as poetry) than I do with his obsession with stylizing, and thus selling, the poet persona in terms of his contrasting characteristics to, and resultant freedom from, market conditions. 5. Lawrence Buell has linked the godlike persona assumed by many poets from this era to the construction of an alternative universe: “Following Emer-


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son’s advice, many of our authors seem to have built their own fictional universes [through] the romantic vision of the poet as a liberating god and the poem as a heterocosm, or second creation” (Literary 141–2). Whitman’s unique inflection of this pattern, I suggest, is that he forwards his fictional universe in a competitive manner, promoting and selling it as superior to the real industrial world, and that the poet figure becomes the very emblem, definition, and model for living in that world. 6. See Steven Fink’s adaptation of Charvat’s theory in the introduction to Fink and Williams, eds., Reciprocal Influences: Literary Production, Distribution and Consumption in America (1–10). 7. Richard Pascal has made a similar argument, noting that the “ ‘rush after wealth’ was not mere editorial fodder in Whitman’s estimation”â•flhe had written in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle on the topic repeatedly in the 1840sâ•fl“but a social issue of considerable urgency” (144). But to pursue this antimaterialistic stance too aggressively, Pascal argues, would overshadow his role as “exuberant booster”: “To pursue the former role too extensively would be to alert everyone, himself included, to the depressing degree to which social reality is falling short of the ideal, and thereby possibly to demoralize and alienate his audience” (146). I would argue that there is considerable optimism in Whitman’s most intimate moments with the reader, passages I examine later in this chapter, that carve out an alternative safe haven from the market. While Pascal’s identification of these two voices in Whitman supports my reading, I make a point of further understanding the antimaterialistic voice as crucial to Whitman’s self-promotional package for publicity. Such self-promotion is evident, for example, in his claims in the 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass that poets are indispensable in a democracy because they help to define the nature of true wealth and the stronger wealth of selfhood. (I explicate those passages later in this chapter.) These claims advertise the poet figure’s powers and thus become a self-reflexive argument/justification for the poems themselves. (Any potential buyer would look first at the book’s frontispiece and perhaps scan snatches from the preface and the poems themselves before making the purchase. Thus such features of the text itself likely did function to sell the book.) 8. David Haven Blake has recently confessed his belief that Whitman would have been a rock star, and not a poet, if he were alive today, arguing that the essence of Whitman lies in his voice. Although Blake does not examine the commodification of that voice as I do, the implications for my argument are provocative. The voice of a rock star is aural, for example, commodified in recordings or consumed in ephemeral live performance; similarly, Whitman’s song expresses the depth of his soul through “heart singing,” and not the words on the page. For more on the historical origins of “heart singing,” see Blake’s “Reading Whitman, Growing up Rock and Roll.”

1 8 6 ::â•… Notes to Pages 95–7 9. Interestingly, Emerson’s and Whitman’s individuated profiles of the ideal poet echo the egocentric English romantic poets. William Charvat’s research identifies a strong backlash against such definitions in the work of Longfellow, who “rescued the reputation of poetry” by imbuing it with clear objectives: the promotion of civilization, learning, and scholarship (Publishing 67). Longfellow defended poetry by arguing for its use in teaching the cultures of other nations, and he defended poets by insisting that they are indeed men of action, as evidenced by Longfellow’s university teaching career (Charvat, Publishing 68–9). Charvat’s overall point differs from mine, however, in that he does not address the full depth of the role of that ideal romantic poet in the marketplace, especially as articulated in Whitman’s poet figure’s attack on capitalism as the cornerstone of his enterprise of self-promotion. 10. Hawthorne satirizes the lack of professional status conferred upon authors by the general public, especially men of business in “The Custom House,” the introduction to The Scarlet Letter: “What is he? . . . A writer of storybooks! What kind of a business in life . . . may that be? Why the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler” (qtd. in Charvat, Profession 76). Indeed, the whole atmosphere of the Custom House as a bureaucratic locus of mundane, perfunctory business stands in direct opposition to the romantic inspiration that the narrator is inclined toward, and eventually finds, in the form of the scarlet letter itself, which he hotly presses, cheeks flushed, to his chest, as a prelude to Hester’s tale. 11. In this vein, James Dougherty has observed that eyesight “lays hold of all things, far and near, spiritual and sensual, present and future. The power that mediates them is, from one side of this crossing, the ‘spiritual world’ of identities accomplished by the Oversoul” (178). Such power may originate in “an intensely physical encounter with a fully realized and specifically urban space,” as Dougherty notes (178). I would qualify the point by suggesting that this Â� power—the poet’s sight and Â�v ision—nonetheless radically disassociates from the dimension of economic exchange that occupies such a big part of that urban space. 12. David Haven Blake, in the chapter titled “Publicity” in Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity, offers an excellent analysis of Whitman’s “unremitting all-out campaign” of self-promotion, Â�that—no matter how delusional, especially in terms of the self-authored reviews of the 1856 edition of Leaves of Â�Grass—attempted to establish publicity and thus legitimate his aesthetic project (100). Whitman “took comfort” and “therapeutic aid” in the “poetics of hype” with which he frequently engaged, according to Blake (99, 101). My argument builds on Blake’s emphasis on publicity as a legitimating discourse by suggesting that Whitman’s emphasis on the unchecked, original energy of the poet figure attempted to distance him from his own business persona in order to raise his work’s value in the marketplace as invaluable or priceless, as it were.


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13. Francis notes that Whitman’s calls to attention in his first lines of stanzas are like the “finger pointer” icon so frequently seen in antebellum newspaper advertisements and the carnival barker’s imperative “step right up!” from promotional discourse (394–5). Straight sincerity opposed to convoluted reasoning, however, marks his departure from the language of advertising; indeed, as Francis observes, the logical principle behind his catalogs is the plus sign, while his “I” is almost always followed by an equal sign (401). I build on this insight by suggesting that the lack of duplicity is a stylized pose calculated to win reader sympathy in a way that paradoxically echoes a successful sale. 14. Of course, the alternative is to dramatize the sweat of literary production like many women writers who “conceptualized authorship as a profession rather than a calling, as work not art” (Baym qtd. in Bromell 136). Baym suggests women were culturally indoctrinated by the dominant patriarchal society into seeing their writing as incapable of reaching the level of great literature, so they thought of it as mere work. Most American Renaissance male authors like Whitman, on the other hand, had a loftier sense of their vocation as spinning timeless truths rather than writing for money to buy coal to boil the pot, a motive and purpose for authorship that Louisa May Alcott, Fanny Fern, and Harriet Wilson would self-consciously and openly espouse. Men, however, still wanted to make money: Whitman, like Thoreau and Hawthorne, cast his narrative voice “outside the realm of the antebellum market signified by professional work even as [he] participated and sought a living in this market” (Newbury 151). My contribution to this well-known pattern is that Whitman aggressively Â�promoted—in ways more thorough and sophisticated than we may have Â�supposed—that positioning of authorship as the key feature of his poet figure and chief commodity of Leaves of Grass. 15. Stephen John Mack asserts that in sections 5 and 27–9 of “Song of Myself” “the poet is not so much narrating an experience as he is attempting to have one,” arguing that in Whitman “experience happens in language” when it actually occurs (62). Mack’s sense of the poet not narrating so much as passively waiting is consonant with my argument that he does not actively produce anything. Mack’s interpretation differs from mine, however, as he uses this insight to locate a democratic pragmatism through shared experience that happens in language. Instead, I drive the insight toward a better understanding of the economy of Whitman’s representation of authorship with respect to 1850s market society. 16. Terry Mulcaire has argued in “Publishing Intimacy in Leaves of Grass” that Whitman’s sense of self utilizes tropes of mass production, and even distribution, as he imagines his body disseminating and diffusing among his readers’ bodies (482–3). This appropriation of marketing discourse, in my view, does not necessarily align Whitman’s poet figure with professional writing. It instead

1 8 8 ::â•… Notes to Pages 104–14 adds to the paradoxical truth that however steeped in economic language his verse may be, it nonetheless mystifies both the process and the resulting product of literary production. 17. For more on Whitman’s separation of his craft from other trades, see Alan Trachtenberg’s “The Politics of Labor and the Poet’s Work: A Reading of ‘A Song of Occupations.’”

Chapter 5. Dollarish All Over 1. The exception is Ruth Stoner, who recently reclaims not only the financial savvy of Davis that made her “one of the most popular writers of the nineteenth century,” but also thirty-three years of what critics have habitually dismissed as potboiler writing for Peterson’s, which she presents as “works of art” rather than cultural artifacts of interest to “social historians” (44). Although such tales were “embedded within very conventional imagery and sentimental plots,” Stoner argues, they contained subversive thinking about women’s sexual repression (44). I further her findings by suggesting that Davis’s use of such mainstream conventions, especially marriage endings and her antimaterialist sentiment, were designed to sell not only her popular fiction, but her didactic reform tales as well. 2. Sharon M. Harris claims in Rebecca Harding Davis and American Realism that many of Davis’s stories, “perhaps unwittingly,” leave their heroines “rooted in a highly patriarchal world,” especially in “The Wife’s Story,” which ultimately “is a very dissatisfying ending for twentieth-century [as well as twenty-first-century] audiences” (114). I argue later that such stories intentionally supported domestic work, for the alternative was not the realistic sort of authorship/artistry that Davis herself practiced, but transcendentalism. Further, Harris tends to overemphasize how after the birth of her son, “she now found balancing her marriage and career even more exhausting with the addition of motherhood” and how “the inequities of responsibilities” were a common complaint, for she had “little time for celebrations and none to think of her own career” (115–6). The evidence shows that Davis was still engaged in a political and literary sense, albeit mostly through letters to Annie Fields, indicating growth if not publications. Such engagement is not so much evidence of literary paralysis, a sort of professional death by domesticity, but a testament to her resourcefulness and grit. Such attributes are underestimated by Rose in “The Artist Manque in the Fiction of Rebecca Harding Davis,” whose focus on Davis’s victimization and unfulfilled, frustrated vision at the hands of S. Weir Mitchell’s rest cure, which I discuss later, misses how her production in spite of it is nothing short of inspirational. 3. See, for example, Dickinson’s letters to Higginson dated 15 April 1862, 25

Notes to Page 115â•…

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April 1862, and 7 June 1862 (Dickinson, Letters 171–5). Sharon M. Harris also connects Davis’s pose with those of the Dickinson/Higginson correspondence (Kindred 57), but her implication is that Davis was merely minding her manners, as indeed she was. She was honoring the cultural expectation of deference to a potential employer and thus social superior. Etiquette books from the era “continued to devise a number of ways to demonstrate respect for class superiors” (Hemphill 138); to not defer would be to display “coarse familiarity confounding traditional notions of rank” (Kasson 138). Yet she is doing more than showing deference, especially in light of the business tactics visible later in her career. I submit that Davis was angling for a full and ongoing commitment from Fields through a show of seriousness to obtain more than a temporary cash advance. I do not mean to imply that Davis was insincere here; her motivation was not only for a bigger payoff in the future, but for a chance at social change through a highly respected venue, both aims very much sincere and not in conflict to Davis whatsoever. My discussion of her double publication of “Ellen” points more obviously to Davis operating according to a profit motive. 4. Jean Pfaelzer’s insight qualifies this point. She argues that much of Davis’s “portraits of daily life and domestic power” attributed to realism really derived from the domestic sentimental novels (Pfaelzer 17). Realism, and its association with literary fiction, was nonetheless coded male, as it remained the driving force behind “the percentage of contributions by women [which] dropped significantly from 90–100 percent of the total fiction featured in the first seven years of the magazine to only 30–40 percent,” as Anne Boyd notes (210). Such a precipitous drop, Boyd rightly concludes, unmasked the editorial agenda of the Atlantic Monthly to return to its original identity as a men’s magazine, a fact that is crushingly obvious in light of Fields’s willingness to drop Davis from the list of contributors in 1868, right as her star was rising as the new face of realism. He did not want that face to be female, as the writing staff by 1871 was mostly male. Such critics as Richard Brodhead have been blind to the institutional sexism of such editorial business practices. His assumption that Fields was operating a meritocracy as the magazine “underwent a palpable stiffening of its selection criteria” is painfully wrong (along with his unfortunate phallocentric imagery to express it) (qtd. in Boyd 209). Fields did not raise the bar of his selection criteria so much as he shut out women. 5. Melissa Homestead has convincingly argued that “weak copyright laws” were not a disincentive for women to write, but an incentive to “wholeheartedly exploit, and even help invent, the structures of commodity capitalism” while also “maintaining an emotional detachment from the market,” one that she says was not so much an affective decision as a legal fact since “the law effectively created a distance by refusing to grant most women the legal status of proprietors” (3). Yet women writers still made huge profits by literally transforming business

1 9 0 ::â•… Notes to Pages 118–22 practices, particularly the gentleman publisher’s code, with their tremendous consumer demand and profit potential. The trade courtesy of the early national period was one of the structures of capitalism that was destabilized by women writers like Davis and Fanny Fern of the 1850s, whose popularity gave publishers a disincentive to recognize one another’s prior claims on authors, transforming the market into a free-market scramble of competitive open bidding. 6. Such a display of Davis’s business skill shows a full engagement with and manipulation of the market, a dynamic at odds with the predominant pattern of emotional and psychological detachment from the market described in Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture; Lori Merish, Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature; and Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America. My perspective derives from Susan Coultrap-McQuin, who demonstrates that antebellum gender codes of conduct governing the publication industry were not always in conflict with but in many ways supported professional women writers. 7. Kristin Bordeau has noted that “The Wife’s Story” is a “powerful working class critique of Emerson,” arguing that Hetty rejects self-reliance not only for domesticity, but for the family and, significantly, the body, which the disembodied aesthetics of transcendentalism so denies (132). Her focus on the maternal and physical aspects of identity complements my emphasis on realistic images of authorship; Davis embraced motherhood and writing equally with the same realistic ethos. (Her advice to her son is a beautiful confluence of the maternal and authorial roles, not at odds, but mutually reinforcing in their own toughminded, rooted way.) I would suggest that the binary is a false one in Davis’s own life, and that its presence in the story functions as a narrative tool to create a polarized, intense philosophical debate about professions and women that would help sell the article, in this case, especially to Atlantic Monthly readers of significantly more conservative gender politics than the women who read Peterson’s. By contrast, the latter relished her veiled subversive commentary about repressed female sexuality that Ruth Stoner has so convincingly explained in “Rebecca Harding Davis’s ‘Second Life’; or ‘Her Hands Could Be Trained as Well as His.’” 8. Mixed-genre narratives were common during this era, among which “IronMills” is a sterling example. The interior of an average antebellum American bookstore is indicative of the lack of clear-cut divisions between literary genres. Ronald Zboray in A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public has shown that generic divisions of literary categories were in radical flux at the time. His examination of evidence from Homer Franklin’s 1841 New England bookstore brought him to the conclusion that “relatively few books had a chance of appearing next to one of the same genre. Combined with


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high incidence of adjacency of books with wildly different genres, the inventories demonstrate the disarray of Franklin’s bookstore” (154). The larger implications for this finding, Zboray says, point up “the fragmented state of knowledge” and the “boundlessness of antebellum intellectual life” (154). The generic mixing in Davis is symptomatic of this kaleidoscope of kinds of books and authors “old and new of every stripe” that “stood side by side as the antebellum book purchaser browsed the shelves. . . . People would grasp for religion, advice, essays, history, biography, novels, poetry, educational material, anything to help them make sense out of the unprecedented complexity they faced “ (154–5). 9. Wordsworth conceived of the process of literary production not as actively crafted, methodical labor, but as the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (Abrams 8). Coleridge’s organic view equally evades realistic economic contexts and relations, isolating the creative process in the self and describing “a great work of literature to be a self-originating and self-organizing process that begins with a seedlike idea in the poet’s imagination . . . and evolves into an organic whole in which the parts are integrally related to each other and to the whole” (Abrams 8). Hazlitt underlines the romantic concept of authorship as a passive activity in the same spirit of Wordsworth’s “spontaneous overflow” and Coleridge’s “organic growth” when he claims that “the definition of genius is that it acts unconsciously” (Abrams 8). 10. One could certainly include Washington Irving’s economically disinterested authorial figures here as examples of American romantics who are not transcendentalists writing in this mode. R. Jackson Wilson’s Figures of Speech: American Writers and the Literary Marketplace, from Benjamin Franklin to Emily Dickinson treats Irving in chapter 2 as a writer who crafted various nonprofit authorial personae in his career for sale on the literary marketplace. One of these artist figures is especially drawn from the romantic tradition, as he casts himself as a suffering romantic whose lifelong love had perished. Wilson shows that Irving barely knew the woman, but wove a semifictional devotion to her that conformed to the self-effacing romantic author figure that was very marketable in the 1820s. 11. J. F. Buckley adds the important qualification that “the realism of ‘IronMills’ rejects the notion implicit in transcendentalism of the divinely inspired artist as a self-reliant force for cultural improvement at the very time that its romanticism supports the transcendental notion that such an artist is of fundamental importance to society. Davis places the poet within the everyday society of industrialized nineteenth-century America” (73). The story read in isolation from Davis’s career appears to simultaneously reject and support transcendentalism. But her career indicates an alternative model of artistic creativity, one fully adapted to the market, economically grounded, balanced, and realistically engaged with demand. There was never a delusional pursuit of capital in her

1 9 2 ::â•… Notes to Pages 123–31 career as with Hugh. His sacrifice to industrialization is a function of the incompatibility of his conception of artistry with his economic surroundings, a kind of perverse amalgamation of capitalism and Emersonian aesthetic idealism, with a fatal consequence that brings out the worst in both systems: an individualistic egotism that has Hugh behaving like a hallucinating drug addict and a compulsive gambler at various moments in the story. Thus Davis mourns the passing of the “divinely inspired artist” but easily sees how ill suited it is to the current economic climate. Such mourning is indeed the source of much of the story’s sentimentality, yet as her realistic conception of authorship in her career shows, a viable socially engaged and profitable alternative vision indeed existed. 12. For more on Davis’s use of romanticism, see Walter Hesford, “Literary Contexts of Life in the Iron-Mills.” Hesford examines the function of a variety of genres in the story but does not treat the economic consequences of those literary contexts the way I do here.

Chapter 6. Satirizing the Spheres 1. This epithet amounts to high praise for the wife in her refusal to conclude that “strange noises” in the table signified “spurious ghosts” like the ones with which “one midnight the mischievous little boys of the town tried to frighten that sturdy philosopher,” Democritus. The suggestion that supernatural phenomena occur in “the tombs of Abdura” only encouraged Democritus to make them “his place of study.” The superstitious narrator husband plays the perfect comic/gothic foil to his wife’s rationalism, invoking Irving’s Ichabod Crane and Poe’s tormented narrators of “Tell Tale Heart”â•flmenaced by vanishing time and impending death, “Tick! Tick! Tick!”â•fland “The Raven.” Most notably, the narrator of “The Raven,” like the narrator of “The Apple Tree Table,” discourses with an unintelligible source whose unchanging replies mock him with “jeering defiance” (Melville, Short Works 372, 382). 2. Just as Ishmael is careful to balance leisure and work, and even intermix domestic and public sphere activities on the Pequod as I will demonstrate, he also seeks balance between solitude and society, as Linda Costanzo Cahir notes, “moving between both modes of being. His wisdom is in understanding that we cannot live exclusively ‘on land’; to do so is to commit spiritual suicide. And, we cannot pass our lifetime at sea; if we do, we become dangerously self-absorbed, like Ahab” (43). This insight fascinatingly exposes the complexity of Ahab’s obsession with the whale, which pits him in a solipsistic cycle of solitude, shutting him out of not only the tranquility (a time for sorting out “the chase” of the marketplace, as it were) but also the society of the domestic sphere. 3. Andrew Delbanco represents “The Cassock” only as a “sniggering joke”


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reflective of Victorian constraints about direct references to sex in literature (68–9). Stephen Railton writes it off as “a short, obscene, impious joke about the whale’s penis (referred to obliquely) and ‘pulpits,’ ‘bible leaves,’ and ‘an archbishoprick’” (175). While both are correct, they miss how the chapter critiques the division of labor along gender lines. For a deeper analysis of the phallic jokes in Moby-Dick, see Terry Roberts’s “Ishmael as Phallic Narrator.” Roberts effectively traces how “the series of complex phallic jokes” in the novel suggest a narrative pattern “roughly equivalent to the sexual act” (99). Roberts extends Shulman’s earlier conclusion that such jokes “‘satirize conventional religious, economic and social values’” (qtd. in Roberts 99). Gender roles, though unexplored in Shulman and Roberts, can be understood as part of the conventional “social values” Melville satirizes. 4. For more on the novel’s masculine codes of behavior in particular, see Jillian C. Rice, “Male Sexuality in Moby-Dick.” 5. But such masculinity in the Morewood letter is still hyperbolic, even mockingly so, as the overdetermined, romanticized images of male toughness at sea turn into silliness, especially when he shifts toward a warning voice, with tongue firmly in cheek, naming the woeful afflictions of sciatica and lumbago that could threaten a woman reader of his novel. The tone is reminiscent of his mockery of the dyspeptic, hypochondriac traveler in The Confidence Man. The excessively male voice in the Morewood letter is the inverse of Ishmael’s feminine voice in “Stowing Down and Clearing Up,” but with the same effect of calling into question rigid gender divisions by exaggerating the respective masculinity and femininity of each narrative voice. A humorous mismatch is the result, between burly sailors fussing over decorations, and the prospect of a woman sitting down to read a womanless novel. Thus the letter is too commonly read humorlessly and at face value as simply more evidence of Melville’s “separation from the public” and alienation from his female readership through earnest, serious “images of radical masculinization” that expose an “understanding of himself and his work as strongly, even dangerously, individuated” (Newbury 55–6). Missing in such readings of the letter is the self-effacing way in which Melville subverts, rather than reinforces, conventional beliefs about gender’s function as a determinant of literary taste and the potential “harm” of crossing such essential boundaries. 6. Melville subverts “the popular conservatism of [the] nineteenth-century” in much of his work, especially Moby-Dick, according to Railton: “As in Walden Thoreau locates his life in the woods in antithesis to the ‘shams and delusions’ that are worshipped in the village, so Ishmael defines the ‘highest truth’ that resides in ‘landlessness’ against the assumptions of his contemporary audience. . . . The rhetorical plot is finally against their reader’s innocence, the unexamined complacencies of their belief” (171, 173).

1 9 4 ::â•… Notes to Pages 135–6 7. Sarah Wilson has provided an excellent and much needed analysis of “the degree to which Melville understood gender as produced by living spaces” (59). Her emphasis is more on the specifics of the architecture of the narrator’s house in “I and My Chimney”â•fldown to floor plans and Â�blueprints—as her access to Melville’s gender inversions, while my focus is on domestic economy within the larger capitalist context. Like my argument, she asserts that “Melville’s male characters need access to domestic space in order to form viable identities” (S. Wilson 59). Unlike Wilson, I emphasize how those identities intersect significantly with Melville’s relation to professional authorship in a capitalist context. 8. This attempt to find tranquility and productive literary labor in the domestic sphere is a grand example of the “magnificent fusion[s] of opposite qualities” Reynolds felt Melville was capable of (Beneath 289). What underscores this fusion is the publication history of “I and My Chimney” rendered by Sheila Post in “Melville and the Marketplace,” which indicates that Putnam’s antisentimentalist leanings were consonant with those of the narrator, whose resistance to domesticity has precedence in an earlier Putnam’s tale, “The Potiphar Papers.” In this story, “the male narrator, disturbed at the refurbishing attempts of his wife and family, determined to subdue their efforts” (Post 125). Post’s evidence points to the complex mix of male authorial need and the domestic setting, while she herself misinterprets Putnam’s liberal agenda as ruling out any sentimental domestic yearnings in the narrator of “I and My Chimney.” On the contrary, he very desperately clings to the domestic sphere and sentimentalizes his attachment to it in the story, but in a way that radically refigures domestic ideology. Thus her general point about Putnam’s policy of printing stories subversive to conventional sentimental domestic Â� ideology—compared to Harper’s penchant for mainstream stories like those of sentimentalist Ik Marvel (author of Reveries of a Bachelor)â•flis nonetheless well taken and supports my reading of “I and My Chimney.” Interestingly, the challenges to domestic ideology in “The Apple Tree Table” can be viewed as all the more risky and radical in this light, given its appearance in the more conservative of the two magazines. This might also help to explain the preponderance of “light humor” in the story, designed to set up his female readers for his direct address to them at the story’s end, calling for them to emulate the wife’s model of antisentimental hard-nosed realism. 9. Mr. Scribe can also represent the mental health authorities, who are similarly interested in fixing, defining, and thus delimiting the powers of the narrator’s head, a point that has valid biographical implications: “Pierre marks the low point at which Melville was the closest to madness. In fact, his family had him examined for his mental health soon after he finished the novel, an experience which he conveys in the story ‘I and My Chimney,’ ” according to Emory Elliot (196).


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10. Antebellum readers would have recognized this cultural Â�type—the stock character of the henpecked husband; later, I consider the narrator’s link to Rip van Winkle in this light. 11. The criticism of this story, however, has tended to focus on Melville’s debilitation and bitterness associated with a reactionary conservatism during his short-story-writing years, even hinting that his professional impotence signified masculine sexual inadequacy, as Sarah Wilson’s diction infers: “Melville’s frustration with the inconsistency of his literary work at Arrowhead seems analogous with his frustration at his inability to perform in the literary marketplace” (78). See also Carl Schaffer, “Unadmitted Impediments, Unmarriageable Minds: Melville’s ‘Bartleby’ and ‘I and My Chimney.’ ” Schaffer views the narrator’s defensive stand toward the chimney as “indicating Melville’s doubts about his worth as a writer,” in a portrait of the author as “flawed and essentially unhappy,” far from the self-effacing satirist of gender ideology I reveal him to be here (101, 93). See John Alliston’s “Conservative Architecture: Hawthorne in Melville’s ‘I and My Chimney’ ” for another reading of the story that indicts Melville for “resistance to cultural innovation” and “opposition to . . . feminist . . . tendencies [he associated] with modern times,” concluding that he “privileged a patrician and patriarchal model of individual, familial and cultural identity” (17). William B. Dillingham offers a less reactionary portrait, arguing that Melville’s signature “attacks on the world,” while present in his magazine fiction, had to be submerged and camouflaged since Harper’s and Putnam’s “were the very mirrors of nineteenth-century middle class American culture” (12). 12. The homosexual bond of the bachelors has been well established by Bruce Franklin (55) and Robyn Wiegman (736–8) to expose the gender-based oppressions, especially male elitist arrogance within the context of industrial capitalism. However, as Newbury aptly points out, the sexuality of the diptych is not so thinly veiled, but actually quite obvious, especially in the narrator’s symbolic anal sex upon entering the bachelor’s “deep glen”â•fla kind of initiation into “homo-erotic exclusivity” of fecund sexuality that stands in sharp contrast to the maids’ sterility (60). My point is that the bachelors, though they are sexually gratified, are impotent to produce progeny, and thus represent in the story a metaphorical dead endâ•flcorroborated by their superannuated Â�aesthetics—to the future of gender relations. Instead, he locates the bonding experience “in their shared ability to conceive of evil and misfortune as wholly circumscribed by a genteel literary imagination that defines real-life tragedies as frivolous literary forms” (Newbury 60–1). That indifference is a defining characteristic of the new domesticated literary male, who emerges in part from the genteel Irvingesque tradition but occupies a place of power and, beneath the geniality, economic dominance. 13. According to Brecht’s alienation effect (Verfremdungseffekt), “everyday

1 9 6 ::â•… Notes to Pages 143–7 things are thereby raised above the level of the obvious and automatic” in order to give the spectator “the chance to criticize human behavior from a social point of view,” and most importantly, see it not as natural, or preordained, but as an arbitrary artificial construct that is “alterable” (92). The technique depicts man himself “as dependent on certain political and economic factors and at the same time as capable of altering them” (Brecht 86). 14. Whereas Rogin may forget gender at the expense of politics (205, 208), Renker reads “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” as dependency between “textual production and domestic economy” and the women’s “agony and torment” as Melville’s own afflicted ego projected, cruelly, onto them: “daughters Frances and Bessie and wife Lizzy were his Copyists for letters by the time of the composition of Mardi” (136–7). Sheila Post-Lauria also claims that the narrator of the diptych is essentially conservative in his quiet despair about the social injustice of the maids’ exploitation, because a desire to reform would be dissonant with Harper’s mainstream, sentimental publication policy (92). This reading convincingly supports why Melville would carefully mask the subversive content of the story, but does not discuss the radical import of the tale, as I do here particularly in terms of the economics of gender roles. 15. For the newest and most provocative reading of the diptych, see Tom Allen, “Melville’s Factory Girls: Feminizing the Future.” Allen argues that Melville was actually supporting a protechnology sentiment present in antebellum culture that would have seen the advent of the factories as signs of America’s bright industrial future, and the bachelors as outmoded and irrelevant by contrast. His main claim is valid (“Melville might be read as historicizing domesticity by showing how time’s passage renders the equivalent fraternal comfort of Temple Bar obsolete”), yet he underestimates the severe, if not total, dehumanizing portrait of the mill girls (Allen 63). It nonetheless holds true in its assault on the common belief that mill girls, as well as women writing for commercial success under duress (“productive reluctance” and “forced labor” as Kelly has it), universally suffered (qtd. in Newbury 66).

Dreams Deferred 1. Brian Doherty’s new history of libertarianism notes that Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980 through a campaign that relied heavily on laissezfaire capitalist rhetoric. A telling tableau appeared shortly after his election in a photograph of him on an airplane reading The Freeman, the leading libertarian magazine, as his wife rested her head on his shoulder (114). 2. As alluded to at the beginning of this book, many literary historians have noted that increases in population, higher literacy rates, ever more efficient mail delivery and thus mass distribution, improved public education, and boosts in


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the process of production of printed matter with the invention of the doublecylinder steam press all contributed to unprecedented large-scale audiences in the 1840s and 50s. See, for example, Hart, The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste; Charvat, The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800–1870: The Papers of William Charvat; and Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public. 3. Given limitations of space, I do not attempt to fill the gap between Melville’s and King’s historical moments, although other works have certainly dealt directly with the same concerns for literary fame in the gulf between them. Midtwentieth-century writers, for example, are discussed in terms of the sublimation of authorial anxieties into their fiction in Loren Glass’s Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880–1980. 4. Sheila Post’s assertion that Pierre was not really a botched domestic novel tends to overstate the case for it as a fully realized (at least on the level of form, genre, and style) version of the sensational French romance novels popular at the time (129–40). If the work is to be considered a “popular” success for effectively drawing on such popular forms, one must overlook the overwhelming evidence of its commercial and critical failure documented by Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker (419–52). 5. About Laundrette’s reception in the Asian community, he says: “They’ll think that this is the last straw: now he’s showing us as drug dealers, sodomites and mad landlords. But then I don’t pretend to be a spokesman for the Asian community, and they shouldn’t expect me to do PR for them, any more than you’d expect Neil Jordan to do PR for the Irish community” (qtd. in Ranasinha 49). He prefers to define his authorial role as cultural translator, rather than agent of social change. His writings have nonetheless created change by raising awareness of postcolonial ethnic communities and the social, economic, and racial tensions they face. His films and novels of the 1980s came more than a decade before literary critics, let alone mainstream media, discovered the full significance of postcolonial transnationalism in film and literature.

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2 0 8 ::â•… Works Cited Rogin, Michael Paul. Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville. New York: Knopf, 1979. Rose, Jane Atteridge. “The Artist Manque in the Fiction of Rebecca Harding Davis.” Writing the Woman Artist. Ed. Suzanne W. Jones. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. 155–74. Rowland, William G. “Introduction.” Literature and the Marketplace: Romantic Writers and Their Audiences in Great Britain and the United States. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. 1–16. Rush, Caroline E. The North and South; Or, Slavery and Its Contrasts. Philadelphia: Crissy and Markley, 1852. Santamarina, Xiomara. “The View from Below: Menial Labor and Self-Reliance in Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig.” Belabored Professions: Narrative of African American Working Womanhood. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. 64–99. Saunders, Judith. “Economic Metaphor Redefined: The Transcendental Capitalist at Walden.”Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. Modern Critical Interpretations. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. 59–67. Schaffer, Carl. “Unadmitted Impediments, Unmarriageable Minds: Melville’s ‘Bartleby’ and ‘I and My Chimney.’â•›” Studies in American Fiction 24.2 (1987): 93–101. Schocket, Eric. Vanishing Moments: Class and American Literature. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. Sellers, Charles. The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Shaeffer, Helen Woodward. “Rebecca Harding Davis: Pioneer Realist.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1947. Shohat, Ella. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. New York: Routledge, 1994. Shulman, Robert. Social Criticism and Nineteenth-Century American Fictions. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987. Stern, Julia. “Excavating Genre in Our Nig.” American Literature 67.3 (1995): 439–66. Stoner, Ruth. “Rebecca Harding Davis’s ‘Second Life’; or ‘Her Hands Could Be Trained as Well as His.’â•›” Legacy 19.1 (2002): 44–52. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 1852; rpt. New York: Penguin, 1988. Strengell, Heidi. Dissecting Stephen King: From Gothic to Literary Naturalism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. Taylor, George. Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860. New York: Rinehart and Winston, 1951. Tebbel, John. A History of Book Publishing in the United States: The Rise of an Industry. Vol. 2. New York: R. R. Bowker, 1975.

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Index

advertising, 4, 7, 16, 17, 22, 49, 82, 89–91. See also marketing techniques American Antiquarian Society Book Trades Collection, 7 American Publisher’s Circular and Literary Gazette. See Publisher’s Circular anticapitalism, 27, 28, 29, 30, 171; for Thoreau, 44, 45, 47, 48; for Whitman, 83, 92 antimaterialism, 2, 3, 17, 20, 22; for Davis, 110, 111, 113, 114, 116; for Emerson, 94; for Melville, 139, 143; for Thoreau, 45, 52; for Whitman, 85, 88–91, 95, 99, 100, 102 artistic freedom. See writing: as art Atlantic Monthly, 4, 110, 113, 114, 115, 117, 118, 120, 121 authorship: culture of, 3, 4; free-market enterprise, 5, 19, 147; pragmatism, 113, 170; professionalization of, 1, 2, 4, 23, 50, 103, 104, 117, 125, 140, 142, 148; universal, 104. See also writing Bonner, Robert, 4, 15, 66, 68, 72, 75, 76, 81, 82 Buddha of Suburbia, 165, 166, 167 business ethics, 20, 22, 23, 65–73, 74, 81, 111, 117. See also trade courtesy Cannibals All! or, Slaves without Masters, 28 canonicity, 22, 146, 147, 148, 154, 159, 165, 168, 171 capitalism, 2, 3, 14, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 60, 65, 71, 81, 86, 118, 131, 132, 136; evils of, 28, 31, 34, 37, 41, 43, 50, 72, 73, 83, 137;

social consequences of, 32, 33, 35, 36, 39–42, 52, 55, 74. See also anticapitalism; free market; values: marketplace cheap novels. See penny press commercialization of literature, 2, 49, 84, 89. See also capitalism commission system, 16 consumerism. See literary market copyright law, 67 Coultrap-McQuin, Susan, 72, 76 Coupland, Douglas, 22, 23, 146, 147, 165, 168, 169; authorship for, 169–70, 171 culture, 3; as leisure, 4. See also values: cultural Davis, Rebecca Harding, 2, 3, 6, 19, 20–23, 109–26, 127, 145, 171 death, for entrepreneur, 100 democracy, 82, 83 Dial, 6, 33 Dickinson, Emily, 2, 114 discount. See commission system distribution, 16 divinely inspired style, 3, 83, 90, 97, 100, 110, 120, 121, 171 domestic fiction. See fiction: domestic Dyer, Oliver, 68, 69, 70, 75 economic development, 17, 55, 56 economic independence, 80, 81, 119, 124. See also women’s roles: economic economic necessity, 71, 77, 79; for Davis, 118, 119, 124; for Thoreau, 52, 53; for Wilson, 28, 30, 33, 36. See also subsistence writing

2 1 4 ::â•… Index economics. See capitalism egocentrism, 97, 111 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 4, 5, 6, 30, 59, 60, 83, 89, 94, 95, 110, 111, 112, 120–7 entrepreneur; author as, 2, 5, 20, 30, 93; corporate, 66; death for, 100 fame. See canonicity; immortality feminism, 24, 80, 82, 170 Fern, Fanny, 2, 3, 5, 12, 13, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 65–81, 82, 109, 145, 170, 171 fiction, 15, 17; domestic, 58, 66, 77, 109, 134. See also popular literature Fields, James T., 110, 113, 115, 116 first rights. See trade courtesy Fitzhugh, George, 27, 28, 29, 31–7, 38, 40, 43 Flag of our Union, 11 free market, 2, 23, 30, 31, 32, 34, 39, 42, 56, 66, 67, 69, 70, 96, 115. See also capitalism Fuller, Margaret, 6 gender barriers, 14, 20, 34, 66, 72, 73, 74, 78, 79, 80, 81, 110 gender roles, 128, 129, 131–5, 137, 138, 142, 143, 144; inversion of, 132, 133, 135, 138, 140, 141. See also women’s roles gentleman publishing, 6, 15, 21, 66, 70–5, 76, 78, 116, 117, 145, 170 Gleason, Frederick, 11–2, 15, 16 global market, 21, 22, 165, 168, 169, 170, 171 harmonialism, 88 Harper and Brothers (publishers), 11, 13, 16, 17 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 5, 134, 143, 151, 157 Hey, Nostradamus!, 168, 169, 170 Hoffman, Charles Fenno, 1, 18

immortality, writing for: Coupland, 168; King, 146–8, 152–65; Kureishi, 165, 167; Melville, 137, 139–40, 142, 143, 144–53, 157, 158, 165; Whitman, 90, 91, 95, 99, 100, 105, 169 individualism, 2, 28, 34, 36, 53, 56, 66, 91, 120, 126 Intimacy, 165, 166 Irving, Washington, 1, 3, 4, 6, 14, 53 Jewett, John P., 7 journal writing, 46, 47, 48, 49–50, 57, 61 King, Stephen, 22, 23, 146, 147, 148, 150, 152–61, 167, 170, 171; authorship for, 161–6 Kureishi, Hanif, 22, 23, 146, 147, 165, 166, 167; authorship for, 167, 168, 170, 171 labor, 37, 38; conditions, 70, 71–2, 73; divided, 55, 85, 92, 143, 145; literary, 84, 91, 98, 99; northern attitude toward, 20, 31–4, 38, 41, 42, 43; theories of, 51, 77. See also leisure; racism laissez-faire politics, 6, 23, 40, 55, 56, 76, 86, 109, 170 Lamplighter, 7 language: of business, for Thoreau, 46, 47, 54, 61; of business, for Whitman, 83, 91; for Melville, 51; for Thoreau, 51, 59, 60 Leaves of Grass, 20, 30, 82–90, 93, 97, 98, 100, 169 leisure, 4; and labor, 45, 56, 58, 87, 94, 99, 129, 130, 132, 134, 158 Life after God, 168, 169 Lisey’s Story, 153, 164 literacy rate, 11 literary market, 22, 47, 49, 53, 89, 148, 155, 165, 168, 169, 170, 171; history of, 7, 9. See also poetry market; publishing industry history Literary World, 1, 18

Indexâ•…

:: 2 1 5

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 4, 5, 16, 97, 152

Norton’s Literary Gazette and Publisher’s Circular. See Publisher’s Circular

Mardi, 12, 130, 149, 150 market. See literary market market revolution, 1, 22; author responses to, 3, 109, 133; on women as free agents, 109, 115 marketing techniques: spirituality and consumerism, 89, 102; universal authorship, 104; value of self, 84, 85, 91, 105. See also advertising; self-promotion Marx, Karl, 51, 54, 55 Melville, Herman, 1, 3, 5, 12, 13, 19, 20–3, 33, 51, 103, 109, 127–44, 145–55, 158; authorship, 127, 148, 155, 156, 157, 164, 165, 166, 171 Merish, Lori, 24 Misery, 146–8, 152, 153, 155, 156, 157, 159–64, 167 Moby-Dick, 12, 33, 51, 127, 129, 130, 134, 135, 136, 138, 139, 143, 144, 146–53, 158 money. See capitalism; economic necessity; money and art money and art, 2, 123, 145, 164, 165, 166 morality, 103; of women’s work, 21, 36, 79, 109. See also values Moulten, William, 66, 70, 81 My Beautiful Laundrette, 165, 166, 167

Olive Branch, 69, 70, 75 Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, 20, 27–34, 38, 39, 40–3, 93

nature: in Davis, 123; in Thoreau, 58, 59, 61; in Whitman, 95, 96, 97, 98 New York Ledger, 4, 75, 81, 82 Newsboy, 7, 9 newspapers, 11–2 North and South; Or Slavery and Its Contrasts, 28, 41, 42 northern capitalism. See labor: northern attitude toward northern labor system. See labor: northern attitude toward

pastime. See leisure patronage system, 2, 3, 5, 6, 72, 80 penny press, 9, 11, 14, 15 Peterson’s, 4, 6, 110, 115, 117, 118, 120 Pierre, 129, 143, 146, 147–53, 156, 158, 164 poetry market, 83 Poole’s Index, 7 popular literature, 7, 12, 14, 15, 16, 67, 110, 115, 118, 145, 155, 160, 163, 164, 165, 168, 169, 170, 171 printing press, 9, 11, 14, 17 production costs, 11–2 productivity, 55, 84, 86, 96, 97, 171 property, respect for. See business ethics proslavery, 27–32, 34, 35, 40–3 Publisher’s Circular, 7, 10, 15 publishing: business model, 66, 67, 72; supporting role, 77 publishing industry history: prior to 1830, 4, 9; 1850s, 4, 6, 7, 9, 11, 12, 16, 17; 1860s, 18. See also literary market: history of racism, 20, 24, 27–30, 34, 35, 165, 166, 168, 170. See also labor: northern attitude toward readers, 19, 49; author relationship with, 83, 86, 89, 91, 93, 98, 101–4, 121, 127, 146, 147, 150, 152, 153, 155, 156, 159, 161, 162, 164, 170 realism, 80, 110–5, 118, 122, 123, 127; social, 21 reflective thinking, 129, 130, 135, 138, 139, 148 romance novel, 14, 58, 73. See also popular literature

2 1 6 ::â•… Index romantic authorship, 2, 3, 21, 85, 86, 87, 90, 102, 109, 112, 113, 122, 123, 129 Rush, Caroline E., 28, 41, 43 Ruth Hall, 20, 65–75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81 self-culture, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 54, 57 self-preservation. See economic necessity self-promotion, 1, 20, 22, 30, 32, 82, 83, 84, 86, 89, 90, 97, 102, 109, 170, 171 Sellers, Charles, 1, 66 separate-spheres ideology, 20, 21, 23, 66, 72, 109–10, 127, 130, 132, 133, 136, 138, 139, 170. See also women’s roles serious literature, 118. See also literary market sexism. See gender barriers Shining, 158, 159 social activism, 23, 28. See also writing: as social enterprise social realism. See realism Sociology for the South, 27, 31 “Song for Occupations,” 101, 102, 103, 104 Song of Hiawatha, 5 “Song of Myself,” 84, 92, 96, 102, 103, 104 spirituality, 37, 38, 48, 54, 56, 57, 58, 61, 88–91, 94, 95, 96, 100, 101, 168–71 Stationary Bike, 153, 154, 155, 164 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 4, 7, 21, 31, 34, 41, 42, 73 subsistence living, 45, 56, 57 subsistence writing, 44, 46–54, 56, 60, 61 technology, 168. See also printing press Thoreau, Henry David, 1, 3, 5, 13, 19, 20, 21, 23, 33, 44–61, 65, 115, 123, 145, 170, 171; and economy, 44, 46, 51, 52, 54, 61; on labor, 45, 46, 54, 57, 58, 59, 84; on living life, 57, 60, 61; on nature, 58, 59, 61; on writing, 2, 6, 44, 45, 51–9, 105 Ticknor and Fields, 13, 16

trade courtesy, 22, 65, 66–7, 68, 70–4, 80, 81, 115 transcendentalism, 6, 21; for Davis, 110, 111, 112, 121, 122, 123, 125, 126; for Emerson, 94; for Thoreau, 45, 48, 49, 50, 52, 54, 57–61; for Whitman, 83, 84, 90, 95 True Flag, 66, 69, 70, 75 Typee, 12, 127, 146, 147, 151, 157 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 5, 7, 8, 31, 42 values: cultural, 68, 72; marketplace, 40, 44, 52, 53, 54, 100, 101, 147; middleclass, 67; northern, 44, 65; product, 102 Walden, 20, 44–7, 50, 51, 52, 55, 56, 57, 115, 171 white bondage, 41 Whitman, Walt, 2, 3, 13, 19, 20, 22, 23, 30, 82–105, 109, 145, 169, 170; businessman, 82, 84, 85–8, 92, 97, 105, 171; communal coexistence, 83, 93, 102, 103; ideal poet, 84, 85; physicality of poet figure, 86–8, 95, 96; poet figure (“I Walt”), 82, 83, 86–102, 104, 105; poetry and nature, 95–8; process of creativity, 93; value of self, 84, 85, 91, 100, 105, 170. See also transcendentalism Wilson, Harriet, 3, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 27–43, 44, 65, 84, 145, 171 women as authors, 9, 20, 65, 66, 71, 72, 76–8, 80, 109, 112, 115, 119, 120, 121, 126, 138, 171 women’s roles: economic, 3, 19, 21, 22, 23, 31, 33, 34, 36, 39–41, 66, 77, 78, 80, 81, 109, 111, 112, 118, 127; social, 42, 66, 109, 112, 120, 121, 127, 128. See also gender roles; separate-spheres ideology words. See language work ethics, 111 worker alienation, 51, 54, 72, 83

Indexâ•… writing: as art, 6, 45, 49, 56, 90, 92, 99, 100, 165, 167, 170, 171; as profession, 2, 19, 52, 53, 54, 56, 61, 65, 66, 67, 77, 78, 79, 89, 90, 92, 94, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104, 105, 110, 113, 116–21, 125, 126, 136, 143, 144, 145, 148, 159, 166; as social enterprise, 3, 28, 60, 112, 118, 122, 123,

:: 2 1 7

125, 126, 142; as therapy, 119; as work, 1, 23, 50, 52, 54, 55, 58–60, 61, 90, 91, 95, 98, 104, 105, 113, 121, 130–6, 139, 140, 143, 144, 151, 156, 158, 159, 164, 165. See also authorship Yankee Blade, 11, 14

Capital Letters: Authorship in the Antebellum Literary Market

Unsettling the literary West: authenticity and authorship

The Business of Letters: Authorial Economies in Antebellum America

Authoring the Self: Self-Representation, Authorship and the Print Market (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

Capital Market Liberalization and Development

Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship

Authorship in Film Adaptation

Letters to My Father (Southern Literary Studies)

Ancient Greek Literary Letters: Selections in Translation (Routledge Classical Translations)

Authorship Attribution

Theatre in the Antebellum South, Volume 2

Capital Market Instruments: Analysis and Valuation

Market Institutions, Transaction Costs, and Social Capital in the Ethiopian Grain Market

Lost in the customhouse: authorship in the American renaissance

Lost in the Customhouse: Authorship in the American Renaissance

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Attributing Authorship: An Introduction

The Letters

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Unsettling the literary West: authenticity and authorship

The Business of Letters: Authorial Economies in Antebellum America

Authoring the Self: Self-Representation, Authorship and the Print Market (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

Capital Market Liberalization and Development

Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship

Authorship in Film Adaptation

Letters to My Father (Southern Literary Studies)

Ancient Greek Literary Letters: Selections in Translation (Routledge Classical Translations)

Authorship Attribution

Theatre in the Antebellum South, Volume 2

Capital Market Instruments: Analysis and Valuation

Market Institutions, Transaction Costs, and Social Capital in the Ethiopian Grain Market

Lost in the customhouse: authorship in the American renaissance

Lost in the Customhouse: Authorship in the American Renaissance

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