Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel: Reading the Atlantic World-system

nnnnnnnnnnnn continued from front flap Shapiro American Studies across time. Rather than relying on contiguous time, a...

Author: Stephen Shapiro

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Shapiro

American Studies across time. Rather than relying on contiguous time, a

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world-systems approach might compare the cultural production of one region to another at the same location within the

The Culture

recurring cycle in an economic reconfiguration. Shapiro offers a way of

and

thinking about the causes for the emer-

the pennsylvania state university press

of the

university park, pennsylvania

Early American Novel

gests a fresh approach to the paradigms

of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.

www.psupress.org

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Stephen Shapiro is Associate Professor

Taking his cue from Philadelphia-born novelist Charles Brockden Brown’s Annals of Europe and America, which contends that America is shaped most noticeably by the international struggle between Great Britain and France for control of the world trade market, Stephen Shapiro charts the advent, decline, and reinvigoration of the early

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Commerce

gence of the American novel that sug-

shaping American Studies.

The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel

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reading the atlantic world-system

American novel. That the American novel “sprang so unexpectedly into published existence during the 1790s” may be a reflection of the beginning of the end of Franco-British supremacy and of the power of a middle class riding the


Stephen Shapiro

crest of a new world economic system.

Shapiro’s world-systems approach is a relatively new methodology for literary studies, but it brings two particularly useful features to the table. First, it

Jacket illustration: John Vanderlyn, Sampson

refines the conceptual frameworks for

Vryling Stoddard Wilder, oil on canvas, c.

analyzing cultural and social history,

1808 –12. Courtesy Worcester Art Museum,

such as the rise in sentimentalism, in

Worcester, Massachusetts. Gift of Lawrence Alan Haines in memory of his father, Wilder Haydn Haines.

relation to a long-wave economic histoisbn 978-0-271-03290-0 90000

penn state press

ry of global commerce; second, it fosters a new model for a comparative

9 780271 032900 continued on back flap

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The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel reading the atlantic world-system

Stephen Shapiro the pennsylvania state university press university park, pennsylvania

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Frontispiece: John Vanderlyn, Sampson Vryling Stoddard Wilder, oil on canvas, 92.1 × 73.3 cm (36 1/4 x 28 7/8 in.) (1981.331). Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts. Gift of Lawrence Alan Haines in memory of his father, Wilder Haydn Haines. Used with permission. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shapiro, Stephen, 1964– . The culture and commerce of the early American novel : reading the Atlantic world-system / Stephen Shapiro. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-271-03290-0 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. American fiction—18th century—History and criticism. 2. Capitalism in literature. 3. Commerce in literature. 4. Consumption (Economics) in literature. 5. Politics and literature—United States—History—18th century. I. Title. PS374.C36S53 2008 813’.3093553— dc22 2007034900

Copyright © 2008 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802-1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. This book is printed on Natures Natural, containing 50% post-consumer waste, and meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi Z39.48 –1992.

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Acknowledgments 1 Method and Misperception: The Paradigm Problem of the Early American Novel 2 The Geoculture of the Anglo-French Eighteenth-Century World-System 3 The Re-export Republic and the Rise of the Early American Novel

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4 The Paradox of the Public Sphere: Franklin’s Autobiography and the Institution of Ideology 5 Wieland and the Problem of Counterinstitutionality 6 Arthur Mervyn and the Racial Revolution of Narrative Consciousness

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Afterword: Early Nineteenth-Century American Studies and the World-Systems Perspective 301 Bibliography Index

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Without the help of an honor guard over the years, these pages would not exist. My gratitude to Michael Denning, Bryan Wolf, Philip Barnard, Mark Kamrath, David Waldstreicher, Jeffrey Richards, and Ed White. Others gave encouragement and aid when all seemed lost. In rough chronological order, let the dignity of their names sound my thanks: Mark Averitt, David L. Smith, Christopher Pye, Michael Knight (rip), Peter Conrad, Steve Rachman, Alan Trachtenberg, Philip Baldwin, Stephen Paul Miller, Nicholas Lawrence, Andrew Lawrence, Jane Lebow, Michael Green, Gary Philo, the act up/ny collective, David Paul, James Wentzy, Tony Davis, Fredrika Teute, Liam Kennedy, Richard Ellis, Saskia Schabio, Walter Göbel, Michael Bell, Gill Frith, Neil Lazarus, Carol Rutter, Benita Parry, Peter Mack, and Graeme Macdonald. For the Woldwinite I know, Anne Schwan.

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method and misperception: the paradigm problem of the early american novel

In the introduction of his contemporary history of the United States, the Annals of Europe and America (1807–10), Philadelphia-born novelist Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810) considers the idea of America’s manifest selfdetermination as nonsense. Because America principally depends on international trade, its “destiny . . . is intimately connected with the situation and transactions of European nations.”1 As the demand for American goods was determined by shortages resulting from the convulsions of war among foreign peoples, the country was shaped by the wake of antagonistic global forces since the conditions of modern trade and navigation “have the wonder power of annihilating . . . space itself.” Because “two maritime and trading nations encounter and interfere [sic] with each other in every corner of the globe that is accessible by water,” the combative encounters of this pair of dominant actors in the world market affect America, even if these skirmishes occur halfway around the earth.2 The two superpowers referred to here are “undoubtedly France and Great Britain,” and the history of their conflict is “the history of Europe, and, in some measure, of the world.”3 Understanding America as fundamentally conditioned by turbulence within a globalized arena of political economy, Brown consequently insists that his current moment belongs to a long eighteenth century that extends beyond the 1700s in either direction. Even in the early nineteenth century, America remains shaped by a trajectory that Brown sees beginning in 1688 when France intervened in the fractional disputes surrounding Britain’s dispossession of the Stuarts during the Glorious Revolution. The first segment of this phase ends with the Seven Years’ War (1756 – 63), which amplified 1. Charles Brockden Brown, “Annals of Europe and America, for 1806 –7,” The American Register; or, General Repository of History, Politics and Science, ed. Charles Brockden Brown, vol. 1 (Philadelphia, 1807), 1–79, 3. 2. Ibid., 3– 4. 3. Ibid., 4.

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Franco-British tensions beyond Europe and projected them throughout the world. American modern history breaks from its past only in 1793, with the period’s second inflection point, marked by the rise of French offensive expansion after nearly a century of having to defend its domestic and imperial territory against British incursions. Although Brown would not live to experience its arrival, he would probably have understood Napoleon’s defeat in 1815 and England’s consequent Victorian-era hegemony as the periodizing conclusion to this long passage of time. While Brown sees the “quarrel . . . between Great Britain and her colonies in 1776” as a “favourable opportunity to France for reducing the formidable power of her rival,” the War for Independence is a minor point in a larger series of tactical sallies for position between the European powers, one less significant for Americans than the War of Spanish Succession (1701–14), which resulted in the expansion of the Atlantic slave trade.4 Discounting the noteworthiness of domestic independence and constitutionalism, Brown argues that America belongs to a global history not of its own making, given its incorporation into what the historical sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein calls a world-system of capitalist trade.5 The world-system is a constellation defined by the hierarchizing competition among bourgeois-dominated nation-states for profit through the exploitation of human and natural resources and business cycles of economic expansion and contraction. Throughout the Annals, Brown insistently describes seemingly personal acts, social experiences, and cultural expression as shaped by the worldly conflict over trade, which becomes enacted through the medium of bellicose states and mediated by declarations that use the language of moral value to disguise and justify the desire for commodified ones. In Brown’s account, the year 1793 ought to serve as the focus of the early period of American studies as it marks the start of the last segment of the Franco-Britishdefined phase of the modern world-system and an internal transition that prepares the onset of another. Would such a perspective help answer why the longer fiction of the early American novel sprang so unexpectedly into published existence during the 1790s only to fall into a long decline after 1800 until its resuscitation in the 1820s? Lillie Deming Loshe’s bibliography of early American fiction illustrates the trend. With only a handful of nonimported titles 4. Ibid., 5. 5. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974).

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published in the United States before 1790, Loshe cites the appearance of thirty-three works in the 1790s, with thirty-one of these published during the years 1793–1800. Between 1801 and 1810, the number of novels drops by a third, and in the following decade it continues to fall to slightly more than half of what it had been in the 1790s. In the 1820s, however, the number surges more than fourfold to stand as greater than double the 1790s output. The decadal contrasts are even sharper if new author fiction titles are separated from ones produced by already active writers as a marker of the field’s ability to support its enlargement. While the catalog of the 1790s mainly includes novices, initiate authors become a minority between 1800 and 1820, at which point the list returns to being dominated by new writers.6 Loshe’s review is an early one, but its findings do come from a period before the canon of U.S. writing began to exclude early American writing according to “literary” worth. Even with the recent recovery of antebellum texts, with its greater acceptance of a broader range of discursive and life writing as constituting “fiction,” contemporary criticism and the new digitalized archive has not markedly altered the shape of rise and fall described by Loshe. In my focus on the novel as an evidentiary field, I have no interest in consecrating any particular text as the original U.S.-produced novel or in hazarding evaluations of any particular work’s merit. I have chosen the novel because, even discounting the period’s own debate about what generically constitutes a novel rather than a romance, the mode of printed matter in a long fictional narrative was clearly recognized by contemporaries as markedly different from collections of ecclesiastic sermons and partisan broadsides. American publicists recognized that the domestic novel was an event that had no substantive precedents before the 1790s, a perception that indicates the presence of conditions that are either unique to the decade or ones that could not be easily brought into the optics of social recognition before then. The question about the novel’s changing rate should not be mistaken as one about cultural florescence and decline. Jared Gardner has initially, but convincingly, suggested that periodical shorter fiction and marginalia publishing in the 1800 –1820 period came to serve that period’s cultural 6. Lillie Deming Loshe, The Early American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1907). See also Henri Petter, The Early American Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971); Hugh Amory and David D. Hall, eds., The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World (Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 2000).

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needs and talents in ways that novels had previously done for a prior one. 7 This book instead asks: what factors drove cultural production first toward and then away from a specific form? I have selected the novel as a category meriting analysis not because it has any greater or less value than other social forms, but because its recognizable wave of appearance and disappearance suggests the presence of a social transformation during the 1790s that remains poorly articulated in existing narratives of American cultural history. What hitherto unrecognized energies and contradictions find shape in novelistic construction in ways that existing frameworks have elided, at the cost of confusing our perception of the foundations constituting antebellum society? The central claims that I put forth in this book as a response to these questions about early American fiction and society are easily stated. Against nationalist claims for the endogamous production of cultural forms, I argue that the early American novel had little concern for allegorizing the nationstate or enunciating patriotic themes. There is a particular regional logic to the early American novel’s appearance, but its motivations are overwhelmingly not those of either nationality or statehood, but the expression of concerns by a particular set of middle-class interests, a bourgeoiseme, rising with the tides of change within the circumatlantic world-system. The early American novel arose as a local response to a global reconfiguration in the Atlantic political economy in the wake of the French Revolution, brought about as a result of the long confrontation between Great Britain and France for imperial control of global resources. Within this conflict, the French Revolution’s social and political turbulence on U.S. interests was not primarily registered as a source for cultural allusions, allegorical representations, or political party claims, although all exist as features in the period. The French Revolution’s impact came as it altered circumatlantic trade flows in ways that reshaped American society more substantively than had the political act of independence. This change was catalyzed by the mutual embargoes that British and French governments placed on each other’s Caribbean export shipping in order to undermine the other’s supply lines and ability to generate revenue for the financing of inter7. Jared Gardner, “The Literary Museum and the Unsettling of the Early American Novel,” ELH 67 (2000): 743–71. William Dowling’s argument for Federalist journalism also recognizes a general turn from novelism in the early 1800s. William C. Dowling, Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson: Joseph Dennie and the Port Folio, 1801–1812 (Charleston: University of South Carolina Press, 1999).

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imperial conflict. Anglo-French blockades unexpectedly created an opening for a previously marginal stratum of mid- and southern-Atlantic seaboard merchants and associated professionals to reap tremendous profits in a highly compressed time as they stepped in to fill the gap. When the National Assembly lifted the ban in 1793 from Americans accessing French Caribbean ports and their lucrative commodities of sugar, coffee, tea, and alcohols, the British feared that Americans would be drawn into the French sphere of influence and stopped enforcing similar limits on Americans trading in the British West Indies for the same goods. Once these commodities from the colonies of either imperial power were shipped to an American harbor, they could then be sent as goods from a neutral power to the United Kingdom and continental Europe, more or less, free from confiscation by either side. Within a few years, the freedom to import and export super-profitable goods brought unprecedented levels of wealth into New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. The sudden capital influx ignited a series of changes that revolutionized the nation’s economy and texture of everyday life. As America became a re-export republic, it experienced transformations greater and more redefining than those attached to political independence and nascent administrative centralization, even if these effects are difficult to perceive because they are not often captured in the writings of the period’s political elites or in American studies accounts based on these elites. Histories that frame the period through partisan disputes for authority between New England–based Federalists and Virginia-centered Democrat-Republicans often miss this internal alteration, which is not well represented in partisan debates because the re-export merchants came from different regions and were not active leaders of either political party. The profits of re-export shifted power away from the colonial and postindependence anchors of New England and the Virginian-Carolinian South and toward the mid- and southern-Atlantic coastal harbor towns, with their proximity to the Caribbean. The re-export trade magnified a rupture within the nation’s aggregated middle classes as an older set of New England and southern bourgeoisie, who sought to gain status through political independence by removing their own superiors as Loyalist émigrés, found themselves confronted and displaced, in turn, by a nascent commercial faction of middle and southern Atlantic ones who disregarded the revolutionary-era leaders and their prestige. A quasi-gentry, land-based bourgeoisie that aligned itself with patriotism was shunted aside by an urban, cosmopolitan trading

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one that adapted more quickly to the new conditions of the 1790s and better leveraged the seemingly spontaneous commercial advantages opened by international conflict. The Caribbean-oriented traders were uninterested in debates about the nation’s founding and Constitution because their money and functional decolonization came from fully embracing recent conditions within the broadly Atlantic arena, not retreating from them. Similarly, much of the decade’s political invective ought to be read as an effort by the period’s traditional elites to comprehend and enunciate the nature of rapid changes for which they had no existing analytic terminology or illustrative example. The re-export merchants ought to have cleaved to the governing New England–dominated Federalist ruling party because of its support for credit, banking, and free trade. Yet the Federalists’ official Francophobia in a time of European conflict threatened to roil the French Caribbean trade that made the mid- and southern-Atlantic merchants rich. Already chafing at their long-standing marginalization by older political and religious elites, the groups associated with the re-export trade looked for a new means of expressing their domestic social location. Because the men who formed both sides of the existing political parties had been involved in forging independence, they relied on and monopolized an ornamental language of patriotism as a means of consecrating their status and legitimizing their financial schemes. Since the foreign trade merchants and their families had not been politically active or powerful throughout the 1770s and 1780s, they tended to avoid nationalist discourse, which did not speak to their international connections or compensate for their lack of domestic recognition. Instead these merchants and their children renovated older forms of expression, like those caught within the slightly obsolete British and French sentimental novel, to represent their anxieties and experiences. The early American novel was born and circulated from within the network of these nouveau riche traders, their families, and associates as an alternative, nonpartisan mode of displaying their political discontent, class interests, and perceived connection with the larger world of Atlantic mercantile traffic, which was itself in transition at the time. While isolated individuals had attempted the novel, or novel-like narratives, in America before the 1790s, the occasional use of the form would not consolidate until a significant social-cultural effect allowed it to cross a threshold of emergence. By the 1800s, the reaction to re-export’s effects and shifts in French politics began to establish a new internal compromise among once

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more reorganized bourgeois factions, a reconfiguration that demagnetized the representational needs carried by the novel. The increasing disappearance of the novel-form in the first decades of the nineteenth century marked, however, a diastolic prelude to the onset of a new wave, beginning in the late 1810s, which would recall, slowly at first, the novel-form to represent that phase’s own social reorganizations. In the pages that follow, I will attempt to relate these macrolevel changes within phases of the world market’s political economy to the microlevel of the early American novel’s general themes, specific responses, and later narrative erasure. Doing so requires, however, a new method.

Method and Misperception: Paradigms of Early American Writing Previous accounts of the novel’s emergence in the eighteenth century, like those of Ian Watt, Michael McKeon, Nancy Armstrong, and Leonard Davis, attribute it to the rise of the middle class.8 Yet what else could it be except as a cultural form brought into being by a nascent social class seeking a novel means of representation that differs from the communicative modes of the old regime? The middle class, however, is a set of competing interests, which share certain attributes, while differing in others, and changes shape and density, rather than a static, homogeneous category. Furthermore, British-centric studies tend to consider the novel’s development in a linear fashion rather than as a dynamic form that has different phases of relative activity depending on period-specific tensions. So molar a treatment cannot differentiate moments within the novel’s long history or explain the links between a period’s infraclass competition and cross-class struggle and cycles of the novel’s relative expansion and decline or generic alterations as indices to these confrontations. These generalizing studies of the novel thus tend, paradoxically, to separate bourgeois cultural forms from the patterns of accumulation and crisis within a capitalist political economy that simultaneously enables and threatens bourgeois civil society. Consequently, they

8. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957); Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600 –1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Lennard Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

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tend to read the appearance of American fiction as little more than belated cultural development, a predictable but redundant supplement to a prefabricated trajectory from the British center. Yet the early American novel arises less as an example of placid diffusion than one of strategic discontinuity with early midcentury European novels. Late eighteenth-century American interests reinvigorated the novel precisely because it had run out of steam in the prior decades, having already served its occasional purpose around the midcentury’s hinge. A reading of the early American novel’s regional particularity as a result of altering global conditions has been difficult to perceive—not because the claim is obscure, but because existing frameworks for the novel in general and early American fiction specifically have made it so. Whatever success American studies had against totalizing Anglo-centric theories of the novel has been limited by its own ersatz frameworks for pre-1800 fictional texts. The explanatory codes that have been mainly used to transmit meanings for the period’s fictional texts are: nationalism, liberalism, republicanism, gendered sentimentalism, the public sphere of depersonalized print media, and, more recently, Atlanticism. These paradigms have provided compelling frameworks, but none of these heuristics can identify the transformations within the 1790s because of their terminological imprecision and presentist assumptions. While most critics admittedly rely on a syncretic approach that variously invokes two or more of these approaches, scholarly bricolage cannot cover over their intrinsic flaws. For the sake of clarity, I will disentangle the interpretive gestures more so than they typically appear in actual practice to clear the way for a new approach.

The Nationalist Imaginary of Early American Studies A customary reading of the early Republic’s novels understands them as expressing, in various celebratory or anxiety-ridden ways, a nationalist imaginary. An earlier mode of American studies tends to see these novels as evidence of a mythic national exceptionalism and transcendental spirit inaugurated by the act of political independence. A contemporary turn simply inverts the affect as critics argue for the novels’ registration of concern about the fragility of the new nation. Both responses, however, share the same vantage point as they see the equation between the performance of concerns about national identity and literary imagination as common-

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sensical. These claims are by no means simply provincial chauvinism since influential Romantic and post-Romantic era accounts of the novel-form see its relation to nationality as a truism. More recently, Benedict Anderson’s influential account of cultural nationalism conflates the rise of nationalism as a collective ideology and the print capitalism of commodified narratives.9 Yet Anderson’s study primarily focuses on non-European nationalist movements attempting to respond to Western imperialism, which was organized long after nation-statist categories had congealed. If non-Western independence struggles understand the fusion of literary standards and national norms as self-evident, this equivalence appears commonsensical only because these movements become strongly integrated within the global market after the ligature between national identity and literary endeavor had been constituted in the now-dominant capitalist West. Anderson’s model selfadmittedly works less successfully for the Americas in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and not because these tendencies were absent, but because they were still in the process of becoming fused together, let alone revealed as hegemonic. Anderson himself argues that a successful promulgation of a nationalist imaginary requires the alignment of manifold social interests, especially an alliance between statist protobureaucratic interests and print publishers, a coalition that is never automatic and nowhere guaranteed.10 The allegory of nationalism stumbles on the American case and, perhaps more generally, on several counterfactuals. If the early American novel’s primary motivation was to express the experience of American independence, why then was there no outburst of novelistic output until the 1790s? Given the usual short time lapse between an author’s inspiration for a novel and its composition and publication, long fictions could presumably have been produced immediately on the heels of the Declaration of Independence, British military and diplomatic capitulation, states’ confederation, federal constitutionalization, and so on. Indeed, a frequent complaint by modern readers is that the 1790s novels were written too quickly and rushed into print with little authorial selfrestraint or editorial supervision. Technology is of no help here since the 1790s witnessed neither any dramatic upswing in the number of printing presses in the United States, such as had occurred earlier in the century, nor the implementation of the 9. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 10. Ibid., 65.

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more efficient and cheaper production processes that would later spur novelism.11 The decade did, however, see a sharply increased circulation of newspapers that serialized fiction amidst an expanding communication network.12 The number of post offices increased during the 1790s from 75 to 903, miles of post road went from 1,875 to 21,000, and the number of newspapers from 100 to 250.13 The expansion of distribution channels obviously facilitates the traffic of printed material and its potential market, but the increase of exchange relays can by itself neither wholly explain the advent of the novel’s particular form nor why novelist production declined in the early nineteenth century, even as the range of distribution continuously expanded and transport costs declined. Another insufficiency of the nationalist paradigm lies with its refusal to make national comparisons. The increase in American novelism is matched, if not superseded, by similar trends in England and continental Europe. Robert Heilman argues that the English production of novels and magazine reviewers’ interest in novels generally fell throughout the 1760s and mid-1780s.14 Beginning in the late 1780s and sharply increasing in the 1790s, novels and critical commentary on novels returned. Similar trends can be found in France and other European linguistic domains, where the 1790s, in particular, saw a vertiginous acceleration of novelistic production.15 For instance, French domestic novels went from 15 in 1794 to 177 in 1799.16 This global expansion indicates that novelism responds to social effects that are neither unique to the United States nor wholly driven by its local factors. The renaissance of the novel in Anglo-continental Europe and its nascence in the United States does not wholly exclude the effects of state-formations on cultural forms, since it could be argued that the French Revolution and its ensuing seeding of republics is a major, if not primary, cause of novelism. The rise of statism is not exactly that of nationalism, 11. Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in EighteenthCentury America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). 12. Allan R. Pred, Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information: The United States System of Cities, 1790–1840 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), 20 –35, 78 –100. 13. Joyce Oldham Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York: New York University Press, 1984), Warner, Letters of the Republic, 125. 14. Robert Bechtold Heilman, America in English Fiction, 1760–1800: The Influences of the American Revolution (New York: Octagon Books, 1968), 43– 47; Paul Keen, The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 15. Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (2000): 54– 68. 16. Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 171.

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however, and the period’s ongoing condensation of these elements in the term nation-state means that the production of representations might as easily resist as endorse the cultural equation of the nation and state. Even though the parameters of state containers may have had important implications for the fate of novelism, these factors cannot automatically be transcribed as emanations of literary nationalism. It is questionable whether the early American novel’s perceived vitalist relation to nationality existed as anything approaching a compelling tendency during the 1790s as it would later on. As nineteenth-century Romantic aesthetics made the analogy between an interior mental space of vital imagination and a local or regional geography, it conjoined notions of intrinsic personhood and particularizing cultural characteristics. Both trends, however, were undergoing construction during this time and were by no means dominant mentalities or clearly premised on their later convergence. When eighteenth-century writers evaluated the relative merits of a novel, the distinguishing criteria gauged the success of writing in relation to a nexus of social traits, but proximity to a nationalist imaginary was not one of the leading ones. If by nationalism we mean the putative assumption of traits illustrating a regional clan and status association, an ethnie, then novelism for eighteenth-century writers was often functionally antagonistic to particularistic nationalism; the latter’s claims of isolated and inward reflection would have appeared to many of the period’s writers as a mark of social immaturity and stunted development resulting from the inability or refusal to embrace progressive, civilizing trends of disembodied, universal enlightenment within a supranational republic of letters. Most eighteenth-century authors intentionally abandoned conventional representational forms that focused on a cultural region, like the epic, and embraced a new (“novel”) form in order to resist archaic place determinations tainted by association with the reactionary blood-and-soil determinants of aristocratic-regal provincialism, a form of alienation that artificially divides humans by the accidental location of their birth. Because a primary concern of eighteenth-century bourgeois writers was to devalue the legitimacy of the old regime’s social foundations, feudalistic topographies could not be immediately reformulated as national identity until an intervening phase could separate the ligands tying a mode of social power (feudal, absolutist) to place-determining representational forms. Not until the “post-Enlightenment” phase of the early nineteenth century could literary canonizers, like Barbauld and Walter Scott, use the form of historical romance to rehabilitate the gentry’s territorialism in order to

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categorize fiction by standards of bourgeois-led nation-statism. Not until an evolving modernity fully consolidated the separation between public and private spheres in the nineteenth century could literary nationalism take hold. For nationalism’s attraction rests in how it mediates the publicprivate antinomy, since it operates simultaneously as a public mode of defining society and a private feeling of intrinsic personality. Even then the process of reconfiguring aristocratic notions of land-based subjectivity into the geographized ones of a cultural nationalism congruent with the dictates of industrial-era society was not without its discontents, as seen with Samuel L. Mitchill’s A Discourse on the State and Prospects of American Literature, delivered at the 1821 anniversary meeting of the New York section of Phi Beta Kappa at Union College. If any American of the time rivaled Benjamin Franklin in terms of civic, scientific, and intellectual engagement, it was Mitchill. A professor of natural history at Columbia in the 1780s, Mitchill was considered by John Randolph to be a human “congressional library” because of his widespread knowledge and participation in more than fifty learned societies.17 One of these societies was New York’s Friendly Club, a hothouse of cultural activity in the 1790s that included Charles Brockden Brown, whose prolific output of longer fictional narratives exemplifies the decade’s turn to novelism. Mitchill’s personal learning and location within the cross-hatching of multiple early American projects and nascent institutions makes him an especially privileged redactor of 1790s attitudes and concerns, since it was the formative period of his most intense cultural activity, before his turn to formal politics as a New York state senator and U.S. congressman and senator. If his 1820s Phi Beta Kappa audience had expected Mitchill to position himself in a cultural field mainly defined by the opposition of gentrified conservatism, exemplified by the Knickerbocker school, to “Young American” literary nationalism, they instead received a masterfully insistent recovery of views belonging in spirit to the 1790s. Mitchill works forensically to dissociate an essentialized geographical “Americanness” from the recent achievements won in the field of “Literature,” since the latter belongs to the “mighty march of the mind,” the mobility of which exceeds the limits of cartographic outlines. He repeatedly encourages his audience to refuse the definition of arts and sciences according to nationality, and Mitchill 17. Eleanor Bryce Scott, “Early Literary Clubs in New York City,” American Literature 5, no. 1 (1933): 3–16; Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 377.

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begins his talk by describing how the recent post-Napoleonic peace may actually result in a period of cultural deficiency because the absence of European conflict will decrease the immigration to American shores by foreign (mainly French) intellectuals who have particularly instigated literary, scientific, philosophical, and publishing activity.18 If the Jacksonian-era United States isolates itself from the worldly currents of cosmopolitan invention and intellectual conversation, then it will simply slither backwards to stew in stagnant pools. Before citing a state-by-state catalog of regional centers of higher education, Mitchill reminds his listeners that Congress has repeatedly refused to establish a national university that might institutionalize a centralizing school of thought or brand of education as a federal model for the regions to emulate. The defensive need to produce nationalist definitions of culture is the mark of excremental critics, who prize “American” subject matter with the same nature of “sturdy beetles in a path, boring the ground and stealing manure. They roll with peculiar art— one pushing and the other pulling, their new-made ball, which is precious above all things to them.”19 As for the certainty of the terms invoked by patriots, Mitchill claims that these are intellectually untenable confusions of an actually existing reality since a term like United States is a temporary political appellation, not a fixed identity. Rather than assume the self-evident nominalism of a national imaginary, Mitchill wryly suggests that the matter be referred to committee for a possible referendum. The pleasure that Mitchill takes in knowingly antagonizing his audience marks a historical shift in the intellectual currents between the late eighteenth century and the early mid-nineteenth one. Mitchill would not have delivered such an arch lecture in the 1790s because he would not have yet seen himself as marginalized in the period’s cultural mainstream. Only with the later formation of literary nationalism does Mitchill see the need to intervene. The value of Mitchill’s discourse for us, however, is that it flags the absence of literary nationalism by a paradigmatic key player in the cultural field of the 1790s. My claim here is not that literary nationalism cannot be found in the early Republic, but that it nowhere exists as so influential or decisive a factor as many critical studies of the period insist. Not only were state (lowercase) and provincial affiliations still prevalent, but, I will argue, differentiating 18. Samuel L. Mitchill, A Discourse on the State and Prospects of American Literature (Albany: Websters and Skinners, 1821), 7. 19. Ibid., 35.

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regional determinations were crucial to the novelistic representation of social experience in the 1790s. A self-fulfilling prophecy appears as critics favor the evidentiary material of the period’s political party actors, their official documents and voluminous portfolio of written letters on the national question. Yet the presence of an articulate and prolix faction should not be taken as representing either a cultural totality or a dominant feature.

The Paradigm Debate: Liberalism and Republicanism The distortions of nationalist-oriented scholarship were partially recognized as later efforts position the study of the late eighteenth-century United States through the intellectual history paradigm debate between liberalism and republicanism. This debate is now so long-standing, especially as its proponents have retroactively incorporated earlier Americanist scholars within its critical narrative, that mapping its sallies is practically tantamount to recapitulating a bibliography of early American studies cultural historiography.20 The liberalism approach often interprets the period as primarily operationalized by a set of assumptions associated with Locke’s writing that are taken to signal the devolutionary rights of “possessive individualism,” the postaristocratic assertion that the monadic subject can participate in the free market of exchange by instrumentalizing itself, and the labor of others, as commodities and determine the course of its life apart from physicalized status determinations, denominational hierarchies, and the absolutist State.21 Republican positions look to the ideas of “commonwealth” or “country” English party claims for personally disinterested virtue, exemplified in the dedication to a civic humanist opposition to the despotic “hidden” interests involving the monarchy’s assumed constraints on liberty enacted through the covert machinations of its political servants in tandem with speculative financial and mercantile elites.22 20. For summaries of the debate, see Daniel T. Rodgers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History 79, no. 1 (1992): 11–38; Robert E. Shalhope, “Toward a Republican Synthesis: The Emergence of an Understanding of Republicanism in American Historiography,” William and Mary Quarterly 29 (January 1972): 49 – 80; and Joyce Oldham Appleby, “Republicanism and Ideology,” American Quarterly 37, no. 4 (1985): 461–73. 21. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955); C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967). 22. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967); Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776 –1787

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The paradigm debate has experienced so long a life, partly because it aptly functions as a surrogate for a series of other critical confrontations, ranging from ones over methodology (the author-centric approach of history of ideas versus the “history from the bottom up” that attempts to excavate the collective experience of unnamed and disempowered groups), periodization (the points, stages, or residues of protomodernity, modernity, and countermodernity), and, not least, the often covert war of left-right political affiliations by academics and how they understand various critical positions as allegorizing these allegiances. One would need something approaching a polygonal model to visualize the debate’s manifold nature, especially as there are often internal divisions even within political sides. No simplifying binarization of the statements made between adherents of the liberal and republican heuristic can exist because the subterranean skirmishes between these tendencies often become ventriloquized through what seem to be stable and objective categories, but which frequently transform a previously received meaning into the opposite of its original provenance. If the category of liberalism was first marshaled into service by a Progressivist critique of capitalism’s social antagonism, a later academic generation complained that it had become reconfigured into a language of pluralism, which submerged the scars of social confrontation within a cold war rhetoric of melting-pot nationalism that celebrated the ethical superiority of U.S. consensus and consumer democracy over the racializing antagonisms of mid-twentieth-century Europe. As the term liberalism flip-flopped to contradict the argumentative positions that it was originally meant to signify, the confusion led critics to veer away from its use as a tool for critiquing dominant forces in American society. As a more socially heterogeneous U.S. humanities academy evolved after the 1960s, scholars desired a paradigm that excluded the intellectual complacency and political quiescence that was connoted by liberalism-based research, as republicanism has become something like a default category throughout the 1980s and 1990s, especially for the renewed interest by nonhistorians in early American studies on matters of race, gender, sexuality, and geography.

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969); Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1991); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development, and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II Until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959).

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Of the three titles that mark the recovery of late eighteenth-century writing in the United States —Jane Tompkins’s Sensational Designs, Cathy Davidson’s Revolution and the Word, and Michael Warner’s Letters of the Republic—all have implicit and explicit allegiances to the republican camp.23 Tompkins’s reader-response approach defends noncanonical work against the liberal aesthetic’s patriarchal disregard for female-authored and mass audience taste. Davidson’s richly theorized mediation of pre-1800s texts avoids relying on the depth interiority of a liberal aesthetic’s prioritization of irony and authorial self-assertion, which are of little use in many of the period’s highly generic texts. Both critics also enabled a serious return to discussions of sentimental and gothic writing, while Ann Douglas’s liberal-inspired complaint against sensationalized narratives feels barely part of the current discussion and is usually mentioned only as a bibliographic marker of quickly dismissible claims.24 The slightly later work of Warner introduces a variant of republican claims by mediating Habermas’s argument for the disembodied, universalizing sphere of public communication for the relevance of the early Republic’s texts. As republicanism became a hegemonic term, the point of its historical intervention became increasingly lost through treatments that position its antagonist as a straw dog. For instance, Bruce Burgett argues for the weakness of liberalism as a category by comparing it to republicanism: “Liberalism and republicanism share a theoretical commitment to the principle of popular sovereignty, a commitment that presupposes the distinction between civil and state authority central to any democratic political theory. They differ, however, in republicanism’s greater emphasis on the public sphere as the space within civil society where the people’s sovereignty is debated, contested, and exercised. In contrast to the liberal subject, the republican citizen requires not only the negative liberty to withdraw from legal coercion and state supervision, but also the positive liberty to participate in public processes of collective self-determination.”25 Burgett frames the difference between liberalism and republicanism as the former lacks a sphere, or utopian claim for a sphere, that allows 23. Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Warner, Letters of the Republic. 24. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977). 25. Bruce Burgett, Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 31.

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for conflict-free collectivity. But surely liberalism has such a fantasmic receptacle — the bourgeois marketplace: “The sphere of circulation of commodity exchange, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labor-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. It is the exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham.”26 By reducing liberalism to its political, rather than economic, characteristics, Burgett turns the argument into one over the relative benefits of different modes of bourgeois sociocultural representation. The oppositional or populist features of republicanism that often attract critics to its claims, namely, as a form for the expression of plebeian class dissent and subaltern complaint, consequently becomes another version of consensualism when it elides a sustained treatment of the marketplace and becomes a shorthand for the retreat from class as a category for critical inquiry. When republican-oriented scholars fashion liberalism as simply a choice of particularity over universality, they deflate the antiliberal intervention to little more than a culturalist gesture that often reintroduces aesthetic-led criteria, much as had the earlier proponents of liberalism. In other words, the longevity of the paradigm debate may rest on how the terms of its confrontation have become so plastic as to encompass nearly any proposed position. The incoherence of the underlying argument is perhaps expected, given that even for the historical agents involved, the question—liberalism or republicanism—is one badly posed. A revenant from Greek and Roman history, the idea of republicanism was recalled and reinvented in the eighteenth century through tendentious readings of archival fragments by a broad coalition of disenfranchised gentry and nascent bourgeois interests as part of a decades-long project to construct a political theory that could, on one hand, legitimize antimonarchical energies and enable a mode of postregal governmental practice that might prevent the king’s restoration, as had happened in England during the seventeenth century and, on the other, contain any potential violence by plebeians. Rather than a coherent set of statements, republicanism is more usefully considered as a tactical representational field that encapsulates a series of multiple, often contradictory, claims, even to the point where republicanism could be taken as a gambit for reforming, but not revoking, the monarchy.27

26. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 280. 27. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1991), 95–96.

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In this light, Isaac Kramnick cautions against assuming that the concept has an initially radically democratic valence because “republicanism is historically an ideology of leisure. Its conception of citizenship privileges people who do not need to work, and have time to devote themselves to civic life.”28 For most of the eighteenth century, republicanism was the rallying cry of social and political elites who had the misfortune of not occupying government ministries, but desired to do so and sought to shift the center of power away from the old regime to a slightly different set of actors. In this form, the ideal of the disinterested citizen looks nostalgically to the authority of an extracourt landed gentry, or, for Americans, the Creole standing order of political and theological leadership. The elites’ financial independence and comfort grants them the liberty to disengage from a marketplace that makes men vulnerable to base influences either through the despotism of credit or coerced dependence on wages.29 By the century’s end, republicanism was recodified by plebeians, artisans, mechanics, and other wage and bound laborers for functionally antibourgeois purposes. The concept’s refunctionalization means that the term’s recurrence in the 1790s mainly indicates the presence of social transformations that use the language of republicanism to enunciate collective confrontations at a time when the language of class was not widely available. When John Adams said late his life that he had “never understood” what republicanism meant, since it “may signify any thing, every thing, or nothing,” his professed confusion mainly indicates the degree to which the term had been redefined by interests other than his own.30 While the lability of “republicanism” made it tactically useful for the period’s factors, its fluidity prevents it from operating as a stable analytic category for contemporary scholars. If republicanism was deployed throughout the eighteenth century in ways that do not necessarily link the signified beliefs to its signifying name, then the same is true for liberalism, which was a nascent practice, but not one recognized by the historically posterior use of that term. If liberalism refers to an impersonal marketplace, freed from governmental oversight and constituted by anonymous, autonomous, and mobile subjects, known

28. Isaac Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 1. 29. Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution, 105– 7; Paul A. Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern: New Modes and Orders in Early Modern Political Thought (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). 30. Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution, 95.

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through the abstract identities of buyer and seller, who are motivated by the restless desire to accumulate, the term characterizes features of a fully developed capitalist society that has overcome the personal power of known caste-status hierarchies. In this sense, however, liberalism is still in the process of formation for the late eighteenth century, “still an unarticulated behavioral pattern more than a sharply delineated mode of thought.”31 The problem here is that liberalism is an overly expansive term that does not adequately delimit the leading traits of capitalist activity in the phase between early modern merchant capital and nineteenth-century industrial capitalism. As I will argue below, the move from the personal early modern to impersonal industrial-era modes of the marketplace is too great a social catachresis: the dominant mode of the eighteenth-century phase of historical capitalism instead represents a calibrated transitional form of power that advocates for a “friendly” mode of the bourgeois marketplace, which ostensibly functions through universalizing sentiment and moral community among strangers. The dominant topic for eighteenth-century writers associated with the middle class is the question of forming postabsolutist civil society, not competitive individuality. Unlike later, nineteenth-century ideologues, Adam Smith’s defense of free trade saw the good of commerce in terms of collective wealth and as a medium for civilizing society, not as an arena of permissible Hobbesian war of all against all. Certainly many aspects of classic nineteenth-century liberalism are present in eighteenth-century affairs, but using a term forged by evidence of a later historical moment to define an earlier one risks injecting a teleological trajectory onto a set of conditions that might have produced different conditions than the ones that did, in fact, ensue. For the conditions of an intermediary phase, like the 1790s, more period-specific terms are needed to apprehend that era’s form of capitalist accumulation. The couplet of liberalism and republicanism does make sense, in the last instance, because the motility of these terms’ use in the eighteenth century points to the logic of their pairing: republicanism is a mode of liberalism as the former is one of the politicocultural mediums through which eighteenthcentury agents articulated the ideals of protoliberal capitalism. Within the 31. Robert E. Shalhope, “Republicanism, Liberalism, and Democracy: Political Culture in the Early Republic,” in The Republican Synthesis Revisited: Essays in Honor of George Athan Billias, ed. Richard D. Brown, Milton M. Klein, John B. Hench (Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 1992), 37– 90, 55.

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widely divergent meanings of republicanism, one version is entirely compatible with the mode of capitalism that later became nominated as liberalism. Before a fully fledged capitalist marketplace could arise in the nineteenth century, commercial interests needed to liberate the exchange of commodities from regulation by the church, absolutist state, and gentry concerns. Mercantilism and physiocracy could only be overcome by proposing an enlarged market of ostensibly equal agents who match self-interest with a sympathetic concern for the collective. Republicanism could shift throughout the century from being conveyed as a rhetoric of aristocratic oligarchy to one of plebeian equality because protoliberal middle-class actors had appropriated a version of republicanism’s insistence on the mutually enabling corporate body as a viable vision of a bourgeois ideal in order to use its invented traditions as a revisionist justification for the rise of commercial society. For this reason, the liberalism/republicanism dyad indicates the onset of a larger social movement, which the debate cannot be used by itself to clarify.

Gendered Sentiment and the Public Sphere After much of the work on republicanism, and partially informed by a sense of its exhaustion, two other paradigms evolved during the 1980s and 1990s for the study of early American novelism: sentiment and the public sphere. Because both are topics that I will treat later at greater length, a full-blown analysis will have to wait. In the interim, a few comments are in order. Although the themes of sentiment and the public sphere attempt to provide a more historically nuanced context for the early Republic, these topics have been frequently deployed in ways that emphasize, if not acerbate, gender divisions as the sentimental becomes associated with a feminized private sphere of emotions and affective intensities, while the public sphere is often configured as a male-dominated realm of political administration, commerce, and (print) communication configured as disembodied universality.32 Such a scholarly division has tended to distort our 32. The gendered division was exactly the grounds on which some critics revalorized sentiment. Though Habermas’s arguments about the public sphere are not necessarily masculinist, feminist historians have often considered the concept and historical referent as being so. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989); Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 109 – 42; Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution

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understanding of both terms for reasons of collapsing oppositions similar to those mentioned above with the liberalism-republicanism pairing. The period’s claims for these elements never compartmentalized sentiment and publicity in the ways that recent criticism routinely enacts. The assignment of sentiment to the private sphere and publicity to the male one assumes both gender difference and emotional performance to be transhistorical categories readily transparent to modern readers. Gender and emotion, however, have a complex history of recodification and reconfiguration throughout the long eighteenth century, and they cannot be taken as independent variables that carried the same meaning then as they are often assumed to have today. The eighteenth century’s conceptualization of print discourse in spaces of collective discussion was neither disembodied nor defined by the absence of emotional display, just as sentimentality cannot be split off from its economic concerns. In a linked fashion, sentimental tales are often conflated with industrialera narratives on the cult of domesticity. The sentimental is made to flow seamlessly with the domestic in order, again, to buttress claims for women’s experience as unaltered by historicity. Yet the object defined by “classic” nineteenth-century domesticity differs from that of the prior century’s sentimentality, as elements of the earlier were refashioned to produce the later category. The problematic enshrined at the heart of nineteenth-century “domestic” novels is the nexus of reproductive heterosexuality; the nuclear, bourgeois family; and an individualizing subjectivity marked by intrinsic personhood and genitalized sexual drives. The problematic enshrined at the heart of eighteenth-century sentimental tales involves the nexus of new associative relations made possible by the bourgeois subject freed from aristocratic lineage and status hierarchies and a subject marked by a sociability of body surface correspondences and a host of other bodily passions, which are not necessarily subordinated to a particular erotogeneous zone, like the genitals, or easily transcoded as primarily erotic in nature. The concerns magnetized and amplified by domesticity in the nineteenth century have a different configuration and point of emphasis than those of eighteenth-century sentiment because the middle classes have slightly different historical concerns and positions of relative power in the two phases. Domesticity shares many of the generic narrative elements (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); Joan B. Landes, ed., Feminism, the Public and the Private (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); and Dorinda Outram, The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class and Political Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

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and devices of sentimentality, but the same words have been used in an entirely different social grammar. Because new formations find the cultural investment cost of inventing fresh terms too high, the concerned agents often appropriate preexisting tropes and recode them within a new syntax. Both the discourses of sentiment and domesticity use similar representational devices, but domesticity is of a piece with one phase of historical capitalism whereas sentimentality belongs to the preceding one. They share similar dynamics as they both belong to bourgeois culture, but they also diverge, as these dynamics take on different forms in different phases of historical capitalism. A definition of sentiment that sees it as nothing more than domesticity occludes its actual function in the eighteenth century.

The New Atlanticism Recognizing its prior paradigms’ lack of efficacy, American studies has recently begun taking the “spatial turn” to consider the ways in which human geography impacts cultural production, particularly because hemispheric Atlantic studies might escape nationalist categories.33 In the broadest sense, Atlanticism considers the production of cultural experience and its transmission as no longer comprehensively defined by the bounding limits of either a monocultural ethnic or state structure even while recognizing these as significant and determining factors. Although the level of the nation-state cannot be discounted, Atlanticism prioritizes the dense network of the extraterritorial circulation of goods and peoples as its primary context. Considering economic, social, political, and cultural factors as one involving the process of encounter and exchange, Atlantic studies considers the ocean as a relational unit of littoral contact zones rather than as an aquatic obstacle of division and difference. The idea of a mutually structuring and systemic Atlanticism is not of a recent coinage. R. R. Palmer and Jacques Leon Godechot showed that the 33. William Kennedy, “The Spatial Turn: American Studies and Cultural Geography,” in Literature and Society: The Function of Literary Sociology in Comparative Literature, ed. Bart Keunan and Bart Eeckhout (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2001), 205–21; John Carlos Rowe, ed., Post-Nationalist American Studies (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000); George Lipsitz, American Studies in a Moment of Danger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Donald E. Pease, ed., The Future of American Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); Antoinette M. Burton, ed., After the Imperial Turn: Thinking With and Through the Nation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).

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tides of political transformation in the late eighteenth century had to be understood as an integral matrix rather than simply as a set of isolated case studies.34 Though widely admired for their scholarship, Palmer’s and Godechot’s arguments were largely left alone by their scholarly generation, perhaps because their focus on revolutionary and counterrevolutionary struggles was at odds with a cold war academy intent on mythologizing an intrinsic national spirit of pluralist consensus as an allegory of American difference from Europe’s fascist and authoritarian regimes. When a later generation of Americanist historians and cultural critics came of age through the 1960s social movements, the sensibility shift toward a “history from the bottom up” made Palmer’s and Godechot’s work on political figures seem methodologically suspect as a Whig history of great men and dates. Yet, ironically, the first-wave practitioners of labor studies tended to internalize nativist predicates as strongly as had the prior scholarly generation.35 The new Atlanticist turn may likewise reinscribe tendencies that were previously critically objectionable. For instance, transatlanticism as a recently revalorized term deserves qualification. The trouble with transatlanticism involves its conceptual inability to apprehend the cultural, economic, and ecological mechanisms that generate social history. At the epistemic level, transatlanticism rests on a static binary (a move caught in its prefix) that current criticism would otherwise avoid, if not seek actively to dismantle. Implicitly foregrounding, and nationalizing, with the Anglophone poles of England and the United States as its dominant reference points, transatlanticism fails to acknowledge that Britain and America have different ratios of importance throughout modern history, and that Euroamerican productions are contingent on the matrix formed by Africa, the Caribbean, and the other Americas. Collapsing the Atlantic basin into a self-contained, monolinguistic zone, transatlanticism risks reinstating a triumphalist history, which often relies on a census of imperial diplomacy, great individual actors, and economic patterns abstracted from human agents that can marginalize the subordinated subjects that American studies has otherwise prided itself on documenting. 34. R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800: The Struggle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959 – 64); Jacques Godechot, France and the Atlantic Revolution of the Eighteenth Century, 1770 –1799 (New York: Free Press, 1965). 35. The next significant historical text for the Atlantic arena, Jesse Lemisch’s on Jack Tar, was decidedly nativist in orientation. Jesse Lemisch, “Jack Tar in the Streets: Merchant Seamen in the Politics of Revolutionary America,” William and Mary Quarterly 25 (1968): 371– 407.

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In this vein, Paul Gilroy criticized accounts that “view modes of material production and political domination as exclusively national entities” in ways that disinclined the study of “racial politics as a significant element in the formation and reproduction of [white] English national identities.”36 To counter this insularity, Gilroy suggested the “image of [slave] ships in motion across space between Europe, America, Africa, and the Caribbean as a central organizing symbol for . . . a living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion” that circulates “ideas and activists as well as the movements of key cultural and political artifacts” throughout the Atlantic. The Middle Passage as ethical imperative was the moral compass for two later defining instances of cultural Atlantic studies: Joseph Roach’s Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (1996) and Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (2000).37 By replacing the term transatlantic for circumatlantic, Roach defines his Atlantic as formed by multiple traumatic histories, including the devastation suffered by the Americas’ first peoples at European contact as well as the institutionalization of oceanic African slavery.38 Circumatlanticism imagines the Atlantic basin as a systematizing matrix in which all sections exert bounding pressure that define the space, even if the movement of specific goods and peoples does not actually transverse the Atlantic but travels along segments of its perimeter. Like Gilroy, Roach links trauma and the transport of performative, visual, and printed texts as the catalyzing feature of modernity, but whereas Gilroy focused on the “revolutionary transformations of the West at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries,” Roach extends the horizon back to the seventeenth century, a move that logically includes the first establishment of New World plantations by the English but also tellingly centers his study away from the emancipatory political energies of the revolutionary era. For Roach, acts of historical violence create a culture of primal grief that organizes cultural interaction throughout the ages in ways seemingly outside of further elaboration or intervention. Describing what he calls surrogation,

36. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), 3– 4. 37. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London: Verso, 2000). 38. Roach, Cities, 4.

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wherein “the unspeakable cannot be rendered further inexpressible” and acts as the return of the repressed, often through various performances of morbid desire by oppressors for the oppressed, Roach allows scarring experience to free itself from later sociohistorical contexts that may amplify, re-direct, or ameliorate trauma.39 This New Historicist tendency to grant cultural codes a fetishized life and self-referentiality of their own means that experience becomes presented as increasingly belonging to an autonomous signifying chain of quotations that seeps into every text because of the metonymic nature of semiotics, rather than as a matter regarding further political and economic investment and rearrangement through a historically transforming series of material exchanges, alliances, and institutions. As Roach’s focus becomes increasingly attuned to the flow of representations, rather than the social transformations that cause certain representations to be promoted or contested, his study increasingly relies on a synchronic citation of historical context that lacks any notion of cultural change. More emphatically, we need to insist that the circumatlantic matrix does not simply arise because of an abstract “modernity,” but rather because of a specifically capitalist-driven dynamic that catalyzes social change as it appropriates geographies and constructs commodity chains. The advantage of using circum rather than trans to describe the Atlantic matrix is not finally just a matter of replacing one geometric abstraction for another, a circle for a line, but that even at the level of its name, the circumatlantic underlines how social geography is shaped by the circuits of capital flows, where the search for surplus-value contours the topography of encounters. Like Roach, Linebaugh and Rediker remain committed to tracing the flow of memory about injustice, but they differ in their approach to the links between representation and the history of capitalist expropriation. Linebaugh and Rediker argue that the antinomian, revolutionary politics of seventeenth-century plebeian England do not disappear after their political repression, first by Cromwell and then by the Restoration. These energies become externalized as the newly landless and masterless men go to the seas. Projected into this nautical matrix with a mixture of desperation and desire for opportunity, these dispossessed sailors created an aquamarine terrain of resistance in the ship’s holds and seaports within the interstices of the imperial machine. As the ships shuttle between the ports, they scatter the seeds of remembered rebellion and ideals of millennial transformation 39. Ibid.

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throughout the Atlantic to create a gestalt outline of resistance, which Linebaugh and Rediker chart by indicating contemporaneous clusters of rebellions throughout the eighteenth-century Atlantic as the belated receptacle of England’s seventeenth-century crisis. As a foundational guide to an alternative world of plebeian insubordination, The Many-Headed Hydra provides a welcome new map of linking social relations through space. But if they want to tell a labor history about the motley community of plebeian consciousness in an era before capitalist racism was fully consolidated, Linebaugh and Rediker’s tendency to anchor their study on acts of relatively spontaneous outbursts of revolt does not entirely extricate them from the insufficiencies of prior approaches that they hoped to surpass. Their emphasis on the spirit of rebellion means that they often mimic the myth-and-consensus school of an earlier mode of American studies, especially with their celebratory focus on cross-racial alliances. Despite their professed renunciation of the national frame, they mainly hold to the shores of a self-contained Anglophone, albeit creolized, Atlantic defined by the mythos of naval England. Yet England was neither the only Atlantic player throughout the eighteenth-century nor was it free from the pressures and limits of other imperial interests, especially as a latecomer to New World colonization. This point is crucial since the sequence of plebeian revolt makes sense only in context of interimperialist conflict. When dominant colonial elites face no extrinsic threat from other imperial authorities, they could contain riots and foreclose the idea of revolt in the first instance. Even the most successful rebellion —Haiti’s — succeeds only because its leaders were able to pit Spanish, French, and British interests against one another in order to create the time and space for the black revolution’s survival and consolidation. The enduring secret recourse to the nation-state, even if that container is no longer conclusively determined by territorial limits, raises two macrodisciplinary questions regarding Atlantic studies, one about its object of research and the other of methodology. Has (circum) Atlantic studies constituted itself as a field involving a specific problematic, domain, and method of evidentiary analysis, or has it relied until now on a loose bricolage of approaches charted out in other disciplines (economics, political science, history, and so on) to maintain allegiance to the autarkic nation-state in unreflexive ways? Does Atlantic studies have a particularity different from research into other aquatic containers, like Pacific studies or Indian Ocean

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studies, or should all these pursuits be considered as local facets or levels of analysis within a more general concern, such as the rise of historical capitalism and its spatial configurations of the price-setting marketplace? On another axis, how can we relate the production of cultural artifacts, notations, and performances to larger extranational flows involving commodity chains of goods and peoples, even those that do not necessarily occur within the transmission lines of a specific state? Can we chart an approach that is specific to the Atlantic bundle of relations, processes, and flows; provides a nondeterminist, as well as nonidealist, approach to cultural histories of texts and mentalities; and acknowledges historicity, the phase transformations of social history? My point of departure in this book is the need for a new paradigm that uses Atlantic circulation as the aquatic container of power inequities and polygon of traumatic and utopian experiences, but in ways that better relate the connections between suprasubjective social history and the production of individual cultural notations, the tides of trade and texts.

World-Systeming Literature: Beyond Cultural Materialism In claiming, in this book, that American novelistic production emerges to convey a re-export-associated middle-class experience as a means of compensating for its exclusion from traditional institutions and modes of address, I rely on Raymond Williams’s concept of structure of feeling to describe the mediated representation of experience within moments of historical transformation. Williams’s paradigmatic example of this transformation involves the explicitly or implicitly coerced movement from the plebeian countryside to the proletarian city, or, in a larger sense, from provincial colony to metropolitan nation. This geographical transfer includes the passage from a caste-like society to a class-based one amid the loss of familiar sociological frameworks, the identity-defining networks of customary beliefs and institutions that allow an agent to comprehend and convey her or his subject position in “knowable and communicable ways” through traditional forms like oral folktales.40 Under conditions of dislocation, a (collective) subject has difficulty narrating her or his experience, given that existing codes of representation cannot adequately

40. Raymond Williams, The English Novel: From Dickens to Lawrence (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973), 17; Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973), 165.

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enunciate ongoing change because traditional forms of communication were fashioned to convey a now-fading lifeworld and these subjects have not yet constituted the institutional apparatuses that produce communicative forms that may inscribe the presence of new social relations. In response to this discursive gap, Williams used structures of feeling to describe the “articulation of an area of experience which lies beyond” currently available semantic figurations. As groups experience the whirlwind of change that is difficult to describe, they often resort to and reside within “certain [dominant] modes, conventions of expression” that are only “approximations or substitutions for their own structure of feeling.”41 This indirect ventriloquism can be discerned by disruptions within a text’s chosen generic form, especially regarding the narrative voice, where an unevenness of perspective indicates the presence of a disjunction between a new lived experience and its formal articulation. This text-based means of locating otherwise silenced social conflict and transformation has been immensely productive for literary studies, especially in light of Walter Benjamin’s encouragement to read against the grain. Yet Williams’s method does not come entirely without its own set of unresolved questions. In an extended book-length interview, Williams was criticized for relying on a hermetically sealed national framework, especially as his study of English novels in the 1840s silenced the effects of the contemporaneous continental revolutions and the Irish famine on mid-nineteenth-century English fiction.42 The interviewers see this horizontal limit as indicative of a larger vertical constraint. If, as Williams claims, “the peculiar location of the structure of feeling is the endless comparison that must occur in the process of consciousness between the articulated and the lived,” the editors respond: “Even within one national society there are manifestly many processes which are inherently inaccessible to our immediate experience. We cannot possibly, for instance, hope to work out the laws of accumulation of capital or the tendency of the rate of profit from our personal experience of daily life. Yet these may be an absolutely essential determinant of the way in which the whole society is moving. . . . It is not possible to work back from texts to structures of feeling to experiences of social structures. There is a deep disjuncture between the literary text from which an experience can be reconstructed and the total historical process of the time. There is not a continuity 41. Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review (London: NLB, 1979), 164, 165. 42. Ibid., 170.

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at all.”43 Williams then assents, but I disagree that a recast form of cultural materialism cannot link periodizing transformations in the perceptual and representational apparatus and capitalism’s metanational globalizing processes. The problem lies not with Williams’s method in general, but his initial reliance on a one-dimensional sequence of time and space, a move he makes based on a too limited reading of Marx. In Capital, Marx’s normative model for capitalist enactments is the national history of postfeudal England. Marx isolated England’s development for the momentary analytic clarity resulting from a focus on a single nation outside of the embedding global context, which he planned to provide with the proposed, but unwritten, fifth and sixth volumes of Capital, respectively devoted to international trade and world market crises.44 Yet Marx did telegraph a more complex model when he prefaces this discussion about England’s pathway from capitalist rural dispossession to industrialization with this proviso: “The history of [capitalist] expropriation assumes different aspects in different countries, and runs through its various phases in different orders of succession, and at different historical epochs. Only in England, which we therefore take as our example, has it the classic form” (my emphasis).45 These four modalities of difference in historical capitalism indicate the necessary presence of four different analytic levels. The first level involves the general dynamics of capitalism considered in abstraction and outside of space and time. This is the level of capitalism’s axiomatic “laws” of operation, such as the laws on value, falling rate of profit, increased immiseration of laborers, and so on. The second is more temporally and spatially defined as it involves capitalism’s long development in the West from the late fifteenth– early sixteenth century to the mid-nineteenth, as the terminus of Marx’s consideration in Capital. The third level examines the temporal subsegments of the second level, the cyclical “epochs” of economic and contraction that are categorized by their dominant means of production. An example here is the late eighteenth to nineteenth century as the age of large-scale industry, exemplified by steam and steel machinery. The fourth level involves the particularities of a specific national or regional subunit(s) according to that sphere’s ability to utilize or resist the conditions created by a relational constellation formed by other 43. Williams, Long Revolution, 168; Williams, Politics and Letters, 169 –70. 44. Ernest Mandel, “Introduction,” to Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 11– 86, 28. 45. Marx, Capital, 876.

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national or regional subunits. Taken together, these four levels create highly specific configurations that share general aspects while also having particularizing features according to their specific geographical and temporal location. The sequence of first-level elements that we might recognize in one third- or fourth-level example may appear jumbled or absent depending on the vectors created at one register by the relative conditions by the levels above, below, and around it. Because Marx never lived to unpack these comments, he left an unfortunate legacy in the frequent misreading of Capital’s focus on England as legitimizing nationalist studies and a rigid stage-developmentalism. Although Trotsky’s slogan of mixed and uneven development recognized Marx’s implied model, the phrase remained descriptive more than analytical in his writing. Not until a world-systems perspective emerged, by virtually working backwards from the foreshadowed but unwritten final volumes of Capital, could the larger horizon of Marx’s approach begin to be unpacked.46 A worldsystems perspective, in turn, can recuperate Williams’s terms by providing a more globally aware means of reading historical changes as well as a means of charting the links between abstract laws, personal experiences, and the production of material artifacts, like the early American novel.

Toward a World-Systems Perspective At its heart, world-systems analysis relates political geography to economic history by mapping long waves of economic expansion and contraction caused by the intrinsic falling rate of profit generated by capitalist regimes of accumulation against the spatial reorganization of commodity chains linking all the exchanges between a global core and periphery through an object’s production, distribution, and consumption. Mainly known through the work of Immanuel Wallerstein, along with Terence Hopkins, Christopher ChaseDunn, and Giovanni Arrighi, world-systems analysis understands capitalism as a historically periodizable social formation that operates by altering the

46. On the history of the formation of world-systems, see Immanuel Wallerstein, WorldSystems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 1–22; Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Itinerary of World-Systems Analysis, or How to Resist Becoming a Theory,” in The Uncertainties of Knowledge (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 83–108; Walter Goldfrank, “‘Paradigm Regained?’ The Rules of Wallerstein’s World-System Method,” Journal of World-Systems Research 6, no. 2 (2000): 150 –95.

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formal shape between national sovereignty and world markets in response to cyclical contradictions generated by its operational logic.47 Wallerstein differentiates historical capitalism from other forms of government by means of a typology involving minisystems, world empires, and world-systems. “A mini-system is an entity that has within it a complete division of labor, and a single cultural framework. Such systems are found only in very simple agricultural or hunting and gathering societies” and these “mini-systems no longer exist in the world.”48 When a minisystem encounters other groups and begins to divide its labor processes so as to make commodities for trade, it becomes part of a world-system, a “unit with a single division of labor and multiple cultural systems.”49 A “world” system is so called “not because it encompasses the whole world, but because it is larger than any juridicallydefined political unit.”50 Wallerstein divides world-systems into two kinds: world empires and world economies. A world empire is “an economic network across multiples cultures in which a single encompassing State apparatus has formed.”51 These highly centralized regimes typically depend on a tributary economy that uses its absolute power to integrate political geographies under its rule without demanding that these regimes’ internal sociocultural logics harmonize with the empire’s dominant status-system, although some aspects of this synchronization do occur. In terms of trade, world empires have “clusters of merchants who engaged in economic exchange (primarily long-distance trade), but such clusters, however large, were a minor part of the total economy and not fundamentally determinative of its fate.”52 This 47. Wallerstein, Modern World-System I; Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World-Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern WorldSystem II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy (New York: Academic Press, 1980); Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, eds. World-Systems Analysis: Theory and Methodology (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1982); Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism (London: Verso, 1983); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730–1840 (New York: Academic Press, 1988); Thomas R. Shannon, An Introduction to the World-System Prespective (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989); Christopher Chase-Dunn, Global Formation: Structures of the World-Economy (London: Blackwell, 1989); Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London: Verso, 1994). 48. Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis,” The Capitalist World-Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 1–36, 5. 49. Ibid., 5. 50. Wallerstein, Modern World-System I, 15. 51. Chase-Dunn, Global Formations, 2. 52. Wallerstein, “Rise and Future Demise,” 6.

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commerce tends to be in luxury goods (preciosities like spices, minerals, metals, and furs) for elite consumption, which are often routed through nodes of strict governmental oversight and taxation. Mercantile commerce in a world empire creates tremendous profits by exploiting price differences between distant markets, not from directly managing or reconstituting local forces of production. Unlike a centralized world empire, a world-system exists as an interstate system, a shared economic and sociocultural space dominated by capitalist drives, where congeries of nation-states, conjoined in relations of competition and cohabitation, gain preeminence based on their ability to manage domestic class conflicts and an international division of labor through core-(semiperiphery)-periphery divisions. Wallerstein controversially argues that there has only been one functioning example of a world economy, the capitalist world-system that emerged in Western Europe during the latter half of the fifteenth century. The modern world-system differs from non-, proto-, or embryonic capitalist ones by the kinds of commodities that dominate its trade. Earlier world markets exchanged nonperishable preciosities, since the super-profits of luxury goods’ transport beyond regionalized markets of staples would compensate for losses within an otherwise risk-laden journey and the tariffs imposed along the route. The global trade of historical capitalism tends to move from long-distance exchanges in rare superfluities to ones in food and energy staples where profit depends on economies of scale (rather than economies of scarcity), lowered transaction costs, and the reorganization of local modes of production, according to capitalist dictates. The transformation of world-trade from rivulets of luxury trades to floods of speculative staples traffic requires a different mode of political organization. The world empire’s form of state sovereignty can increase its volume of value-accumulation only when its internal military apparatus can secure the transfer of luxury goods from the provinces to the center. A mutually reinforcing logic appears as only super-profitable preciosities can justify the transactional costs of a regime’s militarized infrastructure, and only a heavily armed empire can ensure the security required in the transport of lightweight but expensive goods from one region to the other. A world-system that creates profit through a mass volume staples trade must reach beyond the empire’s geographic limits of protected distribution. This search for economies of scale looks to decrease the transactional costs of security, so that the realm of exchange can be increased. The modern interstate system

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is a solution to this structural limitation. As the imperial center becomes a system of multiple states, operational expenses and the risk regarding the movement of actual commodities and virtualized ones, like credit, are shared among several players rather than an imperial center. The capitalist world-system’s organization of commodity chains and production processes does not dispense with inequity, since it establishes the global power geometries of a core and periphery. The core should really be called a core zone, since it is analogous to the term middle class, which refers to a set of elites who compete against each other even as they collectively antagonize outsiders. Core regions consist of strong nation-states that define the traffic in goods and commodified labor-power to their advantage, while the periphery includes weak or noncentralized state regions that are violently seized for the natural resources of their terrain, strategic location, and labor of their peoples.53 Yet the difference between periphery and core should not be conceptualized as simply between static boundaries, since these terms represent spatialized relations more than geographic demarcations. Each spatial level (area, national, regional, urban, familial) contains its own core-periphery differences. Individual nation-states have their own internal corelike and peripheral zones (north/south and urban/agrarian divisions), and they often have a “city-system,” where some cities dominate others. Cities likewise have their own “Manchester-effect” of class-differentiated regions, such as the core sectors where elites live and work and the peripheral slums housing the manual labor force. The patriarchal family or a racialized society can

53. According to Chase-Dunn, core production is “relatively capital intensive and employs skilled, high-wage labor; peripheral production is labor intensive and employs cheap, often politically coerced labor.” Robert Dodgshon adds that core regions import raw materials and export manufactured goods and foodstuffs. Their economies mainly involve profit accumulation through exchange, often of cultural and informatic services, which have, comparative to peripheries, lower rates of profit than the massively exploitative production processes in the peripheries. Peripheries tend to be those regions of monocultural agriculture and resource extraction, which usually rely on coerced labor, rather than the core laborers’ “consensual” wage contract. While peripheral production has high profit rates, it also has limited services and connections to social flows and the circulation of information. Unlike core regions, which often have multiple strategies of exchange and interconnections with other regions that provide opportunities to change their macroeconomy, the periphery is often linearly tied to a to the core or, more precisely, to a specific national-unit of the core, which gives it little flexibility and agency to alter its production processes in the global market. Chase-Dunn, Global Formation, 77; Robert A. Dodgshon, “The Early Modern World-System: A Critique of Its Inner Dynamics,” in The Early Modern World-System in Geographical Perspective, ed. Hans-Jürgen Nitz (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1993), 27.

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also be conceptualized as having white men as its core and women and nonwhites as peripheral actors. None of these levels is either wholly independent of the others or mechanistically determined by them. They often intersect each other in unpredictable ways because the relations of one level are not necessarily analogous or contiguous to each other. Due to these manifold geometries of unequal exchange and power relations, ChaseDunn urges that we think of logistical boundaries rather than spatial ones and imagine the divisions as involving relations that cannot easily be mapped on two- or even three-dimensional surfaces, even while the nation-state form provides a momentarily useful cognitive map of these differences.54 Guided by Marx’s axioms on the cyclicality of capitalism’s political economy, a world-system analysis can explain how political cartography is contoured by the rise and fall of (roughly fifty years) long waves due to the intrinsic contradictions of the business cycle. Nation-states, or rather dominant fractions within nation-states, compete to gain the benefits of leadership. The typical strategy for overcoming economic contraction involves the spatial fix of discovering, appropriating, and exploiting new geographies of labor-power, which are forcibly integrated within the world-system.55 Each new phase changes the world-system’s global shape as the leading actor in one phase of the world-system rarely manages to maintain its hegemony in the next. Because the dominant factor in one cycle has invested so much fixed capital and social regulation within one phase, the cycle’s leader is often unwilling to risk new entrepreneurial tactics. Consequently, each new long wave usually presents a new set of core interests presiding over a different geographical layout, means of production, and mode of social regulation. Historically, the sequence of leaders involves a world-system dominated by the Italian city-states (primarily Venice and Genoa) in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; Spain in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; the Netherlands in the mid-seventieth century; a British-French system throughout the eighteenth, which becomes a solely English one in the nineteenth century; a U.S.-defined phase in the twentieth century; and prospectively a Chinese-led one in the twenty-first century. By emphasizing the role of infraclass competition for the rewards of cross-class struggle, primarily at the state-level, a world-systems perspective has a general framework that explains why and how the global market

54. Chase-Dunn, Global Formation, 27. 55. David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (London: Verso, 1999).

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alters its social spaces through time. For literary and cultural studies, such an explanatory device can be marshaled as a means of understanding the rise and fall of aesthetic forms, generic conventions, and the varying centers of cultural consecration, especially as it breaks from nationalist studies by foregrounding the systemic features shaping individual components of the network.56 Because a world-systems perspective recognizes the spiral of capitalist history, where each long wave has both recurring and particular features, it allows for a new comparative studies based on the analogy of similar moments in different long waves, rather than one anchored to a theory of teleological stage development, temporal continuity, or spatial contiguity. Yet because a world-systems perspective has been mainly developed within the intersection of political science, history, and sociology, it requires some secondary elaboration before it can be put to use by the humanities to illustrate how a structure of feeling enunciates global transformations.

Geoculture and Semiperipheral Modernity If culture — as a term covering a range of social relationships, behavior, and expressions — is mutually implicated within and influential on the world-system’s economic cycles, then our subject ought properly to be the world-system’s geoculture. The term is Wallerstein’s, who has left it as a mainly undertheorized and unused concept, adjacent to the notion of geopolitics. For Wallerstein, geoculture is not “the superstructure of this world-economy . . . [rather it is] its underside, the part that is more hidden from view and therefore more difficult to assess, but the part without which the rest would not be nourished. I term it the geoculture by analogy with geopolitics, not because it is supra-local or supra-national but because it represents the cultural framework within which the world-system

56. For examples of a cultural world-systems analysis, see Anthony D. King, ed., Culture, Globalization, and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Thomas D. Hall, ed., A World-Systems Reader: New Perspectives on Gender, Urbanism, Cultures, Indigenous Peoples, and Ecology (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000); Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004); Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Georgi M. Derluguian, Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus: A World-System Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

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operates.”57 In this sense, Wallerstein limits his definition of geoculture to the dialectic of inclusion and exclusion typified by the simultaneous rise of liberal universalism, on the one hand, and racism and sexism, on the other, throughout the nineteenth century.58 This definition of geoculture is, however, an oddly ahistorical one. Because universalism and racism/sexism are features that become dominant in the stage of nineteenth-century high capitalism, they are badly placed to describe earlier phases of capitalism. A more precise explanation would argue that universalism and racism/sexism is the mode of geoculture that is dominant in the long, British-defined nineteenth-century phase of the worldsystem, rather than the overarching geoculture of the world-system itself. Given that world-systems perspectives are willing to show the motility of geopolitics, the same fluidity ought to be accorded to cultural matters. The definition of geoculture that I propose in this book is at once more expansive and particular than has been typical in world-systems writings. If geoculture is taken as analogous to geopolitics, then geoculture covers the spectrum of value’s confirmation and transmission through the regulation of sociocultural institutions, artifacts, and performances that emerge from the interstate system of shared and competing interests in ways that transcend the national, even while it maintains regional variations that can be contextualized as a result of that space’s location within a field defined by the world-system’s centrifugal and centripetal forces. Geoculture involves the intersection between the desired social reproduction of class identities and relations, as the attempt to reinstall the order of one generation into the next, and the range of responses to the historical changes that are structurally and inescapably generated by capitalism’s logistic. As such, geoculture follows the rules of the “four levels” as it includes traits that are generally true within historical capitalism and features that are specific to each phase within the long history of that logistic. If geoculture is the cultural framework within which the world-system operates, then it needs a space for staging the world-system’s transformation from one phase to the next. This ream belongs neither to the core nor the periphery, but to that of the semiperiphery. Despite its integral role in the world-system, the concept of the semiperiphery has remained “one of the weakest and most ambiguous components 57. Immanuel Wallerstein, Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing World-System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 11. 58. Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis, 60 –75.

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of the Wallersteinian framework.”59 Wallerstein describes the semiperiphery as zones that are “clearly ‘in-between’ in the core-periphery structure, in that they house within their borders (in adjacent and often unrelated sectors) both peripheral processes in relation to core states and core-like processes in relation to adjacent peripheral states.”60 Here the semiperiphery is construed as a collection of states that are in the minor leagues, hoping to become core players, but also fearing relegation to the periphery. Semiperipheral agents, analogous to the domestic petit and foreign comprador bourgeoisie, often seek to maintain their privilege by acting as the buffering, junior managerial region that gets its hands dirty by administering core-logistics on peripheral regions and protecting the core from directly receiving the force of peripheral acts of resistance and revenge. In contrast, the semiperiphery helps maintain the system’s homeostasis by generating marketplace competition that redresses the core’s tendency to profit-rate reducing monopolization of resources.61 A more important aspect of the semiperiphery is its geocultural calibration of the world-system. Because the social action of the core region is too incommensurate with that of the periphery, the world-system requires a calibrating zone that can mediate and “translate” the cultural and commodity economies of each sphere to one another. It receives, monetarizes, and forwards two kinds of commodities: the core’s “fictional” ones of credit, insurance, and contractual property and intellectual rights and the periphery’s labor-power and natural resources.62 As the “transistor” space where two different segments of a commodity chain become articulated and receive their first pricing, the semiperiphery is the contact zone that makes it possible for the core and periphery to transmit value to each other, especially as both the rural dispossessed of the hinterlands and the factors of the core’s jobbing interests congregate there, one to commodify their labor and the other to finance and insure the material apparatuses that will consume this labor-power. As the zone where political economy receives its greatest cultural inflection and amplification, the semiperipheries are the sites where the experience of

59. R. Milkman, “Contradictions of Semiperipheral Development: The South African Case,” in The Modern World-System of Capitalism: Past and Present, ed. Walter L. Goldfrank (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1979), 261– 84, 264. 60. Wallerstein, Modern World-System I, 349. 61. Immanuel Wallerstein, “Dependence in an Interdependent World: The Limited Possibilities of Transformation Within the Capitalist World-Economy,” in The Capitalist World-Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 66–94: 69. 62. Hans-Jürgen Nitz, “Introduction,” The Early Modern World-System in Geographical Perspective, ed. Hans-Jürgen Nitz (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1993), 1–25: 1.

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trauma by peripheral peoples and the speculative entrepeneurialiship of the core collide to produce new forms of representation, especially as it receives both the oral, folk beliefs of the periphery and the core’s printed matter and institutionally consecrated notations, objects, and behavioral performances. In tracing the passage of value through different forms (the commodity-form, the money-form), Marx argues that the capitalist market’s dedication to the endless accumulation of profit leads to a cultural supplement with the commodity fetish as the creation of profit cannot easily be related to its origin in the sphere of production. Williams used this notion of a spectral effect for his concept of a structure of feeling. Just as the gap between production and consumption creates an ineffable aura, so too does the gap between experience and existing processes of communication give a peculiar animation or oddity to a text’s narrative form. Just as Marx took the commodity fetish as the event that could be unpacked to reveal the entire capitalist system, as its consumerist fiction could be traced to the realities of exploitation, Williams believed that a text’s formal disruptions and magical solutions to a plot’s contradictions could deliver a larger cultural historiography of capitalist modernity. World-systems theory can be read as continuing this conceptual development by suggesting that if the semiperiphery is the zone of transculturation and transvaluation, then it stands as a privileged region for registering the sociocultural formations of each phase in the world-system. Because the semiperiphery has a homeostatic and communicative role in the worldsystem, its spaces are also highly sensitive to global transformations. As semiperipheries mediate the experience of violence and coercion in the periphery and in the core’s institutions of cultural valorization, they become especially pressurized in times of phase transition as they bear the burden of suturing two different configurations, one emerging, the other fading. Consequently, in times of transition between long economic waves and the ensuing spatial reorganization of the world-system, the semiperiphery functions as the locale of a heightened globalizing structure of feeling, producing affects and artifacts often in advance of these experiences’ concrete articulation by agents at either end of the system. Because the semiperiphery is the space that mediates action between the societies of the core and the periphery, it should not be considered as neatly contained within the borders of a particular political nation-state, but as the world-system’s internal arterial matrix: the geocultural “systemform” of the world-system. Since the world-system lacks a centralized point

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of regulation and command, it requires a circulatory system that allows all the world-systems regions to communicate with each other. As the zones of transmission where peripheral goods and peoples enter one node of the semiperipheral network to be translocated to another one closer to the core, the semiperipheral nodes also form a coherent matrix unto themselves, a realm with distinctive features shared among all the other semiperipheral templates. For the eighteenth-century world-system, the geography of the semiperiphery includes both the intermediary state regions, like the British American colonies, and a chain of linked seaports and harbor towns: London’s Thames estuary; the African coastal slave factories, like Whydah, Old Calabar, and Bonny; the European slave ports of Liverpool and Bristol; the Caribbean ports such as Kingston and Cap François; and the mid- and southern-Atlantic seaboard towns of the United States. The semiperiphery also includes the sections of the cities that connect the provinces to the high finance markets. In the case of London, there is an infraurban semiperiphery that acts as the contact point between the incoming provincial dispossessed and the core of Westminster governmental administration and the City’s financial bureaus. Because the semiperiphery is not simply a clearly demarcated territory but also includes the littoral and interstitial spaces within core and periphery territories, the semiperiphery is poorly delineated with basic cartographic implements like two-dimensional maps, which cannot easily illustrate how some sectors of London belong to the British core within the European interstate system while others belong to the semiperiphery realm of the Atlantic harbors and immigration flows: hence Chase-Dunn’s suggestion that we think in terms of logistical boundaries, not strictly spatial ones. If the semiperiphery is the site that produces new geocultural experiences, as it receives and responds to the core’s reorganization and incorporation of new peripheries in periods of phase change, then we have a theory of cultural genesis relating to long-wave shifts in the historically mutable world-system. The argument put forth in this book depends on this assumption as it works down spatial and temporal registers from the broad context of eighteenth-century cultural and social Atlantic economies to map the changes caused by a world-system in transition during the 1790s, which results in a set of national, regional, urban, and institutional transformations within the United States that find one expression in the early American novel. Moving on to smaller units of analysis, I will examine specific texts that both exemplify and comment on the local reception of shifts within the Atlantic world-system, with the goal of finding a more supple way of

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balancing the general and the specific on one axis, while revising the relation between the economic and the cultural on another.

Reading the Atlantic World-System The early American novel did not emerge simply because a seemingly accidental set of Caribbean events allowed for a relatively marginalized and diffuse set of traders to condense into a group that produces its own form of representation. The structural conditions for this emergence were prepared by the increased tensions within the circumatlantic worldsystem during the crossover between two long-wave phases. This transition magnetized the semiperipheral regions, like the United States, which bear the double burden of trying to maintain the equipoise of a fading long-wave order while also acting as the pivot on which the world-system shifts in its process of reformation to the next emerging order. These pressures become overdetermined so that they tessellate through several levels at once, through the semiperipheral United States within the semiperipheral mid- and southern-Atlantic states down to the semiperipheral agents of these coastal region’s new traders, located between the older standing order and the peripheral hinterland and urban populations. Within these predispositions, emergent groups appropriate the increasingly residual geocultural terms of a fading order and recalibrate them to serve their own purposes. In order to understand the context from which the moment of the early American novel rises, it is necessary to consider the four main, interlocking geocultural elements of the Franco-British, eighteenth-century Atlantic world-system involving the expansion of the bourgeois trade domain, and its consumer market, pool of exploitable labor, and cultural productions. These features are sensibility, as a social mode of establishing communal trust and commercial credibility among the nonaristocratic protobourgeoisie busily constructing civil society as a counterpoint to the old regime’s monopoly on power; sensational consumption with the superprofitable Caribbean trade of sugar, coffee, tea, and, to a lesser degree, chocolate; Atlantic slavery involving the coerced labor of Africans and its associated production of psychic distress; and sentimental cultural productions, like novels. These four elements are not a crystalline structure, but rather a matrix of interlocking aspects that facilitate each other’s development and stability.

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The consonantal proximity in naming these factors sensibility, sensational consumption, Atlantic slavery, and sentimental cultural artifacts means to suggest that they are neither entirely autonomous categories nor predetermined ones. In this blueprint, readers may find themselves suggesting counterfactuals of individual cases that do not operate, or even resist, the claims that I make for these categories as dominant geocultural forms and tendencies. Because genre is always a contested field, it makes perfect sense that counterfactuals exist. What is at stake here is not the purity of a totalizing category but the prevailing tendencies within that category. Some readers may discern other factors that they feel are as, if not more, significant than the ones here considered. In principal, I welcome such additions on the grounds that geoculture is not a structuralist convention. The geocultural turn neither argues that we must discover an underlying rigid syntax of propositions nor dedicates itself to citing the presence of some traits in order to deduce the necessary presence of other, momentarily obscured, constitutive presences in a grid of fixed positions.63 Because a period’s geoculture is not a fixed structure, it is entirely possible that other elements may supplement or complicate the aforementioned social, subjective, productive, and aesthetic forms. The description here is open to further elaboration. That said, in order to analyze a dynamic process, it is momentarily necessary to keep some distinctions. Many scholarly accounts see sensibility as bundled with civic humanism and stoicism.64 I challenge this grouping by subordinating civic humanism as

63. The tools of structural anthropology are of little use in analyzing a logistic rather than a structure. Logistical analysis foregrounds dynamic, rather than fixed, lines, and it recognizes that certain expected elements of a social process may be absent or even replaced by others in the diachronic flow of manifold social relations. Additionally, other elements may be massively more important and interconnected than others at certain historical points; there is no formal equality of necessity in social action. Even when cultural codes work through binary differences, each term does not necessarily achieve the same threshold of significance, especially if one descriptor remains relatively unarticulated with other factors of the geoculture. The absence or diminution of an element in a logistic does not have the same implication as it would in a structural analysis. The latter sees this absence as symptomatic and illustrative of an entire fixed field, which only has certain of its elements visible; a structural analysis then interrogates the existing elements to force a confession of what truth is being submerged. A logistical analysis does not deny that dominant codes structure the enunciation and suppression of other codes, but it rejects the notion that unarticulated structures have the same effect as dominant ones, and it looks to the relative magnetic or gravitational force of elements, rather than to their linear predeterminations. 64. John Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse: Sensibility and Community in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1987), 38; J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment:

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a feature of sensibility, as I think Shaftesbury suggests when he places his discussion of communal sense within a larger one of sensibility; I likewise consider neo-stoicism as belonging to sentimental codes. The condensation of sensibility and humanism, on one hand, and sentimentality and stoicism, on the other, appears because these categories are chosen based on their operation rather than their simple proximity in the writing of the period’s figures. As I will explain below, the role of stoicism’s self-control speaks to the potential crisis of sensibility’s overproduction, to which sentimental artifacts and performances arise as a response. Simply because claims for sensibility and stoicism were often made simultaneously by the same publicists does not mean that these codes have the same function, even while it does indicate the interconnection of these codes as formative aspects of the same geoculture. The eighteenth-century’s Atlantic geoculture forms the bedrock for American developments when the world-system shifts in ways leading to the opening of the re-export trade. Chapter 3 narrows the second chapter’s focus and goes down a register to consider the revolutionary effects of the carrying trade on a previously minor set of merchants. I examine how the carrying trade accelerated the urbanization in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore and introduced new experiences that changed the texture of everyday life for all social strata. As Caribbean consumer goods were more widely and cheaply available in the United States, this new access to stimulants catalyzed a revolution of the senses that left its mark everywhere, from changing diet and interior domestic architecture to external fashion and a new manner of bodily composure. As re-export’s transformations altered American social manners, it also aggravated life conditions for the laboring classes who found that urban growth did not translate into better life security for them. The increase in poverty amidst mercantile wealth produced the need for modern social welfare institutions, which the new men of wealth used as a medium of their own social legitimization and extrapolitical base of power. The increasing instability of workers amidst an economic boom was matched in the younger ranks of the middle classes as the new traders helped finance higher education institutions so that the number of secular universities in postindependence America soon tripled. This expansion resulted

Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).

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in the overproduction of young, educated men who gravitated to the harbor cities in search of vocational establishment. Many of these men found employment through the rise in the legal and contractual paperwork associated with long-distance trade. With their ongoing experience of recent changes, uncertain prospects, and educational and vocational familiarity with texts, this generation of young men appropriated the increasingly obsolete forms of the Atlantic geoculture, the languages of sentiment and sensibility, to produce fictions to represent and reflect on their condition. From the circles of young re-export traders and their associates, the American novel was born. As central participants in the new world of re-export wealth and its social, cultural, and literary institutions, New York’s Friendly Club, which includes the period’s most active novelist, Charles Brockden Brown, epitomizes the social conditions created by re-export. Brown’s novelistic writing remains centrally preoccupied with narrating the structure of feeling transmitted through the early American novel and the social transformation of literature itself. If Brown’s writing emblematizes the larger tale of the 1790s, it does so under the personal and social shadow of Benjamin Franklin. Few American writers so explicitly present themselves as exemplifying the sociocultural trends of the eighteenth-century’s Atlantic geoculture as Franklin. In his Autobiography, he reshapes these elements for new cultural forms — like the novel, which his text self-consciously prefigures — and modern forms of bourgeois sovereignty. Franklin recognizes the historical shift from a vertical mode of power descending from the king and church to a more horizontal one associated with the rising influence of the social actors categorized as the middle class. Unlike theocratic and absolutist governments, which control populations through the fear of coercion, the new mode of sovereignty relies on the soft power of consensus building, which rests on new kind of institutional power working through ostensibly neutral and disembodied spheres of knowledge formation that covertly establish power inequalities without the recourse to physical violence. Franklin is not only an early theoretician of institutional ideology; he is also perhaps one of the first writers to conceptualize literary texts as mediums implicated within actionable social power. If Franklin’s Autobiography illustrates how the latent energies of the Atlantic matrix can be leveraged to produce a secondary set of transformations that conglomerate middle-class elements into a more cohesive bourgeoisie, these effects had begun playing out for the generation of men who were coming

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of age as the formations that Franklin proposes are rapidly materializing thanks their financing by re-export wealth. In chapters 5 and 6 of this book, I will look at Brown’s response to these conditions and the problem of bourgeois male establishment in his long fictions, Wieland; or, the Transformation (1798), Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist (written 1798, published 1800), and Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 (1799 –1800). Even though Brown belongs to the social factions that are busy constructing these new public institutions, his tales ought to be read as critiques of the social violence immanent in Franklin’s model of the institutionality, as Brown sees this new social phenomenon as laden with power designs and willing to enact actual violence on subaltern groups when their members seek the equality that these public institutions advertise as available to all. Although Brown’s fictions have become touchstones for literary and historical considerations of the 1790s, they often prove difficult for contemporary readers to approach. To properly understand Brown’s fiction, one must situate them within the period’s intellectual context and within Brown’s own statements about how literature can be used as a device of mass political education. His justification for using “gothic” themes of murder, insanity, and plagues alongside an often intrusive, forensic narrative voice is the desire for a Brecht-like device, which simultaneously engages the reader’s passions and puts a brake on these emotions so that the reader can rationally contemplate what is the proper course of action. If sentimental narratives were designed to ensure the bourgeoisie’s sensibilitarian flow of emotion, Brown’s rational gothic means to draw attention to and dissect the unexamined nature of this social logic by reversing its course. Brown is not content, though, simply to criticize Franklin from the vantage point of bourgeois dissident claims associated with William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Thomas Paine. He also challenges these writers’ inability to conceptualize progressive politics as requiring the construction of crossclass alliances and the effects of their distrust of all social institutions as a result of their rejection of corrupt regal and aristocratic ones. A consensus reading of Wieland and Carwin sees them as combining a suspicion about language’s inability to maintain stable meanings and a nationalist anxiety about foreigners, but such readings mistake these narratives’ dual critique of Franklin and Godwin and Wollstonecraft. By arguing that social violence comes from within domestic society, not outside of its borders, Brown suggests that the period’s progressive ideals need to be institutionalized, lest they collapse before the onslaught of nascent economic and political

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conservatism. For by the start of the new century, conservative factors were also revising the older geocultural elements by transcoding sensibility and sentiment in order to celebrate the emerging nineteenth-century ideals of marketplace individualism and competition. As a self-aware surgery into the limits of fiction within this process, Arthur Mervyn takes up from where Wieland left off: the problem of progressive counterinstitutionality. Recognizing the key place of Atlantic slavery within the period, Brown uses Arthur Mervyn to tell a tale about the process of de-ideologizing racial privilege (“whiteness”) as the means of forming an alternative society. Yet in contemplating what this gesture entails, Brown’s fiction is simultaneously defensive and insubordinate as he fears that an unreconstructed fictional form is incapable of progressive purpose given the ongoing ideological contestation of that form, unless narrative refashions its own mode of signification to respond to insurgent liberalism. Despite Arthur Mervyn’s attempt to inaugurate such a method, Brown’s diagnosis about the novel-form was correct. Shortly after 1800 a reconfigured bourgeoisie was able to block fiction’s progressive agendas and then leave the novel-form to represent itself in other modes, for example, journalistic social science discourses, to adjust to the unfolding nineteenth-century long wave. But that tale is beyond my purview here.

Culture and Commerce: Interlude Writing in 1856, Freeman Hunt laments a constitutive absence in cultural history: “We have lives of the Poets and the Painters; lives of Heroes, Philosophers, and Statesmen; lives of Chief-Justices and Chancellors . . . yet no one has hitherto written the Lives of the Merchants . . . and the history of trade if thoroughly investigated, would throw much light upon the pages of history.”65 As the New York editor of the Merchants’ Magazine, Hunt makes increasingly expansive claims for business history’s relevance to cultural studies. First, the American scholar must acknowledge the fundamental eccentricity of culture, which is brought to native shores by the grasping mediation of trading capitalists. International commerce provides both the objects and material facilities for domestic academic research: “By extending its thousand

65. Freeman Hunt, Lives of American Merchants, vol. 1 (New York: Office of Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine, 1856), iii.

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hands to every region of the earth, [mercantile endeavor] has collected whatever is curious in science, or desirable in art. That the wisdom of ages may lie within [the scholar’s] easy reach, the ship girdles the globe, and every cranny of its surface is ransacked, to supply his wants, and anticipate his wishes . . . in the halls of colleges hang the portraits of benefactors, who trafficked in the busy world that they might endow professorships, fill the shelves of libraries, and place at the command of the student whatever is recorded of the genius, intelligence, and industry of man.”66 The merchant’s donations do more than simply sanitize exploitative adventures and what might otherwise be considered a depraved profession; the businessman is an energetic partner in human enlightenment through the construction of “good fellowship between all occupations,” a convivial alliance between fractions of American elites. Business provides not only the artifacts and architecture of culture, but also the conditions for its historical emergence. Echoing eighteenth-century claims about the refining effects of le doux commerce, Hunt insists on a narrative of trade that illustrates its connection with civilization, and the influence it has had on society. It doubtless originated in the first wants of man, which he was unable to gratify without recourse to others. Wherever distinct property became acknowledged, trade was established, and an interchange of articles effected, from abundance that exceeded necessity. The equivalent was in kind, and was a simple consideration, in an operation which looked only for convenience, and the supply of an immediate want. Commerce, as a distinct profession, could not have existed until a degree of luxury had been attained; and the more adventurous sought in other lands what could not be found at home. Intercourse between different countries was thus commenced, and improvement and refinement progressed as it augmented. In availing themselves of whatever made life more desirable, men imperceptibly adopted customs which assimilated them in manners, and the merchant as he united nations, became an instrument in advancing their condition. The battle-field was no place for his operations, and from the earliest time to the present day, his wishes, feelings, and interests, have made him a friend and advocate of peace.67

66. Ibid., ix. 67. Ibid., xi.

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To elaborate the terms of Hunt’s analysis, he assumes an axiomatic transitivity between the rise of consumer democracy, the diffusion of publicly enacted civil society, and the historical advent of the bourgeoisie and their capitalist world trade. Modern trade begins when rudimentary portable property ownership allows objects to be exchanged between exogamous parties as a means of fulfilling each other’s immediate basic needs (“actual necessities”). The range of commerce expands as consumers desire luxury goods that exceed any locally satisfied basic utility (“artificial requirements”). Rather than condemning these superfluities as the outward manifestation of a degenerate people’s or deficient personality’s lack of self-regulation, Hunt sees the taste for precocities as a tutelary social good. The desire for luxury goods propels the rise of long-distance commerce “as a distinct profession” or particular bourgeois-class subjectivity that defines a new mode of social intercourse. Even while foreign trade seeks out geographical differences of climate, demography, and divisions of labor for commercial advantage, it also “unites distant branches of the human family, cultivates the relation between them, encourages an interest in each other, and promotes that brotherly feeling which is the strongest guaranty of permanent friendship. People differing in creed, in language, in dress, in customs, are brought into contact, to find how much there is universal to them all, and to improve their condition by supplying the wants of one from the abundance of the other. The friendly intercourse created by commerce is slowly but surely revolutionizing the earth.”68 The thirst for goods helps replace aristocratic society based on military prowess with a commercial society that rests on the merchant bringing commodities, rather than blood trophies, back from his quest. Commerce is thus performative. Its trust in abstract mechanisms of credit simultaneously displays and enacts a civilizing process that elevates (Western) humanity above its prior feudal Neanderthalism. Because the foreign marketplace’s behavioral requirements operate as the primary site of refinement, civilization is by definition cosmopolitanism as the merchant’s overseas experience is then transported home for reenactment as training for the next round of longdistance trade. This refining process circulates locally and its domestic repetition creates predictable actions that ultimately become congealed in the material institutions of learning, which objectify the process of acculturation as they enshrine transported artifacts as immediate material signifiers of a 68. Ibid., xl.

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spatially elongated chain of exchanges. Because the extramural encounters of the commercial bourgeoisie catalyze a social revolution that transforms home relations from the brutality of the nativist gentry to the compassionate contemplation of the businessman of feeling, Hunt sees the origin of culture as fundamentally situated in the dynamic flows of international traffic, not in the emanations of an organic nationalist spirit or an exceptional self. Listening to Hunt, it is hard not to recall similar descriptive arguments by his contemporary editor and fellow New York–published journalist Karl Marx. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. . . . In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arise a world literature. The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization.69 Unlike Hunt’s belief in modern political economy as a socially harmonizing system and equalizing mechanism of human amelioration through the composure of consumption, Marx sees it as relentlessly expanding through class antagonism and deranged by “the beautiful trinity of capitalist production: over-production, over-population and over-consumption.”70 Rather than the commercial world-system bringing its house into order, Marx

69. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 6 –7. 70. Marx, Capital, 787.

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argues that its intrinsic predicates necessarily create crises of social upheaval and disruptive transformation. All is not sweetness and light for Hunt’s subterranean agenda is to remove the atavistic residue of prebourgeois formations. His specific target is not really the squirearchy residue of European aristocracy, but their American analogs, an ingrown and necrotic New England cultural and academic elite that Hunt feels is unable to appreciate and lyricize the modernity of contemporary, mid-Atlantic urban capitalism and its advancement of a more heterogeneous, and often foreign-born, set of middle-class interests. Attempting to dislodge the iconic status of New England as a site of religious and intellectual autonomy, he claims that the tale of global trade, rather than founding father mythologies or a transcendentalized history of ideas, is the urtext of American history writ large. But if commerce forms so large a chapter in the history of the world, what would the history of America be if commerce and men of commerce were left out? Trade discovered America in the vessels of adventures, seeking new channels to the old marts of India; trade planted the American colonies, and made them flourish, even in New England, say what we please about Plymouth Rock; our colonial growth was the growth of trade—revolution and independence were the results of measures of trade and commercial legislation, although they undoubtedly involved the first principles of free government: the history of the country, its politics and policy, has ever since turned chiefly upon questions of trade and finance, sailors’ rights, protection, banks, and cotton.71 What follows is an attempt to make good on Hunt’s encouragement, though not exactly with his equanimity, that no useful hermeneutics about the production of cultural notations, performances, and artifacts can exist without immersing itself within the terms of a world market based on the globalizing traffic of capitalist drives, the dynamics of which cannot be understood as limited to the parameters of a particular nation-state, and its cycles of expansion and crisis-driven depression.

71. Hunt, Lives of American Merchants, iv.

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A Seafaring man made his appearance— He was surrounded by a multitude of persons, who persecuted him with interrogatories. This person was a captain of a ship in the negro trade. From the conversation which passed between the captain and those who surrounded him, I discovered that the cruelties, incidental to the slave trade, were not confined to the unhappy negroes, but affected the instruments who carried it on. The captain before me had gone out mate—the crew had been thirty— of whom only three returned. He had a long scroll in his hand. It was a list of the original crew. “Where is my daddy?” asked an infant—“Dead.” “My husband?” inquired a matron—“Dead.” “My brother?” interrogated a girl—“Dead.” In this manner he ran through the list. One had died of fever—another had been murdered on shore—several had been killed by slaves who had mutinied. When the friends of the deceased had retired, the captain gave his employers an account of his voyage. Three ships had gone out together. They had each taken in their quantity of slaves, when a hard gale, drove two of them on shore. One was boarded by the negroes and the crew massacreed [sic]. On board the other, a similar attempt had been made. But the whites having got command of the small arms, fired into the hold, and made dreadful slaughter. Thus circumstanced, one of the negroes who had discovered where the powder lay, rushed into the room, set fire to a powder barrel, and blew the vessel to pieces. The captain ran over these occurrences of horror with a philosophic calmness: but it was not so with his employers: they frequently interrupted his detail with imprecations against the damned blacks. And why is this cruelty practised? That we may have sugar to sweeten tea, that debilitates us— Rum to make punch, to intoxicate us— And indigo, to dye our clothes. In short, thousands are made wretched—nations are dragged into slavery— to supply the luxuries of their fellow creatures? Camilla, “Negro Trade--a Fragment,” New-York Magazine, April 1797

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the geoculture of the anglo-french eighteenth-century world-system

A Blueprint of the Anglo-French Eighteenth-Century World-System The intrinsic, cyclical tensions for competitive advantage within the capitalist world-system propel phase transformations, where each long wave has its own distinctive geocultural features within the larger predicates of historical capitalism. Marx characterized the eighteenth century by its supersession of small workshops with the conglomeration of formerly isolated workers in a single space of production, the manufactory, where economies of scale then allowed for the division of labor into specialized tasks.1 The eighteenth century’s geoculture, likewise, involves the dual process of expanding the social and geographic domain of trade, consumption, and membership of the bourgeoisie, while increasing social disintegration through the production of modern-looking class and status identity differences (racial, gender, sexual). As noted above, this geoculture is patterned by four intertwining elements: sensibility, as a medium of behavioral distinction that helps to establish an expanded moral community necessary for enlarging the realm of capital’s circulation by reducing the risk of lending and trading among strangers; a sensational consumption of mass-market, processed commodities, such as the superprofitable, parastaples of sugar, caffeinated beverages like coffee and tea, and alcoholic goods like rum, Madeira wine, and gin; Atlantic slavery as the economic mode of labor exploitation on which the production of sensational goods depends; and sentiment as an affect congealed in the visual, aural, and literary artifacts that belatedly arose as a device for regulating the geocultural field by attempting to contain the tensions of competition that would otherwise make it incoherent. For the purposes of argument, these elements will be considered in isolation, but in actual practice they converge to form a mutually enabling geoculture. 1. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 439 –91.

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Sensibility’s Bourgeois (Civil) Society Most historical and contemporary accounts of sensibility begin by attempting to define and delimit what the term, and its cognates of sympathy, benevolence, sociability, and fellow-feeling, encompasses and resists.2 A broad formulation of sensibility might consider it as involving claims for the subject’s spontaneous, extrarational mimetic response to natural or sensual phenomena and the sight or imagination of a body in distress, particularly those of the socially disempowered (women, elderly, children, servants and the poor) or the parahuman (animals and botanical and geological formations). Recounting the tremendous and often promiscuous surge of contemporaneous reflection on the theme in the eighteenth century, Markman Ellis notes that debates on sensibility “left definitions imprecise and flexible” and produced what he sees as “a philosophical nightmare of muddled ideas, weak logic, and bad writing.”3 For Ellis, the proof of this incoherence is seen with the wide-ranging fields of knowledge that sensibilitarian claims operated within, like aesthetics, science, physiology, and political economy.4 A host of recent studies on sensibility has rigorously documented sensibilitarian claims within these categories in a renewed effort to name its object with greater accuracy, but the contemporary classificatory impulse often falls short of its mark. The initiative of defining sensibility will be interminable not because we need to excavate ever more archival material or require a more comprehensive bibliographic redaction of sensibility’s period usage, but that the very effort to demarcate sensibility’s outlines elides how its profuse claims were meant to bind together a group of social

2. G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986); John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); June Howard, “What Is Sentimentality,” American Literary History 11, no. 1 (1999): 63– 81; Julia A Stern, The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Elizabeth Barnes, States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Bruce Burgett, Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Michael Bell, Sentimentalism, Ethics, and the Culture of Feeling (New York: Palgrave, 2000); and Lori Morish, Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). 3. Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 5, 7. 4. Ibid., 8.

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interests into the collective subjectivity of a “middle class.” Sensibility is not a thing but the discursive process of legitimizing civil (bourgeois) society as a third estate different from the old regime in ways other than those provided by strictly political forms and enactments. Sensibility involves a diffuse matrix of sociocultural claims and set of characteristics, to use Shaftesbury’s term, that fuse class and public/private enactments the nascent bourgeoisie use to distinguish themselves from the regal court, aristocratic gentry, and religious authorities as a politically safer tactic than direct, violent confrontation, which middling class factions had already tried and failed in the seventeenth century; to promulgate an embodied set of sociocultural norms and expectations that would provide parainstitutional credit security for commercial transactions in lieu of an international and domestic state apparatus ensuring civil and contract law; to consolidate a corporate class by conglomerating various social groups into a more expansive, yet simultaneously more coherent, bourgeois collectivity; to establish a transitional category between early modern modes of personal power, typified by the known structure of social estates and the church’s and state’s deployment of auratic and charismatic power, and modern modes of impersonal power, represented by corporate bureaucracy and the price-setting marketplace of anonymous buyers and sellers; and to valorize themselves as socially superior to the plebeian strata, who are also opposing the structure of the old regime. The slippery expansiveness of sensibility’s usage and its seepage into multiple discourses is not a weakness, but its strength. The proliferation of sensibilitarian claims indicates a determined project by its agents to explore all the possibilities by which a social revolution can occur in the absence or, more accurately, in preparation of a political one. If sensibilitarian claims appear intellectually promiscuous, it is not because their proponents were mentally confused or incapable of maintaining control over their prose, but because they deployed a set of strategic core principles in multiple discourses as a means of undermining the tributary mode of feudal and absolutist society by a thousand soft blows and presenting bourgeois organization as commonsensical and eternal. Before the arrival of a thoroughly bourgeois state, a bourgeois civil society must be forged. Sensibility is the name we ought to give to the building block for civil society as the prerequisite and precursor for the onset of the modern liberal nation-state. Throughout the postfeudal period, the groups associated with capitalist procedures increasingly gained economic influence but lacked the governmental

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power and administrative organization to assume political control and its legitimate monopoly on violence, not least since many belonged to “foreign” ethnic groups (Jews, Armenians) or faith nonconformists (Huguenots, Dissenters, Quakers) that could not hope to solicit and maintain authority outside their minoritarized realms. These groups could also not afford the military instruments of coercion necessary to protect capitalist-looking relations of property, trade, technology, and communication. Instead the rise of the absolutist state, anchored on the extralegal focal point of the monarch, typifies the submarine alliance of the court, as administered by urbanized, minor courtiers and mercantile and usurious protocapitalists against the depredations of the provincial aristocratic seigneurs and warlords. Hobbes’s Leviathan, with its justification for repressive absolutism, lest plebeian rebellion or aristocratic civil war rend the realm asunder, typifies the nascent bourgeoisie’s historic preference at that moment for a strong coercive state, which will protect commercial agents engaged in long-distance trade, legislative domestic deruralization of small farmers for the interests of speculative agriculture, and act as a ready borrower of credit for its military adventures. The protobourgeoisie willingly subordinated themselves to the absolutist state because it freed the nascent commercial interests from having to risk the financial and social costs of revolutionizing their society’s existing mode of social regulation or for vulnerable middle-class agents being seen as the system’s prime catalyst of change. Absolutism is the means by which the middle classes externalize the political and economic costs of their speculations by shifting them onto the shoulders of the regal state.5 The English Civil War marks an initial attempt by groups of merchants to abandon this historic compromise and aggressively confront the court.6 The revolutionary gambit of direct attack fails because the bourgeoisie were unable to consolidate a stable institutional foundation that could maintain and extend their rule after an initial period of success. In the aftermath of the Restoration, sets of bourgeoisie and lower aristocratic discontents from the current order began to reflect strategically on the causes of their defeat and consider different tactics that would enable a renewed effort to overtake and dismantle the regal, religious, and aristocratic obstacles to bourgeois insurgence. In the largest sense, the historic realization of the 5. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1974). 6. Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

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middle classes in the wake of their aborted coup d’état was that a social and cultural revolution must precede a political one, since without the former the achievements of the latter will be inconclusive, momentary, and easily susceptible to counterattack. Consequently, a spectrum of disenfranchised lower gentry and upwardly mobile merchants, financiers, and artisans converged in the last third of the seventeenth century to confront the standing order through the less physically dangerous means of reformulating the elite’s codifications of lineage, status, property possession, and supernatural aura in order to contest the sociocultural legitimacy of the ancien regime. By choosing a nominally licit means of indirect insubordination, their goal was to consolidate broader congeries of interests than were involved with the civil war and Commonwealth so as to form a new social formation that would be comprehensive enough to maintain itself until, and then after, the next direct violent confrontation with the church and regal state in the last third of the revolutionary eighteenth century. Here the main “event” was the defection of a tier of gentry elites who had failed to benefit from the Restoration and were increasingly led by their financial emergencies to throw their lot in with previously objectionable lower-caste social groups, like merchants. In the interim between the 1660s and 1790s the groups that would condense to become the bourgeoisie raised a multipronged effort to scramble the standing order’s legitimacy by recoding the habitus that Restoration status elites relied on to reestablish the control they had momentarily lost during the Commonwealth. This cognitive restructuring by the embryonic bourgeoisie involves a process of devaluing the sovereign and his associates’ corporeality, historicity, and status aura in order to reassign them, in slightly different forms, as the rightful property of the bourgeoisie. Among the more-well-discussed features of this internal reconfiguration and passive revolution are “Enlightenment” desacralization and rationalization; construction of separate public and private spheres as realms beyond absolutist oversight; and a prolonged invention of “Rome,” where a host of revisionary historical initiatives looked to package prefeudal Roman history, juridicality, governmentality, and mores into a historical imaginary. This justificatory teleological fantasy would implicate the postfeudal regimes as aberrant, rather than normative, in the trajectory of Western development, thus providing an alibi for the middle classes taking up, albeit now in a bourgeois form, from where this constructed past moment had left off before its interruption with the rise of feudalism and absolutism.

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Although there is not a clear prime mover in these rhetorical and archaeological endeavors, the aspect that I want to highlight initially is the role of sensibility as an argument for bourgeois (civil) society’s replacement of the court. Sensibility promotes the idea of civility—sociable manners and disinterested benevolence as a justification for authority that defines the ideal civil subject by what he does rather than what he was born into, by his “productive” processes of affective response rather than immanent essences expressed by spectacular consumption. Consequently, sensibilitarian claims seek to replace the premodern codes of corporeality and (super)natural shock and awe with ones that emphasize the embodiment of le doux commerce, the mutually satisfying realm of polite trade. Even when the English bourgeoisie are able to replace the Stuarts by purchasing from their Dutch class colleagues the kind of kingly regime they want, with the “Glorious Revolution” followed by William and Mary’s 1689 ascension, they continue to invoke sensibilitarian claims either because they do not consider themselves to be strong enough to defeat an entire set of entrenched social conditions or because they remain unconvinced about the need to invest the cultural, social, and political capital into building explicitly bourgeois-defined institutions at this historical point when other more pressing bourgeois agendas, like expanding the realm of global trade, need safeguarding. The nascent middle class continues their use of sensibilitarian claims to manage a host of other social dislocations and transformations in an indirect, soft manner. Bourgeois bellicosity would wait until a later nineteenth-century phase after the middle class had firmly established its dominance and forced regal, aristocratic, and older theological interests into a position of residual importance and quasi-obsolescence. Until this threshold arrives, sensibility becomes the process through which the sociocultural predicates of blood, soil, and status honor that underline ancien regime legitimacy could be contested and replaced. While the nobility might have good blood, the rising social forces advertised themselves as having alternative, and implicitly more normative, qualities of merit with good feelings: the audience-oriented sympathetic emotions transmitted through corporeal reflexes that respond to their environment. The emphasis on manners, rather than manorial seignuership, makes it possible for gentry codes to be reshaped and determined as belonging to a bourgeois “gentleman,” as a term now defined through a man of feeling’s gentle sensibility and outward displays of behavior. If the aristocracy hoarded status through its proclamation of prestige by intrinsic blood lineage, the

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alliance of embourgeoisified minor nobility and commercial factors denied the significance of blood-based corporeality by arguing for a new bodily form that was claimed as being natural and radically nonsocialized, as an anatomy preceding the historical onset of the aristocratic one, and more civilized than that of a provincialized warrior caste. The Shaftesburian claim for an invisible characteristic, a sixth “moral” sense, that spontaneously allows the subject to recognize and enact the difference between good and evil, virtue and vice, suggest that an inbred elite’s learned honor codes are unnatural supplements to a morality that ought to be automatic. In the emotional realm, the patriarch’s right to determine the matrimonial arrangements of his descent group was contested through claims for affective individualism, where bourgeois coupling will be arranged through an automatic and self-evident elective affinity of companionate love rather than a premeditated concern for preserving territorial claims and dampening clan disputes.7 The move toward a corporeality defined by sensibility also works to confront the property rights of landed aristocracy. Because the bourgeoisie were anxious to establish agrarian capitalism by enclosure’s accumulation through dispossession of subsistence farmers, commercial interests want land to be placed on the price-setting market as a commodity exchangeable between buyer and seller, rather than transferred through blood descent. To help legitimize the snapping of the rentier less lord’s “eternal” link to the estate, the claims of associationist environmentalism, the sympathetic appreciation of nature, suggest that the new man of sensible tastes legitimately “possesses” the landscape through aesthetic response in ways that the cold, unfeeling aristocrat lacks. Lockean associationism argues that the mind is a tabula rasa formed by its environmental impression, and if this is the case, then the gentry’s estate should be open to all. For if the mind is formed by contact with the wider world, there is no need for obeisance before an isolated gentry that can barely afford to maintain their property in a visually sympathetic manner. After evacuating the aristocratic right to terrific power, sensibilitarian claims do likewise with the theological elite’s monopoly on divinity and the apprehension of the supernatural. The new religion of feeling challenges the theocratic oversight of experience as it considers heartfelt exclamations rather than doctrinal codices as proof of faith’s authenticity. Although the

7. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500 –1800 (London: Penguin, 1990).

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Great Awakening may initially seem in opposition to the Enlightenment, they both share a refusal of the gentry’s and the priesthood’s privileged access to modes of cosmological knowledge. Beyond contesting the first and second estates’ monopoly over the nexus of the body, household, land, and awe, sensibility would also cast doubt on the history of absolutist legitimacy. Coextensive with promotion of the sociable body is the production of invented histories about inalienable rights situated in a Rousseauian precivilized idyll, a republican imaginary about pre-empire Rome, and the forest of Saxon freedoms before the feudal and absolutist state. The claims of civic humanism, republican historiography, and primal naturalism all insist that history need not have been detoured through regal or aristocratic governmentality. If these revisionary historiographies depend an analytic code of moralized features (virtue/vice, masculinity/effeminacy, honor/decadence), their point was to emphasize the circulation of sensibility as the foundational norm for political endeavor.

The Agglomeration of the “Bourgeoisie” and the Sensibilitarian Expansion of the Marketplace Sensibilitarian claims provided a comprehensive kit for the sociocultural delegitimization of both absolutist and aristocratic status-authority that was as revolutionizing as the Reformation’s assault on early modern theological prerogatives. The agents of sensibility’s transformations, though, went beyond the negative purpose of disestablishing the old regime; they also helped produce a bourgeois civil society that would be more expansive than the existing, relatively discrete clusters of merchant capitalist and foreigner groups associated with trade. Before the late eighteenth century’s economic revolution in production processes and the political revolution in nation-states, the phase saw a revolution of “civil society” that established a collective agent, the “middle class,” as greater than the previously isolated sets of “middling” factions and merchant capitalists. By generating corporate solidarity through the sodality of fellow-feeling, sensibility helped conglomerate social factions into a bourgeois society as a mechanism for enlarging middle-class credit and trade relations. The historic lesson that the small merchant groups learned from the debacle of the English Civil War was that their own ranks and the realm of available credit were too small a foundation from which to leverage social

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transformation. In order to overcome the absence of a larger corporate collectivity, middle-class interests had to evolve strategies of agglomeration that would not only expand the realm of possible exchange partners for a wider price-setting marketplace, but also cement a shared culture of marketplace self-regulation and group security, lest middle-class interests tear themselves apart before consolidating political authority. Sensibility provides the medium through which an expanded cohort of the bourgeoisie could train themselves to take the risk of trusting each other within the flows of fictional capital— credit and stock speculation — that are the prerequisites for an enlarged price-setting marketplace. At first glance, the simultaneous growth of Enlightenment rationality and sensibilitarian humanism, Descartes and Voltaire, on one hand, and Rousseau and Shaftesbury, on the other, amidst an insurgent commercial society seems paradoxical. Critiques of capitalism’s development, such as Lukács on reification, Weber on rationalization, and Adorno and Horkheimer on instrumental reason, have rightly illustrated the links between the agenda of rationality’s calculus and the capitalist need to calibrate human endeavor into quantifiable and predictable circuits of value. Less recognized is the crucial role that sensibilitarian declarations of sympathy and open displays of emotion play in the historical normalization of capitalist practice. For as important as “hard rationality” is to commercial society through its logic of quantification, sensibility’s “soft rationality” creates familiar behavioral templates that give market agents a sense of security by telegraphing, through a set of affective semaphorics, the assumed motivations with whom they exchange. “Feeling” rightly is as important as “calculating” to the rise of capitalism because the former provides an informal insurance and encouragement to risk capital necessary for the market’s initial expansion in ways that the latter could not. Rationality’s insistence on transparency could undermine the absolutist state’s institutional control of markets, but it could not establish an alternative, parainstitutional regulatory device during the eighteenth century, which the middle classes so desperately needed. The difference between an institution and a parainstitution is that an institution has named agents who administer routinized social acts, often within a paid-for, enclosed architecture that houses the enactment of conventional beliefs and practices. A parainstitution is modernized customary behavior; it is decentralized, unauthorized, and highly mutable because it lacks a stable mechanism for self-regulation. Whereas nineteenth-century middle-class society would come to rely on institutional power, for much of the eighteenth, such instruments were not

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necessarily desirable, given that the primary examples of institutionality, the church and court, were negatively perceived. Instead the nascent bourgeoisie championed the idea of parainstitutionality, like the marketplace’s invisible hand or sympathy’s circulation of affect, as the automatic and disinterested structures of postfeudal society. In this view, a parainstitution structures social interaction without having the maintenance costs of an institution. Hence while it is a modern commonplace to position sensibility, and its cognates of benevolence, fellow-feeling, and conversational sociability, as the private retreat from or therapeutic compensation for the cold, impersonal, disembodied sphere of the public marketplace, the Scottish School of eighteenth-century moral philosophers, like Adam Smith, David Hume, Francis Hutcheson, and Adam Ferguson, who articulate and amplify the emerging bourgeois common sense, did not see sensibility in opposition to or in conflict with the commercial marketplace. Sensibility was instead the parainstitutional means of using emotional bonds as the ligature for a durable price-setting market. As a metonym for sensibilitarian formations, the historical transformations of the bonds regarding male friendship neatly illustrate how the middle classes deployed affective emulation as an extrajuridical form of security to ensure the reproduction of a market-driven exchange society. Benjamin Nelson argues that ancient and medieval codifications of friendship involved particularist, nonaffective connections of blood kinship and political alliances that required a physical obligation to stand in surety for a friend’s debts or dishonor. This nonegalitarian notion of reciprocal and redistributionary friendship was tied to Deuteronomic (and pagan) prohibitions against usury among clansmen, alongside a lack of contractual respect for the property and life of one’s enemies, who were anyone outside of religious and status affinity networks.8 Older notions of friendship reinforced constraints on the price-setting marketplace because it strengthened the preexisting separation of subjects by denomination, ethnic, and lineage status divisions. Because “capitalism could not mature under such conditions [since] it required a society where uniform rules were observed wherever the game was played,” the protobourgeoisie needed an affective-behavioral bridge that encouraged previously discrete groups of merchants to break out from their enclosed ghettos and trade, at home and abroad, with other outward-

8. Benjamin Nelson, The Idea of Usury: From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), xix–xxv.

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looking merchants. To address this need, market-oriented groups replaced the older “tribal” social identities, which limited the expansion of commerce, with a more anodyne, but inclusive, affect of friendly willingness to trust outsiders. The “intensity of [friendship’s] moral bond” was scaled down, partially through rhetoric of Christian generality, in order to make it more widely available as a sociological norm.9 Friendship’s dilution allows for its dilation beyond kinship and clientage boundaries and denominational insularity, so that a friend could be chosen spontaneously at the moment of visual encounter, conveniently located in the marketplace. To prevent wild, Hobbesian antagonism arising after early modern social regulations and ethical codes were shunted aside, eighteenth-century moral philosophers also promoted a secularized version of sympathy, as a companion to friendship, as a regulatory mechanism that would safeguard both players from ruthless competition or fraud. Because sympathy was said to result spontaneously from every body’s noncalculated, that is to say, disinterested, involuntary somatic reflex, friendship’s exchange of emotive affinity rehearses a normative model for the free-market ideal of a purchaser and seller satisfying each other’s needs through the surety of mutually accepted responsibilities and polite desire to do no harm or gain brutal advantage over those with whom you exchange commodities. Friendship not only cautions against deception and cheating as it looks to the next round of exchange with the original partners, but it also encourages enlarging the number of market participants by informally insuring that the friend of a friend can also be trusted. Commercial friendship’s tutelage of civil decorum harnesses potentially disruptive lawlessness by binding passion to a teleology of civilization. To fully understand sensibility’s perceived market, Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) usefully assimilates the period’s prevalent notions, especially as Smith lacks forward thinking about the evolving industrialized political economy and shirks from celebrating the competitive individualism that a later, nineteenth-century phase of capitalism would enshrine. Smith characterizes sympathy as the imaginary reception and response to another’s discomfort. While Smith insists that sensibility indicates the presence of civility, he does not consider the subject’s sensible reaction to others in distress as undifferentiated empathy, since it primarily reinforces the viewer’s awareness of his self-interest: “Though our brother is upon

9. Allan Silver, “Friendship in Commercial Society: Eighteenth-Century Social Theory and Modern Sociology,” American Journal of Sociology 95, no. 6 (1990): 1474–1504.

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the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. . . . It is the impressions of our own sense only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy. By imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them.”10 In the first instance, Smith does not characterize sympathy as a mechanism for politicizing worldly distress and removing the differences of rank between the viewer and the subject of his optics. Smith postulates sympathy as preconditioned by an amnesia that leaves the viewer ignorant about the history of events leading to the subject’s torture, alienated from any shared subjectivity (“no immediate experience”), and untroubled by any concern for liberating the man from his suffering. Smith is not proposing a model of intersubjectivity here, since the sufferer never expresses his own experience but exists only to supply representational equivalents that enable the viewer to evaluate pain’s worth. This valuation turns sensibility into the medium for establishing an equivalent form that enables exchange, much as the money-form creates a device for establishing equivalences between otherwise incommensurable commodities. Feeling’s procedural determination of value equivalents as a feature of the self-regulating market helps explain why Smith later defines humanness as the act of exchanging.11 While the sensibilitarian gaze is selfish, it should not be mistaken as a sign of the observer’s personal autonomy or aspect of the self ’s authentic interiority. Smith divides the sensible viewer into two parts to emphasize that sympathetic judgments are socially conditioned. Insisting that standards of taste regarding “personal beauty and deformity” are not transcendental but drawn from public opinion, Smith claims that all individuals are anxious about their relative standing in the optics of social approbation. “We examine our persons limb by limb, and by placing ourselves before a looking-glass . . . endeavor, as much as possible, to view ourselves at the distance and with the eyes of other people. . . . We suppose ourselves the spectators of our 10. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1984), 9. 11. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 17.

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own behavior, and endeavor to imagine what effect it would, in this light, produce upon us.”12 By redirecting our gaze away from the disarticulation of the person on the rack to observe our own extremities through the eyes of an auto-projected imagined spectator, a virtualizing circuit of transfers occurs as the initial sufferer’s production of pain is removed from the equation so that the viewer can fantasmically offer the exchange of his own representation as the primary object of consideration by an imagined third party who is at once different from and like the viewer. By shifting the focus of the encounter away from the producer of traumatic experience toward the encounter of two consumers, Smith sets up, before Marx, a model of how the sweat of a plebeian’s body gets alienated from that body so that it can be floated through a circuit of redistributions. This prototheory of exploitation explains the creation of an affective aura emerging from the sphere of pain’s production to a sphere of exchange in ways prescient of Marx’s description of the commodity fetish. Yet Smith’s concern here is less to critique this process than to harness it for a collective bourgeois consciousness by explaining how the reception of this aura incorporates the sensible viewer within an assumed cohort of other middle-class subjects, even while the plebeian’s body remains writhing in contortions. For Smith, this circulation of affective markers by a moral community’s shared outlook telegraphs his model of the market, especially as it highlights bourgeois fellow-feeling, rather than competition, as the parainstitutional invisible hand that guides the marketplace as sensibility’s reflexivity generates group cohesion through shared opinion. When I endeavor to examine my own conduct, when I endeavor to pass sentence upon it, and either to approve or condemn it, it is evident that, in all such cases, I divide myself, as it were, into two persons; and that I, the examiner and judge, represent a different character from that other I, the person whose conduct is examined into and judged of. The first is the spectator, whose sentiments with regard to my own conduct I endeavor to enter into, by placing myself in his situation, and by considering how it would appear to me, when seen from that particular point of view. The second is the agent, the person whom I properly call myself, and whose conduct, under the character of the spectator, I was endeavoring to 12. Smith, Moral Sentiments, 111–12.

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from some opinion. The first is the judge; the second is the person judged of. But that the judge should, in every respect, be the same as the person judged of, is as impossible, as that the cause should, in every respect, be the same with the effect.13 By first dividing the spectator into the two roles of spectator and judge of that spectator and then admitting the impossibility of such a division, Smith looks to legitimize a virtual mediating force. By the Wealth of Nations, the problem is more clearly discussed with the problem of bourgeois selfdivision. On one hand, the bourgeois subject is both a buyer and seller, since the bourgeois agent sells one commodity in order to buy another and buys in order to sell. On the other, the subject cannot simultaneously be both buyer and seller to himself, a move suggested by necessity that traders have similar outlooks. The solution to this contradiction for Smith is the introduction of a third universal agent—the market—as a social-form that buys and sells at once everywhere yet is incorporeal and cannot be located within a particular body’s self-interest. It is this spectral third element as a parainstitutional secular divinity that the viewer internalizes through a consideration of his own actions. Although the terms of Moral Sentiments are not exactly those of the Wealth, the conceptual architecture producing these terms for these texts is nearly identical. The spectator described in the passage above is not a specific, embodied individual subject but the ghostly, intangible authority of an imagined bourgeois collective, rather than the absolutist king, and its class-ifying social opinion, a communal bourgeois norm to which the viewer refers his experience for adjudication. The performance of fellow-feeling that we have for the sufferer is thus not meant to alleviate the condition of the abject, but to give evidence of one’s sense of appropriate behavior in ways that ensures the viewer’s inclusion within the benefits and privileges of collective approbation. The juridical examination that characterizes sensibility looks to validate an ideal community that celebrates its homogeneity and cares for its own corporate agents through the exchange of sentimental comparisons and equivalences, especially outside of the traditional lines of kinship, denominational, or service obligations. Smith’s notion of sensibility as the psychic incorporation of class attitudes marks an entry point into the historical development of the idea that humans have an unconscious and 13. Ibid., 113.

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the materialist critique of the idea of the unconscious as little more than a bourgeois invention, since the collective opinion that transcends traditional distinctions should not be mistaken as a totally inclusive operation. Smith intends his civil society to be a thoroughly bourgeois one, as it does not include the lower classes, which are positioned as the potential objects of sympathy but never as agents thereof. “The amiable virtue of humanity” is not a trait that can be held by all, since it “requires, surely a sensibility, much beyond what is possessed by the rude vulgar of mankind. The great and exalted virtue of magnanimity undoubtedly demands much more than that degree of self-command, which the weakest of mortals is capable of exerting. As in the common degree of intellectual qualities, there is no abilities; so in the common degree of the moral, there is no virtue. Virtue is excellence, something uncommonly great and beautiful, which rises above what is vulgar and ordinary.”14 By conflating aesthetic, moral, and social terms, Smith sees the man in the spectator’s breast as necessarily a class colleague, and the real emotion that the spectator experiences on seeing the body in pain is not a shared sense of intersubjective connection but the anxiety that the viewer might slip from the safety of bourgeois identity. “The mere want of fortune, mere poverty, excites little compassion. Its complaints are too apt to be the objects of contempt than of fellow-feeling. We despise a beggar; and, though his importunities may extort an alms from us, he is scarce ever the object of any serious commiseration. The fall from riches to poverty, as it commonly occasions the most real distress to the sufferer, so it seldom fails to excite the most sincere commiseration of the spectator.”15 By installing of a shared sense of fear of failure, sensibilitarian claims attempt to link commercial groups together by training them to sympathize with the possibility of each other’s possible bankruptcy so that they do not push exchange into spirals of destructive competition. Because he dogmatically refuses to consider the possibility of intrinsic contradictions within the market’s logic, Smith must insist that parainstitutional sympathy can prevent merchants from tearing the fabric of commerce apart. By encouraging the members of its moral community to trust and protect one another, sentimental claims also help enlarge commerce as it encourages a host of smaller investors to enter a “risk society” and transfer their

14. Ibid., 25. 15. Ibid., 144.

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savings into speculative long-distance trade and other ventures.16 In the absence of a swarm of technological innovation and managerial accounting practices that calibrates in and outputs, sensibility functions as the cultural technique that tries to overcome the two bottlenecks holding back the world market’s expansion: reliable news and credit. Alfred Chandler notes that accounting techniques remained unchanged between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries because annual price fluctuations were so great that up-to-date business information was more important for survival than organized accounts.17 Merchants’ need for accurate news led them to nodes of commercial information about shipping and market prices that were also ones where a trader could secure investment and insurance credit. This need for the intangible commodity of news and credit was filled by the emergence of an institutionalized stock exchange and the only slightly geographically wider and contiguous realm of the coffeehouse world. There was often no initial difference between the two, as many stock exchanges began literally as coffeehouses, like New York’s Tontine Coffee House, or later become full-fledged insurance brokers, like Lloyd’s of London. The coffeehouses became amplifiers for the market’s expansion as magnetic zones where a mass of small capitals could be drawn into the market, since smaller investors, who did not have access rights to trade inside the Bourse, would speculate through brokers who would come to the coffeehouses throughout the day, announce the stock’s prices, and agree to transact stock purchases for a commission.18 Having accurate information about commercial events is only half the battle; gaining credit to put this information to profitable use is the other. It was the latter need that fused the elements of sensibilitarian discourse, the journalism of publicists, and the coffeehouse realm into a vital nexus. The coffeehouse world was the manufactory in which the bourgeoisie produced credibility as their initial commodity, their own behavior as a monetarizable object. If most newspapers mainly listed “ship arrivals, departures, sales, auctions, and prices . . . advertisements of merchants, giving the types, amounts, and prices of goods for sale,” the remaining text in these journals was frequently devoted to sensibilitarian commentary and narratives.19 16. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992). 17. Alfred Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977, 39. 18. Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism: 15th–18th Century. Vols. 1– 3. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2:103– 4, 107. 19. Chandler, Visible Hand, 40.

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This writing should not be mistaken as marginal filler, since it was as crucial for the development of market society as the shipping information. If commercial news advertised the presence and price of commodities, then the sensibilitarian writing ensured one reader of that journal that another would have internalized the cultural predicates of sensibility well enough to trade fairly and not seek selfish advantage. Not only was the coffeehouse world where commercial news could be found, it was also where one went, or read about, to learn and practice bourgeois confraternity through the seen performance or literary imagination of the sensibilitarian codes and performances that would help seal investment arrangements. Contemporary readers of sensibility often find its insistent outward display of emotion paradoxical. Because we are the inheritors of a later historical phase, which considers the authenticity of emotional interiority as able to be represented only after a prefatory declaration about the impossibility of bringing unique feeling into public discourse, sensibility’s often knowingly staged and rehearsed display of emotion sounds calculated and false. Likewise, sensibilitarian rhetoric often appears indistinctive and impersonal because of its repetitive nature and the boringness of its familiar slogans and redundant outbursts. Sensibility tends to the performative, emulative, and didactic because its motive was to instantiate a mode of bodily training. This dressage was socializing, and civilizing, in Elias’s sense of the term, as it sought to teach its consumers how to control their bodies within the time delays of new market information’s arrival and then to use this corporeal regulation as the outward certificate of creditworthiness, where the skill of bodily maintenance signified the one of fiscal integrity during the waiting time within a loan’s repayment.20 The work of replacing one grid of social meaning for another, a new embodied character that models modern-looking bourgeois, rather than early modern burgherish, subjectivity, requires a tremendous amount of social labor, and for this reason, sensibility must be pedagogically bored in to instill a set of behavioral familiarities, the new manners of bourgeois confraternity and sodality. Sensibility is a kind of historically new physical regimen of time management as it trains the middle class to sit peacefully with unfamiliar associates during the long pauses between the intermittent announcements of crucial 20. Robert Markley, “Sentimentality as Performance: Shaftesbury, Sterne, and the Theatrics of Virtue,” in The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York: Methuen, 1987), 210 –30. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).

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financial news. As traders had to wait passively on trading news and the completion of contractual negotiations, they had to learn how to remain in quasi-public spaces without attempting to overcome the tedium by verbally taunting or physically aggravating each other, as might either aristocrats or plebeians.21 Unlike Habermas’s claim that the coffeehouse world of print communication functionally disembodied its reader, the coffeehouse sphere of the sensibilitarian press actually worked to embody its readers, but in a way that only appears disembodied because its disciplined public docility defines itself through the absence of laboring and gentry class physicality. The new bourgeoisie used sensibility to overcome early modern corporeality that placed constraints on the realm of permissible trade. In the early phases of capitalism, usury and merchant’s commerce was conducted internally between particular ethnic and denominational groups. The market functioned according to preconceived notions of these encapsulated identities; whatever regularities commerce had in matters of news and credit were grounded by assumptions that one Jew, for instance, would act as every other Jew because the fear of status/kinship exclusion or retaliation by unhappy exogenous exchangers on the collective kept each Jewish merchant bound within certain behavioral limits. Ethnic and denominational self-regulation worked to protect the market in its pre-, proto-, and early capitalist stages. With an expanding marketplace that seeks to broaden the pool of exchangers and capital, these behavioral supports increasingly become limits. Much as the older ideal of friendship had entry costs that were too high, so too was a system of creditworthiness based on ethnic conditions. A world market also increasingly needs fictional capital, since the forms of specie transfers used in the earlier modes of capitalism are too immobile and prone to shortages. The extramuralization of finance and virtualization of its instruments, however, requires a medium of trustworthiness beyond ethnicity. In its earlier phases of intimate trade, credit could be arranged, since the colonial merchant “knew personally most of the individuals involved” in his trades, and a merchant’s family members or denominational colleagues acted as his agents in foreign ports and supercargoes on the ships.22 With the expansion of mercantile trade, a new stratum of unaffiliated brokers, factors, and agents arose. In a period that did not have lending institutions or banks of deposit that would easily supply credit to individuals, mercantile 21. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 99. 22. Chandler, Visible Hand, 18.

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bills of exchange, where merchants personally guaranteed the financial instruments, emerged to fill the gap. This tendency meant the rise of “general merchants whose business increasingly became that of granting credit to and discounting exchanges for other merchants.”23 Chandler calls this specialization the impersonalization of business, since credit was granted outside of ethnic and denominational circles, but a more apt term would be the characterization of business, where one’s sympathetic character, the outward display of behavioral regularities and normativities, was used as the signifier for credibility and trustworthiness, and there was no better document of one’s creditworthiness than an emotive performance involving the recitation of sensibilitarian actions and attitudes.24 The display of associative emulation and fellow-feeling was the means by which the bourgeoisie could signal to each other that one was not going to be “selfish” and cause another merchant’s downfall by breaking the chain of bills of exchange in the safe distance away from physical force. With the collective spectator in his breast, a mercantile man of feeling uses sympathy as informal insurance protecting the links of credit. Robert Darnton records the tremendous popularity of Rousseau’s weepy style amongst long-distance tradesmen in eighteenth-century France. The continuity between an economy of inscribed tears and one of credit exists because the frank display of affective concerns by merchants exists as a means of asking for each other’s mutual care for maintaining fragile credit flows in an age where juridical protections were either absent or slow to intervene properly and protect the marketplace by demanding and ensuring timely repayments.25 In the worst case, sensibilitarian displays functions as a kind of reserve credit that might alleviate a creditor’s hard-heartedness.26 If the period saw a proliferation of admonitory narratives about the rake’s seduction and ruin of a woman’s reputation, it was because these tales neatly allegorized what could happen to a merchant if his financial purity

23. Ibid., 28. 24. Margot Finn, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740 –1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Virginia D. Harrington, The New York Merchant on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935), 34, 37, 40. 25. Robert Darnton, “Readers Respond to Rousseau: The Fabrication of Romantic Sensitivity,” in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Vintage, 1985), 215–56; Lawrence E. Klein, “Property and Politeness in the Early Eighteenth-Century Whig Moralists: The Case of the Spectator,” in Early Modern Conceptions of Property, ed. John Brewer and Susan Staves (London: Routledge, 1995), 221–33. 26. Smith, Moral Sentiments, 144.

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and trustworthiness was not safeguarded, like a woman’s virtue, against libertine disregard for the proprieties of trade.27 The sensibilitarian display of tears by men functions as a mode of antiregal and antiaristocratic principles, but it also ensures the sustainability of a new mode of economic distribution and circulation. Opposition to the superior ranks and the consolidation of an enlarged middle-class corporate identity was not all that sensibility could provide. As emotional outwardness was a marker of class belonging, it also operated as a covert means of class warfare, particularly against the plebeian groups that would now be manhandled by the “sympathetic” commercial ones. For as the nascent bourgeoisie left the umbra of the absolutist state, they feared what else might emerge once Leviathan’s rock is lifted, and they sought to balance the tension between dissolving the glue that bound old regime society and quickening legitimacy for a new order. One strategy by publicists aligned with the middle classes was to cloak them as the “helpers” of the poor and disempowered in ways that surreptitiously acted as a means of gaining control over the lower classes, while also erasing the traces of middle-class violence on subalterns. Claims of universal benevolence were used to legitimize the new welfare institutions that would act as a base from which bourgeois actors could gain control over the subaltern lifeworld through the mechanisms of discipline instantiated through moral reform institutions.28 As a medium for and marker of civil society as a mechanism for middleclass cohesion and expansion, delegitimization of the old regime, and containment of plebeian complaints, sensibility stands as one defining vector of the eighteenth-century world-system’s geoculture and means of

27. Peter Mathias, “Risk, Credit, and Kinship in Early Modern Enterprise,” in The Early Modern Atlantic Economy, ed. John J. McCusker and Kenneth Morgan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 15–35; Toby Ditz, “Shipwrecked: Imperiled Masculinity and the Representation of Business Failures Among Philadelphia’s Eighteenth-Century Merchants,” Journal of American History 81 (1994): 51– 80; Toby Ditz, “Secret Selves, Credible Personas: The Problematics of Trust and Public Display in the Writing of Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia Merchants,” in Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America, ed. Robert Blair St. George (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 219 – 42. 28. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1977); Raymond A. Mohl, Poverty in New York, 1783–1825 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971); Michael Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (New York: Pantheon, 1978); John K. Alexander, Render Them Submissive: Responses to Poverty in Philadelphia, 1760–1800 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980); and Michael Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760–1835 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

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facilitating the rise of global commerce. The particular commerce that sensibility financed involves the goods of sensation: sugar, tea, coffee, and alcohols.

Sensational Trade and Chronovoric Consumption The initial rudiments of the European world-system appear with the Italian city-states of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. These Mediterranean cities saw the first glimmers of European historical capitalism because Italian mercantile links with the Levant gave traders there the opportunity to tap into the large circulating pools of capital within the Asian basin through the complex intermediary chains of Indian and Arabic commerce that helped bring spices and silks to Europe. The Italians’ construct was fragile because its tenuous projection into eastern spheres ultimately depended on conditions not of their own control, and the small range of commodities and Black Sea and Mediterranean slave labor pools that they could offer to non-European markets limited their purchasing power. When Spain and Portugal gained access to American silver and gold, the chief commodities for which the East was willing to trade, they anchored themselves more firmly within the world markets than had the Italian city-states.29 Though the Iberians established themselves as greater actors in longdistance commerce, they, too, were ultimately minor players, kept afloat only to the degree that they could continually pay with precious metals for their inclusion into the game. Yet by the start of the nineteenth century, global trade flows were increasingly controlled by the European world-system. What intervened during the long eighteenth century that allowed the European cluster of nation-states to make the transition from being a continental semiperiphery to a global core zone? While the Spanish and Portuguese and also the later Anglo-French agents peripheralized the New World, their respective modes of profiteering differed. The Iberian world-system extracted South and Central American metallics to finance their overdrawn imperial accounts and enter the Asian trade circuits. Much as the English and French would have liked simply to displace the Spanish from American mines, these two sparring partners never succeeded in piercing Spanish naval control of the South American

29. Andre Gundar Frank, ReOrient (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press), 131– 64.

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coasts.30 Attempts to appropriate these metals by state-sponsored piracy could never replace the benefits of directly controlling these resources. Frustrated in their attempts to seize the mining regions, the North Atlantic nation-states had to settle on the New World terrain left open to them by the Spanish and search for nonmineral goods that would make further investments in American ventures economically feasible. The Anglo-French colonies fortunately delivered superprofitable organic produce, the lucrative Caribbean goods of sensation: the digestible intoxicants of sugar; the caffeine of coffee and tea; and to a lesser degree, the rush of tobacco and sweetened alcohols. As Abbé Raynal wrote, the profits from the West Indian commodities of sensational consumption made the eighteenth-century Anglo-French world-system possible. “The labors of the colonists settled in the long-scorned islands are the sole basis of the African trade, extend the fisheries and cultivation of North America, provide advantageous outlets for the manufactures of Asia, double perhaps triple the activity of the whole of Europe. They can be regarded as the principal cause of the rapid movement which stirs the Universe.”31 The world-system grounded on the Anglo-French narcotics trade radically differs from one organized around Spanish American gold and silver in three significant ways.32 First, the trade in sensational goods generates a mass domestic consumer market that allows the European bourgeoisie to trade amongst themselves on a previously unknown scale and decrease their dependency on profit gained from access to Asian goods. By establishing the circumatlantic’s polygons of value-transfers (“triangular trades”), Europe’s own self-generated and sustaining system, the Anglo-French-led constellation diminished the drain of specie to the East to the point of achieving an event horizon involving the creation of a semi-autonomous European “world-system” in the world market. Italian capitalism arose mainly as a supplement to the Levantine-Asian matrix, where the Mediterranean acts as a semiperiphery with northern Europe as its periphery and the Orient its “core.” The Spanish system was more stable than the earlier Italian phase as it liberated northern Europe from its status 30. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy (New York: Academic Press, 1980), 159. 31. Michael Duffy, Soldiers, Sugar, and Seapower: The British Expeditions to the West Indies and the War Against France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 6. 32. For argumentative purposes of concision, I am contrasting the Iberian-led world-system to the Anglo-French one. The seventeenth-century Dutch embarrassment of riches is a transitional moment that includes all aspects that become predominant in the Anglo-French one, which was able to bring these elements to fruition in ways that the Dutch were not.

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as a periphery by situating the New World as the periphery to an expanded, more core-like European semiperiphery. The eighteenth-century’s circumatlantic module of hinterland African and Caribbean peripheries and North American semiperiphery finally draws the European interstate system away from its eastward perspective and allows European nation-states to aggregate themselves as a core with an autonomy that they had never yet had the privilege to receive. The circumatlantic sphere that was solely under European oversight also gave the Western nation-states their first competitive tools to undermine the East as the cheapness of the New World’s cotton and sugar undercut Eastern commerce, which meant that less specie flowed through the Middle East and India on the way to Asia.33 This recentering furthered disestablished Eastern political elites as their need to overcome lost revenue set off a vicious cycle of trade-disruptive wars and led to the long decline of the Ottoman and Mughal empires. Second, the emerging Atlantic world-system gave European peoples the gift of confidence in their ability to be collective historical agents. The optimism of Enlightenment perfectabilitarianism and teleological historiographic claims becomes possible only after the success of a large-scale project of extraterritorial expansion and weakening of contiguous Eastern competitors. Europeans’ initial foray beyond their frontiers with the Crusades was a failure as they were eventually repelled from the Levant. The demise of Crusader imperialism had disastrous economic, biological, and political consequences for Europeans, but also a cultural one with the tremendous deflation of self-worth and loss of nerve that led to a mental refeudalization and turn backward to the sure ground of familiar superstitions and folklore. The success of increasing expansion after the fifteenth century created the cultural appetite, in spite of the church’s resistance, for speculative modes of Renaissance empirical inquiry and its material projects, like long-distance shipping. The conquest of the Atlantic laid the foundation for the next wave of epistemological claims, which we call the Enlightenment, to move outward from pockets of intellectuals to flower into a broad social movement, which also led to the birth of the “West” as a collective imaginary. Similarly the technological revolution in the eighteenth century would not have happened were it not for the confident felicity engendered by victorious imperialism. Here the smallpox epidemic that decimated American Indians was a second bit of good luck to Europeans. If the 33. Frank, ReOrient, 272.

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American First Peoples had been immune to the pox, and thus more successful in resisting European incursions, they might have diminished European willingness to engage in further adventures and broach the mental horizons of new ideas. The third effect of a Caribbean-based world-system involves the development of a phenomenological subjectivity that moves from one defined by the elite distribution of metallic currency instruments to one based on the mass consumption of non-nutritive stimulants that alters the individual’s reception of their own somatic domain—their body and its production. To unpack the implications of this shift, a review of the period’s alterations in patterns of consumption is in order. Recent revisionary history of the eighteenth century notices the period’s “consumer revolution,” as made-for-profit commodities became more popular and widely available, alongside the period’s industrial one.34 The period’s prolix commentaries on the risks of growing luxury testify to its own participants’ sense of newness about the increased scale and routinization of consumption in a rapidly commercializing society.35 McKendrick argues that this production of consumables was driven by “social emulation and class competition” as “many objects, once the prized possession of the rich, reached further than ever down the social scale.”36 Proposing that what was novel in the eighteenth century was not “the desire to consume, but the ability to do so,” McKendrick assumes that the middle class always desired to emulate their social superiors and the realization of this transhistorical desire was simply been delayed until it was made possible by new modes of supply.37 Certainly the bourgeoisie’s efforts to subsume and supersede the aristocracy meant that the period saw considerable efforts by the middle classes to poach the codes of the upper classes, but there was also a desire to refunctionalize these codes and to consume goods in ways that had little to do with quasi-aristocratic sumptuariness. Why would a class struggling to define its difference from the absolutist regime and its gentrified correlates look to repeat exactly the status consumption patterns of the upper strata? Arguments for a demand-led consumerism through the primary motive of 34. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London: Europa Publications, 1982), 9. 35. John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollet (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977); Daniel Miller, ed., Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New Studies (London: Routledge, 1995). 36. McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb, Birth of a Consumer Society, 11. 37. Ibid., 2.

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emulation stumbles on the riddle that Timothy Breen’s work on British American consumerism poses. Breen argues that the emulative consumerism brought the colonials increasingly closer to the consumer choices of the British metropolis.38 However, if Americans, throughout the eighteenth century, shopped like Britons in order to mimic them, “Anglicization thus makes it hard to explain the American Revolution” since emulation ought to reduce, not encourage, surly rebellion.39 In a later study, Breen claims that Americans’ increasing participation in modern consumption patterns led to the drive for political independence as American colonists learned that they could trust each other based on their shared consumer choices. This still does not explain why Americans would want to emulate one domestic set of consumers rather than another overseas one.40 When the actual commodities involved are considered, emulation becomes less convincing as an explanation. Jacob Price argues that “though neglected by the consumer-revolution school, the most dynamic component (accounting for over half of all imports in the 1770s) were items of food and drink, particularly the exotics—sugar, tea, tobacco, and coffee— all of them only recently items of mass consumption and heavy taxation. By the mid-eighteenth century sugar overtook linen as the most important colonial import and was not superseded until 1825 when cotton replaced it.”41 The eighteenth century’s consumer revolution is not unique because tactile objects in general, like china and pewterware, became diffused through nonelite households, but because these objects were support commodities, accessories made for the consumption of other ingestible, sensational commodities, the purchasing of which illustrated the subject’s ability to belong to a culture of consuming exotic goods of taste that was cosmopolitan rather than centered on an imperial court. Of these exotic commodities, Price insists that “the preeminent place of sugar as the leading colonial input is unassailable.”42

38. Timothy H. Breen, “An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690 –1776,” Journal of British Studies 25 (October 1986): 467–99. 39. Ibid., 497–98. 40. T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), xv. 41. Jacob Price, “The Imperial Economy, 1700 –1776,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Eighteenth Century, ed. P. J. Marshall, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 78 –104, 81. 42. Jacob M. Price, “The Transatlantic Economy,” in Colonial British America, ed. Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 18 – 43, 28.

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Like many of the other exotic goods, sugar’s consumption had a tradition of luxury consumption by court elites as a prestige foodstuff, the sumptuary consumption of which displays status hierarchy. With Caribbean islands becoming plantation colonies, sugar becomes increasingly cheaper and widespread throughout society; sugar costs fell by half throughout the seventeenth century and then a further third by 1750. The cheapness of sugar meant that whereas English per capita consumption of sugar in 1660 was two pounds per annum, it had risen to five pounds by the end of the century and was more than twenty in the 1790s.43 Sugar infiltrated the entire spectrum of food and drink as eighteenth-century cookbooks and practice used it in novel combinations, such as the addition of sugar to tea, a historically novel fusion that had never existed outside Europe.44 The newness of the tea-sugar combination, and sugar’s association with other caffeinated drinks, at locales like the burgeoning coffeehouses suggests that emulation alone could not have driven eighteenth-century consumption: “What social cachet was there to be had from flaunting a substance now within the economic reach of everyone and which, increasingly, found its way into millions of cups of tea?”45 Mintz, likewise, rejects the power of emulation as an explanation for the rise of narcotic consumption, since the consumer revolution is intertwined with the production of modern class relations, not simply the widening of consumer taste or reinforcement of older status stratification.46 The period’s commentators frequently bemoaned the laboring classes’ demand for sugar as a necessity, not superfluous luxury, and its consequent democratization meant that sugar “lost many of its special meanings when the poor were also able to eat it” as well as consume associated drinks like tea, coffee, and sweetened or processed alcohols, such as rum and gin.47 These sensational foodstuffs are hard to read as an insignia of prestige when the popularization of these narcotics often appeared to the bourgeoisie as the very opposite of civilizing, a degradation portrayed in Hogarth’s immensely popular Gin Lane. Not only did the lower classes consume these sensational products in ways unlike the middle class, or a middle-class approximation of elite 43. James Walvin, Fruits of Empire: Exotic Produce and British Taste, 1660 –1800 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 119. 44. Ibid., 131, 128 –29. 45. Ibid., 129. 46. Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1985), 45. 47. Ibid., 95.

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consumption, plebeians often used them to establish and reinforce their own lifeworld and social spaces, which were felt to be increasingly alien to the bourgeois world, let alone the gentrified one of Pope’s poetry. Arguments for increased consumption as a means of producing modern class divisions have two separate but interlinked claims. Wolfgang Schivelbusch argues, in a neo-Weberian light, that the infusion of capitalist behavior from the East brought the taste for new goods as illustrations of and supplemental aids toward enacting a bourgeois lifeworld. The European protobourgeoisie were fascinated by Islamic mercantile culture and practices because they provided a reference point outside of European feudal social organization and the heavy hand of the church’s desire to retard commerce-led change. Factors of emulation exist in Europe, but they often took their cue from tea- and coffee-drinking Eastern rather than European elites. Alterations in European consumer patterns need to be seen as influenced by their contact with more commercially sophisticated peoples, rather than something that developed from within the interior of Western society. Schivelbusch then argues that Europeans began drinking coffees, teas, and their sweeteners because these sobering drinks manifest the spirit of “rationality and accountability” that “characterize the bourgeois spirit that was behind it all.”48 Such a functionalist explanation again leaves out the growth of this consumption among the lower classes, for whom bourgeois rationality was an antagonist, rather than an ideal, and it also forgets that some of the sensational goods, like rum, are not necessarily helpful for clearheaded transactions. On the other side, Mintz argues that the rise of sensational goods helps eighteenth-century commerce as the proliferation of these goods shifts the cost of maintaining the vitality of the laboring classes further onto plebeians, while also positioning them within a postsubsistence consumerist model whereby basic living needs could become satisfied only through the marketplace.49 Because these narcotic goods were low cost and easily prepared food substitutes, they facilitated agrarian workers’ adaptation to proletarianizing “new schedules of work, new sorts of labor, and new conditions of daily life” in the metropolis.50 Explanations of eighteenth-century growth in consumerism as a result of an upward class emulation, bourgeois self-fashioning, and plebeian 48. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants (New York: Pantheon, 1992), 38. 49. Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 180. 50. Ibid., 181.

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adjustments to rapid social dislocations are not mutually exclusive, since widespread social movements have multiple factors and functions. Yet these explanations do not fully capture the cultural significance of sensational consumption in the eighteenth century. The claim for emulation depends on maintaining the division between precocities, long-distance goods that can be sold for high profit because of their rarity or difficulty of transportation in large quantities, and necessary staples, goods frequently produced and sold within the same regional distribution network. This distinction breaks down with the increased availability of consuming goods like cheapening sugar that are no longer luxuries, but not exactly subsistence staples either. The plebeianization of luxury that these “third position” commodities represent indicates a social feature that emulation cannot explain, just as it also challenges Mintz’s argument for consumerism as mainly driven by the need to cheapen the laborer’s daily reproduction of life-energy costs. The potato’s introduction into northern Europe, as part of the Columbine exchange, has implications for how the sustenance food baskets of provincial populations were altered as a result of nascent agrarian capitalism. Increased carbohydrate consumption of this kind clearly facilitates a greater exploitation of laborers by reducing basic living costs in ways that dampens demands for better wages, but the potato did not engender a likewise desire of all classes to purchase instruments surrounding its consumption, as they did with tea and coffee. Why would laborers invest spare earnings into glorifying the objects of their own degradation if their consumption did not give them some pleasure and symbolic significance? The difference between the social relations surrounding the new long-distance staples of the potato and sugar and the investment in accessories of sugar, teas, and coffee suggests the presence of an as of yet underexplored feature of sensational consumption. In considering eighteenth-century consumption, Colin Campbell also discounts emulation as an explanation for the period’s rise in consumption. If emulation was so important, then what explains the increased consumption of novels, since novel reading was a middle-class phenomenon rather than an upper-class one?51 Campbell argues that these new objects of middleclass consumption are fundamentally utopian desires for experiences the consumer “has not so far encountered in reality.”52 Modern consumerism for Campbell is characterized by a proleptic desire that is first constructed 51. Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 33. 52. Ibid., 89.

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in one’s imagination, a turn, he argues, that belongs to a prehistory of the conjunction of subjective interiority as a hallmark of the bourgeois self. There is a perhaps unintended class bias here, as Campbell implies that only bourgeois readers seek social change. And surely the novel had presentday functions for training readers into the ways they should interact with other middle-class readers. The argument about sociocultural contemplation can be slightly reformulated alongside Marx’s insight into the phenomenology of capitalism where the fetishized commodity not only typifies the logic of the system’s operation, but also acts as the initial object of study into a greater understanding of that system. For subjects lacking knowledge about the abstract laws of global political economy, their acts of consumption function as the chief means of perceiving and participating within the social structures that shape our lifeworld, but which are difficult to discern within the limits of an individual’s perspective. The primary medium of most people’s interaction with worldly affairs is not through party politics or high cultural citations of aesthetic traditions and movements but through the (foreign) commodities that we digest, wear, and otherwise consume, since the objects that impact our body’s senses are also the ones most susceptible to registering the impact of far-away events, even if the exact nature of these events remains unclear or poorly discerned. Certain commodities become privileged objects in the collective imagination at specific historical moments because their consumption helps signify the subject’s participation within a revolutionizing present rather than a distant future. The consumption of these goods encodes the experience of transformation, as it enacts a structure of feeling emerging from the gap between the felt experience of change and the dominant cognitive frameworks available to explain events that occur beyond the individual’s horizon. I call this chronovoric consumption, a dynamic consumption arranged around the consumer commodities that give the subject a phenomenological sense that they are “eating contemporaneity” and belonging within, rather than being victimized by, modernity’s fluctuations. Chronovoric consumption acts as a paraepistemology for locating one’s self in history, in the absence of an analytical or even descriptive language for the inchoate experiences of macroeconomic and social changes, a teleasthetic perception about the larger social forces shaping individual and collective subjectivity. When we listen to music on an iPod, we consume the hardware, software, and the music, thus helping to transform a previously high-cost luxury good into a relatively common feature of everyday life; participate in a

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new, digitalizing mode of production; and perhaps even emulate to a certain degree the perceived behavior of haute capitalism’s agents and their gadgets. Yet the primary experience that we receive as mediated by these objects is the one of participating within and then being seen to participate in contemporary trends. Without necessarily understanding the moment’s larger dynamics, the chronovoric consumer’s valorization of certain consumable objects as an iconic social action makes this her or his pre- or protopoliticized medium for comprehending social transformation occurring beyond their immediate environment. We cannot relate the contemporary moment “as it really is,” but our desire to consume particular goods is a message to ourselves that we have agency within this mobile world, a message that delivers a feeling of subjective agency and security amidst historical transformations, no matter how tenuous or illusory that power and safety may be in reality. Objects of chronovoric consumption often achieve this status because they are commodities that were previously luxury items but have been reformulated as they come through new distribution flows of the worldsystem, have undergone secondary processing, and impact the body’s sensorium and orthopedic maneuvers in ways that can be performed in public arenas. Just as downloaded music has chronovoric prestige because it transforms analog mediums of music and allows its consumption to be enacted in collectively seen rituals, so too does the consumption of sensational narcotics in the eighteenth century. The vital difference of the eighteenth century’s capitalist consumer revolution involves the rise of long-distance goods that are more widely available after they have been processed and can be consumed in performative ways. Sugar consumption explodes when the condiment becomes refined, in ways that spices had never been. The exemplary British consumer demand was not simply that for sugar, which Canadian flows of maple syrup could have provided, but for “white” processed sugar, and “to cater for their tastes businessmen in ports throughout the country constructed refineries to process the crude sugar which arrived at the dockside in large hogsheads of unrefined sugar.”53 The desire for other sensational goods likewise increases to the degree that they have been submitted to a manufactured process of industrial transubstantiation in ways that allows for their public or quasipublic ingestion. Coffee grows through the allure of its roasting process and distribution within specially arranged social factories, like the coffeehouse, 53. Walvin, Fruits of Empire, 120.

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and its linkage with sugar, as was the case with tea. The increase in alcohol use during the period is not for simple beers and wines, which had been available for centuries, but for the new distilled alcohols like gin and processed wines, like rum and Madeira, taken in new model drinking establishments. Likewise, the growth in textile consumption is not just one of clothes, but a growth in (indigo) dyed clothes; this is a mode of vestimentary ornamentation that does not mimic ancien regime style but explicitly foregrounds the “artificiality,” or modernity, of its colored presentation. In contrast to other sensational goods, tobacco consumption decreases throughout the eighteenth century. Although the decrease in tobacco production meant that the cost of its consumption did not fall as rapidly as the other goods, the relative price difference can only partially explain the decline in its consumption. The relatively unprocessed nature of tobacco in contrast to the other sensational goods suggests that it lacked the chronovoric aura that drove other types of consumption. Tobacco becomes saturated with chronovoric aura only after a new processing technique allowed it to appear as the mass-produced, heavily mediatized, paper-rolled cigarette. Caribbean sensational goods succeed as objects of chronovoric consumption because they emerge from the fundamental aspects of the eighteenthcentury world-system and its transition away from the old order’s ranks of regionalized status and cosmological authority. Sensational consumption liberates corporeality from old regime mannerisms through the immediacy of their instrumentality. These caffeines, glucoses, and alcohols give an immediately felt experience in the tingling of the flesh, which suggests other ways in which the rank body could be freed from a host of other sociocultural constraints imposed by early modern social regulation. The most readily available language for the physiological effects and corporeal transformations of these consumed sensational goods was that provided by the lexicon of sensibility, especially as sensibility’s rhetorical claims about a mimetic response to extramural stimuli were felt as empirically verified by the somatic effects of sensational narcotics. Enactments of sensibility and sensational consumption became mutually reinforcing and were able to do so in the institutional and informal sites that enabled the distribution and circulation of sensational goods, such as the coffeehouse, and sensibilitarian axioms. European consumption of Caribbean narcotics had an elective affinity with liberal commerce because the increasingly ritualized consumption of sensations helped accustom the middle class to displaying the bodily performances of “feeling” in zones like the coffeehouses

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that interwove the trade in sensation with the behavioral guarantees of commercial sensibility. These informal rehearsals would, in turn, begin the process culminating in formal contracts and trades, often involving the very goods that were being simultaneously consumed in the coffeehouses. This corporate effect was further amplified because these sensational goods were particularly understood to be socially consumed ones. Although teas, coffees, and sugars, can, of course be consumed in isolation, for eighteenth-century agents, they were socializing commodities meant to be consumed not only in a group, but in a group that often enacted manual exchanges of fellow-feeling and sociability with the ballet of pouring and serving the liquids for each other and the benevolent oral exchange of toasting the health of those present. If the use of sensational commodities likewise increases among the plebeian class during the eighteenth century, it was for many of the same reasons. The bodily liberation from ancien regime corporeal restriction was as useful to plebeians as it was for the middle class. Sensational socialization was likewise as attractive to newly urbanized plebeians, struggling to establish postagrarian communities and their own collective consciousness as a modern class. Domestic class identities, however, were not the only social feature relating to the rise in sensational consumption. For embedded within the experience of bourgeois freedom or domestic plebeian insubordination was the human distress made by the international divisions of labor in Atlantic slavery.

Savory Coercion: Sweetness and Atlantic Agrarian Capitalism The first historical accounts of sugarcane describe its production on the Bengal coast, during the sixth century.54 From India, at the conjuncture between the Levantine economic zone and the Asiatic one, sugar is brought into other regions: grown in Canton by the eighth century, it is carried by the Arab expansion to the westward Mediterranean of Cyprus and Sicily. Sugar first begins to appear in the European sphere sometime around the ninth century after Europeans come into more frequent contact with Muslim merchants. After it enters the Mediterranean basin, sugar gets carried westward with each expansion of the capitalist frontier. At each landing of their imperial conquest, the Iberians hurried to transform their newly occupied lands into sugared ones as a means of 54. Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 23; Braudel, Civilization, 1:224.

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making territorial acquisition profitable. This appropriation of land differs from early models of conquest because the surplus to be extracted from these terrains was not based on the potential for feudal tribute or bodies of aborigines to be captured, but production for capitalist distribution and exchange. Each new land was immediately calculated in terms of its potential exploitation, particularly for sugar as it was the crop most likely to deliver profits. Yet when regions were turned into monostaple plantations, sugar’s ecological unsustainability ultimately compelled the need to look elsewhere for new regions that did not have soil exhausted by sugarcane farming. The topography of sugar production thus indicates the overall contours of capitalist production as the profits from sensational commodities stoked Europe’s consumer revolution, which in turn sought to exploit ever more territory through the introduction of capitalist agriculture of sensational goods. This reinforcing loop also amplified what had always been the inseparable companion to sugar production: slavery. The history of speculative extradomestic, monocultural agriculture is a history of the need for superexploited labor, typified by the coerced slave.55 Sugar slavery’s initial stages involves peoples culled from subordinated ethnie, but this fixed submission was not based on dermal difference (race), since “Black Africans . . . played only a small part in the broader patterns of Mediterranean slavery before the middle of the fifteenth century.”56 The Africanization of slavery takes its first step forward when the Turkish recapture of Constantinople in 1453 foreclosed access to Black Sea slave ports, making “white” labor more difficult and costly for the Italians to obtain precisely when overfarming of cane depleted the western Mediterranean islands’ fertility and lowered profitability. The increased costs of acquiring coerced labor amidst the decreased profit from worn-out lands was one reason why the Iberian interests, who had discovered cheaper sources of sugar in the Atlantic, were able to rise to dominance in the next long wave.57 Portugal and Spain had the initial benefit of not having to trade for slaves on their east Atlantic island plantations; they simply coerced indigenous 55. Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 9. 56. Ibid., 10. An ethnie is “a named human population with myths of common ancestry, shared historical memories, one or more elements of common culture, a link with a homeland and a sense of solidarity among at least some of its members.” John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith, “Introduction” to Ethnicity, ed. John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 6 –7. 57. Curtin, Rise and Fall, 10.

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populations. When sugar production sugar went across the Atlantic, local Amero-Indian populations were likewise marshaled into service until biological devastation dramatically reduced their numbers. After this loss, African populations provided a vital labor source for the plantations. Atlantic slavery did not arise because of clearly defined racism, which came later as an ideological justification, but when the American continent’s local populations could no longer be subordinated because they no longer existed in large enough numbers to make them a “natural” resource ready for exploitation. Because the Spanish had to trade with African merchants for slave labor, the English and the French found an opening in the Atlantic, since no European nation absolutely controlled the African coast and its slave networks. In a slightly more competitive environment, the English and French start a “sugar revolution” in the mid-seventeenth century in the Caribbean islands that the Spanish did not dedicate resources to dominating. The final demise of the Spanish-dominated world-system in the early eighteenth century meant that British and French interests were now freed from the necessity of state protection, and the dissolution of the Royal African Company’s monopoly in 1712 and English acquisition in 1713 of the Asiento, the monopoly trading rights to ship slaves to the Spanish New World that provided the cover for the larger illicit trade, wholly reshaped Atlantic slavery by removing the constraints on trading long-distance human goods so that companies could radically accelerate the number of Middle Passages in order to service the plantation and harvesting of oceanic sensational goods. Within this new capitalist organization, Atlantic slavery’s growth became terrific, with the number of transported slaves increasing nearly fivefold in the eighteenth century compared to what had been the case in the seventeenth.58 The rise in slavery directly correlates to sugar’s cheapening and increasing availability for a mass Western consumer market. While great scholarly attention has, rightly, gone into documenting the increased volume, distribution, and manifestation of Atlantic slavery, less effort has gone into differentiating Atlantic slavery from other historical modes of slavery and the implications of this difference for an understanding of the eighteenth century. If slavery is understood as the forced appropriation 58. Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), 196; A. G. Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa (Edinburgh: Longman, 1973), 102; Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492 –1800 (London: Verso, 1997), 3.

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of a subject, typically involving the brutalizing transportation from her or his home region, often as a result of war and conquest of territory, then Atlantic slavery is not especially exceptional in human history but is rather the default mechanism for gaining coerced labor. Slave trades have long existed, such as the Spartans’ capture of non-Hellenes, the Roman transportation of northern Europeans for the Italian fields, Viking raids on the northern seas, the Black Sea trade in Slavs, and so on.59 Many critics highlight the “Middle Passage” as African slavery’s defining traumatic moment, out of the many steps in the trajectory from African hinterland capture to American hinterland labor conditions, but, here too, the forced and nightmarish nautical translocation of peoples has little particularity to Atlantic African slavery when compared to some of the examples mentioned above. An emphasis on the Middle Passage has been vitally useful as a means of documenting the slavery’s trade directions and volume, but it also works at counterpurposes for specifying the unique features of Atlantic slavery as a capitalist reformulation of slavery. Marx distinguishes feudal labor, which he sees as analogous to traditional forms of slavery, from wage labor as the human body in the former is both a commodity-producing agent and a commodity itself, something that can be exchanged in toto. Neither vassalage nor slavery speaks directly to capitalism, which is distinctive as a social system not because it alienates the worker from the means of production but because it exploits humans by forcing them to commodify their energy on the labor market. The rudiments for capitalism exist from the moment labor becomes labor-power as it is mediated through the equivalence of the money-form. This point is crucial to our ability to distinguish pre- or weakly capitalist (i.e., mercantile) slave trades that have existed for centuries, if not millennia, from the particularly capitalist mode involved in Atlantic slavery, which places the trade in human commodities (slaves) within a matrix defined by the exchanges in commodified human labor involving such aspects as the wage relations of the transporting sailors, the workers involved in the secondary processing of sugarcane or textile finishing of cotton, and the consumers of these products, positioned as they are in class-defining societies. Atlantic slavery is capitalist-defined slavery, especially as the slave in African, Asiatic, and Levantine systems was not subjected to the form of social death that was the case in New World slavery. Other slave systems deployed this form of bound labor as 59. Blackburn, Making of New World Slavery, 33–93.

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a status distinction, where slaves could be incorporated within the host society, after postcapture disempowerment or juridical disestablishment, with various degrees of lower rank. The Atlantic system institutionalizes slavery as a class distinction. The modern world-system erodes precapitalist status by instituting a capitalist form of status through scientific racism, where slavery is defined not as a condition of disempowerment but as an inalienable, biological feature of the skin. To slightly foreshadow a point, Atlantic slavery is distinctive because it functions itself as a form of chronovoric consumption, as human bodies are put in new technically driven flows, given a secondary cultural processing in the shape of new racial identities, and are “consumed,” that is to say beaten, in unusually public, performative, and publicized ways. In what has become a foundational claim for Atlantic slavery studies, Eric Williams argues that Atlantic slavery was a constitutive, not supplemental, feature to capitalist modernity as the profit from the sugar plantations provided the capital that financed Europe’s domestic industrialization.60 Philip Curtin goes further as he argues that the technical expertise and managerial knowledge of how a modern factory operates, especially with the managerial organization of laborers into specialized detail labor segments in order to ensure maximal efficiency, was first elaborated in the colonial plantations. The sensational sugarcane plantation was “the closest thing to industry that was typical of the seventeenth century,” with its administrative and technical skill that organized material inputs, processing apparatus, and output distribution.61 The need for rapid throughputs, lest the sugarcane go off after being cut, meant that the plantation complex required a finely coordinated processing production that relied on speed from the initial cutting of the cane through its milling with expensive, heavy machinery, which required a large initial investment that demanded sizeable returns.62 The plantation periphery became a laboratory for cutting-edge capitalist work practices that would only later be transported back through the Atlantic matrix to bedevil European laborers. The peripheral plantation

60. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1944). A summary of the debates about the Williams thesis occurs in Blackburn, 510 – 80. 61. Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 48. 62. Curtin, Rise and Fall; Wallerstein, Modern World-Systems I, 88 – 89; Dale W. Tomich, Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar: Martinique and the World Economy, 1830–1848 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 126 –28.

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complex is not a belated echo of European development, but a refunctionalization of an older social formation (pre- or protocapitalist slavery) that creates a new form of work exploitation in advance of core-zone practices. Atlantic slavery belongs to capitalist modernity not because of its traumatic transformation of peoples, but that people were brought specifically within a capitalist world-system and put to labor in ways that provide the fiscal resource and technical and managerial expertise for the next stage of its development. The colonies were not simply supplemental to the home nations; they provided the space to experiment with variations of capitalist labor practices away from the sight of home populations on highly coerced subjects, who were less able to resist the imposition of these practices because they lacked the “customary” and communal protections of European plebeians, since they had been dissociated from their own domestic lands. The extreme form of racial social death that Atlantic slavery advanced arose because even with these severe advantages the European bourgeoisie needed outlandish measures to establish the elements of modern marketing and coerce displaced workers into modernizing labor conditions. Atlantic slavery erodes the precapitalist status identity of bound labor by advancing a form where slavery is not defined simply as a condition of disempowerment, but as an inalienable, biological feature of the skin. The initial motivation for the elaboration of scientific racism did not come from any intrinsically perverse attitude by Europeans toward peoples from other continents. Instead it emerged as a needed solution to cultural obstacles holding back the expansion of a capitalist world-system, particularly those involving the installation of consumption driven by the belief that commodities have a desirable power unto themselves. The move from a pre- or weakly modern notion of a commodity, as a dead object that is only a transitional form for the mutual satisfaction of use needs, to a modern fetishized commodity is too great a transubstantiation to be achieved without an intermediary form. This transitional state was furnished by the mercantile invention of an ethnologized African slave as an object that is both alive and socially dead in ways that premodern slavery never countenanced.63 63. For the role of Atlantic slavery on the historical development of fetishism, see William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish I,” Res (Spring 1985): 5–17; William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish II,” Res (Spring 1987): 23– 45; William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish IIIa,” Res (Autumn 1988): 105–23.

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Before the rise of Atlantic slavery, slavers marketed their human goods according to a set of exterior traits, like muscularity, health, or gendered beauty, or readily displayed skills, like literacy. In the early phase of Atlantic slavery, traders likewise did not bother to expand this basic classification of human goods, but with the flesh trade’s increased scale and its concomitant competitive pressures, an anthropological discourse arose wherein Africans were marketed through a “tribal” nomenclature (for example, Mandingo, Coromantee, Ibo, Moko, Mungola, and Congo) that ascribed intrinsic personality traits to these subjects.64 This group anthropology defined peoples less by their collective skills or language than by essentializing qualities. For instance, those called Ibos were taken to be excessively moody, but also good house servants. Coromantees were considered surly, but solid workers if treated properly. While there exists an ongoing debate today about the cultural authenticity and relative meaning that these tribal names had for the ascribed slaves, for the eighteenth-century merchants these collective names were meant to address the new problem of maintaining value in goods that are neither regionally produced and locally distributed staple or craft goods made for the satisfaction of basic needs, nor the stable and relatively compact preciosities, like precious metals, spices, or textiles, that were the bedrock of early modern long-distance trade.65 The increased volume of eighteenth-century Atlantic slave trade

64. Douglas B. Chambers, “‘My Own Nation’: Igbo Exiles in the Diaspora,” Slavery and Abolition 18, no. 1 (1997): 72 – 97; Douglas B. Chambers, “Ethnicity in the Diaspora: The Slave-Trade and the Creation of African ‘Nations’ in the Americas,” Slavery and Abolition 22, no. 3 (2001): 25–39; Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Philip D. Morgan, “The Cultural Implications of the Atlantic Slave Trade: African Regional Origins, American Destinations and New World Developments,” Slavery and Abolition 18, no. 1 (1997): 122 – 45; Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). 65. Chambers, “My Own Nation” and “Ethnicity in the Diaspora,” and Douglas B. Chambers, “The Significance of Igbo in the Bight of Biafra Slave-Trade: A Rejoinder to Northrup’s ‘Myth Igbo,’” Slavery and Abolition 23, no. 1 (2002): 101–20; Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Robin Law, “Ethnicities of Enslaved Africans in the Diaspora: On the Meanings of ‘Mina’ (Again),” History in Africa 32 (2005): 247– 67; Russell Lohse, “Slave-Trade Nomenclature and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Evidence from Early Eighteenth-Century Costa Rica,” Slavery and Abolition 23, no. 3 (2002): 73–92; David Northrup, “Igbo and Myth Igbo: Culture and Ethnicity in the Atlantic World, 1600–1850,” Slavery and Abolition 21, no. 3 (2000): 1–20; Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

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meant that flesh merchants had the historically new problem of having to buy not-entirely-durable goods in one circumatlantic port and then sell them without a loss in another, especially in the face of wide-ranging competition on both sides of the Atlantic. To resolve this problem, slavers began to fix their commodities with a nationalizing brand name that could help standardize otherwise highly varied commodities and protect the capital lodged within captured bodies against the erosion of prices across time and space. The eighteenth-century development of a limited spectrum of ethnographic labels for slaves helped convince a Caribbean or American planter that he was getting good value for his purchase, as the ethnographic discourse promised, in the absence of visual examination, some expectation of the coerced human’s value. By using tribal or national names that made humans the bearers of unseen value, sedentary merchants were able to invest in slave ships and buy and sell lots of Africans, as if they were just any other item of stock, in the core’s coffeehouses and Bourses far from the semiperipheral slave marts where Africans were actually manhandled. The chronovoric “processing” of slaves through the logo of tribal identities meant that Europeans used Africans not only as the template to forge a new mode of commodity fetishism, without which a capitalist world-system could not exist, but also to develop the modern sociology of nationality, the classifying of humans by reference to the place of their regional emergence. Romantic-era claims for Euro-American national imaginaries were possible only because of their initial elaboration through the protocols of the circumatlantic slave trade. Because new forms of bourgeois bodily regulation and commodification were enacted by core middle-class fractions on themselves and on African coerced labor in the peripheries as a means of calibrating the timing of the eventual confrontation with domestic laborers and because the sensational goods were crucial to the expansion of bourgeois civil society, it should come as no surprise that the experiences of oceanic coerced labor would wash through the world-system to have geocultural elaborations. Ian Baucom has convincingly written how late eighteenth-century financial capital produced the psychic ecology underpinning Atlantic slavery, but the same deserves to be said in reverse.66 For whatever advantage

66. Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).

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Europeans had in this process was lost as the north European mentality was then distempered by its own reception of slavery’s sorrows and consequent imagination of this trauma.67 Mass African suicide was already commonly discussed among European slavers when Englishman Philips wrote in the 1690s that Africans were so “loath to leave their own country, that they have often leap’d out of the canoes, boat and ship, into the sea and kept under water till they were drowned.”68 Jacques Savary’s manual for traders urged them to sail quickly since “more Negros die [from suicide] before leaving port than during the voyage.”69 Ship officers worried about losing profits from suicide attempts and a sadness unto death as much as they did about slave rebellions or deaths from illness.70 Self-destruction occurred because Africans feared European cannibalism, which was thought to prevent a soul’s transmigration back to Africa.71 These acts of spontaneous suicide and fears of cannibalism mainly happened at the semiperipheral points of loading-in slaves off the African coast and Caribbean landfall in the semiperipheral zones in between two worlds. Within this network, accounts of African suicide were brought back to Europe both with the oral accounts of sailors on the ships and in the discursive records written by the trade’s factors for the benefit of the slave traders and their investors. These representations of African trauma were initially discussed for their threat to profit but were then seized on not for the purpose of moral outrage at slavery, but because they provided a metaphoric language for bourgeois suffrage, and black distress became a

67. Stephen Shapiro, “Mass African Suicide and the Rise of Euro-American Sentimental: Stevenson and Equiano’s Tales of the Semi-Periphery,” in Revolutions and Watersheds: Transatlantic Dialogues, 1775 –1815, ed. Wil Verhoeven and Beth Dolan Kurtz (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 123– 44. 68. Daniel P. Mannix, Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (New York: Viking, 1962), 48 69. Robert Louis Stein, The French Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century: An Old Regime Business (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), 94. 70. Ismail Rashid, “‘A Devotion to the Idea of Liberty at Any Price’: Rebellion and Antislavery in the Upper Guinea Coast in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies, ed. Sylviane A. Diouf (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), 132 –51; 137. 71. W. Jeffrey Bolster, “An Inner Diaspora: Black Sailors Making Selves,” in Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America, ed. Mechal Sobel, Fredrika Teute, and Ronald Hoffman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 419 – 48; John Newton, The Journal of a Slave Trader (London: Epworth Press, 1962), 103; Donald Wax, “Negro Resistance to the Early American Slave Trade,” Journal of Negro History 51 (1966): 1–15.

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means for the middle classes to construct didactic mythologies about themselves as victims of absolutist force and martyrs for a “natural” constitutional state.72 Yet once African trauma was brought within sensibilitist discourse, it revealed a truth about the replication of affect once it enters the sensibilitarian matrix that depends on a mirroring relay of emotion. It is perhaps not coincidental that as England became the slave trading nation par excellence, it also began to be considered the most suicide-prone nation in Europe.73 Slavery’s screams began to seep into European psyches as with the horror of “Negro Trade,” which makes the shipowners squeal in the prose-poem read by New York’s mercantile elites and cited at the beginning of this chapter. While middle-class, white Europeans had never experienced spectacles of distress like the ones associated with slavery, they understood, however indirectly, that this terror was linked to their consumption of new comforts. This affect was magnified as the sensibilitarian coffeehouses were the sites of contractual exchanges where lots of African slaves were bought and sold amidst conversational exchanges about the difficulties of working in the flesh trade.74 The psychological affects of slavery were connected to the period’s geoculture not only because Atlantic slavery was at the heart of its mode of production, but also because it spoke to the “heart,” the sociocultural manners being developed for this phase of historical capitalism’s maintenance. Consequently, the more Europeans learned about the brutality within slavery, the greater their need for a compensatory narcotizing of the self through increased dosages of sensational commodities and tales of their own sympathy that might blot out the painful recognition of their complicity within horror. The corporalities of slavery, bodily sensations caused by narcotics, and physioreflexive gestures of sensibility so constantly implicate each other’s conditions that they congeal to stand as the main features of the period’s geoculture. Yet because these aspects often exist in disconnected locations over the vast expanse of the oceanic world-system, a suturing and

72. John McManners, Death and Enlightenment: Changing Attitudes to Death Among Christians and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 415–16. 73. Roland Bartel, “Suicide in Eighteenth-Century England: The Myth of a Reputation,” Huntington Library Quarterly 23 (1960): 145–58. 74. James Walvin, Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1994), 3.

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communicative element was required to maintain the semiperiphery’s fluidity. This was the function of sentimental narrative as the fourth, and final, aspect of the eighteenth-century’s geoculture.

The Sentimental Paradox and the Novel’s Prosthetics The eighteenth century’s geoculture interweaves sensibility, sensation, and slavery to facilitate the market’s expansion through the circulation of fellow-feeling aided by the experience of ingested bodily experiences and increased pools of exploited labor. Yet “benevolent” consumption’s success in promoting a market grounded on physiologized sensations and corporeal markers of credibility creates its own systemic crisis of sociocultural overproduction. As the commercial market extends its long-distance reach, it diminishes the tactile and visual proximity that associationist sensibility requires for its operation and guarantees that credit and contractual agreements would be fulfilled. Sensibility’s claim that it aids the unimpeded growth of commercial refinement becomes blocked by the effects of its own procedures. The problem of sensibility’s intrinsic spatial constraints appears clearest with Montesquieu’s argument that republics cannot function properly on a large scale because geographic distances will weaken the intimate bonds necessary for a smooth social operation. Hume’s reply to the problem of affective dilution was to argue for the constitution of smaller units of social organization, and Madison, in the tenth chapter of the Federalist, extends this argument by enshrining the separation of powers as an institutional set of firewalls that would block the expansion of social action beyond the point where it would be so weakened as to no longer be viable as a means of social coherence. Without arguing for the relative efficacy of the Humean-Madisonian solution, these responses locate a central paradox in sensibilitarian claims: if the mark of a postabsolutist society is its removal of institutional hedges and dedication to the unimpeded flow of commercial and collective exchanges, then what will regulate the new order? As the aristocratic order based on blood status became contested by the ideal of sociability, the latter’s proponents became haunted by the fear either of not having fully expunged the old order or of inscribing new errors into the system. If the bourgeois subject gains establishment by performing merit learned by watching the play of sensible collective behavior, then

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what happens if an unrecognized vice, like self-interest, enters the mirrorhouse of social emulation where it will be instantaneously replicated? Since publicists had demanded the removal of Leviathan’s interventionist oversight, they left themselves without any supervising Maxwell’s demon that could filter out unwanted actions. Once having delegitimized the notion of superior regulation, the period’s writers responded by continually insisting on the need for balance and equipoise within the socially reflexive body. The tenuousness of these claims can be seen by how frequently different discursive realms were called on to conceptualize the problem in their own terms to see if they could think through and resolve the problem. We can group different discursive conversations, like those on the conditions leading to the sociopolitical corruption of republics (i.e., Gibbons, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire), the cheapening of reason through the proliferation of cheaply made and available print material, and luxury’s derangement of commercial consumption, as analogous attempts to both articulate and displace the paradox, often through a moralizing lexicon of oppositions (virtue against vice; proactive masculinity versus passive effeminacy and “slavishness”; sensibility versus passion).75 In retrospect, the exemplary luxury debate about vicious overconsumption can be recognized as an attempt to conceptualize the commercial market’s mismatch between supply and demand that causes inflationary or deflationary trends and weakens the price of money. Eighteenth-century economists struggled to clarify the market’s dynamics because they chose to do so as a problem of dysfunctional passions, rather than endogamous profiteering and business cycles, since (aristocratic) passions were argued as reformable through a proper (bourgeois) administration of bodily behavior. As economists, like Smith, confronted the mercantilist system’s hoarding and the aristocratic realm’s large number of unproductive service workers as a problem of underconsumption, they failed to broach the problem of the price-setting market as itself intrinsically disruptive. Not until Malthus abandoned the idea of social harmony as a natural default would economic theorists be able to postulate the crisis of overproduction as an intrinsic feature of the capitalist market’s cyclicality. Even without a clear sense of the possibility that damaging overproduction was intrinsic to the system, the period’s writers sensed the need for control

75. Paul Keen, The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

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mechanisms, as seen with their florid obsession with parainstitutional mechanisms and manners. One such device would be the promotion of stoicism and rational sentiment. The period’s writers’ mutual celebration of the display of sensibility and its suppression by stoic self-regulation is initially hard to perceive as belonging to a coherent agenda. Yet stoicism is meant to act as a break on sentiment by preserving the energies of sympathy before they are too quickly dissolved, and bourgeois calls for stoic emotional response help control the overly touchy realization by the middle classes that they were the real cause of social disruption and human trauma throughout the Atlantic. Another more widespread solution to sensibility’s possible failure came with the rise of sentimental narrative and, to a lesser degree, sentimental visual forms that seek to resolve the problem of sensibility’s inverse relation to space. To compensate for the absence of intimate proximity inherent in the expanding long-distance market, the group associated with the sensibilitysensation-slavery complex would deploy stock literary representations to incite the reader’s physical response (of tears, heated compulsion to keep reading, etc.) that might stimulate the regulating somatic effects that would otherwise result from close-quarters sociability. In lieu of face-to-face encounters, sentimental narratives act as a prosthetic technology over longdistance, a pharmaceutical surrogate that reinscribes the reader’s proper behavior in the absence of other devices so as to enable the market’s continued outward growth. The sentimental narrative’s fulsome calls for emotional response, even despite the sheer boredom caused by reading repetitive and artless narratives, especially of the epistolary variety, is purposively created to incite and then channel the reader’s responses. Sentimental tales are both exciting and enervating to read because they were designed to incite both a sensibilitarian response and a prescriptive diminution of that response. Rather than the print medium acting as a form of disembodiment, sentimental fiction operates as a mode of surrogate embodiment as it ensconces the reader within the aestheticocultural conditions of sensible manners to enable long-distance commercial trade. After all, what better activity to do when discussing a novel then to do so over tea, and what better topic of conversation during a group moment of coffee consumption than sharing opinions about the latest novel? The corporealized nature of sentimental narratives emerges as a slightly belated response to the concerns by the period’s groups for a collective regulator during a time when other forms of institutionality were denounced as coercive. This sentimental discipline was acceptable because its imposition of

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order appears innocent of premeditation, consensual, and short-lived. In actuality, it was none of these, but the social fiction of sentimental narratives’ uselessness, bannered in so many antinovelistic comments, had a purpose. Because sentiment was, in the first instance, corrective and tutelary, the medium also became one of the few permissible sites for registering bourgeois anxiety about the fragility of its ascent. The ur-sentimental tale is one about female “virtue in distress” because the seduction narrative codified bourgeois fears that it would not be able to manage its balancing act as a third way between the old estates of the church and court, on one side, and plebeians, on the other. Because virtue and vice were frequently engendered as masculinity and effeminacy, the felt contradictions with this phase of capitalism found apt expression in the stock figure of young womanhood threatened by the quasi-aristocratic rake or heartless plebeians. Male bourgeois readers’ anxiety at the world they were otherwise busy establishing became articulated through cross-gendering tales, which convey their own fears about personal disestablishment and bourgeois class disintegration. The “Negro Trade” asks its readers to imagine female distress, but mainly as a means of redirecting the male reader’s own fears about slavery, sensation, and sensibility. Sentimental fiction as a dominant literary form does not simply reflect the Atlantic world-system, it plugs the holes that would otherwise eviscerate its energies. The Atlantic world-system depends on the interplay of these four elements to form its geoculture. From this context comes the moment of the early American novel.

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the re-export republic and the rise of the early american novel

The transformation of Western European society through the long eighteenth century from early modern political, juridical, belief, and exchange systems to modern ones ends with the enlargement and incipient consolidation of two classes: the bourgeoisie and an urban, provincial, and colonial proletariat formed from a collection of previously discrete or loosely affiliated groups. This sociogenesis occurs through a geoculture of sensibility, sensation, slavery, and sentimentality, which belongs to an Atlantic world-system dominated by the British and French imperial nation-states. The expansive phase of this long wave of political economy peaks in the mid-1700s as Britain and France confront each other for control of global resources. While Britain won the first round with the result of the Seven Years’ War, it did not do so decisively enough to prevent both nation-states, and by extension the world-system, from falling into a contractive phase from the 1760s to the 1790s.1 As neither the British nor the French were able to recover easily from the war’s costs, the next three decades saw various attempts by both powers to regain profitability through a variety of internal social and political reorganizations. The inconclusive result of the midcentury conflict ultimately led to a rematch in the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars of the early 1790s and mid-1810s, a period that marks the transition to an ensuing, now clearly British-led configuration of the world-system and renewed expansive economic phase. The pressures created in the formal restructuring of world-systemic cycles and passage from a depressive to an expansive phase during the 1790s are immediately registered in the world-system’s homeostatic buffer zones, the Atlantic semiperipheries.

1. Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 263; Frank, World Accumulation, 1492 –1789 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 108.

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Because the semiperipheries articulate the commodity chains between the core and periphery, these contact zones are sites of complex social and cultural transvaluations as they negotiate the exchange of the core’s credit for the periphery’s labor-power through the monetarization and materialization of value in tangible commodities. Consequently, these spheres are where new cultural forms emerge or become amplified as a product of their channeled circulation of social energies, particularly in times of phase change when the pressure to maintain macrosystemic integrity dramatically increases. Economic conflicts rarely dictate or simply predetermine cultural representations. They do, however, project a variety of tensions and contradictions into a social field composed by a constellation of customary and institutionalized labor relations, household arrangements, corporate practices, and status identities of region, kinship, and religion. The conjuncture of these manifold alterations becomes manifested in cultural commodities, like novels, that reflect and respond to ongoing social fluctuations. For the American case, it would be overly simplistic to say that the early American novel is simply the transcription of the Franco-British conflict over the Atlantic system and its linked events, like the French and Haitian revolutions. Yet the effects of these antagonisms do catalyze a series of reactions that sediment new cultural formations, like fictional prose, as a medium of enunciating global changes in the Atlantic world-system. Because the creation of new modes of expression and symbolism requires tremendous cultural labor, which nascent social groups can rarely afford in times of large-scale transition, given that they lack the resource advantage of traditional institutions, semiperipheral agents typically invoke the preexisting geocultural elements that constitute the terms of a fading world-system as their syntax of representation within times of systemic reorganization. These quasi-marginal groups appropriate already present elements not because these symbolic codes are manifestations of the core’s authority, but because the ongoing breakup of a long-held global order means that core authorities no longer tightly control the manner in which these symbolic codes are used. As codes become increasingly up for grabs, noncore subjects can use the gap between the fading order and their own current interests to reconstitute these figurations as a structure of feeling that awkwardly marks out their emerging social position. If the transformations in the 1790s United States encouraged Americans to inhabit the already established, but also slightly shabby, form of the Anglo-French novel,

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they did so as a means of telegraphing their aspirations and anxieties about the modernity of a newly emerging order and not as the belated impression of developmental trajectory dictated by imperial hierarchies. Yet while the broad eighteenth-century geoculture acts as the context for Americans to express new social actions in the transition between two larger worldsystemic phases, the conditions of the early American novel’s emergence lie with a more time-specific register.

The Re-Export Republic: The Caribbean Carrying Trade and American Modernity The political independence of the United States from Great Britain did not translate into actual increased autonomy due to the uninterrupted continuation of its economic subordination. Throughout the eighteenth century, the British American colonies, particularly New England, were shaped by the boom-bust cycles of English imperial militarism. When Franco-British colonial wars were afoot, ship construction contracts and associated military expenditures flushed currency and credit through the provinces. When these wars ended, the American regional economies collapsed. Merchants lost the trade and profits that belligerent adventures brought to the colonies and plebeian hardship increased as veterans returned looking for absent work.2 The typical pattern of postwar contraction was even worse after independence, and “the decade from 1783 to 1793 [was] one of the dreariest in the annals of American commerce.”3 The American states were burdened with war reconstruction costs that could not be partially redeemed by imperial agencies or relieved by taxing domestic merchants, who likewise had liquidity problems. Without their former access to London’s financial and insurance brokers, American merchants had difficulty raising capital, especially as their former English counterparts were now their competitors. An unfavorable balance of trade emerged in the mid-1780s as British merchants dumped goods, which had been stockpiled through the war years, through port vendue 2. Gary Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979). 3. Harold F. Williamson, ed., The Growth of the American Economy (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1944), 212.

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direct sales, which made for trade imbalances as middlemen American export brokers were removed from the profit equation.4 Consequently, American exports to Britain in 1790 were a third less than they had averaged in the six years before 1779.5 Americans additionally faced restrictive British trade policies, akin to the earlier Navigation Acts, which excluded them from the profitable West Indies trade and, to a lesser extent, one in Canadian staples.6 Because the Caribbean islands depended on American staples for their sustenance, a vicious cycle resulted that generally undermined the Anglophone Atlantic’s interregional output and trade flows.7 After Britain outlawed in 1783 the export of U.S. fish, beef, and pork to the British West Indies, even when carried in British ships, 15,000 slaves in Jamaica and Barbados died of starvation over the next four years, increasing planters’ production costs by the need to purchase more captive African labor.8 John Adams wrote then that the West Indies “can neither do without us, nor we without them.”9 Other American exports failed to make up for the lost domestic and Caribbean trade. The profitable tobacco trade, which represented one-third of all U.S. export values before the Revolution, was flat during the 1780s, and staples, like wheat and flour, either showed no upward trend or, like rice, declined.10 With a constrained export trade and without a vibrant domestic one, the postindependence American economy was functionally stymied. Without a stable credit guarantor in the shape of a banking system backed by a centralized state, the confederated states faced endemic capital shortages, which were further aggravated by continuing labor shortages, despite rapid 4. James Blaine Walker, The Epic of American Industry (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949), 41; Rolla Milton Tryon, Household Manufactures in the United States, 1640 –1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1917), 124. 5. Ross M. Robertson, History of the American Economy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), 239. 6. Douglass C. North, The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790 –1860 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), 19, 20. 7. “Between 1768 and 1772, New England shipped 99 percent of its livestock exports, 88 percent of its wood, and 79 percent of its flour and grain to the British West Indies.” Stephen J. Hornsby, British Atlantic, American Frontier: Spaces of Power in Early Modern British America (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2005), 135. 8. Katharine Coman, The Industrial History of the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1910), 114; F. Lee Benns, The American Struggle for the British West India Carrying-Trade, 1815 –1830 (Bloomington: Indiana University Studies, 1923), 10. 9. Cathy Matson, “The Revolution, the Constitution, and the New Nation,” in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States: The Colonial Era, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 363– 400, 374. 10. North, Economic Growth of the United States, 19.

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population growth, that left labor costs high.11 The erosion of international trade and the ensuing domestic stagnation bankrupted many merchants and resulted in a depression that spread throughout the population. Benjamin Rush noted the stalled development of Philadelphia’s housing and construction during the postwar bust as 1,000 houses were left vacant and bricklayers, house carpenters, mechanics, and other common laborers, like those in cartage, became unemployed. Property values fell by 75 percent in a dozen years, leading to decreased rent revenues, vagrancy for the newly unemployed, and the need for capital-dampening tax raises to service the rising demand for welfare relief.12 The 1780s economic hardship also created political costs. As the struggling New England merchants, excluded from the West Indies trade and in need of specie, turned their attention to domestic debt collection as a compensatory source of money, they made confrontations with hinterland farmers, like Shays’s Rebellion, nearly inevitable.13 Economic conditions began shaking the new nation apart. Decades of colonial and postcolonial underdevelopment were dramatically erased in the 1790s when the United States turned its semiperipherality into locational advantage. As the competing British and revolutionary French regimes sought to undermine each other’s supply chains, they placed embargoes on each other’s oceanic trade. Under the terms of these embargoes, however, Caribbean produce from the colonies of both imperial powers could be legally shipped to American ports, where they would be classified as trade from a neutral power, and then re-exported across the Atlantic, theoretically safe from confiscation. Americans discovered that they were suddenly granted historically unprecedented access to and control over the Caribbean’s lucrative commodities of sensational taste when the French National Convention in February 1793 declared the ports of their West Indies colonies open and free from tariffs to Americans.14 Fearing that the United States would be drawn into the French sphere of influence, the British simply abandoned enforcing prohibitions against Americans trading in the West Indies.15

11. Ibid., 23. 12. Carl Binger, Revolutionary Doctor: Benjamin Rush, 1746 –1813 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), 175. 13. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600–1750 (New York: Academic Press, 1980), 238. 14. Anna Cornelia Clauder, American Commerce as Affected by the Wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon, 1793–1812 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1932), 28. 15. Stuart Bruchey, Enterprise: The Dynamic Economy of a Free People (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 145; Benns, American Struggle, 18.

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The opening of Caribbean ports for re-export, particularly those of the French islands, had an immediate and astonishing effect. Domestic exports doubled between 1790 and 1807, but “re-exports grew from $300,000 in 1790 to $59,643,558 during the same period.”16 Between 1790 and 1807 the tonnage of American foreign commerce went from 127,000 to 1,098,000, and total foreign trade jumped from $43 million to $246 million. The United States economy shifted overwhelmingly to re-export as the carrying trade’s percentage of the nation’s total commerce went from 24 percent in 1789 to 92 percent by the century’s end.17 The primary commodities trafficked in re-export were the goods of sensation. Units of re-exported sugar went from 74.5 thousand in 1791 to 78.8 million in 1799; units of coffee from slightly less than a million in 1791 to 32 million in 1799 (peaking at 62.4 million in 1796); and bohea tea from 5.7 thousand pounds in 1791 to slightly less than a million in 1800.18 As Americans became significant brokers to England and Europe of the hotly desired Caribbean commodities of sugar, coffee, tea, and cocoa, they pocketed fabulous profits in a highly compressed time. Freed from having to invest in production, like the expenditures incurred with the forced importation of African slaves and the fixed capital of the plantation’s processing apparatus, or pay for distribution, like expensive land transportation through continental Europe and England, a set of American merchants reaped the rewards of brokering highly profitable goods. Writing in 1961, firmly within the post –World War II boom, North notes says that “1793–1808 were years of unequaled prosperity” in the American economy, especially in the 1790s, which produced a “higher per capita income . . . than at any subsequent decade until the mid-nineteenth century . . . far above the previous or subsequent years.”19 As the May 9, 1795 issue of the Columbian Centinel gleefully exclaimed: “The affairs of Europe are certainly of less and less consequence to us in a political point of view; in a commercial,

16. North, Economic Growth of the United States, 25. 17. James Blaine Walker, The Epic of American Industry (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949), 60. 18. Timothy Pitkin, A Statistical View of the Commerce of the United States (Hartford: Charles Hosmer, 1816), 56 – 69; Clauder, American Commerce, 72 –75. 19. North, Economic Growth of the United States, 53, 53n; Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 2: The Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 22.

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they rain riches upon us; and it is as much as we can do to find dishes to catch the golden showers.”20 Caribbean re-export was by no means a new phenomenon. Indeed, the British American colonial economy not only depended on it, but the prerevolutionary political history of American contention over various navigation acts before independence was mainly about rights to broker Caribbean goods. Yet the American traffic in these commodities was highly regulated and constrained. The conditions created by re-export shot far beyond what had been a much smaller volume of licit and illicit trade by Americans with the Caribbean during most of the eighteenth century, and it gave Americans access to all the Caribbean islands at once in ways that none of the imperial European powers themselves had ever received. As Americans took control of the sensational traffic in the Atlantic system, the traditional ligatures of British influence on American trade declined swiftly. The number of British ships entering New York dropped from 40 in 1792 to 22 in 1793 and 17 in the following year. In 1789 British tonnage to America was 72,000, while Americans shipped only 21,000 tons to Britain. By 1800, British tonnage to the United States was only 14,000 as America sent 110,000 tons to Britain.21 Furthermore, it was also increasingly American ships that carried the United States’ foreign trade, rather than British bottoms: “in 1790 American ships carried only 40.5 percent of all goods in transit in the Union’s foreign trade.” By 1793, it was 79.5 percent, and 90 percent in 1795.22 Americans not only became the largest shipper of goods to the British West Indies, they also carried a larger number of Britain’s foreign export to continental Europe.23 The result of the increased 20. Walter Buckingham Smith and Arthur Harrison Cole, Fluctuations in American Business, 1790–1860 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935), 15. Goldin and Lewis admit that 1793– 96 created a “fairly rapid increase in income,” but seek to diminish the impact of the re-export trade based on the limited aggregate income increase. The point is that the carrying trade provided regionally concentrated, not nationally aggregate, benefits in the period. They do acknowledge that these benefits created the foundation for the growth of the national economy in the new century. Claudia D. Goldin and Frank D. Lewis, “The Role of Exports in American Economic Growth During the Napoleonic Wars, 1793–1807,” Explorations in Economic History 17 (1980): 6 –25. 21. Clauder, American Commerce, 26. 22. Curtis P. Nettels, The Emergence of a National Economy, 1775 –1815 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962), 234. 23. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 1: The Colonial Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 395; Benns, American Struggle, 20.

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self-sufficiency by American merchants meant that in the 1790s “in proportion to population, the United States had already taken rank as the most commercial nation” in the world.24 Far more significant than the reversal of fortune between the United States and Britain was the opening of Haitian ports to American merchants. When the National Convention allowed Americans to trade in Haiti, the source of a third of France’s total foreign trade, they gave them a de facto monopoly over the trade of the globe’s most profitable zone of production.25 The new avenues to the French sugar islands meant that American not only gained the benefit of trading in the sensational goods with a region that was previously difficult to access, they gained this benefit precisely at the moment when the French plantations were both producing more sugar and more profitably than the increasingly depleted British ones.26 After 1763, French sugar cost 20 percent less to produce than British sugar, even while the French colonies produced five times as much as the British ones.27 In the 1780s, French-controlled islands produced two-thirds of the global output, and during the 1790s, the price of Haitian coffee on the European markets nearly doubled.28 It is not surprising that most of the energy for re-export was directed to the French islands. Even amidst the height of the Haitian Revolution’s violence, American merchants rushed into the vacuum to trade with the “Black Jacobins” as quickly as possible.29 24. Bishop J. Leander, A History of American Manufacturers: From 1608 –1860 (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966), 48. 25. Thomas O. Ott, The Haitian Revolution, 1789 –1804 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1973), 6; Michael Zuckerman, “The Power of Blackness: Thomas Jefferson and the Revolution in San Domingue,” in Almost Chosen People: Oblique Biographies in the American Grain (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 175–218. 26. Dale W. Tomich, Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar: Martinique and the World Economy, 1830–1848 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 23; Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730–1840 (New York: Academic Press, 1988), 230. British sugar production increased during the time but only by squeezing the land harder in ways that produced lower yields. Coffee imports similarly shifted to the French West Indies. By 1802 only one-ninth of the value of coffee imports came from the British islands. Michelle Craig McDonald, “The Chance of the Moment: Coffee and the New West Indies Commodities Trade,” William and Mary Quarterly 62, no. 3 (2005): 441–72, 444. 27. Frank, World Accumulation, 181. 28. Steven Topik, “The Integration of the World Coffee Market,” in The Global Coffee Economy in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, 1500 –1989, ed. William Gervase Clarence-Smith and Steven Topik (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 21– 49. 29. James Alexander Dun, “‘What Avenues of Commerce, Will You, Americans, Not Explore!’ Commercial Philadelphia’s Vantage onto the Early Haitian Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 62, no. 3 (July 2005): 473–504. C. L. R. James describes one support the re-export traders

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Analyzing the mercantile shipping records of Oliver and Thompson, Bruchey notes that while only one of the firm’s ships went to Santo Domingo in 1792, the number went up to six between May 1793 and June 1794. In the following two years, the firm’s ships went to Haiti “no less than 27 times, 16 of them in 1795. . . . Oliver & Thompson pursued the Santo Domingo trade with such vigor as to give the impression that their schooners had barely sufficient time to unload their coffee cargoes in Baltimore before whisking off for another.”30 No aspect of the early American Republic has gone so underrecognized as the importance of Haitian trade to the United States and how the commercial interests that profited from it continually supported the black revolution, even including the shipping of guns and powder to the insurgents, on the basis that a Haiti free from French imperial control would be structurally dependent on American naval commerce and financial instruments.31 Despite the ruling Federalist Party’s fear of social upheaval and southern slave-owners’ anxiety about armed slaves, mid- and southern-Atlantic merchants were eager to see the Haitian Revolution succeed and willingly supplied whatever tangible support they could as a means of ensuring their access to sugar and coffee plantations. The re-export trade’s opening of American access to the British and French imperial Caribbean not only placed Americans in a suddenly privileged position with regards to British and French domains, but also to the Spanish-controlled regions. Shipping from Philadelphia to Havana increased during the 1790s, especially as Spanish trade was opened to neutrals in 1797, alongside Cuba’s own sugar revolution. Like the other islands, Cuba became dependent on the United States for foodstuffs paid for in exchange for re-export trade.32 Cuba also offered one other attractive feature as Havana

gave to the Haitian Revolution. “On October 1804 [Dessalines] had himself crowned Emperor. Private merchants of Philadelphia presented him with the crown, brought on the American boat the Connecticut, his coronation robes reached Haiti from Jamaica on an English frigate from London. . . . Thus the Negro monarch entered into his inheritance, tailored and valeted by English and American capitalists.” C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Random House, 1963), 370. 30. Stuart Bruchey, Robert Oliver, Merchant of Baltimore, 1783 –1819 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1956), 83. 30. Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 224–25; Tim Matthewson, Pro-Slavery Foreign Policy (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003). 32. Linda K. Salvucci, “Supply, Demand, and the Making of a Market: Philadelphia and Havana at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century,” in Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture,

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“received regular influxes of hard coin from the Viceroyalty of New Spain and it is clear that hundreds of thousands of these pesos flowed northward annually.”33 The events of the 1790s thus gave Americans the dual benefits of the Anglo-French system of sensational trades and the prior Spanish one of specie. Re-export profits transformed the United States’ economic and social contours in ways that nation-state formation had failed to do. In the first instance, the Caribbean trade probably ensured the Republic’s survival as a political entity. Without the accrued advantages that re-export delivered, it is highly conceivable that the nation-state form of the United States might not have survived the external pressures of European imperial predations or the endogamous tensions of regional fragmentation resulting from prolonged conditions of economic depression. As Americans achieved monopolylike conditions over the trading of the most profitable commodity chains extant in the circumatlantic world-system, they finally reversed American economic inferiority with British and continental Europe. The modern shape of the United States emerges throughout the 1790s, and economic, rather than political, history explains this transformation. Taussig correctly argues that 1789 “marks no such epoch in economic as it does in political history,” but he might have as easily reversed the statement regarding the economic boom of the 1790s: we have no political marker to indicate the substantive change in the economic flows and its effects on American society.34 Because the period’s political history has often been divorced from economic considerations, the decade’s actual dynamics have been mystified either to personify them as the clash of individuals or to abstract them through a narrative about the rise of political parties. Yet the heuristic of conflict among political party leaders poorly represents the actual alignments of social interests afoot in the period. Due to re-export’s profitability, a ship’s investment costs could be typically amortized after one or two voyages, since a Caribbean carrying trade voyage could mean a nearly 200 percent profit. American merchants were consequently highly sensitive and immediately responsive to anything that threatened or delayed carrying

and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650–1850, ed. Franklin W. Knight and Peggy K. Liss (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 40 –57, 49 –50. 33. Ibid., 45. 34. Frank William Taussig, “The Tariff History of the United States,” in Selections from the Economic History of the United States, 1765 –1860, ed. Guy Stevens Callender (Boston: Ginn, 1909), 447.

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trade ships from completing their trade circuits as mercantile interests in the Caribbean trade continually shaped American political events.35 The politicodiplomatic history of the 1790s is routinely narrated as the conflict regarding the negotiations over foreign trade relations, like Jay’s Treaty and the XYZ affair, but the main point of these debates has been obscured when presented as a matter of partisan conflict between Federalists and Democrat-Republicans or filtered through a language of liberalism and republicanism. The main point of dissatisfaction with Jay’s Treaty was less over any perceived Federalist Anglophilia and subordination to British aura, than its specific failure to lift prohibitions against American shipping in the West Indies and its willingness to abandon the American right to access the ripe profits involved in the re-export trade.36 Jay’s Treaty fundamentally mistook the level of mercantile anger at the British structuring of American commercial underdevelopment after political independence, and even a Federalist-dominated U.S. Senate angrily struck out the article excluding American ships from British West Indies ports before ratifying the treaty.37 Similarly, the abstract concerns about the principles of oceanic neutrality mattered less for American merchants in the XYZ affair than the perceived threats to the neutrality clauses on which re-export depended. By focusing too literally on the matter of treaties, we falsely assume that the legality ratified by documents reflects actual material reality. All throughout the eighteenth century a middle-class variety of popular illegality occurred in matters of commerce. For instance, the value of Spain’s granting of the Asiento to Britain rested less in its provision for the English legal right to traffic in a small number of Africans than for how this limited legality provided an alibi for the vastly larger illicit smuggling trade in human flesh. The same is true for American involvement in the profits of the Caribbean trade, where the letter of the law was very liberally interpreted. Clauder explains that although “the British West Indies were ordinarily closed to American vessels, the governors of the island were authorized to open their ports to Americans in times of emergency. Thereupon . . . famines and tornadoes seem to have occurred with alarming 35. Williamson, Growth, 214; François Crouzet, “America and the Crisis of the British Imperial Economy, 1803–1807,” in The Early Modern Atlantic Economy, ed. John J. McCusker and Kenneth Morgan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 278 –315, 304. Robert Greenhalgh Albion, Sea Lanes in Wartime: The American Experience, 1775 –1945 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1968), 69. 36. Benns, American Struggle, 17–18. 37. Pitkin, Statistical View, 179; Bruchey, Enterprise, 145.

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frequency.”38 Even with the Jay Treaty’s unfavorable ruling for American ships, there seems to have been widespread tacit noncompliance.39 Throughout the decade, the relative security for shipping often wavered, as did threats of piracy, but none of these vagaries prevented merchants in the 1790s from pursuing lucrative shipping. Despite vocal complaints by merchants about occasional seizures of American ships by British and French belligerents, “American foreign trade . . . instead of being crippled and diminished actually expanded.”40 American merchants often forged letters of passage for Caribbean and Mediterranean trade or had ship captains carry alternative letters of instruction that could be shown to either the French or the English inspectors as circumstances might require.41 Trade with Haiti was willfully disguised as American customs officials often did not differentiate what specific islands the goods came from when filling out their records, and ships often traveled to Haiti with the alibi of helping white refugees but returned instead with sugar and coffee in their holds.42 If re-export is removed from consideration, none of the period’s political maneuvering about foreign relations can ever be made wholly comprehensible, since the matter of re-export is the often unsaid, because so obvious, key to most of the partisan skirmishes, less for how it personally involves political agents than for how it affects the social interests that these agents represented. Yet the social experience that re-export creates is not one that can be gleaned from the period’s political letters, since the most affected interests were not represented in these scripts. The absolutely vital facet of the Federalist Party’s decline throughout the 1790s, even as it occupied the presidency, comes from how its political manifestos divorced the party from the economic interests of a sizable faction of merchants who ought to have been the Federalists’ core constituency. The Francophobia of high Federalist politicians did not sit well with re-export merchants enthusiastic about becoming enriched by the new possibilities of trade with regions of the French empire. The more Federalist politicians foamed about the French, the more an increasingly disgruntled group of re-export traders and their associates either stopped actively supporting the Federalists or

38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

Clauder, American Commerce, 23. Albion, Sea Lanes in Wartime, 76; Bruchey, Robert Oliver, 79. Clauder, American Commerce, 67; Albion, Sea Lanes in Wartime, 76. Bruchey, Robert Oliver, 60; Clauder, American Commerce, 42. McDonald, “The Chance of the Moment, 441–72.

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unexpectedly veered toward a tacit support of Democrat-Republicans, who had a greater tolerance with French concerns. Given the Jeffersonian suspicion of commerce versus the Federalist Hamiltonian support of credit, this was no automatic affinity, but Federalist hostility to foreign engagement alienated the carrying trade merchants. On the other hand, there is no simple division within the parties regarding the black uprising in Haiti. The importance of Haitian commerce forced the Federalists to shift their policy in the last years of the decade in support of the insurgents, while Jefferson’s Virginian attitudes about race meant that he turned against support for Haiti’s freedom in spite of his party’s mid-Atlantic mercantile factors.43 In general, responses to Haiti scrambled the coherence of both political parties’ internal alliances in ways that made these institutions less able to magnetize and contain the energies generated by the re-export trade. To understand the 1790s passage, then, we need to move beyond our focus on consecrated political elites in favor of the social, economic, and cultural effects of re-export.

The Re-Export Republic’s Social Transformations The sudden influx of 1790s re-export wealth radically transformed the United States in multiple, interlocking ways. As the carrying trade allowed the United States as a national unit to challenge its subordination within the Atlantic world-system, its benefits flowed throughout the United States in highly uneven ways, and this imbalance created the first fundamental revolution of social cartographies within America since its initial colonization. Re-export accelerated and heightened urban-regional differentiation as it shifted power geometries away from the traditional poles of New England and the Virginian-Carolinian South and toward the locational and entrepreneurial advantage of the eastern seaboard harbor towns. Re-export’s traffic became mainly concentrated in the United States’ four largest (seaboard) cities: New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and to a far lesser degree, Boston.44 Charleston, as one of the main ports used for the inflow of the slave trade, was less involved with the carrying trade’s traffic, since

43. Tim Matthewson, Pro-Slavery Foreign Policy (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003); Zuckerman, “The Power of Blackness,” 175–218. 44. Seymour E. Harris, ed., American Economic History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961), 184.

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its harbor resources were already dedicated to the flesh trade, and consequently its employment-driven population growth, as an index of economic development, was less than the other urban centers in the period.45 The rise of a mid- and southern-Atlantic harbor continuum came alongside the erosion of traditional power centers. By the late 1780s and early 1790s, the Virginian-Carolinian South was in the awkward position of being overtaken by the North in terms of economic worth for the first time as the southern regions were stuck with an increasingly obsolete monocultural staple economy.46 With farmed-out fields (due to overintensive agriculture), a series of bad crops in the late 1780s (from drought, storm, and frost), and decreasing global demand during the 1790s for the products of their farming, the South, as Nettles points out, “urgently needed a new crop. The limitations of rice, indigo, and sea-island cotton were matched by the troubles that beset the tobacco planters of the upper South.”47 North argues that since “the growing dilemma of the South was that the demand for its traditional export staples was no longer increasing and its heavy capital investment was in slaves,” the region had to find a solution within the terms dictated by its preexisting fixed capital investments. “The concerted search for new export staples and the experiments with cotton all reflect the problems of the region; invention of the cotton gin can be viewed as a response to the dilemma rather than as an independent accidental development.”48 The cotton gin led to a spatial rearrangement of the South as it spurred the use of a different kind of cotton and increased the scale of its production. Cotton production had previously been limited to “a narrow coastal strip in Georgia and South Carolina, where an easily processed long-staple variety could be grown.” The gin, however, allowed for a short-staple variety to be harvested, which was of better quality, more durable, and could be grown in fields wider than those available in the coastal regions.49 The change in staple variety led to the “geographical spread of cotton-growing from the Atlantic seaboard into the Deep South along a climatic belt in which there was a minimum of 200 frostless days and sufficient rain-fall 45. North, Economic Growth of the United States, 52. 46. Joyce Oldham Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 41; John A. Agnew, The United States in the World-Economy: A Regional Geography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 36. 47. Nettels, Emergence, 184. 48. North, Economic Growth of the United States, 52. 49. Agnew, United States in the World-Economy, 101.

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for a successful cotton crop.”50 The provincialization of cotton drew southern producers further away from the nautical lanes of re-export, since largefield production depended on the massification of slave labor, which could function only at a distance from the coastal escape routes. This turn away from the re-export littoral placed the southern regions in what would be a long-lasting path of structural underdevelopment, by subordinating their cotton-slave economy to British and northern industrial and financial concerns. The cotton gin undoubtedly revolutionized the southern economy, but the full benefits of this shift did not really occur until slightly later in the nineteenth century.51 The era of “King Cotton” had to wait until northern and British capital began to be directed toward building textile manufactories, a move that was delayed until the last phases of the Napoleonic wars and re-export’s decline. As long as fabulous profits were available through re-export, there was less incentive to shift capital investment to other ventures. Inland cotton’s rise in the 1790s, alongside the degradation of the older staples of rice and tobacco, inaugurates a “southern difference” as it splits apart the southern regions of economic and political power. Throughout the eighteenth century, the British American colonies remained primarily status-driven, caste-like societies in which economic and political power was transitive and tautological. Cotton’s conglomeration of slave labor in the South’s inland differentiated the groups of political and cultural southern elites (primarily Virginian) from the rising economic factions of the antebellum Deep South, who abandoned a paternalist model of slavery in favor of a more class-like one, where slaves were simply units of production. The political economy of the new South’s interiorization further aggravated the finances of an already overdrawn traditional coastal planter elite, who increasingly had to compete with other inland southerners for credit and venture capital.52 Status-driven Virginia increasingly became a place of vestigial importance that had to rely on its swiftly diminishing political resources lest it be overtaken by the hinterland Deep South. The Virginian elite had previously

50. Ibid., 102. 51. Alfred Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 19 –20. Cotton output increases from 3,000 bales in 1790 to 178,000 in 1810, but this still pales before the 1850 bale count of 4,500,000. Agnew, United States in the World-Economy, 101–2. 52. North, Economic Growth of the United States, 53.

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used its economic power to forge a regional alliance with New England in the push to independence and constitutional debates. Throughout the 1790s, the shift in southern economies meant that a swiftly impoverishing Virginian elite had to gamble on its increasingly residual status through a mode of “culturally invested” political positions even as it was rapidly losing the economic importance that had buttressed its political pronouncements in the first instance. The grandiose rhetoric of Virginian politicians at this time often seems hyperbolic precisely because it was inflationary, an overproduction of cultural signifiers as a means of masking a diminishing cache of power that would validate discourse. Virginian elites continued to play an important role in the political arenas, but they did so increasingly aware of their deflating authority with regards the North and within the South. As Virginians lost their financial eminence to inland cotton producers, they increasingly had to compromise by aligning themselves with other new economic forces, like those in New York, before ultimately capitulating later in the nineteenth century to the Deep South. The creation of the Democrat-Republican party, as an alliance between Virginian elites (Jefferson, Madison) and rising Middle Atlantic commercial ones (Burr, Clinton), produces paradoxical policy decisions throughout Jefferson’s administration. The fusion is often considered a tactical move by Virginia as a means of outflanking their traditional antagonists, the New Englanders, by finding alternative northern allies. Less perceived is that this coalition was also a Virginian-Carolinian holding mechanism against the rising economic power of the hinterland South, which at that point had not yet developed skilled political operatives or the self-confidence to dictate policy positions. Nonetheless, the fall of the older staples meant that the South’s center of influence began to shift to new regional interests who had little experience with or stake in the social arrangements of independence and the phases of 1780s constitutionality. Re-export, by itself, did not create the roots of the colonial South’s crisis, but it amplified its sociocartographic break by exponentially revealing the increasing disparity of wealth between the North and the South. This gap helped stoke the drive for the solution of inland cotton that began to split the Deep South from the coastal one. The functional secession of the “new” antebellum South from the predicates of the colonial standing order meant that the Virginian-Carolinians were likewise less able to prevent a from a slightly more northern secession as South-Atlantic Baltimore tended

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to join the mid-Atlantic harbors in activity. The internal dislocation of previously centralized regional authority in the South is mirrored in the North during the 1790s. The later entente cordiale between an elderly Adams and Jefferson transpires because the similar weakness of the regional interests that they represent drew the old antagonists together in dismay. For like Virginia, Boston and New England was diminishing as an economic force by the late eighteenth century.

The Demise of New England and the Rise of the Mid-Atlantic As with the South, re-export enacts a similar geopolitical shift in the North as the carrying trade’s gains were uneven in the North as Boston lagged behind other ports. Boston’s difficult harbor, lack of hinterland distribution network that could exchange food staples for oceanic goods, and distance from the Caribbean, which made for longer capital return cycles, placed it at competitive disadvantage to the mid- and southern-Atlantic cities of New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. While New York’s value of exports increased from $2.53 million to $18.72 million between 1792 and 1799, Massachusetts experienced a comparatively slower rate as its trade went from $2.89 million to $11.42 million.53 Boston’s proximity to Canadian timber and fisheries had rewarded it before independence as a British depot and ship construction site during the decades of confrontation with French Canada.54 As the Atlantic economy shifted shape after the Seven Years’ War in ways that no longer emphasized the North Atlantic theater, Boston’s place within a shipping circuit of decreasing importance proved to be a disadvantage.55 Like Virginia, Boston’s story is one of long structural decline throughout the eighteenth century, but the disparity between it and other regions sharply widened as a result of the re-export trade. Tied to their trade, the mid- and southern-Atlantic cities grew at Boston’s expense, as other harbor towns received immigrants from both their own backcountry and New England’s. In the space of the two decades on either side 53. Pitkin, Statistical View, 51–52. 54. Agnew, United States in the World-Economy, 28. 55. Nash, Urban Crucible, 127–28; Jacob Price, “Economic Function and the Growth of American Port Towns in the Eighteenth Century,” Perspectives in American History 8 (1974): 123– 86, 145.

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of the century’s turn, Boston’s population barely doubles, while New York’s and Baltimore’s nearly triples and Philadelphia doubles what had already been a much larger population than Boston’s.56 The main recipients of re-export-driven growth were Philadelphia and New York, with New York beginning its ascent to the summit of commercial centralization.57 The economic boom of re-export facilitated a variety of subsidiary industries that were necessary to support and extend the longdistance carrying trade: banking, insurance, warehousing, port facilities, shipbuilding, and agricultural imports for the increased urban population’s consumption.58 In every aspect, New York and Philadelphia led the way over Boston and Baltimore, despite the latter’s closer proximity to the Caribbean and faster growth rate due to its initial underdevelopment. New York and Philadelphia had better shipping construction, labor inflow, and supply lines than Boston and better credit-handling institutions than Baltimore. In 1790 there were only four commercial banks in the United States. By the end of the decade, there were twenty-six, mostly in the financial centers of Philadelphia and New York.59 Apart from the growth in population and export profits, the increasing importance of the mid-Atlantic cities is felt with the circulation of information as a surrogate marker for more strictly demographic and economic indicators.60 As the Atlantic harbor city becomes dedicated to the circulation of commodities and information about commodities, the advantages of monopolization in commerce mutually supported monopolization in information. New York, with its greater Atlantic shipping, became the main center of traffic in foreign mail and distribution of news, as other cities simply reprinted what the New York press originally published.61 The swiftest and most prolific segment of the commercial news current was between New York and Philadelphia, with the time interval of transmission between 56. North, Economic Growth of the United States, 49 57. Pitkin, Statistical View, 51–52; Rohit Thomas Aggarwala, “Seat of Empire: New York, Philadelphia, and the Emergence of an American Metropolis, 1776 –1837” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2002). 58. North, Economic Growth of the United States, 49 –51. 59. Harris, ed., American Economic History, 108; Stuart Bruchey, The Roots of American Economic Growth, 1607–1861: An Essay in Social Causation (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1965), 128. 60. Allan R. Pred, Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information: The United States System of Cities, 1790–1840 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), 2. 61. Ibid., 32; Robert E. Wright, The First Wall Street: Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, and the Birth of American Finance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

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the two dropping 60 percent between 1794 and 1798 due to increased traffic.62 As Boston and Baltimore became increasingly dependent on information that came initially through New York, this delay worked to Gotham’s strategic advantage as control of news meant control of circulating capital.63 The growing economic prominence of the mid-Atlantic cities can also be registered with these cities’ relative lack of commitment to building institutions of traditional cultural consecration in contrast to New England. In a comparative study of Boston and Philadelphia, E. Digby Baltzell asks why a Boston-led New England produced ranks of cultural and political leaders before and after the Revolution, whereas Philadelphia did not, despite its larger size and scale of wealth.64 Why did the premier New England institutions of higher education, Harvard and Yale, become clearly more influential than those of the mid-Atlantic regions, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania? Baltzell sees this disparity as a Weberian result of denominational cultures: New England Congregationalism’s insular theocracy buttresses an endogamous, quasi-aristocratic hierarchy, while the Pennsylvanian Quaker Grandees, perhaps because of their experience of nonconformist discrimination, were more willing to incorporate talented immigrants, like Franklin, into the ranks of their elites. Although there may be volkish-like denominational traits that focus on producing excellence in traditional cultural institutions, the New Englanders’ concentration on familiar modes of cultural authority was a compensatory mechanism for their eroding economic one. As the mid-Atlantic cities were busy becoming rich, they did not feel the New Englanders’ need to create and reinforce preexisting educational and denominational institutions. The re-export trade did not create the original conditions of divergence between New England and the mid-Atlantic, which was developing throughout the eighteenth century, but it magnified the difference and provided the tipping point. After the 1790s re-export revolution, New Englanders would never be able to bundle economic and political power as they once had. In this development, the Virginian and New England elites began to mirror each as their relative exclusion from the bonanzas of the re-export republic 62. Pred, Urban Growth, 39 – 42. 63. Michael Kraus, Intercolonial Aspects of American Culture on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1928), 32. 64. E. Digby Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia: Two Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Class Authority and Leadership (New York: Free Press, 1979), 4.

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meant that they increasingly devoted themselves to backward-looking culturalist and political solutions to their economic demise. If New England and the Virginian-Carolinian South provided the cohorts most active in postindependence politics, they did so as an increasingly desperate sign of weakness, not strength, as political discourse became the social form through which these regional interests masked their conjunctural economic decline. By generating a socially laden (Congregationalist and Cavalier) politicized rhetoric, they highly charged the cultural field. Though these regions lacked the catalyzing elements for the production of new forms like the novel, such a development would not have been possible had not the cultural field been saturated by increasingly residual regional groups to the point of sedimentation in ways greater than had been the case before independence and constitutionality. American transformations resulting from its location within a competitive Atlantic world-system in the 1790s saw the decisive turn away from the regionalized predicates of a New England-centered North and Virginia-based South towards a mid- and southern-Atlantic nexus of circumatlantic-oriented harbor cities. American history is traditionally binarized according to the Mason-Dixon Line. Although this may be a useful heuristic for colonial and nineteenth-century antebellum America, it is not for the phase around the 1790s when a regional division emerges that blurs this boundary in favor of a mid- and southern-Atlantic coastal urban complex based on the newly enlarged Caribbean trade. The later rise of the inland cotton empire would increasingly snap this formation, as seen with Maryland’s decision to join the Confederacy. That redistribution, however, belongs to a period later than the one covered in this book, but that shift cannot be fully understood through the false assumption of an eternally cohesive “South” or by assuming an unbroken lineage between the powerhouse of eighteenth-century Virginia and the much more vitiated later one, which was reduced by the mid-1800s to providing symbolic matter and a thin stream of iconographic figures, such as Robert E. Lee, but little else. In many ways, the bet on traditional cultural and discursive forms that the New Englanders and Virginians took succeeded; our histories have overly relied on the archive of political writing and letters scripted by New Englanders and southerners rather than the “invisible literature” of the mid and south Atlantic, its business records and mercantile-driven journalism. The mid-Atlantic agents did not need to raise monuments of traditional

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cultural appreciation or devote themselves to political skirmishing because they were too busy putting out the dishes for re-export gold to rain into. The prolix commentary of New Englanders and Virginians throughout the 1790s distracts attention from the significant transformations in 1790s American, transformations within the bourgeoisie that results in the production of their own forms of representation, like the novel, but these are not ones our received histories have typically considered as significant evidence of social rearrangements.

The Economy of Infrabourgeois Competition An ensuing effect of re-export’s changing geography of commerce involves dislocations within the middle class’s internal hierarchies as re-export altered social networks rather than reinforcing already existing ones. Re-export created a faction of “new men” who rose with the tide of broker trade, and these arrivistes disregarded the aura of revolutionary-era elites, who felt that their prestige would be immemorial. While the 1790s has usually been analyzed through the fencing among the elites associated with political independence, an approach favored by history of ideas, or by one of crossclass struggle, an approach considered by history from the bottom up, these frameworks are unable to capture the granular transformations resulting from the infrabourgeois struggles for priority in the 1790s as one bourgeoiseme, or middle-class faction, functionally displaces another. The shifting nature of the middle class due to a subterranean and internecine confrontation between segments of the bourgeoisie is essential to making sense of the decade’s actual dynamics. The standing order of revolutionary-era elites thought that the status they gained with the acts of national independence would guarantee their unquestioned right to govern perpetually and garner continually the rewards of privilege. After the Revolution, the ground was clear for the patrician and old mercantile cohorts who had advocated separation from Britain to gain political and economic priority. With the mass emigration of Loyalists and confiscation of their lands, the patriot bourgeoisie, the set of Creole legal, political, and property-owning elites who had previously been subordinated to a more imperial-court privileged set of colonists, were freed from the prerevolutionary society’s obstacles to their assumption of political

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status and its expected economic rewards.65 To the political factors involved in national autonomy, and the social factions from which they came, there was never any internal hesitation or doubt about intermingling the rhetoric of patriotism and national expansion with profit-making ventures. A Robert Morris, for instance, could comfortably see the project of nation-making as coeval with the enlargement of his private purse, since he took it for granted that the nation-state project would not be truly democratic but rather operationally oligarchic and made for the benefit of those like himself. Yet the economic benefits that the patriot bourgeoisie assumed political independence would grant them were sadly lacking in the 1780s and first years of the 1790s.66 The two main projects of nationalist capitalism—the face-value federal assumption of state debts bought at deep discount, which also involved speculation in bank stocks, and frontier-oriented speculative land purchasing —both spectacularly failed to live up to their expectations as they bankrupted swathes of interconnected postindependence elites.67 From 1783 to 1793, the patriot bourgeoisie suffered a series of fiscal disasters, each one more embarrassing than the last. The dreams of U.S. merchants, who thought that independence would give them a free hand from British taxes and trade regulations, vanished in 1784 as British mercantile speculation won the day through goods dumped at vendue sales. After the value of competitively priced British goods sold in the United States leapt from £1.4 million in 1783 to £3.7 million in 1784, a wave of domestic bankruptcies followed, leading, in turn, to widespread credit restriction that further distressed traders.68 Local elites discovered that not only had national independence not functionally broken the century-old cycle of British-defined postwar depressions, but that the postwar doldrums caused by the usual retraction of military supply contracts were made even

65. Loyalist James DeLancey’s forfeited Manhattan property “fell into the hands of fifteen persons—practically all of them conspicuous representatives of noted mercantile, landowning, and legal families” that formed a cohesive ruling class in the 1780s. Harry Yoshpe, “The Delancey Estate: Did the Revolution Democratize Landowning in New York?” New York History 17, no. 2 (1936): 167–79, 171. 66. Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 90. 67. Daniel M. Friedenberg, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Land: The Plunder of Early America (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1992); R. A. Burchell, ed., The End of Anglo-America: Historical Essays in the Study of Cultural Divergence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991). 68. Tryon, Household Manufactures, 124; Thomas M. Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 246, 142.

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worse by the unexpected addition of British competition. The bursting of the mercantile bubble directly translated into the specie shortages that were one of the main aggravating factors motivating Shays’s Rebellion in 1786, which was a first glimpse that the patriot bourgeoisie would not easily maintain uncontested control.69 The implicit preindependence belief by local elites that their problem was the institutional hand of the British state, rather than intrinsic crises of the price-setting market, led, after the fact, to a tremendous deflation of feeling about the value of independence in itself by the leading domestic bourgeoisie. By 1787 the worst of the crisis may have been over, but by then a previously diffuse group of merchants had learned a lesson about the need for their own centralizing state.70 A relatively disaggregated set of middling-class interests, who had not devoted much effort toward regional compromises beyond defeating the British, now decided that they had to coalesce more formally into a federal apparatus by abandoning a confederation in favor of a constitutional state. These bourgeois not only politically mobilized to favor political centralization, they also became more condensed economically at the higher levels, since the “revolution tended to concentrate unprecedented amounts of capital in the hands of a few enterprising traders,” like William Duer and Robert Morris, who had managed to escape the bust of the 1780s.71 Consequently, the political project of constitutionalism was an attempt to recreate the conditions of independence, but this time more profitably for these groups. Merchants snapped up war bonds at a discount from revenue-starved states, so that they could sell them at face value to the new federal state, conveniently governed by their associates, who would be personally protected from risk of federal insolvency. The speculative assumption of state debts was meant to generate a capital infusion for merchants that independence had failed to provide, and these funds were then quickly reinvested in frontier land speculation, which was often advertised through a booster language of manifest nationalist expansion. Sadly, the expectations of profit from gambling in state debts and hinterland speculation were dashed. Both projects failed. The first signs of collapse involving the boom in states’ debts came in the spring of 1792. A panic touched off a fall in the stock of the banks that

69. Walker, The Epic of American Industry, 43. 70. Doerflinger, Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise, 275. 71. Ibid., 284.

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helped leverage the trade in state debts, and this deflation of fictitious capital led to William Duer’s downfall. Duer had been a key leader in the bull market of 1791, and when he failed to meet his credit obligations, a financial rout ensued that pulled down many others who could not extricate themselves from the matrix of financial obligations that he had personally guaranteed.72 The bank stock bubble led directly into the collapse of hinterland land speculation, which was a more widespread and disappointing failure for the patriot bourgeoisie, given the assumption that national independence and expansion would automatically and “innocently” provide wealth as pioneers purchased land.73 Once again, the nationalist elites failed to recognize how market dynamics would undermine their expectations. Given the loss of income resulting from having sold their debts at discount and “needing revenue[,] the states dumped onto the market far more land than the pioneers could occupy within a short time. The resulting surplus invited promoters to acquire claims and titles, with the purpose of either selling them quickly at a profit, or of holding them for an increase in value.”74 Nettels explains why the strategy backfired: Viewed as a whole, land speculation did not meet the expectations of its devotees. The most regal operators—William Duer, Alexander Macomb, Robert Morris, John Nicholson and Henry Knox— ended their careers in bankruptcy. Washington in 1799 estimated his holdings at 60,200 acres, and although he made some profitable sales and avoided debt, he died land-poor, for his lands did not yield either himself or his heir the returns he anticipated. The flaw in the business was the poverty of the settlers. As pioneers, they lacked the cash needed for buying even moderately priced lands,

72. David L. Sterling, “William Duer, John Pintard, and the Panic of 1792,” in Business Enterprise in Early New York, ed. Joseph R. Frese and Jacob Judd (Tarrytown, N.Y.: Sleepy Hollow Press, 1979), 99 –132; S. J. Davis, Essays in the Earlier History of American Corporations, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1917), 307– 8, cited from Walter Buckingham Smith and Arthur Harrison Cole, Fluctuations in American Business, 1790–1860 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935), 13. 73. For the overlap between land and debt speculators, see E. Wilder Spaulding, New York in the Critical Period, 1783 –1789 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932); Friedenberg, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Land; R. A. Burchell, “The Role of the Upper Class in the Formation of American Culture, 1780 –1840,” in The End of Anglo-America: Historical Essays in the Study of Cultural Divergence, ed. R. A. Burchell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 184–212, 204. 74. Nettels, Emergence, 149.

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and for many years their rude clearings produced only meager surpluses. The most ambitious of the operators could not afford to tie up large sums in long-range investments, and when lands became accessible to settlers, taxes levied a toll on profits. Much land and few monied settlers meant cheap land. To most speculators it was largely a matter of trying to get blood out of a turnip.75 The burst dreams of debt stocks and land speculation had two main effects. First, the interlocking and intensifying busts systemically weakened the postindependence elites and patriot bourgeoisie. Given the tightly intertwined nature of American credit relations, the failure of merchants like Duer and Morris was damage done to the entire constellation of merchants, lawyers, and politicians within which Morris and Duer operated. Second, the losses borne by the established “gentleman” mercantile class opened a space for the rise of a new bourgeoiseme of “anonymous” men, the minor merchants who stood outside the status entitlements of the patriot bourgeoisie’s sociopolitical networks. I call these groups of merchants the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie since they were a set that was able to profit from the unexpected opportunity of nondomestic trade that re-export offered. Because the 1793 boom of re-export followed so quickly on the bust of 1792, the older strata of merchants were not able to reorganize their finances and lines of credit swiftly enough to realize the new trade opportunities, and this delay provided the open door for the smaller merchants who had not been allowed to be on the inside of the earlier speculative schemes because they came from the “wrong” denominations and lineage chains, but were ready to receive the easy credit that British banks offered after they received an inflow of capital from French émigrés, seeking to protect their money from the ongoing revolution.76 Even those merchants who had been involved in the boom and escaped without tremendous losses were, as a general rule, often at a skills and contact network disadvantage

75. Ibid., 154. Chernow argues that had Morris been able to hold onto his property into the nineteenth century, he would have seen profits. This begs the question about the dire need to satisfy momentary credit obligations. Barbara A. Chernow, “Robert Morris: Genesee Land Speculator,” New York History 58, no. 2 (1977): 195–220. See also Barbara A. Chernow, “Robert Morris and Alexander Hamilton: Two Financiers in New York,” in Business Enterprise in Early New York, ed. Joseph R. Frese and Jacob Judd (Tarrytown, N.Y.: Sleepy Hollow Press, 1979), 77–98. 76. Richard Chew, “Certain Victims of an International Contagion: The Panic of 1797 and the Hard Times of the Late 1790s in Baltimore,” Journal of the Early Republic 25 (Winter 2005): 563– 613, 577–79.

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that limited their participation in the rising Atlantic carrying trade.77 While there were crossovers and blurry dual memberships between these groups of patriot and cosmopolitan merchants, these categories do represent distinctive regional and urban interests. Throughout the eighteenth century, many merchants participated in some form of commerce with Caribbean consumer goods. While the established mercantile elite monopolized transatlantic shipping of heavy goods, a strata of lesser merchants focused on coastal and Caribbean trades of sensational goods, which was not as risky and did not require as much capital investment as transatlantic shipping since these trades used smaller ships and crews and had shorter capital return cycles.78 The roots for the real ascension and conglomeration of a distinctive group of cosmopolitan traders began in the 1780s when the British merchants who had profited from goods dumping needed to reinvest in the marketplace in order to maintain their rate of profit. After the War for Independence, English trading houses found that the existing club of American merchants and borrowers was not large enough to receive the capital goods that had been warehoused throughout the late 1770s and early 1780s, and they bypassed older mercantile channels to extend credit lines to merchants outside the traditional formations to increase the purchasing of inventoried goods. Doerflinger argues that “the convulsions of the 1780s transformed the general character of the merchant community by making it more unstable and anonymous. There were at least 50 per cent more merchants in the city after the war than before, and they came and went far more freely.”79 Unstable and anonymous for whom? Surely the new merchants appeared unknown mainly for the standing order of merchants, who could not place the origin of these new men within their own traditional kinship and denominational clusters. Because these outsiders were not within the communicative networks of the established “gentlemen” merchants, they were less likely to be included within in the speculation of bank stocks and frontier land development schemes, which required preexisting contacts. Consequently, they were more willing to look to international commerce and urban plot speculation as fields left relatively free of domination by the older interests of patriotic 77. Cathy Matson, Merchants and Empire: Trading in Colonial New York (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 89. 78. Ibid., 4, 28, 89. 79. Doerflinger, Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise, 249.

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capitalism.80 The personal mobility of the merchants was similarly a result of their exclusion from the more sedentary pursuits of stock and frontier land speculation and their need to travel to ensure the sales of their brokered goods or establishment of credit that the older group could take more for granted. Because these outsiders initially gained experience in the protocols of oceanic trade throughout the 1780s, they were primed to exploit the opportunities of the 1790s. Having practiced on the margins during the 1780s, these merchants had learned to be more comfortable with risk and the innovation of new corporate frameworks, as 295 corporation charters were issued during the 1790s.81 This relative ease with entrepreneurial conditions of insecurity based on new fiscal innovations served them well in dealing with unexpected opportunities, especially like those arising from the conditions of revolutionary Haiti. The older structure of family firms that the patriot bourgeoisie worked within served them poorly now as it prevented them from taking advantage of new opportunities for wealth-making in a timely fashion.82 Family connections continued to remain important, but the cosmopolitan capitalists also increasingly relied on chartered corporations, which could raise capital faster and spread the risks in ways that facilitated entrepreneurial activity among a broader range of less enfranchised traders than the narrowly defined family-oriented associations. The depersonalization of corporatization helped open the doors to a career as a merchant, leading to its explosion in numbers; New York City’s directory lists only 248 merchants in 1790 but catalogs more than 1,100 in 1800.83 As corporations brought together a multitude of smaller capital investors, they were able to create historically new levels and velocity of wealth. The new traffic in long-distance trade quickly led to America’s first millionaires, few of who came from the traditional casteclans. More often they were recent immigrants (John Jacob Astor), orphans (Stephen Girard), or those emerging from the ranks of an upper-mechanic

80. Donna J. Rilling, Making Houses, Crafting Capitalism: Builders in Philadelphia, 1790–1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). 81. Anna Rochester, American Capitalism, 1607–1800 (New York: International Publishers, 1949), 101. 82. Peter Dobkin Hall, The Organization of American Culture, 1700–1900 (New York: New York University Press, 1982), 32. 83. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 337; Robert Davison, Isaac Hicks: New York Merchant and Quaker, 1767–1820 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), 1.

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or lower-mercantile background.84 Beneath these new superrich, there was a much larger strata of men whose capital funds had been increased significantly by profits from the concatenated industries anchored to neutral shipping and the carrying trade.85 As re-export became the leading industry, the cosmopolitan merchants created rings of economic influence around them for a host of material and financial support services throughout the coastal Atlantic. Not only did re-export dominate the harbor’s shipping, but it increased the urban-regional “subsidiary, complementary, and residentiary types of economic activity induced by export industries.”86 The complementary industries necessary for the financing of re-export brought the rise of “commission merchants, brokers, and other business organizations,” like marine insurance and banking.87 The number of insurance companies in the United States went from one in 1791 with a capital of $600,000 to fifteen in 1800, with a combined capital of $5 million, to forty in 1804 with a total capital of $10 million.88 The re-export years also made for a golden period for American shipping, shipbuilding, and ship-fitting industries, like rope works, sailmaking, and cooperage.89 The need for warehouses and docking facilities, as well as housing for harbor workers, also boosted the dry building trades. An increased market for food and agricultural products, its cartage and distribution, emerged to service the deruralized, harbor-centered workforce. Entire subsidiary economies emerged out of the re-export trade in ways that was not the case for stock and land speculation. While the patriot capitalists spoke about a new national economy, it was the cosmopolitan capitalists who actually created multiple industries and interconnecting modes of employment for the coastal regions. This new bolus of merchants and their associates, many of whom had emigrated from New England where they had not been able to gain a foothold in that region’s closed ranks and diminished prospects, brought to their practice an entirely different set of cultural expectations, assumptions, and behavioral preoccupations, which were neither distinctly nationalist nor 84. Harry Emerson Wildes, Lonely Midas: The Story of Stephen Girard (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1943). 85. Bruchey, Enterprise, 147. 86. North, Economic Growth of the United States, 49. 87. Ibid., 49 –50; Bruchey, Enterprise, 148. 88. North, Economic Growth of the United States, 50. 89. Nettels, Emergence, 233; Smith and Cole, Fluctuations, 15, 31.

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retrospectively patriotic.90 Here the world that re-export made in the 1790s is truly postrevolutionary as a faction of the commercial middle classes silently, but radically, dissociates itself from and lacks nostalgia for a recent past that it considers irrelevant to their fortunes, especially as traders assumed that the international conditions creating sudden wealth were here to stay and that the customary practices and cultural manners of the older business elites were obsolete.91 Unlike the earlier merchants who cloaked themselves in the aura of national independence, the new re-export traders and their colleagues recognized the tremendous profit to be made by focusing on Atlantic currents rather than toward the American continental mass. Because few of these carrying trade merchants had actual involvement in the acts of independence or constitutional debates of the 1780s, they had little interest in rehearsing the slogans and language of national autonomy. Mainly they simply ignored these themes, since it gave them little credit. The effects of the re-export bourgeoisie’s social revolution are initially difficult to gauge due to the absence of an explicit self-declared discourse by members of this group. The older elites relentlessly pronounced their importance through writings that were studded with references to classical political commentary and law. The re-export merchants lacked the sonorous rhetoric and textual engagement of the older elites, not least since their trade never required university training and they often came from outside university-associated families. The new merchants, busily scribbling out shipping ledgers and scanning advertisements of ship holdings and commodity auctions, could not have cared less about the nuances of Cato and Commonwealth political philosophy or how these functioned as cultural accessories to the older standing order. Given that the nouveau factions were unbeholden to the parameters of authority that structured America for most of the eighteenth century, they were uninterested in already extant nodes of cultural prestige and self-inscription. Instead they crafted a self-authenticating 90. Sidney I. Pomerantz, New York: An American City, 1783 –1803 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938). It is a truism that New England’s increased land division created inefficient farms that could not support their owners and led to a laboring class diaspora from the region. The reverse happened with the upper elites, who were unwilling to distribute privilege. The closed ranks, however, had the same effect of creating a skills drain from New England as merchants moved to the mid- and southern Atlantic for better opportunities. 91. Adam Seybert, Statistical Annals (Philadelphia: Dobson, 1818), 59 – 60, cited from North, Economic Growth of the United States, 47– 48.

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domain out of different ideological and social material through the reconstruction of the urban built environment; proliferation of new modes of consumption; establishment of public welfare civic institutions, which were distanced from the traditional ones of academic and ecclesiastic imprimatur; and an invigorated publicist realm of commercial journalism that also included fictional narratives within its pages as a structure of feeling.

The Urban Script of Class Relations As the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie created an urban world dependent on international trade, they helped manifest two other social formations: the metropolitan experience of an increasingly class-divided city and the first social reproduction of the cosmopolitan merchants with the arrival of younger men seeking bourgeois establishment in the new conditions of the harbor cities. The combined vocational insecurity for the laboring and middle classes within an already electrified cultural field generated both the figurative elements and motive for new narrative productions. Within the coastal states, the carrying trade accelerated urbanization as the number of city dwellers grew from 5.1 million in 1790 to 7.3 million in 1810, mainly concentrated in the re-export cities.92 Given that the 1790s had relatively little foreign immigration, these urban increases result from domestic deruralization, where cities grew at the expense of the countryside, as the booming re-export provided employment for a countryside ravaged by a decade of economic depression.93 In terms of sheer numbers, U.S. cities did not increase during the 1790s as they later would, but the decade’s percentile rate of urban demographic growth was without precedent in the United States. For the first time in American history, a consciousness of the growing city as a modern phenomenon arose. This metropolitan experience was driven as a cohort of international trade merchants, in varying degrees of conscious strategy, used the architecture of the city and its inhabitants, rather than the political podiums and ministerial pulpits, to indicate their social arrival. Despite national autonomy, American harbor cities remained shabby and underbuilt for more than a decade after independence. New York’s “canvass town,” the downtown district burnt out

92. North, Economic Growth of the United States, 48 – 49. 93. Ibid., 32.

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by retreating British army, continued to exist long after the war’s end, as there were little finances or felt need for its sanitation. Nearly a quarter of New York’s housing was in ruins after the Revolution, and the bust of the 1780s meant that money was scarce for renovating the housing stock.94 The influx of re-export monies, however, created material changes as the harbor cities became freshly bricked with expensive, stately mansions and business fronts clustered round the harbor that announced the arrival of new mercantile wealth, while refurbished concourses and new public projects, like prisons and hospitals, bespoke increased tax inflows.95 The period’s social rearrangements were made visible when the spatial design of cities altered as houses went up higher, residential fields expanded horizontally, and harbor-front shop and housing became more densely populated as traders and laborers clustered near the waterfront. The increasing complexity of the urban fabric brought issues of public health and maintenance to the surface. As built urbanization attracted even more regional job seekers, the re-export republic generated problems of chronic overcrowding, hygiene, and unregulated land use. Epidemiology reflected the economics of the carrying trade. Yellow fever plagues began to wash near annually over New York, Philadelphia, and other coastal cities during the 1790s as the increased transportation between the Atlantic harbor cities and the Caribbean brought mosquitoes, the vector of infection, to congested and poorly sanitized cities. In response to the need for better infrastructure and plague prevention, New York in 1798 began “filing, grading, and paving South Street, a new seventy-foot wide border, and by 1801 new wharves, slips, and piers were under construction from Whitehall to the Fly market.”96 Manhattan’s first sidewalks came in 1790, the streets were systematically numbered in 1793, and the Collect Pond was filled in throughout the 1790s.97 The spectacle of construction and the physical calamities brought the notion of the “city” as a social space, with its own temporality and topography of risk, into the consciousness of the period’s commentators. If the carrying trade mediated a new temporalized sense of public space, with the 94. Pomerantz, New York, 227. 95. Albion, Sea Lanes in Wartime, 69; Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 1785 –1850 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 79 – 80; North, Economic Growth of the United States, 47; Moreau de St-Mery, Moreau De St. Mery’s American Journey [1793 –1798] (Garden City: Doubleday, 1947), 89. 96. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 338. 97. Benson J. Lossing, History of New York City (New York: Perine Engraving and Publishing, 1885), 118.

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materialization of profit through architecture, it also altered the substance of the everyday. With the increased shipping between the United States and the West Indies, the sensational Caribbean goods became cheaper and more widespread than had previously been the case in the United States. The routinization of sensational consumption radically altered the phenomenology of the everyday, from introducing a more varied diet (the days of banal hasty pudding were over as the first cookbooks in America began appearing in the 1790s) and interior design to altering fashions in dress and bodily presentation, a shift often modeled through the increased circulation of cheap cameo portraiture.98 The 1790s did not mark the initial introduction of these goods into patterns of American consumption; rather, the increased scale of re-export transformed existing commodities from luxuries into comfort staples and then vastly accelerated their consumption.99 Richard Bushman has described how gentry notions of refinement organized the backward mentality of the older aristocratic-like elites in the United States, such as those at the “Republican Court” of the new government, but elsewhere social groups enacted chronovoric modes of consumption that did not try to emulate colonial masters.100 The number of New York City inns serving coffees, teas, and alcohols went from 415 in 1790 to 1,090 by 1799 –1800.101 Books became more available as ships returning from Europe carried them in their empty hulls, and the number of booksellers in New York increased from 5 in 1786 to 30 in 1800.102 The re-export monies of the 1790s also accelerated the long demise of household production in favor of shop and factory-made goods.103 The period’s embourgeoisment of upper artisans was possible only because of the increased desire for material objects that both testified

98. Lorena S. Walsh, “Consumer Behavior, Diet, and the Standard of Living in Late Colonial and Early Antebellum America, 1770 –1840,” in American Economic Growth and Standards of Living Before the Civil War, ed. Robert E. Gallman and John Joseph Wallis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 217–63; 234. 99. Walsh, “Consumer Behavior”; The “two big growth areas in consumption appear to have been groceries—tobacco, sugar products, and caffeine drinks—and semi-durables.” Carole Shammas, The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 291–92. 100. Dixon Wector, The Saga of American Society: A Record of Social Aspiration, 1607–1937 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937), 61; Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992). 101. Pomerantz, New York, 466. 102. Ibid., 440. 103. Tryon, Household Manufactures, 125, 260.

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to and were purchased by the dissemination of re-export profits.104 The rage was on for British and French domestic wares, like furniture and wallpaper, clothing and bodily accessories, like new hairstyles or scarves.105 The demand for these goods was not because they were European but because that they were contemporary. A key element in this consumerist turn involves the arrival in 1793 of 4,000 white Haitian refugees in Philadelphia, and others in New York, who, alongside mainland French émigrés, brought with them a Francophone lifestyle of eroticized personal display that was previously unknown in the United States.106 Though the Haitian refugees nowhere approached the numbers of other ethnic immigrants, like the Irish and Germans, they had an effect far beyond these groups, since the Haitian Creoles represent the first substantive group of nonplebeian immigrants who arrived after national independence.107 Unlike those other middle-class immigrants, the Puritans, the Catholic Creoles came without Calvinist antipathy to spectacular, public displays of the self and personal desires. French agents had arrived in the United States before, like Lafayette, but the arrivals of the 1770s and 1780s tended to be small in number and limited to contact with local military and political elites. Because the Haitians came to America politically disenfranchised and economically distressed as a result to the ongoing dual Francophone revolutions, they circulated more widely within the ranks of the American urban populace. Haitian exile Moreau de St.-Mery may have been a famous jurist in France, but in Philadelphia he struggled as a bookseller, conscious of his need to keep the goodwill of his neighbors. As French immigrants opened hairdressing parlors, fencing and dancing schools, and other shops of taste and dress to support themselves in exile, they brought new codes of appearance and bodily comportment to new bourgeois audiences.108

104. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 344; Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788 –1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). 105. David J. Jeremy, Transatlantic Industrial Revolution: The Diffusion of Textile Technologies Between Britain and America, 1790–1830s (London: Blackwell, 1981), 12; Susan Branson, These Fiery Frenchified Dames: Women and Political Culture in Early National Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 68. 106. Pomerantz, New York, 204; Susan Branson, “St. Domingan Refugees in the Philadelphia Community in the 1790s,” in Amerindians, Africans, Americans: Three Papers in Caribbean History (Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies, 1993), 69 – 84. 107. Billy G. Smith, The “Lower Sort”: Philadelphia’s Laboring People, 1750 –1800 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 61. 108. John H. Powell, Bring Out Your Dead: The Great Plague of Yellow Fever in Philadelphia in 1793 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949), 6.

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The refugees also introduced the display of that orientalized object, the mixed-race mistresses, the image of which teased the (northern) seaport’s imagination about other kinds of purchasable sensations.109 The rise of a distinctively different set of urban, domestic bourgeoisie, who were more internationalist in style, did not come without consequences for other social groups. Older elite groups felt their eroding prestige and complained with increasing stridency about the dissolution of status that they took as their birthright. An equally significant transformation was re-export’s reconfiguration of plebeian work and living conditions that paved the way for the later rise of industrial-era proletarianship. Re-export frayed the artisan lifeworld by disintegrating the crafts system and structuring poverty through increased housing and staple costs as hinterland immigration, drawn into the seaboard cities by visions of better wages, aggravated labor and living conditions. Re-export created formations of great wealth and increased average wealth, but it also acerbated the disparity of incomes, degraded vocational security, and increased immiseration, so that by “1800 a third of the city’s white population is believed to have been destitute.”110 The very conditions that facilitated re-export wealth for some lead to poverty for others —“as the city grew richer, it also grew poorer”—and the two trends are inextricably linked.111 The demand for labor in the harbor industries led to rising wage levels, but the increased labor costs meant that the artisan structure of occupational security, created by limiting access to the craft, came under duress with the increased use of ungilded, barely gilded, and loosely indentured labors working outside of the mechanic structure of advancement from journeyman to master. The sudden influx of New England and regional farm lads into the cities meant that more were willing to accept lower wages

109. Moreau de St.-Mery’s travel accounts complain about the American fascination with purchasable commodities, including those involving sexual acts, in the 1790s. Clare Lyons, Sex Among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730–1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); John L. Earl, “Talleyrand in Philadelphia, 1794–1796,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 91, no. 3 (1967): 282 –98. 110. Jackson Turner Main, The Social Structure of Revolutionary America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965); Oliver E. Allen, New York, New York: A History of the World’s Most Exhilarating and Challenging City (New York: Atheneum, 1990), 90; Gary Nash, “Poverty and Politics in Early American History,” in Down and Out in Early America, ed. Billy G. Smith (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 1–37. 111. Raymond A. Mohl, Poverty in New York, 1783 –1825 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 38.

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and hover outside of guild conventions in return for any kind of survival. The terms of the apprentice contract were increasingly flouted as masters used apprentices more as proletarianized cheap alternatives to skilled labor rather than pupils being trained into a trade.112 The decay of crafts provisions was furthered, in turn, by institutionalized competition, as orphanages became clearinghouses for employers to acquire cheap youth labor.113 Jacob Price argues that as “New York City had a higher proportion of artisans in 1746 – 70 than in 1790 – 95, i.e., as the city’s commerce and population grew, its industrial sector failed to grow with it and declined in importance.”114 Price assumes that industrial growth correlates to the number of certified skilled workers. However, the reverse is true. New York’s industrial sector grew in the re-export years precisely because artisanship, as opposed to functional proletarianship, was in decline. Entrepreneurial craftsmen, like Duncan Phyfe, were making the shift from masters to capitalists (i.e., agents who are no longer personally active in actual production) as Phyfe turned his workshop into a model manufactory by destroying limits on workshop size, labor conditions, and skills credentialization, a move facilitated by lax policing and the prosecution of labor-protective legislation.115 As some master craftsmen were accumulating wealth by forming larger workshops, the effect of this economy of scale was to degrade artisan fraternization and the older ideal of a workplace community. As masters excused themselves from properly training their workers, they also abandoned the responsibilities of paternal oversight whereby artisans would live in a master’s house, be fed by him, and some might reasonably expect to advance by marrying one of his daughters. Instead of these traditional arrangements, apprentices were (badly) paid to find their own room and board, creating a strata of male youth and adults whose connection to the crafts workplace was increasingly just that, as a workplace of purely labor conditions rather than as an integrated lifeworld.116 As artisans were thrown back onto the city’s housing market for food and board, the separation of work from living spaces added a new tier of housing and subsistence needs in an already underbuilt city. Even within the strata of masters, many were slipping, and

112. Charles Steffen, The Mechanics of Baltimore: Workers and Politics in the Age of Revolution, 1763–1812 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 29. 113. Ibid., 5. 114. Price, “Economic Function,” 131. 115. Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 35–36; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 355, 344. 116. Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 61– 63; Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 33.

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by 1816, as a result of the process begun in the prior century, fewer than half of the New York masters owned any assessable property.117 The unmooring of artisan geographic stability meant that their mobility was not only within the city but also intermittently outside it as well. Journeymen increasingly mimicked their European counterparts as they frequently had to tramp widely beyond the city limits for work.118 For workers underneath artisan ranks, the re-export-dominated economy structured intermittent periods of unemployment and scarcity. For day laborers, primarily employed in harbor industries and the attendant supplies and construction work, the precarious aspects of re-export trade meant that periods of unemployment were unavoidable due to plague or weather-related interruptions in naval traffic at any point in the trade circuit. Winter’s ice could freeze American harbors; spring storms would keep ships docked in the West Indies; and summer’s recurring yellow fever plagues would empty out a morbid city. Employment was often casualized and seasonal even in the higher-paying industries.119 The casualization of male labor was also felt on women. Because of a household’s pressing needs for more resources, newly urbanized family members had to seek additional income, and women shifted from the unpaid domestic labor of self-sufficient washing and sewing to its commercialization in laundry or household service employment. The feminization of labor and poverty meant a feminization of the public streets, since more women were moving through the 1790s American city due to their need for work.120 With the decreasing stability of sedentary labor, a more mobile lower strata increasingly experienced the city as both the source of and obstacle to their subsistence.121 The metropolitanization of consciousness that emerges at this time for provincial immigrants is one of freedom from the constraints of their rural past and its deferential codes, but it also introduces the particularly urban experience of immiseration and being down-and-out in ways that had not been previously the case in a less urbanized America.122 117. Howard B. Rock, Artisans of the New Republic: The Tradesmen of New York City in the Age of Jefferson (New York: New York University Press, 1979), 239. 118. Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 49 –50. 119. Mohl, Poverty in New York, 29. 120. Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 51; 180; Christine Stansell, City of Women: The Female Laboring Port in New York, 1785 –1860 (1986); Steffen, Mechanics of Baltimore, 45. 121. Simon P. Newman, Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 41.

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Gauging comparative poverty is a difficult endeavor, but several accounts attest to deepening impoverishment in the 1790s alongside a widening disparity of income. While New York’s population increased in the late eighteenth century, the rate of poverty outpaced that growth. One estimate has 15 percent of the coastal cities’ population receiving public assistance, but the number of those receiving aid is probably greater when the following are taken into account: public, institutionalized aid is always incomplete and the last resort of persons in need; many accepted aid from occupational, ethnic, or denominational mutual help societies before undergoing the strictures of municipal assistance: the most frequent form of support given through informal sharing of housing and lending; town councilors often masked the presence of the poor by removing names from city directories to free the impoverished from local tax responsibilities, but also at times to deny aid to newly unregistered people; and the true valence of need reaches beyond those wholly under poverty’s shadow to include those who, through physical or financial accident, might easily cross over poverty’s border.123 The presence of new immiseration was also felt on the city’s surface for all classes to see. By 1798 New York was spending five times as much on public assistance as it had ten years earlier, and the other seaboard cities found their welfare expenditures outpacing the increase in tax income allotted for that purpose.124 In order to economize, municipal leaders sought to further institutionalize poverty within concrete structures. The prerevolutionary system of poor relief depended on an Elizabethan-era system involving a small almshouse for those absolutely incapable of caring for themselves and cityappointed overseers who gave outdoor financial relief for occasional employment, illness, accident, or seasonable distress but did not try to evict or incarcerate people recognized as being city residents. Poverty was an accepted minority constant of the social fabric and punitive measures, while not absent, were not the main thrust of welfare. This centuries-old system reached a breaking point in the 1760s with a surge in numbers needing 122. Smith, Down and Out; Newman, Embodied History; Carla Gardina Pestana and Sharon V. Salinger, eds., Inequality in Early America (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999); Sharon V. Salinger, “To Serve Well and Faithfully”: Labor and Indentured Servants in Pennsylvania, 1682–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 157–61. 123. Gary Nash, Race, Class and Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 185; Alexander, Render Them Submissive, 9; Mohl, Poverty in New York, 22, 34; Main, Social Structure; Nash, “Politics and Poverty.” 124. Pomerantz, New York, 334.

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assistance, as the post–Seven Years’ War depression overcrowded the almshouse and overdrew the money available from the poor tax.125 From here began the shift to the perceived fiscal efficiency of a “bettering house,” where the poor could be coercively isolated and forced to labor with the idea that their products could be sold to pay for the cost of housing and feeding them. While these mansions of misery were later to derive social force by being distant from public view, the first brick structures of poverty were financially, spatially, and visually central to the organization of the metropolis. Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Prison was, on its 1790 opening, the largest structure built to date in the New World. In 1797 New York replaced its 1759 almshouse with one, modeled after Philadelphia’s, which cost an astronomical $130,000 and was the city’s tallest and largest structure.126 Europe had long had massive piles like churches and palaces, but there was no American precedent for the scale or imposition of these structures. When New Yorkers and Philadelphians looked up at the increasing, and increasingly more elaborate, housing being built with re-export wealth, they saw looming above its shingles the brick buildings of administered immiseration, impressively monumentalizing the presence of poverty and personal ruin at the heart of the city. It was a view that often uncannily looked back. One of Manhattan’s premier leisure spaces, the City Hall Park, was shadowed by a cluster including the jail, almshouse, and Bridewell, a detention center for the proclaimed vagrant, idle, and disorderly. Wealthy Gothamites using the park often complained that the incarcerated poor stood by the windows and watched them walking about below.127 Whatever discomfort the metropolitan strollers might have felt while being faced with the gaze of those incarcerated in the poorhouse, these optics did not make immediately clear, however, the ways in which the re-export trade’s suturing of the coastal regions in the circumatlantic economy created the conditions of metropolitan poverty because it simultaneously created the conditions of metropolitan wealth. The wealth of re-export hardened housing, food, and employment conditions for the increasing number of urban immigrants. As Atlantic merchants and their associates built up the regions closest to their zones of business, 125. Alexander, Render Them Submissive, 86 –121. 126. David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970); Nash, Urban Crucible, 314. 127. Mohl, Poverty in New York, 84.

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“mercantile specialization of [Manhattan’s] land use pushed many proprietary artisan households out of the East, South, and Dock Wards in the 1790s,” forcing laborers into crowded alleyways, cellar dwelling, or into the polluted in-fill of the Collect Pond in the terrain later to become the notorious Five Points district.128 In these cramped conditions, the underclass lacked the mobility and financial resources to flee the yellow fever plagues, which drew nearly seven-eighths of its victims from the lower and laboring classes.129 Rising housing costs particularly accelerated in Philadelphia and New York during the times when they served as the nation’s administrative capital, as the influx of government officials squeezed the available accommodations so that even the smallest house brought in three hundred dollars a year in rent. Because this was very nearly a year’s wages for a common laborer, it became increasingly necessary for the entire household, not just the male, to provide income, and a health and employment crisis for any one working member of the household could translate into a dire emergency for all. If the flush of re-export monies drove urban plebeians into the penlike housing that would be havens for the yellow fever plagues to flourish, the mercantile wealth also drove up the price of suburban lands more than fourfold throughout the 1790s. As those who had new wealth bought up farmlands for pleasure retreats, they drove its cost beyond the affordability of young farmers, who often had to seek better prospects in the city.130 Caught in the scissors motion between rising housing costs inside and outside the city, the working classes also found that despite better wages in the harbor trades (for some), subsistence costs rose throughout the period. Re-export made a more complex diet of sensational goods affordable, but it also made the basic staples, like wheat, more expensive as these products

128. Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 79. 129. Billy G. Smith, “Comment: Disease and Community,” in A Melancholy Scene of Devastation: The Public Response to the 1793 Philadelphia Yellow Fever Epidemic, ed. J. Worth Estes and Billy G. Smith (Philadelphia: Science History Publications, 1997), 147– 62, 150. 130. Pomerantz, New York, 180; Edward A. Chappell, “Housing a Nation: The Transformation of Living Standards in Early America,” in Of Consuming Interest: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 167–232, 211. Shankman argues that the 1790s marked a turning point of desperation. The number of landless increased in Pennsylvania as farmland holdings became increasingly centralized within a smaller number of the wealthy, and hopes for a minimum competence of fifty acres substantively vanished. Andrew Shankman, Crucible of American Democracy: The Struggle to Fuse Egalitarianism and Capitalism in Jeffersonian Pennsylvania (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 2004), 55.

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were either sought in greater demand by the urban centers or exported for higher profits.131 Between 1785 and 1800 the price of a bushel of wheat in New York went from $.75 to $2.10 and flour from $4.00 to $10.13.132 The average price of flour in Philadelphia between 1785 and 1793 was $5.41 a barrel, but it rose to $9.12 a barrel between 1793 and 1807 as merchants found it more lucrative to ship wheat and flour to either the Caribbean or France, regions that were desperately seeking foodstuffs for their own population.133 Even at these prices, a barrel of flour purchased for $8.00 in New York could be sold for two to three times that in the West Indies.134 Repackers of beef and pork similarly petitioned the city council against rising prices. As demand for American staples increased in the Caribbean and Europe, domestic costs soared beyond affordability, even for those employed in the harbor-associated trades, and the price index of basic goods steadily rose throughout the 1790s.135 North argues that if the prices of 1790 are used as a base of 100, then prices were at 135.5 by 1799, and the sharpest jump (from 108.4 to 129.2) came at the start of the re-export boom in 1793–94.136 In Philadelphia, the index units for food budget ingredients between 1789 and 1796 rose from 76 to 215 for firewood; 82 to 132 for clothing; and 115 to 201 for household costs.137 Housing consequently became more expensive as wood costs increased.138 “Between 1791 and 1799, the cost of living rose by more than 35 per cent while money wages went up only by 26 per cent. Real wages thus declined by over 7 per cent during the decade.”139 If the effects of re-export made housing and food more difficult to acquire, they also structurally undermined the very conditions of work. One of the main factors undermining the crafts system was the need for inexpensive, prefabricated (“slop”) goods primarily for the Caribbean and southern slave markets and, to a lesser degree, the western frontier market.

131. William B. Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England: 1620–1789 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1890), 102. 132. Pomerantz, New York, 169. 133. Pitkin, Statistical View, 91; Brooke Hunter, “Wheat, War, and the American Economy During the Age of Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 62 (July 2005): 505–26. 134. Albion, Sea Lanes in Wartime, 69. 135. James A. Henretta, The Evolution of American Society, 1700–1815: An Interdisciplinary Analysis (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1973), 199. 136. North, Economic Growth of the United States, 229. 137. Smith, “Lower Sort,” 101. 138. Ibid., 101. 139. Rochester, American Capitalism, 111.

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Pitkin’s statistics of the period’s trade show the dramatic reorientation caused by the neutral carrying trade. In 1791, 7,046 shoes and slippers were exported, but for 1798 the figure is 155,534; boot exports went from 499 pairs in 1791 to 10,599 in 1799; and the dollar worth of exported leather from 5,424 in 1791 to 164,513 in 1799.140 The demand for cheap shoes and clothes for slaves and cheap furniture for whites led masters toward volume production and economies of scale by dividing the labor process that resulted in deskilling labor conditions with lower wages and further undermined artisan training and led the way for laborers to enter protoindustrial conditions.141 The increase in mass-produced goods rests on the interlocking of industrialization and the Atlantic trade flows. Before King Cotton laid the proletarianizing burden of primary harvesting on southern blacks and textile finishing on northern backs, King Sugar Cane unraveled the threads of the artisan order. The result of this international division of labor between Americans and transported Africans in the West Indies meant that the “conflict trades” of shoemaking, tailoring, small carpentry, cabinet-making, masonry, and printing that inaugurated nineteenth-century labor unrest were precisely the ones on the front lines of American primary exports to the coerced labor in the Caribbean in the eighteenth century.142 While Eric Williams’s argument that British slavery was reduced to support the rise of wage labor mode of production carries weight, it is also true that the inaugural conditions in the United States for the capitalist transformation of the work process came about as part of, and not as a replacement for, sugardriven slavery. American laborers faced the onset of structural changes that were prepared at a distance and across racial divides as the modern shaping of the nineteenth-century economy was distilled from sweated labor in the West Indies and then circulated through the circumatlantic. The linkage to the West Indies also brought with it a paradoxical resurgence of northern slavery. Despite the increase of free blacks, New York’s slave numbers increased. “After 1790 . . . the number of white households relying on some form of black labor more than tripled . . . by 1800 three-fourths of New York’s slaveholders had not owned slaves ten years before. . . . New slaveowners were by and large the big winners in the economic sweepstakes of the nineties—merchants, lawyers, bankers, brokers, 140. Pitkin, Statistical View, 56 – 69. 141. Rock, Artisans of the New Republic, 239, 243; Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 31. 142. Rock, Artisans of the New Republic, 243.

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artisan-entrepreneurs, speculators.”143 The cosmopolitan bourgeoisie, minus Quakers, reinstalled slavery, mainly for domestic and personal service, in ways that the patriotic bourgeoisie had abjured, perhaps because they were so comfortable with trading in the products of plantation coerced labor. Slavery at home and afar was the hallmark of the re-export republic. The new forms of hardship that the urban laboring class endured were doubly beneficial to the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie. On one hand, it kept down rising labor costs by ensuring the presence of a reserve army of labor desperate for work. On the other, the various urban social problems presented a medium that the period’s new men could use to represent their own influence and status. The cosmopolitan bourgeoisie could not easily or quickly gain status by moving through the educational, denominational, and political institutions that were firmly in the control of the patriot bourgeoisie.144 Instead they used the various urban conditions of economic duress and emergencies of health distress to form an apparatus of public welfare projects and institutions. The cosmopolitan bourgeoisie’s interest in organizing and administering these new collective forms of aid was threefold. First, the rise of public welfare schemes gave this bourgeoiseme a means of soft coercion and a technique for making subaltern populations docile in what seemed to be a nonpolitical and nonaggressive fashion, and one thus less likely to be faced by plebeian revolts and informal acts of resistance. Second, by approaching urban problems as their own privileged field of expertise, the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie were able to differentiate themselves from the older group of the middle class, who rarely engaged with urban problems other than to quote Roman georgics and moan dismay at the rise of cities. The political elites of the patriot bourgeoisie usually took a confrontational approach to issues surrounding the working class and rarely became involved in public welfare schemes or devoted time to urban studies beyond dabbling in exercises of abstract cartography. The patriot capitalists tended to rely on the traditional academic and religious institutions for their self-valorization, leaving to the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie the opportunity to craft institutions regarding the urban social field, a field that the latter had more immediate stake in, since it affected the labor conditions on which re-export depended. A distinct coterie of those associated 143. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 347. 144. Virginia D. Harrington, The New York Merchant on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935), 34.

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with re-export dominated the administration of the new welfare reform schemes and their attendant cultural, literary, and scientific societies as a tactical means for countering the influence of older elites by establishing an alternative machinery of managerial prestige.145 Lastly, the investment in social welfare schemes became an internal means of collective bourgeois certification as activity in managing these projects displayed the sensibility, sympathy, and benevolence that functioned as the signifiers of commercial credibility and informal credit on which the merchant world and its associates rested for their own collective cohesion. The re-export bourgeoisie fastened on the bodies of the laboring class, both materially and symbolically, as objects of economic and cultural exploitation. Urban reform projects provided direct employment as institutional managers to some members of the new middle classes, but they mainly created indirect employability as the public welfare schemes gave this bourgeoiseme the opportunity to exhibit corporate self-affirmation, good character, and suitability for employment by acting “sensibly” for the bodies of the poor and helpless. After Michel Foucault, one of our key touchstones for definitions of modernity has been the nexus of disciplined subjects, reform institutions, and professionals offering a secularized social therapeutics. While this apparatus would quickly become common throughout the West, it was perhaps first and most concretely developed in the mid-Atlantic regions of Philadelphia and New York.146 The reason for its condensation at this point and time comes as the middle-class formation that would become familiar throughout Europe is first manifested in the American semiperipheries due to the particular conditions of re-export’s velocity. A phase of “Western modernity” was initially forged in 1790s New York and Philadelphia as concentrated receptacles of the world-system’s tensions. As the re-export matrix of new commercial interests and changing vocational conditions amidst the metropolis highlighted the poverty for laborers, it likewise framed the problem of establishment for the next generation of middle-class youth in times of changing stratification. These two crises of social reproduction would fuse to ignite the early American novel’s rise as images of rising class inequalities became used to represent infraclass competition.

145. Mohl, Poverty in New York, 152. 146. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 123–30.

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The Promising Young Penmen and the Birth of the American Novel When youthful Englishman John Davis arrived in Manhattan in 1798 without any means of support or letters of introduction, “solitary and sad among the crouds [sic] of a gay city,” he met an older man, the recent French immigrant and publisher Hocquet Caritat, who asked about his plans to survive. “Do you write a good hand, and understand all the intricacies of calculation? No. Then you will not do for a private Tutor. It is not your Latin and Greek, but your handwriting and ciphering that will decide your characters. Pensmanship, and the figures of arithmetic, will recommend you more than logic and figures of rhetoric.”147 Looking at Davis, Caritat saw a specimen of bourgeois “free labor,” a member of the new cohort of socially displaced, ambitious young men who lacked the clan preferences, institutional imprimatur, artisan experience, and financial capital that might launch a stable career.148 Caritat’s advice, from one recent immigrant to another, illustrates the changing perceptions of what credentials were needed by the new generation for successful incorporation into the rising strata of the cosmopolitan middle class. Training in the classical authors and their mode of address no longer provided the skills that would service the current market and secure personal establishment. Davis’s search for an entry position into metropolitan society epitomizes the problem of the bourgeois male establishment in the 1790s, a result of the expansion of higher education and increased enrollment after the low numbers of university students during the 1780s.149 While the colonial period saw the creation of a few denomination-based universities, between 1792 and 1802, nineteen new, more secular colleges were founded in the United States, tripling the number of centers for advanced education.150 The collegians at these new universities still came from backgrounds of comfort, but they were increasingly the sons of recent wealth, receiving educational credentials that their fathers had either not been able to afford or not thought it necessary. Once out of college, these youths confronted a

147. Caritat later introduced Davis to Charles Brockden Brown, and he was probably the one who convinced (or paid for) Davis to translate Brown’s novels into French. John Davis, Travels of Four Years and a Half in the United States of America During 1798, 1799, 1800, 1801, and 1802 (New York: Henry Holt, 1909), 18. 148. Chandler, Visible Hand, 19. 149. Charles F. Thwing, History of Higher Education in America (New York: Appleton, 1906), 147. 150. Steven J. Novak, The Rights of Youth: American Colleges and Student Revolt, 1798 –1815 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 8.

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society that had no prior experience of having so many university-trained youth. Since the early Republic lacked both a standing military and a permanent civil service bureaucracy that could provide a career path, the nation faced its first crisis of intellectual overproduction. As a result, collegians faced an indeterminate period before they could assume the status awards that higher education ought to have given them. Demographically, the United States was an exceptionally young society, with a median age of sixteen in 1800, and larger numbers of youth meant that the first starting block of a professional trajectory was unusually delayed.151 Law, the most prestigious of the period’s career paths and that most likely for the collegians to follow, was failing to provide its assumed security by forcing later entries into the vocation. Of the lawyers born between 1780 and 1830, more than two-thirds were over twenty-five when they began practicing, one-quarter were over twenty-eight, and some did not pass the bar until their forties and fifties. These belated beginnings existed in spite of the technical possibility for a man to enter a legal apprenticeship at sixteen and practice at twenty-one.152 In the interim, the men had to look for other occupations or interests where they could deploy their skills. In the absence of prefabricated vocational trajectories, many of these men were drawn directly or indirectly to the one clear source of industry, the mercantile realm of re-export. The re-export traders responded in turn as they needed men of certain intellectual skill and behavioral attitude who were not beholden to the older elite’s mentality. Because re-export involved dealings that extended beyond a merchant’s existing relationships, traders found that the increased scale, distance, and depersonalization of re-export trade, especially with exchanges with French Creoles and black Haitians, with whom Americans had limited experience, created a need for a literary matrix that could service the modern requirements of distant commerce: the reams of contractual and paracontractual epistolary communication, credit arrangements, valuation appraisals, and banking and insurance records. As long-distance agreements began to be made by men with little prior contact and known familial background, the ephemeral oral word, given faceto-face in the pedestrian city amidst the patterns of daily congregation and sealed by known reputation, was decreasingly secure enough to validate a 151. Joseph F. Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 38. Contrast this to another youthful period, the 1950s, when the median age was 30.8. 152. Ibid., 31.

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trade. Even the physical presence of a supercargo aboard a ship could not protect against fraud or collusion between the agent and receivers of goods. Consequently, circumatlantic exchange required written records of exchanges and copies of those transactional documents. Since the number of copies needed was too small to risk the delay or justify the cost of hiring a press crew to print them, the need for reproduced certificates created a ready niche for youth who had enough education to follow official directives and skill to wield a legible pen that could reinscribe the notices of agreements made, capital transformed, and goods delivered. Hence Caritat’s advice to Davis that the youth become a clerk. The re-export revolution thus created a role for weakly established and overeducated bourgeois men who could enter the realm of commerce as promising young penmen and gain knowledge about the operation of a commercial world wherein they might advance. Because the rising mercantile interests needed more personnel than their own families and kinship networks could provide, they desired youth who could swiftly adapt to and accept the new commercial protocols. These merchants’ desire to “civilize” the promising young penmen in their own image was given a boost after 1790 with the rising internal immigration of young, non-laboring-class men from New England to the rising mid-Atlantic states, New York in particular.153 The re-export merchants favored these extraregional or provincial arrivals because they could more easily be acculturated in the new commercial behavior rather than the lads belonging to the older set of middle-class interests, which, in New York, were often the families that harkened back to the period of independence.154 Once hired by a merchant, a youth went through a strict regime that began with months of practicing legible handwriting followed by learning the discipline of keeping account ledgers and copying business letters.155 A regimented professionalization of commercial letters developed throughout the 1790s with the substitution of trained bookkeepers for an all-purpose clerk. The first bookkeeping training text appeared in 1796 to accommodate the need for skilled staff.156 If the re-export system depended

153. Walter Barrett [Joseph Alfred Scoville], The Old Merchants of New York City (New York: Carleton, 1863), 56 –57. 154. Ibid., 194–95; Oliver E. Allen, New York, New York, 90. 155. Barrett, Old Merchants, 110 –11. 156. Thomas C. Cochran, “An Analytical View of Early American Business,” in Business Enterprise in Early New York, ed. Joseph R. Frese and Jacob Judd (Tarrytown, N.Y.: Sleepy Hollow Press, 1979), 1–15: 7.

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on coerced African and exploited American labor in a system that operated humans as mechanized subordinates of an industrial production of sensational commodities, a similar dynamic evolves within bourgeois circles in the Atlantic littoral as hinterland youth come to the mid-and southern-Atlantic coastal cities to be culturally trained into the graded and quasi-mechanical behavioral process of commercial paper and credit relations. The intense cultural labor invested in these men through higher education and similar kinds of embodied professional training found one outlet in the supplementary production of noncommercial writing. As middle-class youth found that they were economically positioned by the circumatlantic world-system to rely on manual writing as a vocational entry point, they turned to what was at their hand, the literary, as their resource for explicating their situation. The production of transactional documents that supported outward-directed urban commerce propelled, in turn, the period’s growth in newspapers and magazines. These journals contained market information and foreign news, but they also included a space for fictional communications, which the period’s rising number of merchants, college graduates, professionals, and career politicians (all overlapping categories) used to represent themselves. Appropriating the long-standing geocultural forms of sensibility and sentimentality, the junior merchants and lawyers turned its significations to a slightly different function by renewing and revising the residual form of long prose fiction as a device for representing their own ambiguous positions in a swiftly transforming world. John Davis took Caritat’s advice and became an accountant.157 But he also became a literary translator for Caritat and a novelist in his own right. Davis’s fusion of mercantile and literary activity and socially oriented discourse would have been well recognized by Caritat, who ran Manhattan’s largest and most successful bookshop at the fashionable Broadway location of the new City Hotel at the heart of the business district. Caritat knew the mercantile and literary world as one, and he drew from the former to provide personnel for the latter and supported the latter by guiding it to represent the concerns of the former. As a cohort of weakly established but educated young men gravitated to the realm of urban trade that was formed by the conjuncture of international, regional, and urban conditions, they invoked fictional forms as the medium for thinking through the conditions of their insecurity. Not all the young men who were in this condition engaged in periodical literary activity 157. Barrett, Old Merchants, 344.

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or participated in the wider, protoliterary realm of conversational men’s clubs and societies, and even fewer of this group actually produced novels or literary narratives. Yet the moment of the early American novel depends on the collision of social forces and conditions brought together by foreign commerce. This claim may seem to discount or marginalize the presence and importance of female authors and readers. Such a binary division is less than what initially appears to be the case. When women wrote, the material conditions of publication—its social milieu and communicative apparatus—were established, controlled, and distributed by men who intervened to shape women’s texts to mark their concerns. Even such a now-canonical period woman’s text like Ann Eliza Bleecker’s captivity narrative The History of Maria Kittle may have been published after having been recomposed by her nephew Anthony Bleecker, one of the young men enmeshed within the literary and financial realms of the re-export republic, who possibly used his influence to get it serialized in New-York Magazine, where he was a frequent contributor. Kittle was begun in 1779 by Ann Eliza Bleecker but completed by her niece Margaretta Bleecker, who moved to New York in 1783, married the French deist physician Peter Faugeres in 1791, and then also published her own poetry in the New-York Magazine. The captivity narrative was not published until 1793, when it was brought out by T. and J. Swords, who were the printers for the Friendly Club’s Monthly Magazine and the New-York Magazine.158 A possible sign that the text was changed appears with the narrative’s end, which breaks from its air of trauma and goes to lengths to praise the French for their sensibility, a move that suggests either the intervention of Anthony Bleecker, who as one whose profit from trade with the French might have chosen to make the text give a more welcoming image of these former antagonists, or Margaretta’s own desire to accommodate an Atlantic culture brought in by her husband. Aside from men’s influence over publication, the emerging literary field cannot be so neatly bisected by biology, since the thematic of femininity provided most of the rhetorical devices and connotations of the early American novel, even when women were not directly involved. Sentimental fiction in the 1790s about female virtue in distress is not only a woman’s 158. Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1999), 214; James A. Levernier and Douglas R. Wilmes, eds., American Writers Before 1800, vol 2. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983). For Kittle’s relation to Brown’s Wieland, see Warren F. Broderick, “Fiction Based on ‘Well-Authenticated Facts’: Documenting the Birth of the American Novel,” Hudson Valley Regional Review 4, no. 2 (1987): 1–37.

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phenomenon, since the “feminine” discourse of virtue and the trials of the friendless young woman abandoned in the city spoke excellently to the defenseless and travails of a young bourgeois man of indeterminate place and urban entry.159 Because the young men’s entries into the re-export realm were not wholly secure, since the conditions of their arrival were themselves new, untested for their longevity, and dependent on the vicissitudes of foreign events, this social group depended on the careful calibration of trustworthiness based on the display of embodied characteristics: the codes of sensibility, sociability, and sentimental friendship. These codes often became enunciated through tales of female virtue in distress, which allegorized the structure of feeling that these men experienced, and they produced a discourse of femininity as their preferred mode of expressing their concerns about their own potential vulnerability.160 What are often seen today as women’s tales for women were often read and written by the period’s men, who received the representation of sentimental heroines as signifiers of their own fragility and the medium of differentiation both within and outside their class fraction. An example of this manner of self-representation appears with one late nineteenth-century recollection about the commencement speeches given by Columbia University’s 1791 graduates. “Pierre E. Fleming speaks on ‘Arbitrary Power’; William T. Broome on ‘The Late Revolution in France’; John W. Milligan on ‘Faction’; Thomas L. Ogden on ‘The Rising Glory of America.’ All of these were of New-York city. The provincial youth seem to have maintained the old commencement themes, among which are found on this occasion, ‘The Improvement of Time,’ ‘Sympathy,’ ‘The Beauties of Nature,’ ‘On the Importance of the Fair Sex.’”161 The editor assumes that students not born to the metropolis were unfamiliar with contemporary matters of political interest. The reverse is true. The choice of topics illustrates the separation of modes of self-representation between scions of the older elites and the platoon leaders of an emerging one. The former use the codes of political debate that were the preferred discourse of their fathers, the established elites, while the latter deploy the older themes of sensibility and sentiment 159. Peter Mathias, “Risk, Credit, and Kinship in Early Modern Enterprise,” in The Early Modern Atlantic Economy, ed. John J. McCusker and Kenneth Morgan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 15–35, 29. 160. Lennard Tennenhouse, “The Americanization of Clarissa,” Yale Journal of Criticism 11, no. 1 (1998): 177–96; Ditz, “Shipwrecked.” 161. James Grant Wilson, The Memorial History of the City of New-York: From its First Settlement to the Year 1892, 4 vols. (New York: New York History Company, 1893), 3:80.

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as an available means of representing their modernity with nascent cosmopolitan capitalism.162 Moreover, the inflections of gender act as a class-saturated language through which bourgeois young men could distinguish themselves from the immiseration of the urban working classes, which was increasingly visible to all in the city. The tales of seduction exculpate the failure of its heroine by showing her fall as an error of middle-class judgment, the terms of which were considered as only covering the strata above the plebeians. As both bourgeois and plebeian youth were facing protoindustrializing work conditions, the middle-class youth used a discourse of feminized refinement to differentiate themselves from the “crude” and unfeeling lower ranks. The feminization of American culture, as Ann Douglass puts it, was a tactic of bourgeois struggle for class authority, not its abandonment. Young Americans’ use of sentimental codes was not merely their retranscription of obsolete British references in the spirit of colonial emulation, but their refunctionalization of these codes by a social group attuned to international flows of goods and peoples influenced by French domestic and international conflict. The political conditions of the Anglo-French blockades brought Americans into contact with both the translated ideas and actual presence of French social and cultural influences with the influx of French refugees from the continental and Haitian revolutions. These exogamous elements provided the last conjunctural force that led to the novel’s emergence. An important effect of the Francophone immigrants came out of their preexisting knowledge and continuing dedication to literary institutions. Beyond a number of French-language newspapers that arose for the benefit of displaced Creoles, a network of French booksellers and publishers — Nancrede in Boston, St.-Mery in Philadelphia, and Caritat in New York—were crucial to founding new businesses of domestic bookselling and commissioning creative work. With greater experience in the realm of publishing literature than American printers and booksellers, the French were often more willing to risk bringing native authors and themes into print than were American printers. Nancrede published Royal Tyler’s The Contrast, and Caritat published Charles Brockden Brown, among others.163 Not only did French booksellers generate local production, they also heavily imported 162. For the class fraction use of sentiment, see Matson, Merchants and Empire, 5–7. 163. Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 1986), 30.

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Francophone texts and the codes and arguments within them. Fäy estimates that nearly a quarter of the books imported into New York were written in French, but the overall impact of these texts has been silenced since the bibliographies of early American texts typically do not index imported foreignlanguage material.164 As the socioeconomic conditions of the penmen arose through the geopolitics effected by the French Revolution, they received its geocultural effects as well. This generational cohort lacked a clear sense of their social references and boundaries, especially as the long depression of the 1780s had squandered the rhetorical luster of independence and nationalism, which it would not regain for young male Americans until after the century’s turn. The young, literate American bourgeoisie instead saw how the French Revolution magnetized the career gambits of bourgeois scribblers like themselves, such as the physician-journalist Marat and the lawyer-essayist Robespierre, and this encouraged local aspirations by illustrating how provincial unknowns of their own generation could storm the stage of history. Yet because the French refugees were themselves ambivalent about the French and Haitian revolutions, the reception of European events and cadences was frequently not in the mode of governmental politics, but through the social and cultural discourses that formed belles lettres and the novel, which was a more amenable and politically safer form for the French refugees’ to convey their experience. Furthermore, with the exception of reports by a small group of political and scientific elites and exiles, American knowledge of French events did not come directly from the Continent but usually via the English reception, debate, and redaction of French events by writers like Paine, Godwin, and Wollstonecraft, and their opponents, like Burke. When Americans spoke radicalism it was not in the maxims of St. Just but through the logic learned from the English dissidents, primarily Paine, but also significantly Wollstonecraft’s history of the French Revolution and William Godwin’s Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Political Justice. Anglo-Jacobinism, with its own relations to changing English labor conditions and state repression, shares many characteristics with the French Jacobins of a new writerly group making pronouncements about governmentality in the urban capital. But whereas writers in France quickly

164. Howard Mumford Jones, America and French Culture, 1750 –1848 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973), 197n, 187; Bernard Fäy, The Revolutionary Spirit in France and America (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1966).

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moved into the realm of political rule, English radicals were successfully kept at a distance from the state and shunted into what was England’s more developed and autonomous sphere of commercial publishing and magazines, where they could shape a (marginal) career as a professional writer, often by reviewing, as was Wollstonecraft’s mode of survival for years. While this reduced the mortal stakes involved in writing, it also limited its effects on the state. Both Robespierre and Godwin spoke about virtuous rule, but the former did so in a theater that connected the rostrum to the guillotine with the nation-state in between, while the latter’s avenue was from the writing closet to the bookseller with the coffeehouse world in between. Frustrated in their efforts to enter the Commons and speak to a wider arena, the Anglo-Jacobin writers, whom I call Woldwinites, took the collectivized individual as their substitute field of action and veered toward producing novelistic narratives.165 This shift in medium for the Woldwinite writers during the 1790s meant that their arguments increasingly incorporated preexisting novelistic themes and devices, like those of sentimental fiction, for their working language. By the 1790s the first wave of British literary sentiment had long since diminished, since it was crafted amidst an eighteenth-century configuration of the world-system that was by then fading. As sentiment became an increasingly empty form, its descriptive matter became available for recodification by a younger cohort of English writers, who modernized its devices and tropes within a context of politically motivated cultural scripts. The sentimental novel’s investigation into questions of personal virtue, performed through the encounter between the maiden and the seducer, merged sympathetically with the writings of an ethical political science that had previously focused on the moral artifices of the ancien régime. The meeting of sentimentalism and secular radicalism that occurred in the English novel was mutually supportive. With its presentation of the

165. I prefer the term Woldwinite to Anglo-Jacobin partly to highlight, through an abbreviation of Wollstonecraft and Godwin, a particular formation of mainly metropolitan bourgeois publicists within the century’s much more heterogeneous spectrum of dissent, and partly to avoid the confusion of analogy, since these writers were, if anything, more properly AngloGirondins than sympathizers with Robespierre. For literary Woldwinism, see Pamela Clemit, The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel 1780–1805 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976); Gary Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period, 1789 –1830 (London: Longman, 1989); Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975); J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, 1770–1800 (London, 1932).

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endangered female body, sentimental concerns about the dynamics of personal relations were intermixed with those of Enlightenment-era political theory. The mingling of issues of public polity with private dalliance resulted in a new type of fiction in which Pamela and Political Justice could meet to become Caleb Williams, and A Vindication of Women’s Rights could join hands with Clarissa to become Maria; or, the Wrongs of Woman. If this fusion of the personal and the political was recognized in England as a convergence of several literary sources, readers in the United States received both kinds of text simultaneously from overseas, so that the discourses about personal behavior, whether of a young girl or an ambitious professional, and resistance to the blockage created by the standing orders were read as one. For the American collegians coming of age in the 1790s cohort of young bourgeois men, the combination of mediated French events and personalized social analysis found in Woldwinite writings provided an encyclopedia of gestures they cited to address their class uncertainty within a worldly theater of conflict. Armed with a codex of sensibilitarian claims and sentimental conventions, they went about constructing literary institutions and parainstitutions that would provide the material framework for novelistic production, even if these texts were written by women or individuals explicitly hostile to the brave new world of the re-export republic. The novel flourished as is became the operative medium for cadres of young men encountering the changes propelled by re-export. The social influences prepared by U.S. appropriation of favorable conditions in the Atlantic world-system, resulting in the re-export trade, did not emerge spontaneously. Many of the recognizable elements that congealed due to re-export existed in the decades before the 1790s. These factors, however, had been either weakly present or poorly synchronized. The endogamous production of the American novel responds to the domestic mediation of exogamous conditions in the circumatlantic world-system as the catalytic appearance of the re-export trade allows different phenomena to congeal and cross a threshold of emergence. Because different phases of historical capitalism reshape cultural forms for their own needs in order to resolve that moment’s particular pressures, no homogeneous, formal “history of the novel” can be written. The early American novel exists as much in a state of discontinuity with earlier, midcentury British and French novels as it does in a state of linear influence. While the forms, tropes, and devices of earlier preexisting geocultural artifacts

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and performances became the language that Americans used in their narratives, they were not done in a manner of colonial catching-up with the core’s narrative conventions, but as a convenient means of expression that also looks forward to the onset of the next phase. The particularities of the American novel in the 1790s emerge from the pressures and tensions circulating within a transformational period, where its factors often use older elements to explore what might be the potential avenues for the next phase. The novel ultimately rises and falls in the short time frame of the 1790s to 1800s because the conjunctural moment between the last contractive gasps of one world-system regime of accumulation and the expansive spurts of another result is a relatively short one. When the transition has become complete, the novel-form becomes devitalized until a later point in capitalist cyclicality recalls it for its own particular use. Before turning to examine the response of individual texts to these conditions, a penultimate register — the institutional and parainstitutional— needs consideration. Earlier in this chapter I discussed the overarching world-system of the eighteenth century, its effects on the 1790s as a transitional phase, and the American subsection of the circumatlantic, and then I descended to the regional level of the mid- and southern-Atlantic seaboard and the urban layer, primarily New York and Philadelphia. In the next section I will continue this inward movement with the consideration of New York’s Friendly Club in the mid to late 1790s as exemplary of the period’s fusion of male conversational clubs, social welfare projects, and literary productions. The Friendly Club’s particular interest is that it is the group to which the period’s most prolific new novelist, Charles Brockden Brown, belonged. Because Brown created novels only in the compact period of the late 1790s and the first years of the 1800s, the concision of his production can be tightly mapped against the decade’s dynamics, especially since his novels’ publication was within weeks of their completion and sometimes serialized even before their completion.

The Re-Export Republic’s Cultural Enactments: The Friendly Club and Charles Brockden Brown A main form for literary development is the 1790s was the weakly institutionalized conversational clubs of male sodality that differed from earlier eighteenth-century forms through their association with belle-lettristic

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magazines. The New York Friendly Club, which existed from the mid to late-1790s, is representative of these groups because unlike earlier male clubs, which tended to reconfirm existing status associations, the Friendlies exemplified the social heterogeneity and personnel movements associated with re-export’s internal transformation of the middle class. The Friendly Club’s members were also emblematic as they collectively generated a large body of discursive, dramatic, and literary writing, not limited to Charles Brockden Brown’s longer fiction. With their various positions and projects in the 1790s, the Friendlies were central to Manhattan’s literary endeavors. In 1785 New York had no magazines, but in 1800 there were four, two of which were run by Friendlies: the Monthly Magazine edited by Brown, and the Medical Repository, the first magazine in the United States to last longer than eight years, edited by Elihu Hubbard Smith, Samuel Mitchill, and Edward Miller.166 Previous discussions of American conversational societies have not adequately recognized the difference and particularity of the ones emerging in the 1790s from either their predecessors or followers. The foremost cultural historian of conversational groups in eighteenth-century America, David S. Shields, details the influence of sensibility and sociability as a discursive construct in early America in ways congruent with this book’s understanding of these terms. Shields dates the period of sensibility’s institution in European coffeehouses and the more exclusive clubs of colonial America as “roughly 1690 through the 1760s” and one that “predates the formation of an American middle class.”167 After independence, the “discursive institutions nurtured by provincial belles lettres [that] had survived the Revolution” faced a showdown with “the republican critique” of belles lettres as aristocratic and unproductive.168 Clubbable discourse managed to survive only insofar as it became more formerly commercialized with links with bookstores. Shields argues that this maneuver eventually failed because “perhaps the competitive ethos of the marketplace could not be escaped in a commercial setting.”169 This model aptly captures why the ersatz gentry clubs fell away, but it mistakes how new factions appropriated the form of the male club while changing its internal logic. The Friendly Club flourished precisely 166. Pomerantz, New York, 456. 167. David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), xix. 168. Ibid., xxviii. 169. Ibid., 323–24.

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because its members were products and participants in the re-export world of extramural commerce. In his history of New York City’s intellectual life from the colonial period onward, Thomas Bender celebrates the Friendly Club as paradigmatic of late eighteenth-century clubbable discourse, but he does so on account of its secularism and the “relative unimportance of the academy (Columbia College)” to this “rather close association of men of letters, professionals, and businessmen.”170 Like Shields, though, Bender’s account is a lapsarian tale about the retreat of “intellectuals” from public involvement with commercial nonspecialists and into the cloisters of a solipsistic university, which attempts to monopolize the right to debate by erecting exclusionary academic protocols around the production and free exchange of ideas. In this spirit, Bender’s tale is similar to Habermas’s lament for the commercialization of the public sphere, except that Bender sees the downfall of open discourse as a result of its disengagement with urban commerce rather than the reverse. Yet the Friendlies were not the last appearance of a public-minded culture in New York; they also act as a precursor to the very privatization of discourse that Bender laments. This apparent paradox is no paradox at all when we recognize that the Friendly Club’s sodality represents a distinctive phase in between (early modern) personal and (modern) impersonal modes of power that cannot be entirely linked to or separated from either the eighteenth or nineteenth century. Their in-between status is captured in their mode of communicative presentation. The early and mid-eighteenth-century clubs produced reams of prose and poetry that were circulated mainly in manuscript form or small print run texts for a relatively familiar circle of readers or patrons. By the late eighteenth century, American clubs moved away from this model of reciprocal literary production, as writing enters a quasi-controlled market through the limited publicity of small-distribution magazines and journals, wherein the club’s members often published their writing semi-anonymously, using initials or pseudonyms that could be fairly easily fixed to a real name. The club magazine nexus moves from a model of oral and manual transmission to a semi-impersonalized print culture, which is not yet a fully autonomous and impersonal market of print capitalism that removes the links of familiarity between a piecework author from a readership of

170. Thomas Bender, New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City, from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 29.

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unknown consumers. When Charles Brockden Brown wrote his “Editor’s Address to the Public” for the Literary Magazine’s inaugural October 1803 issue, he clearly understood that the journal will be read neither by a mass public nor by an entirely intimate one. Brown wants to “hold the mirror up” so that the public can see its own reflection, but his definition of this public is a world consisting of “a few hundred persons,” a set of bourgeoisie about whom he feels comfortable so that he can knowingly rehearse their concerns.171 The semipublic nature of this address means that Brown will not sign his editorial work, although he will “take no pains to conceal [his] name. Any body may know it who chooses to ask me or my publisher.”172 Brown’s address imagines textual production as something that is in between the older status assumptions implied in patronage and prepublication subscription lists, which often treat the book as a luxury good of sumptuary display, and an exchange model of “free” consumption by an unknown audience purchasing cultural commodities. Brown’s half-public declaration to an audience that he does not personally know, but feels confident that he understands their cultural outlook, might be read as evidencing an anxiety about the onset of a fully commercialized marketplace. While the language of anxiety is much beloved by contemporary cultural critics, this might be a case of the glass half empty, rather than half full. Brown’s declaration also displays a guarded ease with an expanding readership. For Brown and the Friendly Club represents a middle-class fraction learning to become increasingly willing to handle the risk in the capitalist marketplace, despite their penchant for exclaiming the reverse. A review of the Friendly Club’s membership clearly shows that they were firmly located at the heart of the social, commercial, and, to a lesser degree, political transformations involved with the infrabourgeois alterations enacted through the re-export trade. A working list of its membership, gleaned from diaries and period accounts, variously includes: Elihu Hubbard Smith, William Dunlap, Charles Brockden Brown, William Johnson, James Kent, Samuel Latham Mitchill, Edward Miller, Samuel Miller, William Walton Woolsey, George Muirson Woolsey, Charles Adams, Lynde Catlin, Thomas Mumford, Anthony Bleecker, John Wells, Richard Alsop, and Theodore Dwight.173 171. Charles Brockden Brown, Literary Essays and Reviews, ed. Alfred Weber and Wolfgang Schäfer (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1992), 126. 172. Ibid,. 127. 173. The most thorough consideration of the Friendly Club’s membership is Bryan Elliot Waterman, “The Friendly Club of New York City: Industries of Knowledge in the Early Republic” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 2000).

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The core of the New York Friendlies was a cluster of similarly aged, Connecticut-born, Yale-educated men, several of whom become interrelated through marriage. This group joined with some native New York and New Jersey business and medical professionals, along with others linked to Philadelphia commerce, medicine, and law.174 The convergence of regional and denominational groups formed by immigration into the mid-Atlantic cities typifies the erosion of provincial state identities in favor of a cosmopolitan one based on a heterogeneous urban coastal cluster involving immigrants. As the Yale-trained Friendlies move to grasp the vocational and cultural opportunities developing in New York, they represent New England’s loss of talented youth seeking better employability in the re-export metropolises. Far from being bohemian indigents, the Friendlies’ circumstances ranged a middle-class spectrum from the solidly comfortable and newly wealthy to being inheritors of great fortunes. Around half of the group were medical and legal professionals, or had trained to be such, while the other half were commercially active in the re-export trade’s ring of wealth generation. A few had already garnered positions of tremendous political and financial power that had little to do with partisan politics. While Friendlies often grew up within the traditional learning and vocational institutions of the standing order, they tended to reject these in favor of public knowledge, welfare, and abolitionist institutions that were not grounded on the familiar platforms of New England prestige educational and denominational institutions.175 The Friendlies, however, also capture the transitional quality of the 1790s as after the turn of the century, they increasingly reengage with the older institutions of education and politics that they had initially abjured. It would be easy to mischaracterize this turning back to the older institutions as simply a capitulation to the standing order. Such a superficial claim of middle-aged conservatism overlooks that there was no longer any

174. The Woolsey brothers were Theodore Dwight’s brothers-in-law through their halfsister Sarah (Woolsey) Dwight. William W. Woolsey married Timothy and Theodore Dwight’s sister Elizabeth. William Dunlap married the Woolseys’ sister Elizabeth in 1789. Elihu Hubbard Smith’s sister married Thomas Mumford. Prosper Whetmore, sometimes mentioned as a member, was either Dunlap’s cousin or second cousin. Marcia Edgerton Bailey, “A Lesser Hartford Wit, Dr. Elihu Hubbard Smith,” University of Maine Studies 30 (June 1928): 11–133, 21, 29, 31; James E. Cronin, ed., The Diary of Elihu Hubbard Smith (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1973), 46. 175. Catherine Kaplan, “Elihu Hubbard Smith’s ‘The Institutions of the Republic of Utopia,’” Early American Literature 35 (2000): 294–336.

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substantive “standing order” left after the 1790s transformations; the world of the 1780s had vanished as seen with the near total disintegration of the Federalist Party after the election of Jefferson. The Friendlies involvement with these institutions marks the success of the re-export interests as they can incorporate antagonistic elements in ways that defines the prelude to the emerging next wave of bourgeois society. These internal rearrangements, built up on those of the prior century’s last decade, is beyond my purview here, except to note its cause for the novel’s decline. The novel increasingly disappears after 1800 not because it was unsuccessful as a form, but that the interests that engineered the novel in the 1790s were so successful that they decreasingly had need for the form of longer fiction as a structure of feeling. By the start of the nineteenth century, this bourgeoiseme had taken its first laurels of social dominance and consequently chose other forms of cultural expression to signify their initial consolidation of power. The Friendly Club is mainly known through the inner group of Elihu Hubbard Smith, William Dunlap, and Charles Brockden Brown because they were among the members most active in the turn toward the new aesthetic forms advanced by the re-export world and were personally very close friends, as their lives capture the rupture with the past that the Friendly Club collectively embodies. Elihu Hubbard Smith’s family traced itself back to the first generations of Massachusetts Bay Colony immigrants in the mid-seventeenth century, and his birthplace, Litchfield, Connecticut, was soldered to the standing order as it produced several postindependence political and legal figures.176 Smith breaks out from expected career paths of Congregational New England by forgoing law and the ministry for medicine, a career then dominated by Quakers and those trained by Scottish Presbyterians. He left Connecticut to study medicine in Philadelphia, where he met Brown, and then settles in New York to practice, becoming an ardent Woldwinite along the way. He also breaks from the older model of literary sociality typified by his collegiate membership as a minor light of the Hartford Wits and editor of the first American poetry anthology. Once in New York, he resurrects the Friendly Club and orients its literary activity away from poetry toward the more public ones of drama and literary journalism. In 1797, he cofounds, with Friendlies Mitchill and Miller, the first American professional magazine for physicians, the Medical Repository. We do not today see him as important 176. Bailey, “Lesser Hartford Wit,” 11–18.

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a cultural figure as Brown, but this is because his life was quickly ended by the 1798 yellow fever plague, as he died treating sick New Yorkers. Like Smith, Yale-educated Dunlap comes from the older order, but he breaks away from that milieu to participate in the opportunities and aesthetic forms provided by the new wealth of the commercial 1790s. Dunlap was born to a Protestant Irish immigrant who became a successful merchant and Loyalist slave-owner in Perth Amboy, “a social center of the New Jersey aristocracy.”177 Although the family decamped to British-occupied New York during the War for Independence, they did not join the postwar Loyalist exodus. The family seems, though, to have still looked to British culture, as Dunlap’s father financed his son’s study of painting in London at Benjamin West’s atelier in 1784. Returning to the States in 1789, Dunlap settles in New York, where he briefly joins his father’s business after failing to succeed as a painter. Dunlap’s first career as a portrait painter probably came up short as he was trained to produce the kind of large-scale portraiture that the older elites sought but for which there was scant market in the 1790s. The demand for painting in the 1790s was for the smaller, quicker to make, and cheaper cameo portraiture, which the newer merchants preferred. After his father dies, Dunlap recognizes the ongoing shift in cultural tastes when he purchases a share in the Park Theatre, which he managed to keep going with his steady stream of translations from Kotzebue’s sentimental comedies that were popular as they spoke to the heart of a nascent urban middle class.178 Yet because most discussion of the Friendlies focuses on the members, like Smith, Dunlap, and Brown, who most explicitly focused on arts and publication, the club’s close relation to the period’s developing commercial and financial activities has been underrecognized. Many of the members were at the heart of the re-export realm of banking and the carrying trade.

177. Oral Sumner Coad, William Dunlap: A Study of His Life and Works and of His Place in Contemporary Culture (New York: Dunlap Society, 1917), 4. 178. J. Strohschänk (1992), William Dunlap und August von Kotzebue: Deutsches Drama in New York um 1800 (Stuttgart, Akademischer Verlag Stuttgart, 1992); J. Zipes, “Dunlap, Kotzebue, and the Shaping of American Theater: A Reevaluation from a Marxist Perspective,” Early American Literature 8 (1974): 272 – 84; G. S. Williamson, “What Killed August von Kotzebue? The Temptations of Virtue and the Political Theology of German Nationalism, 1789 –1819,” Journal of Modern History 72 (December 2000): 890 – 943; C. B. Brown, “[Review of ] The Wild Youth: A Comedy for Digestion [and] The Wild-Goose Chase: A Play by August von Kotzebue,” in Literary Essays and Review, ed. Alfred Weber and Wolfgang Schäfer (Frankfurt, Peter Lang, 1992), 64–77.

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Lynde Catlin became a prominent New York bank president and wealthy enough to arrange for his son to clerk under John Jacob Astor.179 Even before they joined the Friendly Club, the brothers William Walton and George Woolsey were embedded in New York’s new business elite as they had become rich from their sugar refineries. During William Walton’s time in the club, he was made the secretary of New York’s Chamber of Commerce in 1796 and elected the next year as the Manufacturing Society’s vice president.180 In the new century, he became one of the directors of the Merchant Bank and later, in 1807, was president of the Eagle Fire Insurance Company, which functioned like a bank. In the mid-1790s, Woolsey’s partner was his brother-in-law, Moses Rogers, a wealthy trader in Caribbean goods who was in 1792 one of the original shareholders in the Tontine Coffee House, which became a precursor to the New York Stock Exchange; a director of the United States Branch Bank in 1793; and later a director of the Mutual Insurance Company.181 William Johnson’s brothers, Seth and Horace, were merchants so financially comfortable that Seth purchased a complete set of the thirtyfive-volume French Encyclopédie for the princely sum of $340, giving him one of the few private copies in the United States.182 When Dunlap’s father died, he briefly took one of the Woolseys as his business partner but sold out to buy a quarter share of the Park Theatre, possibly for $12,500 dollars, which then survived by entertaining the new strata of merchants.183 Anthony Bleecker was probably more of a close associate than a regular member of the Friendlies during the 1790s. A 1791 Columbia College graduate and lawyer, Bleecker was a prolific writer and contributor to Manhattan’s periodicals, but he is rarely known as such because “the bulk of his literary work, contributed anonymously to various periodicals, was not collected during his lifetime, and most of it now escapes identification.”184 Although

179. Bailey, “Lesser Hartford Wit,” 22, 26; Walter Barrett, The Old Merchants of New York City: Third Series (New York: Carleton, 1865), 81. 180. Walter Barrett, The Old Merchants of New York City: Second Series, (New York: Carleton, 1863), 318. 181. Ibid., 318 –19; Barrett, Old Merchants: Third Series, 224. 182. Cronin, Diary, 49, 53. 183. Coad, William Dunlap, 28 –29. 184. K. B. Taft, Minor Knickerbockers (New York, American Book Company, 1947), 378. See also John W. Francis, Old New York; or, Reminiscences of the Past Sixty Years (New York: Charles Roe, 1858), 69; Arthur Hobson Quinn, American Fiction: An Historical and Critical Survey (New York: Appleton, 1936), 5.

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descended from the older Dutch elites, Bleecker joined in with those merchants making a fortune in the new modes of wealth accumulation and was on the committee of five that purchased the Tontine Coffee House, making him one of the founding shareholders in the Stock Exchange.185 Even those members who were not directly active in commercial activities benefited from its associated transformation of the harbor town as they directly participated in the new elite’s activities. Native New Yorker and Yale graduate, James Kent was New York City’s recorder from 1796 to 1798, an unelected position that was, after the mayoralty, the city’s second most important municipal office during a time when the post’s profile changed to address Manhattan’s mercantile ferment.186 Before the post of attorney for the city was created in 1801, the recorder was the corporation’s chief legal counsel, who had full voting power on the city’s Common Council and “served with full authority in place of the mayor during the absence of the latter.”187 Because plural posts were common practice, Kent was also master in chancery in 1796, representing the city in the New York Assembly, while also sitting on the bench of the Court of Common Pleas, during a time when juridical power became increasingly centralized and autonomous.188 As “the leading civil tribunal of the city,” the court “far outranked the Supreme Court in its popularity among litigants and lawyers of New York,” such as Hamilton, Burr, and Livingston.189 For municipal matters, the recorder also participated in the passing of city ordinances and committees regarding market prices, sanitation and hygiene (important during the plague years), and other matters of police and social welfare. In 1797, while Brown is writing his first long fictions, Kent admitted that he “made a great deal of money,” as his multiple offices meant that that he received a sizable income from the re-export-driven city — the salary for the recordership alone was $500 a year.190 The members who were not accruing wealth in mercantile endeavor or in the legal matrix associated with it still benefited from cosmopolitan bourgeoisie’s reshaping of the city through their appropriation of benevolent and welfare societies. When Elihu Hubbard Smith moved to New 185. Barrett, Old Merchants: Third Series, 220, 224. 186. Francis, 70; Franklin Bowditch Dexter, Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College, vol. 4: July 1778 –June 1792 (New York: Henry Holt, 1907), 607; Pomerantz, New York, 42. 187. Pomerantz, New York, 42. 188. Ibid., 47– 48, 55. 189. Ibid., 52. 190. Ibid., 47–54, 121–22.

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York, he barely had a medical practice and ended the year 1794 in deficit, although he correctly assumed that his father would cover his debts.191 Smith’s fortunes improved when he gained a paid position on the staff of the New York Hospital, where fellow Friendly W. W. Woolsey’s partner and brother-in-law, Moses Roger, was a governor.192 He then took over the medical practice of another Friendly, Dr. Edward Miller, and gained more work at the City Dispensary in 1797, where Rogers was a principal manager, Anthony Bleecker was its secretary, and Brockden Brown’s future father-in-law, William Linn, was on the board.193 Rogers, Dunlap, W. W. Woolsey, and Smith also knew each other as core members of New York’s abolition society.194 This world of mercantile professionalism also made new literary institutions possible as seen with the publisher (of Brockden Brown’s fictions) and bookseller Hocquet Caritat, who first came to the United States in 1792 at the age of forty. A royal pensioner dismissed from service in 1788, he became an ardent revolutionist and later traveled to New York with a ship of merchandise to sell in order to raise funds for the Girondins.195 In New York he helped John Fellows, publisher of the American deist Elihu Palmer’s and Paine’s The Age of Reason, establish a public circulating library.196 Caritat then left New York to return to France in 1795, where he discovered that his wife had obtained a divorce by denouncing him as an émigré. Despite Paine’s intervention, Caritat was declared an enemy of the state and his goods forfeited.197 Returning to New York in 1797, he purchased Fellows’s book stock and thrived as a brilliant bookseller. By 1800, Caritat’s circulating library had 30,000 volumes, far more than the 6,500 belonging to the city’s Society Library, and was quite possibly the largest in the Western Hemisphere at that time.198 This collection was pitched at Manhattan’s wealthy readers, since it charged higher rates than other libraries in the city, and was located at the fashionable and visually distinctive City Hotel, which had opened in

191. Cronin, Diary, 46. 192. Barrett, Old Merchants: Second Series, 2:318. 193. Bailey, “Lesser Hartford Wit,” 59. 194. Barrett, Old Merchants: Third Series, 2:318. 195. George Gates Raddin, Caritat and the Genet Episode (Dover, N.J.: Dover Advance Press, 1953). 196. Ibid., 18 –19. 197. Ibid., 46. 198. George Gates Raddin, Hocquet Caritat and the Early New York Literary Scene (Dover, N.J.: Dover Advance Press, 1953), 30.

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1794 on the west side of Broadway just north of Trinity Church, a building embellished with the first slate roof in the city.199 For the next several decades the City Hotel remained the banqueting and meeting place of choice for merchant elites. Gilbert Chinard notes that Caritat’s “contribution to the library life of New York can hardly be over-emphasized,” especially as he created a women’s reading room that became a rare secular space where bourgeois women could be seen in public downtown without fearing aspersions to their character.200 When Caritat decided to publish Brown’s romances, Brown’s work was institutionally primed for success as it entered the most successful bookstore, in the most prominent location, and grounded in a network of Manhattan’s financial and professional elites. These were Brown’s intended audience. The Friendlies also typify social trends after 1800, when they tend to return to manage the older institutions, especially those connected to education, but with the idea of renovating these institutions with the experience and outlook of the re-export realm at a time when the new merchants were increasingly becoming the university trustees who hired professors and college presidents.201 Seth Johnson became a Columbia College trustee, Mitchill helped found its College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1807, Samuel Miller became a professor in and then head of Princeton’s theological school, Kent chaired the first Alumni Society in America for Yale, and William Linn became the president of Queen’s College (Rutgers) in 1798 and was appointed in 1808 president of Union College.202 The chief illustration of the reorganized coalition between the old institutions and the new cosmopolitan bourgeoisie is seen with Yale’s presidency, which for most of the period from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century was practically a tenancy for the Dwight-Woolsey clan: Timothy Dwight IV from 1795 to 1817; Theodore Dwight Woolsey from 1846 to 1871; and Timothy Dwight V from 1886 to 1899.203 The lineage could easily be taken

199. George Gates Raddin, An Early New York Library of Fiction: With a Checklist of the Fiction in H. Caritat’s Circulating Library, No 1. City Hotel, Broadway, New York, 1804 (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1940), 15. 200. Bender, New York Intellect, 35. 201. Peter Dobkin Hall, Organization of American Culture, 17. 202. Ibid., 168; William Kent, Memoirs and Letters of James Kent, Ll.D (Boston: Little, Brown, 1898), 125; Bender, New York Intellect, 30; Coad, William Dunlap, 18; L. G. Leary, Soundings: Some Early American Writers (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1975), 176. 203. A. P. Stokes, Memorials of Eminent Yale Men, vol. 1: Religion and Letters (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1914), 237– 42.

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as the continuation of the older order through Dwight were it not that Yale’s history rests on W. W. Woolsey’s financial maneuvers, which he learned from his years in the re-export trade. After 1800, Woolsey returned to Connecticut, and in 1812 formed New Haven’s Eagle Bank with Eli Whitney and Yale’s treasurer, James Hillhouse. This was Yale’s preferred bank under Timothy Dwight’s presidency; by 1824 nearly half of the university’s endowment was deposited in its accounts.204 In the panic of 1825, the bank failed and nearly bankrupted the university. Yale, however, still looked to the generation of re-export: Kent chaired the first American society of alumni formed to solicit donations, and the Dwight-Woolseys continued to manage the university. Even before their wholehearted return to institutions, the Friendlies’ energies sought to create a different relation between culture and society, one exemplified by Charles Brockden Brown’s fictions.205 Within this group, Brown’s writing represents and critically explores the “culture of contradictions,” to use

204. Peter Dobkin Hall, Organization of American Culture, 165. 205. It has become a truism that the Friendly Club splintered after 1800 because of political differences, but none of the members spoke about such a split during their lives or in later diaries, and they maintained cordial contact with each other even as they became increasingly dispersed. While the club seems to have been divided in unpredictable ways over their cultural positions, these differences never threatened their personal relations. Dunlap disparaged Wollstonecraft, while Smith and Brown adored her. Kent’s political conservatism did not stop him from praising Godwin’s anticlericism. Samuel Miller’s The Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century (1803) contains a long diatribe against Godwin and Wollstonecraft yet singles out Brown’s fictions for praise, even though they were directly influenced by Godwin’s and Wollstonecraft’s discursive and fictional writing. Cronin, Diary, 101, 386; Raddin, Hocquet Caritat and the Early New York Literary Scene, 41– 42; Samuel Miller, A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century (New York: T. and J. Swords, 1803), 2:171; Walter H. Eitner, “Samuel Miller’s Nation ‘Lately Become Literary’: The Brief Retrospect in Brockden Brown’s Monthly Magazine,” Early American Literature 13 (1978): 213–16. It is unlikely that political partisanship would split the group because it consciously strove to establish a suprapartisan confraternity in which political topics could be described as cultural ones as was the commonly held tenet among other conversational groups of the time. If political disputes were a problem, it is difficult to explain why Caritat replaced the Friendlies with a new group, the Literary Assembly, which had at its core practically all the Friendlies except Smith (died 1798), Kent (moved upstate 1798), and Brown (moved to Philadelphia 1800). Given that Mitchill from then on held elected posts as a Jeffersonian, he surely would have been the first to go if politics were a problem. When Brown moved to Philadelphia he belonged to Dennie’s Tuesday Club, which was mainly Federalist in orientation but also included the son of fiercely Democrat-Republican Benjamin Rush. John F. Roche, “The Uranian Society: Gentlemen and Scholars in Federal New York,” New York History 52, no. 2 (1971): 120–32, 122–23; Eleanor Bryce Scott, “Early Literary Clubs in New York City,” American Literature 5, no. 1 (1933): 3–16; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 376; Gilman M. Ostrander, Republic of Letters: The American Intellectual Community, 1776 –1865 (Madison, Wisc.: Madison House Publishers, 1999), 108.

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William Hedges’s phrase, resulting from the replacement of one middleclass fraction.206

Charles Brockden Brown and the Novel Charles Brockden Brown was born to a mercantile family on the lower fringes of the Philadelphia Quaker Grandees in 1771. As a law clerk to Philadelphia’s recorder, Alexander Wilcocks, he formed his own conversational and literary club, the Belles Lettres Club, and composed juvenile poetry in a highly sentimental mode.207 Disgusted with the law, as a field that had not broken from the old order’s codes, Brown decides to hazard becoming a professional man of letters in 1793, a move supported by his friend Elihu Hubbard Smith, whose Woldwinite outlook encouraged Brown in this direction. During the mid-1790s Brown seems to be doing little other than filling notebooks and traveling occasionally between the various mid-Atlantic and Connecticut homes of the Friendlies. When the effects of the re-export boom start to take shape, Brown begins one of the most productive phases in American letters. Between 1798 and 1801 he creates six complete fictional romances, several incomplete ones, a fictionalized tract on women’s rights, some short stories and edits the Monthly Magazine and American Review (1799 –1800) and the American Review and Literary Journal (1801–2). After 1801 Brown concentrates on magazine editing, pamphleteering, translating, and on opuses, either incomplete or now lost, involving a long historical fiction and a geographical text. Throughout his writing, Brown relies on the Atlantic world-system’s geocultural syntax and resulting conditions of re-export for his themes and narrative perspective. Not surprisingly, then, Brown’s fictional writing emphasizes a geography that is profoundly circumatlantic, including the Mediterranean, and regional to the mid and southern Atlantic. Brown’s characters mobilize a topography linking the semiperipheries of Ireland, the Caribbean, and Western Mediterranean. France and Iberia to argue that events on the American 206. William Hedges, “Charles Brockden Brown and the Culture of Contradictions,” Early American Literature 9 (1974): 107– 42. 207. David Lee Clark, Charles Brockden Brown: Pioneer Voice of America (New York: AMS Press, 1966), 42.

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landmass are embedded with the flows of international events, social movements, and economies. Even the backcountry Philadelphia described in several of his romances is punctured by circumatlantic journeys and influences, often involving the globalizing effects of the French Revolutionary Wars, their associated slave revolts, and the pressures of native insubordination elsewhere on the peripheries of European imperialism in subcontinental Asia, the Caribbean, and the Western frontier. The domestic zoning in of worldly events frames a re-export domain noted by the main shipping cities of New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore as locales sharing a common set of social assumptions. While Brown’s writing always focuses on the Philadelphia of his birth, upbringing, and domesticity, barring a few months-long periods in New York, the fictions never contrast Philadelphia with Manhattan or Baltimore in any significant fashion, as though Brown recognizes the confluence and congruity of these urban centers. In contrast, the patriotic bourgeois zones of New England and Virginia do not register in his writing even at the level of random place setting, as if these regions do not merit a mention in fictional narratives or belong on the map of the social actions that motivate fiction writing in the early American Republic. If Brown’s narratives have geocultural predicates at their heart and constantly interrogate the economy of trade and value, it may be because Brown himself came from a family that profited from the period’s changing conditions of Caribbean trade and urban property speculation, as a result of rising land values due to the carrying trade. Brown also receives the period’s regional-urban changes as he leaves the cloistered realm of Philadelphia Quaker circles to associate with individuals, like Smith and Dunlap, outside his denominational background. These exogamous contacts catalyze the production of narratives that he might have previously desired to write, but could not until his circulation within the interurban flows of the eastern seaboard provided the necessary conditions and internationalized context. As a member of the Friendlies, Brown belongs to a group of men whose finances depended either explicitly on re-export or indirectly on the financial, legal, and institutional environment shaped by international trade, and whose conceptual interests were shaped by extranational concerns as they actively sought to inform themselves on the cultural arguments going on in England, France, and Germany. Encouraged by his associates to try his hand as the editor of a monthly magazine, Brown read widely in European

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publications and was one of the Americans most knowledgeable about Anglo-Continental cultural and literary debates of his time. On the basis of one letter that Smith wrote to Joseph Dennie seeking a publishing opportunity for Brown, a romanticized vision of Brown as a penniless, struggling author, Melville-like in desperation, has been crafted by literary scholars who are more comfortable with an image of a déclassé writer, rather than acknowledging Brown’s thoroughly comfortable, in material terms, existence. This imaginary has recently been elaborated by psychobiographical readings based on the political and economic failures of Brown’s father. During the War for Independence, Elijah Brown was interned in Virginia, along with elite Philadelphia Quakers who refused to take loyalty oaths in violation of their religious beliefs. Peter Kafer claims this event traumatized Brown as it alienated him from the imagined community of national pride, and it is directly allegorized in Brown’s romances.208 The Quaker environment of Brown’s formative years did not align itself with the patriotic complex, but by the 1790s, Brown discovers that a lack of investment in patriotic nationality is not a position simply limited to Quakers, but one that belongs to many in the realm of the re-export world in which he produces his writing. Furthermore, Brown’s self-declared methodology about the instrumental use of gothic devices for Woldwinite arguments (see Chapter 5) clearly explains Brown’s theorized use of popular forms in ways that precisely position his writing against the indulgence of personal anxieties. Additionally, Brown’s family was never in real financial distress, despite his father’s bankruptcy in 1784.209 Elijah Brown may have suffered repeated financial setbacks, but Brown’s mother, Mary Armitt, came from a wealthy Grandee family belonging to the gentleman merchant class.210 His wife’s family ensured that Elijah would not sink after failing as a merchant, putting him to work as a conveyancer for their real estate transactions. The Armitts ably profited from the rises in property and urban rent during the 1790s, and Warfel suggests that Brown’s childhood interest in architectural drawings may have possibly been due to “the family’s financial interest in the building boom of Philadelphia.”211

208. Peter Kafer, Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution and the Birth of American Gothic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 209. Ibid., 43. 210. Clark, Charles Brockden Brown, 141. 211. Harry R. Warfel, Charles Brockden Brown: American Gothic Novelist (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1949), 25.

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Brown never seems to have wanted as a child. He went to an expensive school but did not go to university, since Quakers did not believe in sending their sons to non-Quaker institutions.212 Unlike his brothers, who became re-export traders, Brown clerked with Philadelphia’s recorder, Alexander Wilcocks. In a world where parents might easily pay between $200 and $250 dollars for a lawyer to train their child, an apprenticeship with the city’s legal counsel would have been one of the most prestigious and costly available.213 Even after Brown rejects a legal career, he never seems pressed for money. Dunlap calls him the “distinguished favorite” of his parents and notes that he “acted as if he had no use for” money.214 In none of Brown’s letters, which often express states of depression and self-loathing, does he give any hint of financial hardship or anxiety about money. After leaving his law training, Brown seems to have been entirely supported by his parents or extended family until he was nearly thirty years old.215 He also appears to have been the favorite of his rich maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Armitt, who made him the chief beneficiary of her estate.216 Although Brown did not become wealthy from his writing, he seems to have made enough to uphold a secure domestic existence based on his magazine editing. His lifelong friend Thomas Cope claimed that Brown received $1,500 a year for his editing the Annals in the mid-1800s, and at Brown’s death in 1809, his total property was worth about $5,000, excluding slightly more than $450 in the bank.217 This was not a princely fortune, but it shows that Brown was in reasonable ease throughout his life. Thoroughly a child and interlocutor of the groups shaped by global commerce, Brown, in his fictions, captures as well as investigates the world of the re-export republic. A word about representativeness is due, however. My claim in this book is not that the carrying trade represents a totalized American experience, but rather an emergent one that dominates the cultural form of prose fiction. Brown was not the only novelist of the 1790s, 212. Clark, Charles Brockden Brown, 21; Richard P. Moses, “The Quakerism of Charles Brockden Brown,” Quaker History 75 (1986): 12 –25. 213. Henretta, Evolution, 209; R. A. Burchell, “The Role of the Upper Class in the Formation of American Culture, 1780 –1840,” in The End of Anglo-America: Historical Essays in the Study of Cultural Divergence, ed. R. A. Burchell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991) 184–212; 202. 214. William Dunlap, Memoirs of Charles Brockden Brown (London: Henry Colburn, 1822), 18. 215. Ibid., 44. 216. Clark, Charles Brockden Brown, 44. 217. Eliza Cope Harrison, ed., Philadelphia Merchant: The Diary of Thomas P. Cope, 1800–1851 (South Bend: Gateway, 1978), 249.

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but because he operates so clearly within the nodes that printed and circulated other novelists, his work has an emblematic quality that illustrates the cultural field in which all U.S.-based authors operated. In the remainder of this book I will use Brown’s writing to tease out the relation between cultural form and larger world-systemic forces as they become mediated by geocultural questions of civil society’s institutionality and parainstitutionality. The focus on these questions, which I consider to belong to a revised definition of ideology, is primarily chosen for its relation to the materialization of the literary. Although the question of institutionality has been intensely considered by cultural studies as a way of charting the modern formation of affective interiority as a means of social regulation, the institutional and parainstitutional has another crucial function before the nineteenth century, one suggested by Smith’s attempt to fuse laissez-faire economics and sensibilitarian response. Smith understands that Western nations will not be able to advance beyond mercantile capitalism without the complementary consolidation of a bourgeois society on which capitalist activity can be grounded. Yet the relation between capitalist activity and bourgeois subjectivity is neither transitive nor tautological. The strands of economic and cultural practice require a medium that can bring their dendrites into contact, and this ligature is the spectrum of institutional and parainstitutional practices, a sphere often known as civil society. For most of the eighteenth century, parainstitutionality was the subterranean theme of most cultural debates, as a justification for the pacific rise of middleclass authority and capitalist maneuvers. During the transitional period of the 1790s, a shift occurs in cultural commentary, and a new emphasis is placed on the construction of sociocultural institutions as a form of power for the nascent, conglomerated middle class. This institutionality is arguably the early American novel’s main theme, its recurring problematic, especially as its own fate was also bound up with the construction of secularized literary institutions that might be one tutelary medium and vocational berth for the bourgeoisie. The early American novel is different from Atlantic fictions of the early to mid-eighteenth century as it devotes itself far more significantly to recording and interrogating the emerging nexus of power and institutionalized truth-formations, a feature that we can see through a discussion of three of Brown’s exemplary romances—Wieland; or, the Transformation; Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist; and Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793—that foreground the questions of male establishment, textuality, and institutional knowledges.

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A discussion of Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography can serve as a prelude to this period and help to fully gauge the sociocultural effects of the last decade of the eighteenth century. To approach Brown through Franklin’s memoirs may seem counterintuitive on the surface. After all, Franklin belongs to an earlier generation than the re-export realm, he was heavily invested in the party politics that I have claimed as secondary to understanding the period, and his Autobiography is neither initially scripted in the 1790s nor appears in the form of a novel. Yet Franklin remains a vital introduction precisely because his writing captures the historical transition between social groups and is remarkably prescient about the onset of what will later become dominant modern cultural practices. Because of his foresight and willingness to imagine a rupture from the eighteenth-century cognitive predicates, the status of Franklin’s inclusion within the hagiography of founding fathers has always, rightly, been an uneasy one. Finally scripted in the early years of the 1790s, Franklin’s Autobiography speaks to geocultural mutability, the consolidation of bourgeois power, and the rise of fiction, the emergence within which the Autobiography self-consciously notates. Although Franklin was not himself a writer of novelistic prose fiction, his discursive writing sets the stage for its advent and later problematization by Brown, who was enabled to do this self-reflexive examination of his own practice by the peculiarly Janus-like vantage point provided by his period’s transformations.

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the paradox of the public sphere: franklin’s autobiography and the institution of ideology

Amidst the transformation between long phases of the modern world-system, the resulting milieu created by re-export allowed nascent semiperipheral agents to reconfigure elements of the once dominant geoculture, such as sentimental fiction. This literary turn partly occurs because sentimental fiction was already a constituent regulating device within the dynamic system. But when Americans turned to writing fiction, they did so in a chronovoric fashion, investing narrative with the purpose of comprehending and representing the social ambivalences of their own moment. Because the production of fiction allows for the authoring subject’s self-reflection in ways that sugar consumption does not, the early American novel became a key site for analyzing the conditions of transition, particularly involving the question of social institutions as one of the transistors articulating the world market and the emergence of a rapidly consolidating bourgeoisie, enabled by the fruits of Atlantic commerce. To unpack the relation between cultural production and its worldly themes, the remainder of this book will explore some of Charles Brockden Brown’s fictional narratives as exemplary instances of a particular social and age cohort, primarily the generation that was born in the early 1770s and came of age in the 1790s. To capture their context, I will us as a touchstone Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, an artifact generally typical of the period’s cultural ecology and a highly specific influence for Brown. Although not technically a novel, Franklin’s life-narrative properly belongs to any discussion of the form because his memoir self-consciously uses novelistic techniques, such as the mixture of dialogue and description, which he takes from Bunyan’s protonovel, The Pilgrim’s Progress. Few writers so self-knowingly locate their writing within historical transformation, as did Franklin, in order to comment on the literary as a device for channeling the period’s tides of change. Franklin looms so large for

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early American fiction writers since he only awkwardly fits within the rubric of the patriotic bourgeoisie as a founding father and can also stands as an alternative to that formation. So much older than most of the political agents, like Adams or Jefferson, who were active in the 1770s and 1780s, Franklin’s broader personal perspective of the long eighteenth century gave him a more acute sense about the continuities of geocultural elements across national independence as well as their internal reconfiguration. For Brown, Franklin’s aura shades the general landscape of mid-Atlantic culture as well as preconditioning his own background. Growing up amongst the extended network of Philadelphia Quaker grandees, which constituted Franklin’s associates and political base, Brown initially looked to Franklin as the platform for literary production. Initially beholden to an older model of literary activity typified by a poet dedicating his first address to an established figure, Brown launched himself with a poem lauding Franklin. A printer’s error, however, substituted Washington’s name for Franklin’s in the published version. Brown saw the irony of the mistake, as it replaced the figure of a cosmopolitan enlightened pacifist with that of a provincial, quasi-aristocratic soldier. For a Philadelphia Quaker, whose father had been interned during the War for Independence in Washington’s home state due to the Quaker refusal to swear loyalty oaths, Brown would have considered Washington and Franklin as representing nearly diametrical opposites, and he had intended “every word of this clumsy panegyric” to Franklin as a “direct slander upon Washington.”1 Brown’s first literary society, the Belles Lettres Club, occasionally met in Franklin’s house between 1787 and 1790 after the latter’s 1785 return from Paris. There Brown may have either read the Autobiography, as Franklin worked on the manuscript in late summer 1788, or heard its components being discussed.2 Brown has an even more direct link to the Autobiography; it twice names Charles Brockden [Brogden] as the conveyancer who did legal work for

1. David Lee Clark, Charles Brockden Brown: Pioneer Voice of America (New York: AMS Press, 1966), 9. For the Quaker context on Brown, see Richard P. Moses, “The Quakerism of Charles Brockden Brown,” Quaker History 75 (1986): 12 –25; Peter Kafer, “Charles Brockden Brown and the Pleasures of ‘Unsanctified Imagination,’” William and Mary Quarterly 57, no. 3 (2000): 543– 68; and Peter Kafer, Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution and the Birth of American Gothic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 2. Paul Allen, The Life of Charles Brockden Brown (Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1975), 18; Clark, Charles Brockden Brown, 145; Wolf Kinderman, Man Unknown to Himself: Kritische Reflexion Der Amerikanischen Aufklärung: Crevecoeur —Benjamin Rush — Charles Brockden Brown (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1993), 138.

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Franklin’s club, the Junto, in their creation of a subscription library. Charles Brockden was the maternal step-uncle for whom Brown was named.3 Brockden was part of Philadelphia’s new elite as the city’s first recorder, or legal counsel, a position he held for nearly half a century. The Junto secured one of Pennsylvania’s most prestigious lawyers because young Franklin’s companions, Charles Osbourne and Joseph Watson, clerked for Brockden.4 Brown’s own legal apprenticeship to Alexander Wilcocks, who followed Brockden as city recorder, was probably secured through these family connections. Yet by the late 1790s, as the effects of re-export’s transformations began to impact Brown’s cohort, Franklin, his surrounding social horizon, and its assumed conventions no longer function as an unquestioned ideal for Brown, and his genre shift from primarily producing poetry to fiction in this period can be read as a renunciation of the aesthetic form that he had initially signed under Franklin’s nomenclature. Brown instead inaugurates his career as a novelist in Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798) by critiquing the Autobiography’s assumptions, especially as Brockden, as a surrogate marker for Franklin, becomes encoded within Wieland. According to his (semifictional?) family history, Charles Brockden was born in England and apprenticed to an attorney who became involved in a plot against William III. The conspirators, fearing that Brockden had overheard their cabal, thought to ensure the youth’s silence by murdering him, but then decided to send him in permanent exile to Philadelphia.5 Brown recites a version of this story in his incomplete Memoirs of Stephen Calvert. In Pennsylvania, Brockden clerked for Thomas Story, Penn’s master of the rolls, replaced Story in 1715, became the Court of Chancery’s register from 1720 to 1739, and then recorder of deeds and justice of the peace in 1722, a position he held until his retirement in 1767.6 Brockden was Franklinesque in that he was able to jump the status divide of the colony, and despite his lower origins he was able to achieve some degree of “social equality with the founders of the commonwealth, and had much to do with their private affairs.”7 Something of a religious nomad, Brockden was born as an Anglican

3. Clark, Charles Brockden Brown, 14. 4. Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer, The Literary History of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs, 1906), 54. 5. John Clement, “Charles Brockden,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 12, no. 2 (1888): 185– 89. 6. Ibid., 187. 7. Ibid., 189.

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but became in succession a Quaker, a Methodist, and finally a Moravian. In 1737 he purchased 1,200 acres of farmland about twenty miles outside of Philadelphia, where he built a two-story house and had the grounds worked by German and Swedish indentured laborers.8 Brown seems to recall this in Wieland as Wieland senior begins life as a weakly established clerk who converts to a revelation-based Protestant denomination and buys a farm outside Philadelphia, with a small house on it, that is run by African slaves.9 Brown’s seeming citation of Brockden as a linking signifier for Franklin is not just a personal response to the intimate figures of his personal upbringing, since it also speaks to Franklin’s broader concerns abut the durability of bourgeois institutionality. For much of the eighteenth century, the embryonic middle-class fractions condemned institutions as negatively exemplified by those controlled by the church and regal state, and they championed the concept of spontaneous parainstitutions (collective sensibility, Smith’s “invisible hand”) as a method befitting a class that could not yet cement rule by their own institutions. During the crossover between two long waves of social formation, the claims for a parainstitutionality began to fade as an increasingly confident bourgeoisie began organizing its own institutions. Yet this conversion of attitude could occur only after a complex meditation about power, parainstutitonality, and institutionality that becomes amplified during the 1790s. This problematic is one of the primary themes animating the decade’s (American) literary field, given that the novel’s own identity is bisected by claims for its spontaneous effects and need to structure a market for its consumption. As the re-export agents, their associates, and extended families use the novel as a structure of feeling on their establishment, the centrality of Franklin’s Autobiography becomes clear as the period’s most focused inquiries into the intersection of textuality, power, and institutionality.

Ideology and the Autobiography: The Unforced Force of Opinion In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin portrays his arrival in Philadelphia as a young man as a model of the seemingly autonomous subject’s entry into society. 8. Ibid. 9. Kafer and Kinderman cite other Pietists as Brown’s references, but I will later explain why it is the matter of a maternal step-uncle more than religion that is Wieland’s concern. Kafer, Charles Brockden Brown’s, 113–19; Kinderman, Man Unknown to Himself, 139 – 41.

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I was in my working Dress, my best Cloaths being to come round by Sea. I was dirty from my Journey; my Pockets were stuff’d out with Shirts & Stockings; I knew no Soul, nor where to look for Lodging. I was fatigu’d with Travelling, Rowing & Want of Rest. I was very hungry, and my whole Stock of Cash consisted of a Dutch Dollar and about a Shilling in Copper. The latter I gave the People of the Boat for my Passage, who at first refus’d it on Acct of my Rowing; but I insisted on their taking it, a Man being sometimes more generous when he has but a little Money than when he has plenty, perhaps thro’ Fear of being thought to have but little. Then I walk’d up the Street, gazing about, till near the Market House I met a Boy with Bread. I had made many a Meal on Bread, & inquiring where he got it, I went immediately to the Baker’s he directed me to in second Street; and ask’d for Bisket, intending such as we had in Boston, but they it seems were not made in Philadelphia, then I ask’d for a threepenny Loaf, and was told they had none such: so not considering or knowing the Difference of Money & the greater Cheapness nor the Names of his Bread, I bad him give me three pennyworth of any sort. He gave me accordingly three great Puffy Rolls. I was surpriz’d at the Quantity, but took it, and having no Room in my Pockets, walk’d off, with a Roll under each Arm, & eating the other. Thus I went up Market Street, as far as fourth Street, passing by the Door of Mr Read, my future Wife’s Father, when she standing at the Door saw me, & thought I made as I certainly did a most awkward Appearance. Then I turn’d and went down Chestnut Street and part of Walnut Street, eating my Roll all the Way, and coming round found my self again at Market street Wharff, near the Boat I came in, to which I went for a Draught of the River Water, and being fill’d with one of my Rolls, gave the other two to a Woman & her Child that came down the River in the Boat with us and were waiting to go farther. Thus refresh’d I walk’d again up the Street, which by this time had many clean dress’d People in it who were all walking the same Way; I join’d them, and thereby was led into the great Meeting House of the Quakers near the Market.10

10. Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography and Other Writings, ed. Ormond Seavey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 25–26.

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Franklin’s message in his allegory of social arrival is that we have nothing to fear from the onset of deinstitutionalized, laissez-faire capitalism and its new breed of masterless bourgeois men, like Benjamin, the runaway apprentice breaking free from the standing order of status hierarchy. On the road to commercial society (“Market Street”), Franklin seeks to alleviate any uneasiness about percolating Hobbesian antagonism in the capitalist world’s possessive individualism by redeploying preexisting sensibilitist notions of fellow-feeling. Depicting a scene of disinterested (unpremeditated) exchange (“not considering or knowing the Difference of Money and the greater Cheapness nor the names of this Bread”), Franklin lyricizes a scene of mutually beneficial contract, wherein any uneven supplement (profit) achieved through the difference between a commodity’s labor-infused value and the price paid for it seemingly arises naturally and without coercion, conniving, or unfair historical preconditions. The baker receives what he imagines is his due or, at any rate, what he has freely asked to receive. Fulfilling Adam Smith’s promise for the coexistence of amicable mutuality and self-satisfaction, buyer and seller exit from the marketplace with the felicity of the deal’s implicit hearty handshake. Lest any reader worry that the self-interest driving commercial behavior will establish a structural divide between the haves and the have-nots, Franklin implies that the sociability generated through fair trade will readily circulate to dissolve inequity through benevolence. Disbursing the surplus that exceeds his needs to the weaker members of society, mythologized here as husbandless mothers and fatherless children, he claims that the sentimental response to bodies in distress will spur a fair redistribution of resources through society. As he moves from the harbor’s traffic of goods and people to merge with the meeting’s communal feast of friends, Franklin contends that any advantages that might appear through commodity exchange will swiftly become unremarkable and submerged in civil society’s general population and its rituals of comity. This cameo of affable exchange gently works to instantiate his reader within a newly discernible commercial lifeworld, which Franklin assumes is best witnessed in the mid-Atlantic cities. By configuring his coastal shift from Boston to Philadelphia as the geographized record of the historical transport between two societies, radically different in language, customs, affiliation structures, and work relations, Franklin indicates his transition from New England to the mid-Atlantic as the move from an early modern society based on formal, filiopietist deference to a more distinctively modern

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one marked by flexible labor, credit, and extrakinship markets. The shift from antediluvian Boston to cosmopolitan Philadelphia invokes, in turn, a larger geoepochal difference between the Old World and the New, which provincializes the past as Boston/Europe is configured as the topos of an incomplete and underdeveloped civilization still rooted in brute, physical violence and Philadelphia/America as the welcoming atmosphere of pacific modernity. To prevent the reader’s initial disorientation at this new social realm, Franklin charts his movements to encourage us to retrace his steps with reference to an implied printed map. By inviting readers to locate themselves within his pedestrian map, Franklin also asks us to follow the Autobiography’s larger developmental pathway, especially as a typological “becoming American” and incorporation within a national imaginary. Franklin’s exemplary foreignness on Philadelphia’s shores is quickly naturalized as his appearance before, and then later domestic mastery of, Deborah Read, which re-enacts the primal scene of Europeans landing on American shores, an arrival witnessed by a “silent” aboriginal population. By repeating the fantasmic colonial tableau of first contact, Franklin grants every reader, whatever their time and place in the historical spectrum of immigrant experience, the privilege of being allegorically invested within the corporate authority and authenticity of the founding fathers. Since neither the American First Peoples (the Indians) nor their female surrogate (Deborah Read) can lay claim to being participatory agents within these foundational events, the silent gazers are excluded from the ontology of nationality in ways that always transfer the narrative interest from the viewers of the scene to the newly mobile men, the mysterious strangers who have come to impress their figures on the local environment and transubstantiate into the triumphant emergence of the American nation-state. If passive viewing is disempowerment, Franklin’s lure here is that if his silent readers are willing to not just watch (“Read”) him, but also ventriloquize his textual pronouncements, we will imaginatively inherit both the nation’s aura and the prestige of personally fomenting its ascent. Lastly, as Franklin embeds the romance of the emergent nation-state with his adventure of rising intimacy with Deborah Read, he legitimizes the reader’s fantasy that his (and the assumed reader is always gendered male for Franklin) emotional life is a crucial tool for the public structuring of a patriotic history based on commercial exchange. As it intermixes matters of commerce, statecraft, and intimacy, the Puffy Roll episode encapsulates a range of critical debates involving Franklin and

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representation that generate contradictory reading traditions. Weber’s still influential Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism treats Franklin as an exemplar of ascetic bourgeois rationality, which motivates accumulation for accumulation’s sake by deferring consumption for use in favor of endless speculative reinvestment.11 For Weber, Franklin’s homilies exemplify a Protestant regimen of personal and public behavior that marks the shift from early modern rule by charismatic status and icons of mystical authority to the modern rationalization of depersonalized power through a credentialized bureaucracy, where politics is a trained, chosen vocation rather than inherited estate privilege and provides an architecture for the facilitation of a capitalist economy in which commodities can be predictably exchanged through the money-form’s equivalences outside of a regal state’s caprice. While Weber reads Franklin to emphasize rationality, American studies has recently taken an opposite tack by considering Franklin’s ironic literariness to highlight a crisis of efficiency with the breakdown of authentic mediation, not its smooth establishment.12 Yet whatever various positions critics take, by foregrounding Franklin’s representations as the main context to evaluate the Autobiography, they grant Franklin the very displacement that he wishes to produce. An exclusive focus on Franklin’s discursivity as a matter only of his surface significations overlooks his core project in scripting the Autobiography as a manual about establishing a new mode of postabsolutist governance wherein representation is technically deployed to gain managerial authority. From the Autobiography’s early mention of the Franklin family’s ancestral participation in dissenting Protestant challenges to the early modern English state, with an uncle “much of a Politician, too much perhaps for his station,” through 11. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Routledge, 2001). 12. For exemplary illustrations, see Douglas Anderson, The Radical Enlightenment of Benjamin Franklin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Mitchel Breitwieser, Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin: The Price of Representative Personality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Cynthia S. Jordan, Second Stories: The Politics of Language, Form, and Gender in Early American Fictions (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 27–57; Christopher Looby, Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 99 –144; Jennifer Jordan Baker, “Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and the Credibility of Personality,” Early American Literature 35, no. 3 (2000): 274–93; and Jennifer T. Kennedy, “Death Effects,” Early American Literature 36, no. 2 (2001): 201–34. Grantland S. Rice complicates the social sciences-humanities split in The Transformation of Authorship in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), by taking issue with Michael Warner’s discussion of rationality in The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), esp. 73–96.

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its citation of young Ben, “commonly allow’d to govern . . . other Boys,” to the Autobiography’s proliferating, increasingly dense, accounts of public administration, Franklin remains preoccupied by discovering the most effective means of managing other men’s actions in the historically new configurations of power.13 Like Machiavelli’s The Prince and Hobbes’s Leviathan, the Autobiography is a masterly treatise on the physics of sovereignty. But unlike either Machiavelli or Hobbes, who both still prioritize the extrinsic, coercive force of state repression and the puissance of organized terror, Franklin understands these administrative models to be increasingly obsolete as they look to archaic social structures. He sees the power of management in a postabsolutist world as emanating from the gentle art of persuasion and the securing of volunteerist personal assent through the organization of a mass public’s consent. While Franklin’s renown in the field of natural science was based on his proof that a seemingly supernatural force, lightning, could be nominated as electricity and appropriated by base humanity, his social science discovery was the illumination that modes of consecrated sovereignty can be reformulated to bind together an insurgent bourgeoisie. For it is the new mode of bourgeois-defined consensus as a medium of sensibilitarian authority that stands as the revolutionary event that Franklin witnesses unfolding throughout his life. Post-1800 historiography has made the notion of the eighteenth century’s two revolutions, one industrial, the other state-political, as self-evident. Yet the period also saw a third, equally important sociological one involving the rise of civil society. This revolution in the conceptualization and practice of middle-class society occurred in the semiperipheral network of Atlantic “second cities”—the regional capitals of Edinburgh, Philadelphia, the Francophone provinces, and the “other London” outside the clusters of official political and administrative bureaus—and it was mainly led by those groups placed at disadvantage or prohibition from direct participation in politics due to their nonconformist denominations, awkward ethnicities, or work relations. Denied the right to manipulate traditional forms of power, these congeries focused on inventing modes of authority more suitable to their situation, like the subtle forms of consensus-making. Before any (American, French, Haitian) political revolution or technological one, Franklin indicates and prioritizes this third cultural revolution of civil society’s informal power. The Autobiography charts its rise through 13. Franklin, Autobiography, 7, 10.

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Franklin’s life passage that begins locally and individually with Franklin’s initial epiphanies, acquisition, and personal development of techniques for persuasion and ends with Franklin’s social experiments, which test these principles “wholesale” on crowds and impersonal collectives. Discovering early in life that a “positive dogmatical Manner in advancing your sentiments, may provoke Contradiction,” Franklin’s realizes that a manner of “pleasing your Hearers” has greater “Advantage . . . to inculcate my Opinions & persuade Men into Measures” than one of fear, intimidation, and humiliation whereby “arbitrary Power” stages punitive contests to valorize its authority.14 Unlike his brother James, whose editorial policy at the New England Courant was to bait the more powerful authorities through the use of controversy, Franklin learns to replace the failing strategy of confrontation in favor of one emphasizing cooperation.15 Franklin’s decision to abandon a performance that emulates hieratic power grounded on the spectacle of open antagonism becomes a feasible strategy after he perceives the arrival of new techniques of persuasion that make consensus operationally possible. When Franklin listens to the field performance of Methodist evangelical George Whitefield, he finds the compelling aspect of the minister’s call for a return to Christ to be the manner in which he is able to elicit and conglomerate power in the shape of a new mass public, so that “one could not walk thro’ the Town in an evening without Hearing Psalms sung in different Families of every Street.”16 As Franklin relates how Whitefield’s call for donations ended with a resistant Franklin emptying his pockets, the event stands as a master class in how to explode preexisting social barriers. Neither Franklin’s narrow economic self-interest nor his kinship sectarianism and denominational background can withstand Whitefield’s persuasion. Franklin intuits that this nascent power of the “cultural” can overcome premodern estate stratification without the recourse to costly violence. In light of Whitefield’s effortless massification, Franklin’s abiding interest throughout the Autobiography is to recognize, appropriate, and practice the emerging technologies of consensual persuasion, like the rhetorical forms displayed in the development of the novel also exemplified by John Bunyan’s mixture of “Narration & Dialogue,” a “Method of Writing very engaging to 14. Ibid., 18, 21. 15. Esmond Wright, Franklin of Philadelphia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 20. 16. Franklin, Autobiography, 108.

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the Reader.”17 Bunyan’s innovation was to soften the stern, sermonic hectoring style of early modern didactic narration through the sociability of dialogue as a better means of engaging the reading subject’s dedication. Franklin highlights this change with the story of a “drunken Dutchman” who falls overboard and then asks Franklin to dry out his soaked copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress. While this paradigmatic disorderly reader has clearly not taken Bunyan’s ascetic moral advice to heart, he has embraced Bunyan’s style: the Dutchman willingly spent his money on an expensive edition (“finely printed on good Paper with copper Cuts”) rather than alcohol. Franklin cannily perceives that the Dutchman is less concerned with damage to his own body, as the soft tissue of awful terror, than the loss of the book’s ability to excite his mind, and that it is neither Bunyan’s message, nor the printed medium in itself, but his manner of presentation that cements affiliation. In some ways, Franklin is one of the first modern literary critics since he perceives that manifold social energies become embedded within documents, and their ensuing laden power does not come from static qualities, such as the purity of its doctrine, ability to mirror transcendent aesthetic qualities, or the abstraction of printed rather than oral material, but from their ability to magnetize and redirect ongoing sociohistorical processes. Although Grantland Rice notes Franklin’s tendency to autonomize and reify the rationalizing power of print technology as a means of legitimizing his social advancement, the Autobiography continually strives to convey that the power of persuasion does not emerge from either abstract reason or new technologies but from a historically evolving mode of social organization, wherein new modes of sympathetic persuasion are capable of tapping previously unimagined and underutilized social energies, the latent power of the eighteenth-century’s rising, nonelite factions in the process of their reconstruction from early modern middling clans of Franklin’s family background into a more recognizably modern middle class.18 The period’s analytic factors often perceived the presence of this emerging social force, and they strove to nominate it and articulate its presence through a spectrum of speculative discourses, ranging from the fascination with mesmerism to the “invisible hand” of the marketplace, that would exculpate the bourgeoisie from its ownership by presenting it as an intangible, universalizing power or unintentional parainstitution. While Franklin presents

17. Ibid., 23. 18. Rice, Transformation of Authorship in America, 45– 69; Jordan, Second Stories, 27–57.

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many of the assumptions of the eighteenth-century geoculture, he also forthrightly argues that while this tranquil manner appears to be innocent of absolutist violence and furious commands, the soft power of mass rhetoric is properly unleashed for the gain of specific interests. In this light, the Autobiography’s ultimate purpose is to illustrate how a new style of governance can benefit the period’s insurgent bourgeoisie. Although Franklin’s framing address to his adult son in the Autobiography is often dismissed as merely an ornamental narrative convention, the Autobiography is directed precisely to one like the then royal governor of New Jersey. As with The Prince, the Autobiography wants to instruct its addressed reader by encouraging him to recognize the mechanics of power in actually existing contemporary society. The governor would be mistaken to assume that authority comes from the court’s skirmishes with its antagonists. As the life narrative of a career diplomat who was personally involved in the negotiations leading up to national independence and its aftermath, the Autobiography might well be expected to foreground the high political events that many readers would arguably be most interested in Franklin providing. Yet even after Franklin was himself aware of his swiftly impending mortality, he made no effort to abandon his chronology and turn to detailing the acts of national autonomy. Christopher Looby insightfully argues that any description of the secessionist events of the 1770s would be internally contradictory for Franklin, as it would celebrate the failure to achieve peaceful consensus.19 An attendant reason may be that Franklin does not see the political events as themselves particularly significant or useful to his readers, in lieu of the civil sociology that makes these movements possible. For all of Franklin’s pride in his role during these exceptional political events, his purpose is to illustrate the general applicability of the otherwise uninscribed principles of cooperation in everyday experience. The rupture of national independence is too unusual and rarified an event for Franklin’s purposes of collective education. Why bother talking about high politics if most of one’s readers will never get the opportunity to engage with or enact these practices? Franklin believes it better to focus on the sociology of everyday encounters because these granular bonds are the stuff of actual transformation. The Autobiography’s dedication to revealing the mechanical guts of this “third” revolution, one involving the shaping of mass response to consensual ideas as a means of establishing sovereignty, belongs to what is today 19. Looby, Voicing America, 124–31.

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commonly called the “pursuit of ideology.” Franklin’s Autobiography is shamelessly ideological. It is Franklin’s fundamental purpose, after all, but to comprehend what makes Franklin ideological, it is helpful to first reconsider the common perception of that term and contrast it against Jürgen Habermas’s currently influential anti-ideology arguments. The aforementioned disjunction in critical approaches to Franklin, one emphasizing transparency, the other obscurity, may ultimately be less at odds if placed alongside Habermas’s influential claim for the rise of bourgeois sovereignty through a mutually supporting division or responsibilities among a public state “open to the talents”; an “intimate sphere” of the no longer visibly regulated, privatized marketplace and knowingly displayed affective relations; and a depersonalized bourgeois public sphere, as a universalizing realm of disembodied, nonparticularist debate conveyed through “people’s public use of their reason.”20 As I have suggested, Habermas’s trinity seems neatly rehearsed in Franklin’s Puffy Roll scene. Yet, as we will shortly see, Franklin also suggests that obscurity structured as transparency is a fundamental aspect of publicity in the modern apparatus of power. Hence, the critiques of Franklin by Weberian political science and American studies describe two sides of the same coin as Franklin illustrates the rationalization of imposture as a systemic feature of republican liberalism’s universalist address. Arguing for ideology as central to the Autobiography’s claims for the construction of civil society, I renominate it as the production of bourgeois institutional knowledge. Consequently, a reading of the Autobiography reveals the incomplete status of Habermas’s blueprint of the Enlightenment’s separation of public state/public sphere/intimate sphere by indicating a constitutive place for a class-motivated “secret” sphere, the realm of seemingly neutral institutions as a mode of class privilege that is the real “invisible hand” that instantiates, not erases, collective inequalities to the middle class’s benefit. Franklin perfectly understands the paradox of the disinterested public sphere’s fictional transparency, wherein ideological institutions masquerade as unauthorized parainstitutions because he sees this paradox as socially desirable, and he scripts the Autobiography as an instrumental manual about its operation.

20. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 27. The move to consider Franklin as a touchstone for Habermas’s arguments was made canonical by Warner’s Letters of the Republic.

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The Return to Ideology: Marx, Tocqueville, and the Institutionalization of Thought Because contemporary analysis into ideology mainly understands it as a concept defined by Marx’s historical sociology, even though the term’s provenance predates Marx, the most fruitful investigation remains one that works through the Marxist analytic tradition, which has had the greatest commitment to the term’s use and precision.21 Jorge Larrain, however, notes the difficulty in resolutely determining Marx’s meaning of ideology because “there is no general definition or systematic treatment of the concept in his writings which provides a definitive version.”22 Marx may not have provided an explicit definition for ideology, but there is clearly an inferential one to be gleaned from his writing. Critics who treat ideology in terms of sheer negativity, as an erroneous state that simply needs its oppressive confusion removed, mischaracterize Marx’s interest in historicizing the term. Marx does not consider ideology as a transhistorical phenomenon, but rather as a feature that emerges and becomes dominant at a specific moment in capitalism’s development in the transitional phase between the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the same period of the Autobiography’s concerns. Capitalism, for Marx, is a social system defined by the drive of accumulation for accumulation’s sake, profit for profit’s sake, where the endless pursuit of surplus-value is achieved through the exploitation of labor-power.23 Because surplus-value is the difference between the value of a labor-power expended in the production of a commodity and the price paid for it in the market, profit is simply unpaid labor. As a social system dedicated to the routinization of labor exploitation, capitalism operates through a twofold process of alienation and estrangement. On the one hand, the laborer becomes separated from the means of self-subsistence and becomes “free” to sell her or his labor as a commodity (labor-power) in the market. This freedom is actually a coerced necessity as the worker must labor for survival, since she or he has become estranged from the ownership of the tools that make 21. The literature on ideology is predictably voluminous. Helpful surveys are: Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991) and Jorge Larrain, The Concept of Ideology (London: Hutchinson, 1979). 22. Jorge Larrain, Marxism and Ideology (London: Macmillan, 1983), 7. 23. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 449.

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exchangeable commodities; the skills of craftsmanship (lost to fragmented, large-scale labor); and possession of the final product, which the laborer has sold the rights to its possession in advance for wages. The (negative) alienation of the laborer from the conditions and means of production is simultaneously the (positive) alienation of the commodity. After a person’s labor becomes objectified as a commodity to be sold, objects become personified as seemingly possessing an intrinsic, vital force. In reality, the object’s apparent vitality is nothing but the potential surplusvalue generated by the difference between what the laborer has been paid for her or his labor-power and the actual value of the labor-power invested in the making of the commodity, a surplus that is only realized in the marketplace’s exchange. Because the sphere of production is not visible to the sphere of the marketplace, the laborer seems only to be a carrier (Träger) of prefabricated value, like a waiter transporting food to the table, rather than as the actual producer of value. Meanwhile, the commodity not only appears lively but also seems auto-telic, self-making, as if the commodity’s value appears to emanate magically from its own vibrant immanence. From the market’s fragmented vantage point, the commodity seems vested with divinity, suprahuman in its power to produce profit and extraterrestrial in origin, in short—an alien. The otherworldly appearance of commodities as subjects, their positive alienation, is what Marx calls the fetishism of commodities. But while the commodity fetish exists as a general trait for capitalism, Marx also suggests that it has a specificity of emergence at a particularly early moment in capitalism’s initial rise in the early modern period. As the protobourgeoisie strips the halo of divine rights from the church– absolutist state nexus, they must transfer this auratic energy elsewhere, since its power is too great to be simply negated. They thus transport it to the commodity, as their own preferred fetish of capitalist magic.24 With each later long-wave phase, capitalism will reconstitute the nature of its fetishism, keeping the older forms while also fashioning new ones. In this revision, ideology is a particular form of fetishism that becomes prominent in the mid to late eighteenth century. 24. The following passage recites arguments first made in Stephen Shapiro, “The Technology of Publicity in the Atlantic Semi-Peripheries: Benjamin Franklin, Modernity, and the Nigerian Slave Trade,” in Beyond the Black Atlantic: Relocating Modernization and Technology, ed. Walter Göbel and Saskia Schabio (London: Routledge, 2006), 115–34.

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Industry and Ideas Since Marx aligns industrialism’s rise with the advent of a fully fledged capitalist society in the late eighteenth century, one might expect him then to claim that machinery’s replacement of human endeavor propels social transformation, especially given his initial periodizing distinction between a tool and a machine. Marx defines a tool as the instrument used to appropriate and transform nature, and characterizes the West’s “Era of Manufacturing” (the mid-sixteenth century until the last third of the eighteenth century) by the conglomeration of workers in one space and the increasing segmentation of the work process, enabled by the proliferation of specialized tools made to fit these detailed work segments. A machine, however, is a metatool, “a mechanism that . . . performs with its tools the same operations as the worker formerly did with similar tools.”25 The mechanical replacement of human motive power may initially seem to be the defining feature of industrial age, especially as the replacement of human motive power by a nonhuman source, like the steam engine, appears to further the desubjectification of labor. Marx, however, rejects this move since there is nothing particularly capitalist in the loss of human agency to insensate power, as this substitution has been done for ages by “animals, water, and wind” without “creating any revolution in the mode of production.”26 Marx turns instead to another definition of machinery: “All fully developed machinery consists of three essentially different parts, the motor mechanism, the transmitting mechanism, and finally the tool or working mechanism.”27 Having already discounted the importance of tools and motors, Marx classifies machinery as defined by a new integrating mode of transmission that synchronizes production processes to establish an interlocking operational process, a new ensemble of relations and power exchanges, where the “transformation of the mode of production in one sphere of industry necessitates a similar transformation in other spheres.”28 The resulting “articulated system” conjoins production flows across time and space despite heterogeneous local facets and local circumstances. A machine is not something that simply works differently than a tool; it materializes the arrival of a network of social relationships informed by capitalist prerogatives. 25. 26. 27. 28.

Marx, Capital, 494. Ibid., 496. Ibid., 494. Ibid., 505.

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Marx asks his reader to decipher the distinction between a tool and a machine because it leads onward to his real sociological concern in Capital, which is to wonder: How was it that capitalism, as a restricted and often illicit practice in the early modern world, became a seemingly universal set of social practices? How did capitalism grow beyond its relatively constrained initial sphere in small workshops, local markets, and thin trading lines to colonize other spaces? Given the incommensurate sociospatial divide between early modern regulatory modes of caste difference and modern ones of class division, there can be no immediate transformation from one to another, since one cannot simply impress capitalist contingencies on other spheres or even imagine noncapitalist societies as unable to mount a defense. To speed transformation, capitalist agents must instead establish a transistor environment and personnel that concatenates unevenly developed spheres and societies, just as the money-form acts as a mechanism for establishing equivalences between disparate kinds of commodities. Marx thus replaces a negative definition of machinery, as the suppression of human motors, for the positive one of systematizing trajectories to illustrate the means by which capitalism expands and institutes its authority. This process begins as machinification increasingly deskills the Manufacturing Era’s detail worker in ways that allow for capitalist industry to incorporate and reengineer precapitalist inequalities. As new machinery makes physical endurance and trained expertise less important for the human minder, relatively underskilled, but more dexterous, women and younger workers can enter the industrial workplace and replace the male laborers.29 Because women and younger and nonnative workers are less acculturated in collective bargaining for employee rights and customary pay levels, they unwittingly threaten the security of older (white) male workers within the factory’s establishment. As employers introduce these “new economy” laborers, the typical male worker increasingly experiences this threat to his employment security in terms of a horizontal division between the laboring-class genders and generations, rather than the vertical class confrontation between capitalist and proletarian. As male workers get sent off the plant grounds, they enter the nonindustrial domestic sphere full of rage, where they paradoxically invoke an industrial-formed subjectivity in a gendered and generationalized form to insist on their authority as “men” as a private sphere compensation 29. Ibid., 517.

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for their workplace disestablishment. This performance of resentful masculinity benefits capital as it redirects class antagonism away from the space of production; fragments working-class solidarity by using one aspect of the laboring class to dominate another; maintains the rate of exploitation as female and youth labor continue to be functionally underpaid; and, most important, manages to get subalterns to do the work of installing a capitalist-defined habitus in noncapitalist zones, like the household. In this light, Immanuel Wallerstein argues that sexism and racism are inventions of industrial modernity. While misogyny, the patriarchal prejudice against women, and xenophobia, the fear and loathing of ethnolinguistic foreigners, have long existed as occasional confrontations outside of capitalist development, sexism and racism are historical capitalism’s refunctionalization of recurrent forms of misogyny and xenophobia.30 The projection of capitalist-generated conflict, then, reconfigures social relations in ways that, in the absence of the conflict-generator’s removal, continues its transmission of subjects’ work-generated trauma. The secondary elaboration resulting from the first impulse of capitalist introjection was the topic that the late Engels explored in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.31 Though Engels’s reliance on a social stage approach has become discredited, his developmentalism does not detract from a conceptual argument involving the historically mutable shape of kinship relations, ranging from the matriarchal collective (gens) consanguity of precapitalist societies to the bourgeois nuclear family of his contemporaneity, as altered through their encounter with market relations.32 This crisis forces the private sphere to reform, but it also transfers these tensions into yet another sphere, which creates a new social institution and mode of subjectivity as a mediation of these conflicts. For Engels, the paramount example of this compensatory sphere and constructed identity is the modern bureaucratic state and its ideal of the abstract, disembodied citizen. As the bureaucracy’s ghostly agents work through an intangible, interior movement within the citizen’s mind, rather than the absolutist regime’s extrinsic appropriation of the body, they legitimize the state as a disinterested protector of the individual’s life in the private sphere, which has become threatened by displaced social conflict. 30. Immanuel Wallerstein, “Universalism Versus Racism/Sexism,” in The Essential Wallerstein (New York: New Press, 2000), 344–52. 31. Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (New York: International Publishers, 1972). 32. Ibid., 175.

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The Origin’s greater point is that market relations propel the energy of class struggle through social spheres and subjectivities, which become reorganized in the wake of tensions and produce new regulatory apparatuses, These apparatuses are not strictly those of the state, but they use the air of neutral objectivity in the effort to manage the capitalist market’s intrinsic contradictions that have been displaced into non- or weakly capitalist zones, like the household. The modern state, according to Engels, is not simply a repressive authority, but one that produces consensual submission as the state presents itself as the therapeutic salve for the redress of painful social wounds, like the domestic disturbances caused by economic disruption, even while it leaves the origin of conflict untouched as it hails its subjects not as the victim of bourgeois relations, but as potential entrants into a citizenship that can overcome industrially produced abject identities (the injured status of women, youth, nonwhites, nonheteronomates, etc.). Engels’s claims about the systemic distribution of collective anxiety as a mode of social regulation are congruent with Tocqueville’s argument about the function of the modern paternalist Ssate as a bandage for the modern subject’s fear of republican liberal democracy. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville diagnoses a primary effect of modernity’s erosion of early modern hierarchies as the rise of anxious individuality.33 Once the familiar matrix of (blood, territorial, or religious) authority vanishes, each individual becomes socially naked. Divested from the protective raiment that buttresses his or her subject position within a collective, the isolated subject fears falling into social obscurity. The lonely subject then attempts to gain security by striving for wealth and conspicuous consumption, since money has replaced other premodern signifiers of status as a prophylaxis against social death. Beneath the glittering tides of rapid consumption and frenetic activity lie sullen deeps. The inability to determine one’s status except through the intake of material goods, which are ephemeral and fail to promote durable confidence about life in a society of endless competition, induces a “strange melancholy . . . in the midst of abundance.”34 The psychological strain

33. Tocqueville takes “democracy” as his theme, which we better understand as political republican liberalism. Tocqueville, however, poorly perceives the internal linkage between economic and political liberalism. I take Tocqueville’s actual object of study as the effects of capitalist dominated society. 34. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence, ed. J. P. Mayer (New York: Perennial Classics, 1969), 538.

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results in the subject’s increasing sense of moody helplessness, especially before the interiorizing pressures of public opinion. As the individual knows in her or his heart that other members of society likewise live with and hide their fear of vulnerability before the force of social disapproval, the individual loses confidence in the benefit of active sociability and fellowfeeling. Afraid to ask for help from other weak subjects, the subject abandons the pursuit of liberty and desires safety through conditions of imposed mass equality, since it is easier to exist in a society where everything is mediocre rather than face the risks of being exceptional or being humiliated by comparison to those who seem more successful. The deficient individual looks instead for protection from the new Leviathan of the modern centralized state.35 Unlike the early modern absolutist state, which was organized around the severe mien of the monarch, the centralized state deploys an increasingly militarylike organization of humanitarian power as its mode of despotism. The modern state says, “Be weak, but happy for I will protect you. Do not jeopardize your happiness by seeking to control your self outside of my oversight.”36 While Tocqueville confesses that he lacks a term to describe this paternal policing, readers conversant with Foucault will easily supply the name that Tocqueville struggled to find in the existing lexicon of sovereignty: discipline. Foucault’s survey of the industrial era’s biopower and bureaucratic apparatuses, which rely on normalization as a means of interiorizing power that becomes diffused through society by means of therapeutic institutions, like the judiciary, medicine, psychiatry, matches Tocqueville’s description of modern forms of social control that leverage the individual’s fear of abnormality, social exclusion, and the risks of overisolation. Foucault corrects Tocqueville in that he sees power’s consolidation not as solely centralized but as emerging from a systematizing network of interlacing institutionally accredited professionals unleashing new categories of knowledge. Aligning Foucault’s definition of discipline with Marx’s of ideology enables us to understand the latter as the institutional sediment of a systematizing disciplinary epistemology, which arises in response to the social territorialization by the forces of market competition of other spheres of human interaction—such as the realms of gendered intimacy, generational nurture, and exogamous contact—and creates new classifications of subjectivity based

35. Ibid., 691–92. 36. Ibid., 735.

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on aggressive terms of difference (racial, sexual, national, etc.). Ideology is the fetish-effect of a capitalist-driven systematicity arising through the formation of putatively autonomous spheres of bureaucratic-professional socialization that appear to run alongside social conflict without seeming to be implicated in the wake of its antagonism, even as they are empowered to intervene in its operation. If ideology represents the historic emission of subject-framing knowledges by institutions that systematize and mediate the circulation of conflict between capitalist regimes of accumulation and non-, pre-, or weakly capitalist modes of social regulation, then the Puffy Roll’s cameo of Franklin as the mediator between two dissimilar civil geographies is supremely ideological. With his ensuing focus on governmentality and the construction of a mass public, Franklin’s technology of publicity also interrogates Jürgen Habermas’s idealized model of the eighteenth-century bourgeois public sphere, as an illustrative model of supposed nonideological parainstitutionality.

The Paradox of the Public Sphere: Franklin’s Autobiography The Puffy Roll’s primal scene conjoins public commerce and congregation; an intimation of the forthcoming nation-state and an outward display of personal behavior and emotional life. Rarely does any one of these elements appear in the Autobiography without implicating the presence of the others, a triangulation so frequent that the Autobiography suggests they operate more as a pregiven, reified social structure, rather than a pattern under construction. For instance, the financial rise of Franklin’s printing shop becomes confirmed by state covenants to print money and histories of politically significant local groups. These contracts facilitate, in turn, Franklin’s ability to secure his domestic arrangements with Deborah Read, a relation previously deferred on account of his tenuous finances. This interlocking of transparentacting government, public communication, and private affairs strikingly resembles Jürgen Habermas’s model of the bourgeois public sphere amidst his history of altering modes of public/private distinctions as notations of power formations.37 In early modern Europe, publicity was monopolized by 37. For a discussion on non-Habermasian approaches to the public/private divide, see Jeff Weintraub, “The Theory and Politics of the Public/Private Distinction,” in Public and Private in Thought and Practice, ed. Jeff Weintraub and Krishan Kumar (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 1– 42.

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the nexus of court-ecclesiastic authority. The ancien régime fused subjectivity, the absolutist state, and social intercourse into a rigid hierarchy (the “Great Chain of Being”) culminating in supernatural divinity, and, just below this level, a transcendental noumen around regal power involving the idea that the king’s corporeal mortality does nothing to undermine the transhistorical aura emanating from the institution of kingship.38 Congruent with Foucault’s description of early modernity as the age of spectacularized regal terror, Habermas typifies power as authority that focuses social attention on itself, while privacy only signifies status insignificance, not an interior realm of special affective relations. In this scheme, the subject who is not seen, the one who exists in the private realm, remains unnoteworthy and unable to signify within the period’s discursive framework. Privacy cannot be granted value by early modern absolutism because according recognition to the lower-born’s private opinion would be tantamount to the dominant strata admitting the presence of a social equivalence mechanism wherein multiplied plebeians might speculatively be considered equal to a king. The dangerous implication therein is that the collective power of the demos could legitimately override the court’s power. Encountering the immobile privilege of immemorial blood, territory, and mythic origin, the nascent bourgeoisie contested older social structures by promulgating an alternative to the vertical social architecture of the old regime. Because the bourgeoisie had no estate rights in the various confrontations between the prince, aristocrats, and religious authorities, they counterposed a notion of abstract spheres where the evanescent spirit of the king’s virtual legitimation atop an ascending structure becomes refashioned into a “horizontal” balance and the awful totality of early modern elite subjectivity becomes compartmentalized into different, yet interrelated, aspects of egalitarianism based on practiced skill, interpersonal locution, and bourgeois exchanges of volunteerist emotional intimacy and market exchanges. Auratic and charismatic hierarchy becomes disaggregated into different spheres of influence: the “public state,” open to the trained vocational skill of nonaristocratic administrators; the “public sphere” of uncoerced rational discussion; and the “intimate sphere” of specifically bourgeois (“civil”) society and its realms of the “private” unfettered market and performed illustrations of affective relations. For the latter, it is important that

38. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).

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emotions are not closely guarded as evidence of a true, intrinsic self. Instead, affections must be sensibly conveyed to the public, often through the fiction of epistolary communications, as if to say that while the nobility might have good blood, the middle class is noteworthy because it can signify its good feelings. While these three spheres are meant to exert a Montesquieu-like mutual balance, Habermas, perhaps due to his own academic background, focuses on the public sphere’s instrumental use of reason, which is characterized by the use of depersonalized print discourse. Modeled on the “crucial category of the legal norm,” the public sphere is the universalizing, disembodied realm of conflict-free discourse, which allows for equalizing debate without coercion or regard for the speaker’s origin or present location.39 While not explicitly a political forum, like ministries or parliament, the public sphere has political and “private” ramifications. For if the public sphere is the realm wherein one can criticize matters of the state, the nominal equivalence therein means that one’s ability to enter the public sphere, and obey its regulations, functions as a proxy for participatory citizenship and a marker of personhood and contractual agency in the private realm. Being acknowledged as having the right to deploy reason, to advance one’s intellectual positions through the empiricojuridical form of dialogic inquiry, epitomizes inclusion within modern, liberal society and the status of liberal society itself as the balance between possessive individualism and pluralist consensus. Consequently, debates about the public sphere capture fundamental concerns about the elasticity of access to the rights and privileges of liberal subjectivity and what (collective) groups may, or may not, be invested with social rights and resources. Because of the public sphere’s status as a metonym for republican liberal democracy writ large, Anglophone cultural criticism has thus tended to raise three main replies to Habermas’s model. First, critics document the historical group exclusions from enfranchisement within the public sphere: access denied based on gender, ethnicity or race, class, sexual preference, ability, and so on.40 Second, the public sphere’s assumed universalizing normativity, where individuals come to evaluate 39. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 55. 40. For exemplary instances of these critiques, see Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996); Bruce Robbins, ed., The Phantom Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Joan B. Landes, ed., Feminism, the Public and the Private (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002); and Brian Cowen, “What Was Masculine About the Public Sphere: Gender and the Coffeehouse Milieu in Post-Restoration England,” History Workshop Journal 51 (2001): 127–57. Particularly informative is Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the

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social affairs as “disembodied” subjects, unmarked by particularistic identities, functions as a normalizing device that assumes the dominant position (white, male, heterosexual, middle class, etc.) as the standard of neutral subjectivity in ways that disciplines social difference as an aberrant and a self-aggrandizing appropriation of collective resources (in today’s neoconservative lexicon— the selfishness of “special rights”). The public sphere demands that preexisting social inequalities are put aside so that instrumental reason can judge without the friction of premeditated agendas. This republican liberal fiction of universal equality in a despatialized realm, the possession of which is no one’s property, brackets the question of what might engineer any discussion that does not involve the conflict of particularist claims. Once the tyranny of absolutist regimes has been dispatched, what exactly does the republic of letters find compelling to discuss over the long term, especially if the critique of bourgeois (male, white, heterosexual, etc.) power is put off limits? Furthermore, as we have seen in the sensibility-sensation-sentiment complex, the arena of the public sphere’s classical enactment, the coffeehouse, was never disembodied. Its purpose was precisely to embody the bourgeoisie by training them in a corporeal semaphorics that would provide the gestural insurance for the marketplace’s circulation of credit and credibility. A final critique makes claims for the simultaneous appearance of counterpublic spheres, plebeian and subaltern realms, which are distinctive from bourgeois discursive zones.41 Counterpublics do not aspire to the universality of the public sphere, and as Michael Warner notes, “movements around gender and sexuality [and others] do not always conform to the bourgeois model of ‘rational-critical debate,’” as their constituents “seek to transform fundamental styles of embodiment, identity, and social relations” they find oppressive.42 Because the Autobiography seems neatly organized by the features of Habermas’s model of the classic blueprint of a secular trinity of state, public sphere, and intimate realms, each of these critiques can be usefully considered through a reading of the Autobiography.43

Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 109 – 42. 41. Oscar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 42. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 50. 43. For earlier discussion of Franklin in light of Habermas, particularly with regard to the claim for print technology as enacting public disembodiment, see Warner, Letters of the Republic, and Larzer Ziff, Writing in the New Nation: Prose, Print, and Politics in the Early United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 90 –91.

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Against complaints of the estrangement of groups from the public sphere, Habermas claims that these historical absences do nothing to undermine the concept’s ideal utility.44 While earlier formulations of the public sphere were limited to white propertied men, there appears to be no intrinsic reason why the circle cannot be increasingly expanded through affirmative action.45 The regrettable initial failure, or reluctance, to allow non-Christians or women (nonwhites, nonheterosexuals, etc.) entry within public sphere activity is an occasional but not immanent aspect. After various suffrage and emancipation campaigns, a range of social groups have overcome the stigma of their corporeal particularity to claim a “place at the table” in ways that suggest the possibility for the project to repair its early incomplete traits. These prior (or ongoing) exclusions are merely what Franklin calls “Errata.” Using a typographical metaphor, Franklin recalls that if offered the choice, he “should have no Objection to a Repetition of the same Life from its Beginning, only asking the Advantages Authors have in a second Edition to correct some Faults of the first.”46 Franklin’s perfectabilitarian desire bespeaks a tremendous confidence in the reflexive efficacy of social comprehension. He assumes that the origin of personal (and social) deficiencies can be easily discerned, and after this recognition, they can be removed through compensatory intervention. Once “sinister Accidents & Events” become apparent, the fix is swift to follow.47 Not all might share Franklin’s faith in the optics of amelioration. Even if it were possible to state definitively the cause of past failures, or even to understand the consequences of one action as worse than another, few, especially those familiar with compulsive behavior—like overeating, drinking, or gambling—might share Franklin’s confidence in the ensuing automaticity of individual and collective transformation after recognition of a problem. Franklin, however, goes even further as conjoins reparability with historical amnesia. After claiming to have fixed the “error” of having previously abandoned his beloved Deborah Read by later returning to her, he assumes that any psychic damage Read has suffered, due to his humiliating betrayal and long period of silence, is erased. Once the momentary misprint in the book of life is amended, then the second edition need never testify to a prior mistake. Deborah is not expected either to bear 44. Jürgen Habermas, “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 421–79, 429. 45. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 36. 46. Franklin, Autobiography, 3. 47. Ibid.

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the scar of past injustice or recall the initial fault. Franklin appears to argue that whatever errors were present in the public sphere’s initial execution, like the botches of social prejudice, progressive reflection will correct the marred text: the details of exclusion are simply ornamental and have little impact on the model’s fundamental operation and ultimate legitimacy. Yet despite Franklin’s promise of easy social repair, the Autobiography self-reflexively illustrates the consistent failure of perfectibility with Franklin’s calculus of his weekly transgressions in his notebook. Having set up a printed microscope to regulate his manners alongside an implicit norm, Franklin ironizes his systematic failure to fix the errata over the long term by invoking the folktale of the man who decided to keep his rusty ax speckled, lest the seemingly endless friction needed to remove the oxidation only result in diminishing the object’s utility. If a corroded ax is best, then Franklin’s pragmatic moral is that the self and society cannot be made better through an ascetic regime of insistent amelioration; while it is certainly good to aim for perfection, if society has seemingly intractable faults, like prejudice, any prolonged pursuit of justice may adversely damage its already working mechanism. A similar message appears with Franklin’s apostasy from vegetarianism, which also retreats from the principle of rational improvement. Franklin breaks his dietary self-regulation after witnessing a fish being cut open to reveal its having eaten other fish. Witnessing the belly of the beast, he shrugs it off as the way of the world and then justifies his own turn back to flesh-eating by testifying that it is “convenient . . . to be a reasonable Creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for every thing one has a mind to do.”48 By turning rationality into an occasional convenience, Franklin deflates the rigor of normative universality that insists on the postabsolutist social system’s legitimacy based on the rule of reason; his situational ethics allow, to use his own terms, Inclination to overcome Principle in ways that radically undermine the project of public Enlightenment. For those who have been excluded from enfranchisement, Franklin’s condoning of the resilience of human bestiality appears as the gesture of one who is too amenable to compromise with social injustice. Furthermore, since Franklin’s idea of contractualized repayment assumes that historical trauma, like the residues left from oceanic slavery, the Holocaust, or the modern Palestinian diaspora, is quantifiable in ways that allow for its entry 48. Ibid., 36.

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into a circuit of (cultural) capital exchange, financial renumeration stands as his final solution to overcome psychic revenants from leaving any indelible mark or long-lasting stain on the social fabric. Franklin’s willingness to let capital stand in for intrinsic correction suggests that inclusion within bourgeois consumer privilege supersedes the need for civil liberties. Yet Franklin’s ironizing of these blots on the social record’s page becomes undermined through the Autobiography’s own testimony about the structuring effects of psychic trauma. In his transport from Boston’s early modern cultural environment of patriarchal authority and estate rights, Franklin presents Philadelphia as the site of Lockean freedom to choose one’s society, object of affections, and business associates amidst a society of fully autonomous subjects, who can be renominated outside of blood ancestry and socially known through meritorious practices and the personal achievements of the orphanlike individual. The Autobiography details the errors of the older system of patriarchy as Franklin describes family as a set of dysfunctional, if not abusive, natal relations. In relating his domestic past, he can barely suppress his resentment against an obstructionist and emotionally unsupportive father; a hostile and condescending brother; and a seemingly absent and overly submissive mother. Franklin depicts Josiah Franklin as ever ready to pronounce the paternal “No.” Josiah’s repressive authority continually blocks and humiliates the boy’s efforts to go beyond his ancestral artisan class station by gaining personal recognition through cultural merit. Furthermore, Franklin often portrays his father as an atavistic primogeniturist, who is unwilling to allow the youngest son access to his family’s collective past privileges, so that Boston’s lifeworld is even felt as a regression from the personal liberties actually available in England. The Autobiography’s particular complaint often seems to be that Franklin’s father willfully teases out a display of the boy’s wishes only to suppress them. While Josiah and his brothers were “encourag’d in Learning,” an education that results in recognition by their communal peers, Franklin, after advancing quickly in school, hears his father say “to his Friends in my Hearing” that his own further education will not occur because the expense of a college education will not repay the investment (“the mean Living many so educated were afterwards were able to obtain”).49 His father ridicules Franklin’s first effort in poetry as impractical; the boy’s 49. Ibid., 5, 9.

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essay writing is faintly praised for being correctly spelled; and Benjamin’s later venture to become an independent printer is given a “flat Denial.”50 Josiah takes Franklin to various masters, ostensibly to “observe [Franklin’s] Inclination, & endeavor to fix it on some Trade or other on Land,” but only after he has vetoed his son’s “strong Inclination for the Sea.”51 Franklin’s replacement desire, his “Bookish Inclination,” is then channeled into a bound apprenticeship to his abusive brother James, where a male version of the “traffic of women” occurs as Franklin’s father passes contractual authority over the boy to Franklin’s older brother. His father’s oral denial becomes materialized in his brother’s physical maltreatment. As James Franklin refuses the “Indulgence” of family affections, he treats Benjamin as a servant, dispensing “harsh & tyrannical Treatment” in “the Blows [James’s] Passion too often urg’d him to bestow.”52 Frequently forced to take his grievances before his father’s juridical opinion, Franklin painfully discovers that a favorable legal determination does nothing to abate his absolutist brother’s intemperate and arbitrary violence. Franklin freely admits that the lesson his family taught him was that rational persuasion alone is often helpless before entrenched despotism. It does not seem accidental that Franklin chose to see his father only three times in more than twenty years after he first left Boston.53 Despite the assumed clean slate revolution that the move to Philadelphia ought to provide, Franklin’s sore spot at an uncaring father and overbearing brother continue to structure the Autobiography’s post-Boston trajectory in three compensatory aspects. First, the acts of familial displeasure often provide a syntax for later events. Beyond the constant reliance on the language of printing, the Autobiography consistently invokes maritime scenes and metaphors. Franklin describes success as getting on “swimmingly” and many of the Autobiography’s framing devices involve narratives of aquatic transport and actual instances of floating along the water’s surface. These references float to the text’s surface as though Josiah’s initial refusal to allow Franklin a life on the sea rebounds in a language of positive evaluation that implicitly acts to rebut his father’s primal negation.54

50. Ibid., 31. 51. Ibid., 31, 10. 52. Ibid., 20, 22. 53. Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin (London: Putnam, 1939), 6. 54. Michael T. Gilmore, The Middle Way: Puritanism and Ideology in American Romantic Fiction (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1977), 49.

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Second, Franklin’s post-Boston experience does not revolutionize personal relations so much as compulsively reinscribe their negative originating conditions. Rather than ignore his father’s and brother’s lifeworld, Franklin incessantly searches for surrogate father and brother figures, as if the trajectory of Franklin’s adult life is formed by the need to respond and repair a childhood trauma that cannot be easily forgotten.55 Franklin sequences the stages of his development through moments of his being noticed by benevolent older men who are ever ready to dispense supportive advice and opportunities to advance Franklin’s career. The older Denham “counsell’d me as Father, having a sincere Regard for me: I respected & Lov’d him; and we might have gone on together very happily.”56 Franklin’s procession of benevolent elders seems to reproach Josiah by comparison, and his praise for these gentle older men can be read as a resentful cry of the heart against his biological father’s hard-heartedness Similarly, Franklin tends to associate with “bad brothers,” men of his own age cohort who are hurtling to failure and demise. At Keimer’s printing shop his colleagues are an assortment of misfits: Hugh Meredith, “given to drink”; Stephen Potts, “a little idle”; John —, “a wild Irishman brought up to no business”; and George Webb, Oxford Scholar manqué who was “idle, thoughtless, and imprudent” enough to throw away the very educational opportunities that Franklin longed to be given.57 With friends like the ne’erdo-well Ralph and drunkard Collins, Franklin paradoxically spends his time around downwardly mobile contemporaries. A domestic logic appears, however, as Franklin, amidst a confederacy of dunces, symbolically responds to his brother James. By noting that he is a better man (and son) than others of his generation, Franklin not only hopes to overcome James’s condescension, but also to replace him in their father’s estimation and convey that he ought to be awarded the honors of the first son, even in the act of newspaper editing, the very task in which James ought to be his “master.” When Franklin returns to Boston, he makes a point of humiliating his brother by insubordinately performing success by displaying his new, fine dress, proclaiming his new-found “happy Life,” and showering drink money before James’s employees in order to dramatize James’s failure as a 55. Gilmore, Middle Way, 48 – 55; Jordan, Second Stories, 28; Looby, Voicing American, 99 –102. 56. Franklin, Autobiography, 53. 57. Ibid., 53–54.

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surrogate patriarch. Because James’s emotional allegiance is to “his People,” or employees, rather than his blood family, Franklin says that his brother “receiv’d me not very frankly,” a pun on James’s lack of fraternity.58 Finally, Franklin’s description of his acts of own self-regulation, which are meant to typify his individualism, often encode the residue of domestic rancor. Franklin’s vegetarianism allows him to replace early modern artisan relations with modern contractual ones by negotiating for the cost of his board with his brother. Saving money by abstaining from meat or fish, Franklin overcomes his two domestic complaints. He saves money to purchase books, thus self-financing the education that his father has refused. The deal also has the “Advantage” of liberating him from having to eat under his brother’s gaze or within reach of his fists.59 But once Franklin is on the boat speeding away from Boston, he experiences the epiphany of fish-eating fish that allows his “principle” of dietetic regulation to vanish. As Franklin’s first act after his escape is his “reasonable creature’s” rejection of rationality’s a priori transcendence, the Autobiography insinuates that his reason is not giving way to irrationality but that the logic of radical rationality had simply emanated from the wellsprings of antagonistic, selfish concerns in the first instance. In this light, reason becomes nothing more than a tactic to be momentarily wielded against the old regime, but abandoned soon after its demise. In contrast to the Autobiography’s published faith in overcoming the impediments of past mistreatment, its inner architecture not only illustrates the enduring presence of prior (adolescent) abuse but, moreover, their structuring power over ensuing events. The maintenance of hurt, despite Franklin’s appearance of equanimity and commendable lifelong tendency toward diplomatic conflict avoidance rebuts Habermas’s notion that the “public sphere” functions as the arena that dissolves the particularist interests that defined subjectivity in the early modern moment. Initial exclusions from the realm of universal access, like the ones experienced by Franklin as a younger son, continue to impact subjectivity long after the later moment of eventual inclusion. Additionally, the enduring residue of exclusion’s symbolic reenactment through relations with others suggests that rather than the intimate sphere acting as a “privateness oriented to an audience,” Franklin’s text looks to the historical postsentimental notion of the individual as having a “secret

58. Ibid., 31. 59. Ibid., 17.

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history,” a personal life-narrative of emotional interiority that is neither admissible to the public gaze nor self-evidentially manifested.60 With its fusion of backward glances and forward-looking features, Franklin’s tale suggests that rather than the public sphere acting as a premarket ideal, it was developed as a transitional form to facilitate the passage from early modern anticommercialism to a full-blown modern capitalism through an engine of psychic distress empowered by the effects of that passage. If this is the case, then any desire to recuperate the public sphere functions as nostalgia for a particular phase of capitalism, not an avenue outside of its asymmetries.

The Engine of Vice: Mandeville, Franklin, and Ideological Institutionality If the Autobiography’s reader had noticed the particularist intrafamilial and infrapsychic motives for his later career, Franklin might not have refuted the claim because, as the speckled ax tale suggests, his vision of social betterment acknowledges the continuing presence of personal imperfections. Moreover, Franklin sees these errors as having a positive social purpose as he echoes Mandeville’s argument about the relation between private vice and public virtue. Unlike the dominant redactors of sentimental self-correction, such as Shaftsbury and the Spectator writers, who fear the contaminating effects of passionate vice, Mandeville argues, in The Fable of the Bees, that private vices translate into public good. For Mandeville, even the degenerate luxuries of the noxious rich have their positive utility, since these consumer needs provide employment for those who service the wealthy’s depraved tastes, thus raising the living standard for laborers.61 Mandeville’s core argument is that private interests, rather than disinterested sociality, act as society’s motive power, and, moreover, this engine of selfishness does not require regulation by civility and sympathy. Enacted desires will always promote economic activity that keeps society (“the hive”) busily productive and materially better off. Whereas Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” postulates a society-less society, Mandeville is one of the first writers to recognize damaged human interests as a force directing the economy. Yet he shares Smith’s faith in the market as self-regulating, even if individuals are not. 60. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 43. 61. Bernard Mandeville, “The Grumbling Hive: Or, Knaves Turn’d Honest,” in The Fable of the Bees (London: Penguin, 1970), 63–76, 69.

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Mandeville’s acceptance, if not celebration, of egotism rests on two polemical axioms that differentiate him from the antimodernism of the period’s reactionary writers. Against anxieties about new social mentalities, he insists that personal selfishness does not unleash social decay. Unlike Hobbes, Mandeville defends the new bourgeois order as he does not fear that the liberation of desires, as a metaphor for the social appearance of new classes of masterless men, will result in a chaotic war of all against all that requires the intervention of a repressive, suprapersonal authority. Against the concept of moralized natural reason, typified by Rousseau, Mandeville rejects the lapsarian idyll of precivilized good and original convention, as well as claims that this lost ideal can only be reconstructed through the homogenizing nature of sentimental consensus. He assumes that men are bad today but were no better yesterday. He argues instead that social amelioration comes because humans are intrinsically depraved but also naturally social creatures: the tension between vicious desire and communal yearning creates an imbalance that catalyzes, rather than impedes, human progress. In “An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue,” Mandeville claims nature to be immanently selfish. “All untaught Animals are only Solicitous of pleasing themselves, and naturally follow the bent of their own Inclinations, without considering the good or harm that from their being pleased will accrue to others.”62 Contra Hobbes, Mandeville insists that although man is “extraordinary selfish and headstrong as well as cunning,” it is “impossible by force alone to make him tractable, and receive the Improvements he is capable of.” A far greater social lever is “Flattery,” the public satisfaction of vanity’s self-love. In a proto-Nietszchean critique of the genealogy of morals, Mandeville argues that “the first Rudiments of Morality, broach’d by skillful Politicians, to render Men useful to each other as well as tractable” was their mythological definition of two classes of men. In the first, benevolent self-control is celebrated: “Heroes who took such extraordinary Pains to master some of their natural appetites, and prefer’d the good of others to any visible Interest of their own.” Buoyed by their own rhetoric about “the Dignity of Rational Creatures,” “Improvements of the Mind,” and ”the Authority of the Government,” this class sets itself as the “true Representatives of their sublime Species” against a second group “of abject, low minded People, that always hunting after immediate Enjoyment, were

62. Bernard Mandeville, “An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue,” in The Fable of the Bees (London: Penguin, 1970), 81–92, 81.

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wholly incapable of self-denial, and without regard to the good of others, had no higher Aim than their private Advantage; such as being enslaved by Voluptuousness, yielded without resistance to every gross desire, and made no use of their Rational faculties but to heighten their Sensual Pleasure.”63 Although the story that Mandeville tells is similar to Adam Smith’s morality tale, which explains modern class divisions as resulting from the difference between “two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and, above all frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living,” Mandeville casts a suspicious eye on the tale of virtuous ascetics by coming close to Marx’s rejoinder that these fables simply hide a violent history of class struggle.64 The difference between classes, for Mandeville, is not that one is actually more or less virtuous than another, but that one has learned the value of speculative imposture as a mechanism for gaining cultural capital and power. In ways prescient of Marx’s argument about capital as a system that generates commodities only insofar as their sale produces profit, Mandeville claims that the ruling class alienates its passions and momentarily suppresses vanity to labor for the public simply to receive the value of self-love alongside a surplus cultural value with the “the Breath of Man, the Aerial Coin of Praise” for their “heroic sacrifice.”65 Quoting Alexander to the Athenians (“Oh ye Athenians, could you believe what Dangers I expose my self to, to be praised by you”), Mandeville argues that sentimental displays of “republican” dedication to the commonwealth are never anything other than a means of self-aggrandizement: one appears to sacrifice self-interest only to engross the multitude’s clamor in ways that will reward your vanity to a higher degree than what one could have done for one’s own self.66 Mandeville’s focus is ultimately sociological as he understands that the capitalization of vanity through public welfare is not an individual tactic, but a collective one deployed by elites to consolidate political control over the populace and “govern vast numbers of them with the greater Ease and Security.”67 As he characterizes public service as little more than a superficially neutral form that one class gainfully circulates to secure its establishment, Mandeville scandalized his times by refusing to dissimulate the actually existing attitudes and techniques used by the developing bourgeois to gain sovereignty. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

Mandeville, “Moral Virtue,” 83– 85. Marx, Capital, 873. Mandeville, “Moral Virtue,” 90. Ibid. Ibid., 85.

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Franklin’s signposts his sympathy with Mandeville’s position as the Autobiography records, without ensuing condemnation, that Franklin was introduced to Mandeville at the latter’s club meeting in London.68 Furthermore, in a July 26, 1784, letter to Benjamin Vaughan, Franklin rehearses Mandeville’s consumerist argument: “Suppose we include in the Definition of Luxury all unnecessary Expence, and let us consider whether the Laws to prevent such Expence are possible to be executed in a great Country, and whether, it they could be executed, our People generally would be happier, or even richer. Is not the hope of being one day able to purchase and enjoy Luxuries a great Spur to Labour and Industry? May not Luxury, therefore, produce more than it consumes, if without such a Spur People would be, as they are naturally enough inclined to be, lazy and indolent.”69 Like Mandeville, Franklin refuses to denounce the vice of vanity in the Autobiography, since he considers it to be the prime mover of public virtue. “I give [Vanity] fair Quarter wherever I meet with it, being persuaded that it is often productive of Good to the Possessor & to others that are within his Sphere of Action.”70 Franklin also echoes Mandeville when he speaks about the “Impropriety of presenting one’s self as the Proposer of any useful Project.”71 Admitting that he learned to state projects anonymously “as a Scheme of A Number of Friends,” Franklin learns that doing well in silence has its own rewards, since “The present little Sacrifice of your Vanity will afterwards be amply repaid.”72 Franklin’s initial retreat does pay off when he not only later gets the public credit for work done by others, as with the idea of lighting the city, but also it becomes seen as necessary to confer with him on major projects.73 By investing in silence, Franklin receives the good of credibility and its ensuing ease of access to credit. Yet Franklin is a post-Mandevillian in two key ways. Since Franklin’s dissenting background and Quaker associations does not lead him to configure military exploits as a positive act, vanity is, for him, channeled into

68. Franklin, Autobiography, 45. Anderson, conversely, sees “Mandeville’s analysis of the utility of vice . . . runs directly counter to Franklin’s metaphysical convictions as well as his practical experience.” Douglas Anderson, The Radical Enlightenment of Benjamin Franklin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 171. 69. Lynn A. Parks, Capitalism in Early American Literature (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 21. 70. Franklin, Autobiography, 4. 71. Ibid., 80. 72. Ibid., 81. 73. Ibid., 126. Jennifer Jordan Baker, “Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and the Credibility of Personality,” Early American Literature 35, no. 3 (2000): 274–93.

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the management of civil society and habitualization of public utilities rather than imperial belligerence. Second, Mandeville’s tolerance of vice was in service of laissez-faire as an economic principle. He sees the hive as self-regulating and lacking the need for tutelage. Franklin, however, does not believe in letting this power go unorganized, since it can achieve more than the stasis that Mandeville accepts. Similarly, unlike Habermas, Franklin does not see the public sphere as absent of particularist concerns striving for self-recognition, since he believes that selfish interests, masquerading as universal ones, are the factors that actually dynamize the public sphere. Any notion of the public sphere’s universality is not only naïve, at best, but mistaken as to its motive power and actual benefits. But the Autobiography’s final message is selfishness is a good so long as it is institutionally organized. The mechanism by which vanity produces collective good appears as the Autobiography begins its third section with Franklin’s historiography, first written shortly after he had joined the semi-covert Masons, an organization that he would remain active in for the remainder of his life.74 Franklin assumes that all social movements (“the great Affairs of the World, the Wars, Revolutions, &c.”) are carried out by parties, which are the unstable precipitant of a momentary convergence of many individuals’ “particular private Interest.”75 Politics is a masquerade of personal inclination, since “few in Public Affairs” truly act from a “Principle of Benevolence.” Fragile egotism requires a stabilizing agglomeration of interests through its institutionalization as a “united Party for Virtue.” This group will bring together “the Virtuous and good Men of all Nations into a regular body” that enacts corporate standards of excellence in a more organized, hence powerful, way than “common People are to common Laws.”76 Celebrating the rule of the meritorious few over the demos through nonrepresentative, extrapolitical mechanisms, Franklin’s particularizes, which is to say, normatizes, his ideal body as composed (initially) of “young and single Men only.”77 The goal of this sect will be for each member “to afford their Advice Assistance and Support to each other in promoting one another’s Interest Business and Advancement in Life.”78 This self-interest group will 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin, 76 –77. Franklin, Autobiography, 96. Ibid. Ibid., 97. Ibid.

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be called “The Society of the Free and Easy,” due to its members’ freedom from vice, characterized as submission to debt, and “confinement,” typified as marriage. In Franklin’s plan the society should be kept secret “till it was become considerable, to prevent Solicitations for the Admission of improper Persons.” This prophylactic exclusion means that the sect will seek its members from a network of preexisting acquaintances, “to whom with prudent Caution the Scheme should be gradually communicated.” Franklin says that his plan was never put into practice, and he turns instead to describe his inauguration of Poor Richard’s Almanac as a “proper Vehicle for conveying Instruction among the common People.”79 In this fantasia of secret associationist social organization, Franklin moves with ease from imagining a secret instrument of social control to announcing his publication of the Almanac, as a local version of the Spectator’s model public sphere organized by disembodied pseudonyms, and he makes it clear that the purpose of printed matter is the control the plebeian crowd through the persuasive effect of beneficial advice. Predictably, Franklin denies the possibility of a secret club only after having admitted its existence. For Franklin had already “form’d most of my ingenious Acquaintance into a Club, for mutual Improvement, which we call’d the Junto.”80 Although fashioned as a disinterested discussion group that will train its members in modes of sociability, where conversation can be had without members aggravating or “disgusting each other,” the Junto’s real interest for its members rests in how it provides advantageous information for commercial benefit and helps recommend business to each other.81 Franklin admits that the Junto was a “Secret” because the “Intention was, to avoid Applications of improper Persons for Admittance, some of whom perhaps we might find it difficult to refuse.”82 Because the Junto is “useful” as a means of economic uplift, its members want to expand the network. Franklin refuses and proposes that each member “form a subordinate Club, with the same Rules . . . and without informing them of the Connexion with the Junto.”83 The advantage of these secret links is that the Junto can act as a medium for the “Improvement of so many more young Citizens by the Use of our Institutions; our better Acquaintance 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

Ibid., 98. Ibid., 61. Ibid., 62. Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin, 73–74. Franklin, Autobiography, 104. Ibid.

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with the general Sentiments of the Inhabitants on any Occasion . . . ; the Promotion of our particular Interests in Business by more extensive recommendations; and the Increase of our Influence in public Affairs & our Power of doing Good by spreading thro’ the several Clubs the Sentiments of the Junto.”84 The Junto becomes a machine for feeding personal interest while at the same time accumulating and acculturating others to coordinate their actions via the creation of Junto-fashioned institutions, even as they remain unaware of how they have been positioned to enact behavior. Franklin perceives how the core features of republican liberalism, unfettered economic self-interest and a consensual public comity, can be mutually imbricated for forward motion, rather than merely for equilibrium, through the construction of knowledge-based institutions involving personal training, education, and opinion formation. Unlike Adam Smith’s notion of free-floating parainstitutionality, Franklin’s perceives how a cultural, discursive institution can transcend the original Juntoistas’ personal desire for narrow economic gain to become module for a new elite, a transistorizing machine wherein ostensibly neutral cultural realms can suture various interests to orchestrate an apparently consensual-based power that is far more effective and revolutionary than simple economic coercion as a means of consolidating the middle classes and controlling those outside of bourgeois congeries. The Junto’s success as a medium of cultural expansion and control appears with the event that bridges, and thus internally structures, the Autobiography’s first and second parts. Desiring access to books, Franklin sets up a subscription library, legalized in a public contractual form by Philadelphia’s chief legal counsel, scrivener Charles Brockden. The power of this institution as a hidden spring of social history then appears as part 1 concludes by stating that the library was “the Mother of all the N American Subscription Libraries now so numerous. It is become a great thing itself & continually increasing.—These Libraries have improv’d the general Conversation of the Americans, made the common Tradesmen & Farmers as intelligent as most Gentlemen from other Countries, and perhaps have contributed in some degree to the Stand so generally made throughout the Colonies in Defence of their Privileges.”85 The War for Independence, in Franklin’s analysis, occurred because of his covert construction of public opinion through the proliferation of superficially disinterested institutions.

84. Ibid. 85. Ibid., 71–72.

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After the intercalated Vaughn letters, Franklin continues the Autobiography by reiterating the tale of the librarial “institution,” its repetition in other towns, and its civilizational effect of making reading fashionable in ways that increase the average intelligence of Americans. Franklin then admits that it was the successful experience of the Junto as a hidden lever of opinion formation that leads him into discovering the general law of social power’s invisibility, which both protects the entrepreneur from the humiliation of public failure and repays the momentary loss of authorship with later acclaim.86 The law of dissimulation inaugurates something more significant than simply the familiar eighteenth-century debate about aristocratic personal imposture and absolutist state secrecy. Linking the need to protect one’s self from accusation of impropriety, the construction of public interest, and the language of property gain, Franklin suggests, before Marx, Tocqueville, and Nietzsche, how a traumatized self can be conjoined with the spirit of capitalism to contour a civic public that masks inegalitarian privilege. By illustrating the ways in which the “injured self” becomes aligned with class aspirations, Franklin charts how public opinion is formed by a distinctly modern nexus of individual psychic drives, market-state dynamics, and “private” institutionalism. The great invention that the Autobiography records is neither the various gadgets of Franklin’s ingenuity, nor even the specific administrative solutions that he proposes, but the discovery of how public opinion can be molded (“preparing the Minds of People for the Change”) through the organization of apparently disinterested institutions that collectivize private interests into an instrument that “one Man of tolerable abilities may work with great Changes & accomplish great Affairs among Mankind.”87 Franklin’s significance for a history of ideas is how his work springs beyond the period’s sensibilitarian claims and Mandevillian selfishness to stand as an early formulation of modern elite theory. Understanding that power no longer emanates from the muscular modes of traditional estate privilege and kin-status mores, he investigates the techniques of institutional ideology where a new social faction can maneuver through the idea of cooperation’s utility. Franklin’s claim that the Junto acts as the institutional engine to disseminate the public push for national independence illustrates history as

86. Ibid., 80 – 81. 87. Ibid., 107, 98.

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formed by a subterranean matrix of corporate vice that creates its own latent resource architecture for survival. The Autobiography presents disinterested public sphere discussions as being intrinsically directed in advance by the predetermination of a self-selecting few within a systematizing institutional machine. Whatever commonwealth good the public sphere achieves, it remains fundamentally a module designed to advance the particularity of male, bourgeois privilege through the guise of universality. Given that Franklin presents the apparent neutrality of benevolent institutions as the manifestation of self-aggrandizement that forms a corporate bourgeois project and structures systemic inequality, if not social violence, the Autobiography challenges Habermas’s blueprint of the classic bourgeois public sphere by complicating the trinity of the public state, public sphere, and intimate sphere with the additional elements of a secret self-history and covert society. The contradiction of enshrining an institutional invisible hand within the public sphere’s establishment means that it remains an insufficient template for the complete empowerment of subaltern agents. After all, Franklin illustrates the ideal of a disembodied “bourgeois public sphere” as a screen for cabalistic group determinations that use unregenerated “Inclination” to reject those marked by the embodied disability of class, gender, race, and so on. Moreover, the secrecy of the Junto’s existence prevents improper persons, the bearers of social difference, from attempting to meet the requirements of access into its pluralist consensus because these requirements are not even publicized in ways that allow the excluded to recognize what “Errata” they carry. As an “old boys’ network” in formation, Franklin’s Junto reveals that the production of zones (white, male, middle class) of class privilege is no accident, but an immanent feature of republican liberalism. The final irony of Franklin’s text is in a text assumably designed to promote the American dream of self-reliance, Franklin paradoxically reveals that the best way to get ahead is not through individual merit, but with the prosthetics of social connections as the medium of confrontational bourgeois class aspirations. Commenting on Machiavelli’s Prince, Gramsci rhetorically asks why Machiavelli’s treatise was received with such hostility, since “Machiavelli himself remarks that what he is writing about in is fact practiced, by the greatest men throughout history.”88 Given that the addressed prince does

88. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 135.

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not need any manual to learn what was already common practice by the nobility, Gramsci assumes that the readers Machiavelli actually had in mind were “those who are not in the know,” those whom Machiavelli “intended to educate politically”: “the revolutionary class of the time, the Italian ‘people’ or ‘nation,’ the citizen democracy.” Addressing the prince, Machiavelli really wanted to be overheard by the protobourgeoisie. Like the Prince, the Autobiography is a manual that illustrates “how it’s done” to the revolutionary class of Franklin’s own time, the more developed but still rising bourgeoisie, the masterless men who do not resist middle-class authority, but instead jealously seek to appropriate its authority by displacing older elites and their governance of the plebeian class’s productive force. The text’s addressed reader is the mature royal governor, as a notice that these older modes of sovereignty that the son represents are increasingly obsolete, but the Autobiography knowingly understands that it actually has a different ideal reader, a middle-class collective one. Franklin may not have composed the details of American political independence for his readers, but he did something more important in transcribing the dynamics of the necessary prerequisite of a cultural one with the construction of civil society’s management. The Autobiography is the manual of bourgeois sovereignty, the means by which a nonmilitaristic class can assume social control through the promulgation of ideology involving seemingly neutral realms of subjectivity. The paradox of the public sphere is not that its modernity is incomplete, since as a product of bourgeois modernity, it functions as it was meant to—paradoxically—as the sphere that redirects and mediates conflict in order to advance the middleclass struggle for authority. This riddle of institutionality and its discontents lies at the heart of Brown’s writing, itself a product of the 1790s acceleration of re-export– created insitutionality.

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wieland and the problem of counterinstitutionality

In Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798), Brown delivers a tale about gothic violence within Mettingen, the Wieland family manor on Philadelphia’s outskirts, seemingly touched off by the mysterious arrival of Carwin, an educated young man of indeterminate origins, as a geographical device to represent tensions within the re-export republic’s sociocultural field. As his own first complete romance, Wieland also functions as Brown’s selfreflexive examination into the conditions of the present literary field, as a sphere already preconditioned by the generic curriculum vitae described in Franklin’s Autobiography. Hear, for example, Wieland’s knowing echo of Franklin’s description of his Philadelphia arrival as Brown narrates Clara Wieland’s first sight of Frank Carwin wandering onto her property. Like Franklin with his clothes in his pockets, Carwin appears absurd to Clara. His body is disfigured, his comportment suggestive of ignorance, and his rural dress unkempt.1 Although the publication of Franklin’s and Brown’s texts differs by only a few years, the environment they present seems diametrically opposed.2 Franklin depicts the unaffiliated, mobile male as a normative subject to celebrate the seemingly autonomous republican liberal agent’s conflict-free worldly ascent. Brown likewise portrays a clumsy entry into Philadelphia’s regional economy, but his cameo soon lurches into a nightmarish hell of intimate violence (infanticide, uxoricide, connotations of attempted rape, madness), unregulated deceit, and ruthless competition. Given the similar originating conditions of muddy Franklin and malformed Frank Carwin, what bifurcating element causes this Manichean divide? Or is it Brown’s bifocal point that only a slightly relocated perspective

1. Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland; or, The Transformation and Memoirs of Carwin, the Biloquist, ed. Emory Elliot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 46 – 47. 2. While the Autobiography’s first part was composed in 1771 and circulated in manuscript form throughout the 1780s, the text’s multipart publication was posthumous in the 1790s. Brown’s novel was published immediately after its composition.

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would reveal Franklin’s and Frank’s vista as belonging to the same social panorama? By using a tropological starting point in Wieland similar to Franklin’s and then reporting on its consequences through a tour of gore and mutilation, Brown refutes Franklin’s social imaginary by detailing its immanent violence. For Brown, the civic liberal subject that Franklin depicts is triply fictive. First, the notion that an individual has total freedom to dissolve the markers of class and redefine their relation to the price-setting market is an objective fiction, a nontruth. Second, Brown sees Franklin writing a fable about subjectivity that disguises the historical tensions leading to a capitalist political economy and its aligned mode of selfhood. Last, and, for Brown, most important, the Autobiography simulates a faith in the unstructured market and language of consensus that is little more than a sociopolitical tactic of domination masking the coercion that Wieland makes transparent. Franklin’s Autobiography and its sociocultural claims are Wieland’s (and its prequel Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist) main intertext. Wieland is not simply an anti-Enlightenment narrative about abstract rationality’s incapacity to establish a coherent epistemological order and a harmonious nation-state because Brown does not see “reason,” “democracy,” or “nationality” as either self-evident or primary categories outside of the particular social fractions who deploy these concepts.3 Brown is an early instance of post-Enlightenment attitudes because he considers knowledge as a nonautonomous, historically mutable field contoured by particularistic and antagonistic social interests. If reason wavers in Wieland, it is due to conflicting group agendas rather than any intrinsic dislocation between signifiers and signified or transcendental distinction between oral and literate modes of expression. Wieland’s ambivalence annotates Brown’s recognition that the re-export republic’s social transformations electrify the intellectual field in ways that mutually

3. Critical readings of Wieland as anxious about the state of the epistemologized nation are so frequent as to be the dominant interpretation. For exemplary instances, see Edwin Sill Fussell, “Wieland: A Literary and Historical Reading,” Early American Literature 18 (1983): 171– 86; Roland Hagenbüchle, “American Literature and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis in Epistemology: The Example of Charles Brockden Brown,” Early American Literature 23, no. 2 (1988): 121–51; Emily Miller Buddick, Fiction and Historical Consciousness: The American Romance Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 171– 86; Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Bill Christopherson, The Apparition in the Glass: Charles Brockden Brown’s American Gothic (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993); Christopher Looby, Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 169. Russell Reising summarizes these trends in Loose Ends: Closure and Crisis in the American Social Text (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 45– 47.

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enable and threaten fiction’s emancipatory potential as a new institutional practice of knowledge formation. As Franklin’s Autobiography reveals the location of a regulating, classmotivated “secret” sphere that operates through the appearance of a seemingly disinterested public sphere, it typifies for Brown the ideological conditions of the early American novel. Brown resists Franklin’s equanimity and denounces the social damages resulting from the power of ideology, as the unforced force of institutionally prefabricated opinion. Using a generational tale about Carwin and the fall of the house of Wieland, Brown narrativizes the Autobiography’s assumptions to highlight the violence emerging from an attempt to expand inclusion through a medium designed to limit real collective empowerment. At stake here for Brown is the notion of open access to a social sphere of equality wherein previously marginalized subjects achieve the freedom to determine the allocation of resources without enduring fear of retribution by covert maneuvers of collective violence and personal manipulation. Brown’s theme in Wieland is not that we should fear democracy and the presence of noncitizen aliens, but that we need to fear those who fear democracy, the domestic interests who are the real source of social violence, as they would have us quiver before encounters with peoples outside our comfort zone of privilege. In this light, Steven Watts argues that the spastic events and narrative jags in Brown’s fictions document Brown’s own personal incoherence and testify to the ruptures within the liberal subject’s rational and emotive self caused by capitalism.4 Watts’s psychobiographical approach captures Brown’s fascination with conflict but arguably lands off the mark with its Romantic-era fallacy about the inseparability of “literary” expression and the litterateur’s self. Partly because the notion of an interiorized self that nineteenth-century novelists so brilliantly deployed was neither effortlessly available nor immediately compelling to eighteenth-century writers, the earlier writers did not routinely cement aesthetics with the confessional, and they generally treat characters as superficial signifiers of collective positions, rather than as immanent psychologies that must be probed for their truth. Watts furthermore evades the implications of Brown’s self-aware location within the critical project of literary Woldwinism typified by the fiction

4. Steven Watts, The Romance of Real Life: Charles Brockden Brown and the Origin of American Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), xviii.

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of Holcroft, Bage, Godwin, and Wollstonecraft.5 “Godwin’s proposition” was that “the characters of men originate in their external circumstances,” and the Woldwinite authors deposit their characters into crises of damaged environments as an experimental laboratory to explore how personal behavior might overcome or succumb to socially structured adversity.6 Whereas the nineteenth-century bildungsroman charts the unfolding of a precious individual’s transcendent psyche, eighteenth-century Woldwinite narratives use individual characters as maps of collective agents who are formed and deformed by multiple vectors of a complex, intersubjective society. The former emplots an intrinsically heroic or tragic trajectory; the latter assumes that a reconfiguration of forces at any point in time might alter the ensuing course of events and the individual’s status. Consequently, the elements of the Woldwinite long fictional form must be read in the context of its narrative syntax and process, which uses an array of plot twists and encapsulated narratives to think through a social problem. Readers who consider descriptive aspects of Woldwinite texts in isolation from their discursive ecology do irredeemable damage to these writers’ chosen mode of argumentative exposition. In this light, Brown’s novels are neither blunt acts of self-mimesis nor uncomplicated endorsements of the positions explored in his texts. Watts correctly perceives that Brown’s work displays the liberal subject’s incoherence, but Brown does so only to analyze who profits from the self’s fragmentation. Yet even as the English Woldwinite writers provide Brown’s initial themes and instruments, his inquiry into an evolving mode of regulation that operates through an “invisible hand” of ideological thought formation differentiates him from his literary predecessors. Godwin’s primary complaint in Caleb Williams, as typical of Woldwinite narratives, involves the atavistic despotism of landed, old regime statist power against the natural mobility of the middle class as carriers of historical rationality, and the Woldwinites characterize aristocratic tyranny as a repressive force, the removal of which would liberate the bourgeois bearers of reason’s expression.7 By the century’s end, 5. For my use of Woldwinite, see chapter 3, n165. 6. Clemit, Godwinian Novel, 3. 7. “Godwin uses the novel to write an alternative form of history, a history of mentalities: specifically, the mentality of European aristocracy from the early sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. Two themes keep recurring in his novels: contention between two men of unequal social status and the love of a man for his wife. Both kinds of relationship prove tragic because of their inequality; for ‘Aristocracy’ is a form of government and society premised on inequality. Godwin’s power as a writer stems from his fidelity to this theme, which he examines

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Brown perceives the emerging lighter-touch regulation of the subject by parastate ideological institutions, rather than the aristocratic state, as the leading mode of social control. While Woldwinite narratives employ the revolt against patriarchal authority to signify a desired rebellion against coercive, absolutist regimes, Brown interrogates the soft indirection of ideology’s power, which he represents as matrilineal, avuncular, and cousinate. Brown also disputes the Woldwinite faith in the ameliorative denunciation of tyrannical force and their sensibilitarian claims for the effects of personal benevolence and sincerity. For Brown, the Woldwinite gesture of molecular enlightenment not only no longer speaks to actually existing power formations, but its method is one already appropriated, and thus implicated within, these emerging power relations. Such a double elaboration, against Franklin and the first-wave Woldwinites, would be a complicated and ambitious task for any text, especially for one existing prior to a critical lexicon that might more succinctly nominate the problem at hand. Brown, however, adds one more turn of the screw as Wieland’s trajectory leads him to question the efficacy of his own cultural critique within the form of a literary narrative, given that the period’s ongoing transformation of power alliances is also territorializing the social space required by the oppositional work of fiction. Brown’s choppy narrative technique, if that is what it really is in the end, should not be mistaken as incompetence in the craft of plot continuity, since its form attempts to both register the presence of ongoing social struggles and enact a method through cultural forms, which we today call novels but which Brown nominated as romances, wherein readers can recognize and respond to their contemporary environment (more on this below). An absence of the wider intellectual context that Brown operates within has allowed readers to mistakenly situate him as a nationalist and ultimately a conservative writer. Shortly before Brown composed Wieland, his friends and roommates read the new genre of state romance, tales about the hidden springs of nation-state formation, represented by Schiller’s The Ghost-Seer and Cajetan Tschink’s The Victim of Magical Delusion; or, The in depth to the exclusion of almost everything else.” Mark Philp and Marilyn Butler, “Introduction,” in Autobiography: Autobiographical Fragments and Reflections; Godwin/Shelley Correspondence; Memoirs: Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, ed. Mark Philp, vol. 1 (London: William Pickering, 1992), 7– 44, 42. The Woldwinite novel typically pairs a gentry female with a bourgeois male as mutual sufferers of paternal aristocratic hierarchy. Brown alters this plan by using a plebeian male with a bourgeois woman, but one often configured as foreign, in order to emphasize his concerns with class, gender, and ethno-race.

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Mystery of the Revolution of P——L; A Magico-Political Tale.8 Schiller’s and Tschink’s tales involve a narrator who aligns himself with the intellectual aspirations of the Enlightenment, but becomes psychologically confused by a mysterious stranger, who reveals intimate secrets about the narrator by staging ostensibly supernatural events. The confidence man is later revealed as belonging to a secret society that is plotting a coup d’état in the German principalities amidst Catholic-Protestant struggles (Schiller) and Spanishcontrolled Portugal (Tschink). Brown’s Wieland and other fictions clearly rely on this genre’s semiotic codes, and Keats described Carwin as “a Domestic prototype of Schiller’s Armenian [in the Ghost-Seer].”9 Yet he significantly leaves untouched their main and explicit concern with the transformation of specific state regimes. Had Brown truly wanted Wieland to stage concerns about the emergence and stability of the U.S. nationstate, he had only to replicate the full details of the generic construction that he otherwise so scrupulously invokes. By choosing not to underline the matter of political autonomy, which is central to the gothic state romance, Brown’s indicates through careful omission that he sees Wieland’s analytic direction as pointing elsewhere. Likewise, modern readers have puzzled over why Brown titled his first long fiction Wieland and claimed that its characters are related to the German lyricist, Christoph Martin Wieland. Kinderman makes a case that C. M. Wieland’s 1780s writings on spectral frauds, charlatans, mesmerism, and physiognomy in the Weimar-based Der Teutsche Merkur piqued Brown’s interest, as would Wieland’s proximity to Woldwinite ideals.10 As a prolific reader of Continental journals for articles to translate and digest in his

8. James E. Cronin, ed., The Diary of Elihu Hubbard Smith (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1973), 228. Tschink’s novel, translated as Victim of a Magical Delusion, appeared serially in the New-York Weekly Magazine between 1795 and 1796. Schiller’s GhostSeer was serialized there as The Apparitionist in 1796 and 1797. Alexander Cowie, “Historical Essay,” in Wieland; or, The Transformation. An American Tale with Memoirs of Carwin, the Biloquist, ed. Sydney Krause (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1977), 311– 48, here 318. Frederick H. Wilkens, Early Influence of German Literature in America (New York: Macmillan, 1943), 37; Wolf Kinderman, Man Unknown to Himself: Kritische Reflexion Der Amerikanischen Aufklärung: Crevecoeur—Benjamin Rush—Charles Brockden Brown (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1993), 131. Brown’s printers, T. and J. Swords, published Schiller’s The Ghost-Seer as a book in 1796. Wilkens, 70 – 71. The April 1799 issue of Brown’s Monthly Magazine published “On Apparitions,” a story clearly taken from Schiller and Tschink. 9. Clemit, Godwinian Novel, 115. 10. Kinderman, Man Unknown to Himself, 171–75, 193

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own journal, Brown would have known the Merkur as “one of the leading mouthpieces of the Aufklärung . . . and one of the most subscribed journals in Germany.” It was through his writings in this publication that Wieland became known as “first and foremost a social and political writer. Almost all of his major writings after 1759 . . . have an underlying social and political point, a moral that people can improve their lives only by creating a more just society.”11 Wieland’s significance for Brown may also result from his replies to E.A.A. Göchhausen about philosophic cosmopolitanism, secret societies, and patriotism. Throughout the eighteenth century, a debate raged about whether proponents of Enlightenment ideals could be patriots, and whether love for one’s local region is incompatible with the cosmopolitan desire for global perfectabilitarianism.12 On the political right, Göchhausen complained about a secret conspiracy of Jesuits and Freemasons corrupting the German nation, and he saw Enlightenment cosmopolitans as part of these covert cabals. In a series of articles, Wieland argues that cosmopolitanism is not a terroristic secret society of chosen initiates, but rather a set of beliefs that is not delimited to any region or religious group.13 Given that we should care about the entire world’s inhabitants as much as we do about our neighbors, Wieland insists that there is no contradiction between being a local citizen and being a worldly cosmopolitan. By referencing C.M. Wieland in the title page of his novel, Brown indicates that his fiction’s concerns transcend a preoccupation with the national and evolves instead from a Woldwinite-like approach.

11. Frederick C. Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 335–36. 12. Irmtraut Sahmland, Christoph Martin Wieland und Die Deutsche Nation: Zwischen Patriotismus und Griechentum (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1990), 253. 13. Ibid., 263; 255– 68. The pertinent Wieland articles are: “Antworten und Gegenfragen auf einige Zweifel und Anfragen eines neugierigen Weltbürgers,” Teutsche Merkur 1 (1783): 229 – 45 and 2 (1783): 87–96; “Ein Paar Goldkröner aus Makulatur oder Sechs Antworten auf Sechs Fragen,” Teutsche Merkur 1 (1789): 94–105; “Geheimnis des Kosmopolitenordens” Teutsche Merkur 2 (1789): 97–115. The second has been translated as Christoph Martin Wieland, “A Couple of Gold Nuggets, from the . . . Wastepaper, or Six Answers to Six Questions,” in What Is Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 78 – 83. For a comparative discussion, see Pauline Kleingeld, “Six Varieties of Cosmopolitanism in Late Eighteenth-Century Germany,” Journal of the History of Ideas 60, no. 3 (1999): 505–24. For Wieland’s support of the French Revolution, see Christoph Martin Wieland, Meine Antworten: Aufsätze Über Die Französische Revolution, 1789 –1793, in Nach Den Erstdrucken Im “Teutschen Merkur,” ed. Fritz Martini (Marbach: Deutsches Literaturarchiv, 1983), “Nachwort” 132 – 44.

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Romance and Methodology Unlike many authors of eighteenth-century fiction, Brown has a clearly developed and stated motive, set of themes, and methodology about the production of longer fictions. His narrative inspiration primarily comes from his enthusiastic reception of the dissenting Woldwinite writers, who grounded their claims on a variegated legacy of natural rights theories, associationist sensibility, and Scottish School claims for the civilizing force of nonstate social interaction (“civil society”). The Woldwinite agenda rests on three basic axioms. First, ancien régime political and religious sovereignty is illegitimate, since it violates the natural equality of humanity through its unfeeling, coercive imposition of artificial caste and denominational social hierarchies. Second, the old regime has maintained its domination through an obscurantist mythology of territorialized race, priestly tricks, and a politics of secret plots and insincere cabals. Third, since society works through a semiotic chain of sentiment (their preferred term for sensibility), the damages of social obscurity and inequality can be overcome as the sentimental relay is rationalized and instrumentalized. Since a local enactment of behavior will initiate a sequence of mimetic duplications, any performance of virtue will exponentially transform society into a more just world. Modify the ways we interact with friends and associates and we spontaneously introduce these changes into the world’s fabric. With their assumption that global change begins from the bottom up with the premeditated transformation of relations among a small circle, the Woldwinites exemplify an early instance of the belief that a cultural avant-garde can leverage worldly revolution. Despite Shelley’s later attempt to aestheticize Woldwinite beliefs, it is not necessarily isolated poets who are the unofficial legislators of the world according to them, but those molecular groups who perform rational sentiment since any change in the minute granules of behavior and status codes will multiply to become an avalanche. Because the Woldwinites claim that the violence of early modern elites deforms the natural expression of collective emulation, they conceptualize power as repressive and removable. Once the old regime’s coercion and their behavioral mystifications are exorcised, a spontaneous, vitalist human energy and desire for progressive cooperation will flower. Yet despite their strong perfectabilitarian outlook, this circle differentiates itself from older forms of associationist psychology and automaticist sensibility by insisting on the intervention of rational sentiment. Tacitly acknowledging what I have

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earlier called the sentimental paradox, the lack of a prophylactic hygiene within sensibility’s infinity of emulation, the Woldwinites insist on contemplative reason as a corrective guide to the spread of wild feeling, which can easily upset society. The stoic rationalization of sentiment acts as a necessary breakwall that prevents florid sensibility from flooding over into boundless passion. Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman lumps Burke and Rousseau together as much as for their passionate excesses, typified by purple passages of uncontrolled prose, than for their shared misogyny or organicist antimodernism.14 Rationality is also a pacifying tonic that can be therapeutically applied to overcome bodily pain, which is nothing more than the manifestation of rampaging senses, and insanity, which is nothing more than fury (literally the subject’s “mad”-ness). True to their faith in collectivity, the Woldwinites do not subscribe to Cartesian egotism; reason’s locus is not in the seat of the individual’s cognition, but the intimacy of conversation among classless friends. Dialogue is a conflict-free sphere of spontaneous mutual tutelage that sedates the passions, prevents solipsistic overexcitement, and enables the subject’s participation within global changes as rational dialogue removes the status barrier of interpersonal secrets and calms excessive passions, both of which are considered to reenact the aristocratic irrationality of asymmetric power relations. The Woldwinites fear that an individual’s isolated thought will inevitably lead to selfishness (Mary Shelley’s critique of Victor Frankenstein). Their insistence on interpersonal dialogue, where human collectivity prevents the lone actor’s lack of ballast, radically differentiates them from later “romantics,” who will replace the human collocutor with the individual’s spectral imagination or the emanations of an abstract, mute nature. Woldwinite antiabsolutism feeds into their programmatic antistatism and distrust of institutions as the congealed form of the past’s inequality. This gesture is useful, of course, to a group of dissenting nonconformists who are legally prohibited from participating in official governmental activity while also holding ambivalent attitudes toward an unlettered plebeian mass they consider to be as rooted within customary superstitions as the ecclesiastic and landed elites. Because the Woldwinites look to informal cultural formations, like parainstitutional conversations among affinity groups that are neither manorial 14. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Man; a Vindication of the Rights of Woman: An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

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nor plebeian, as the engine of change, they unsurprisingly focus on the renovation of gender roles, not simply because patriarchy is the gender analog to aristocratic despotism, but because the intimacy of the bourgeois hetero- and homosocial encounter is the ideal laboratory for the rational supervision of passion. Friendship between the sexes may include sexual activity, as with Godwin’s and Wollstonecraft’s early relationship, but it, too, must involve the regulatory benefit of rationalization. In their terms, love is an attribute of passion’s despotism and caprice. This passion becomes institutionally enforced in the marriage contract, which mandates obedience that structurally generates degrading insincerity after ephemeral desire has long since vanished. In contrast, friendly (erotic) companionship remains a consensual act that can be broken off at any time by either partner, especially as its enactments are constantly under discussion. Throughout the 1790s, the Woldwinites generally turn to the production of long fiction, rather than political tracts and critical reviews, as the medium best suited to convey their civil society claims. This move is both tactical and strategic. Given the political party restrictions on nonconformists and aftershocks of the early 1790s juridical repression, the Woldwinites find that the literary becomes a safer field in which to publicize their arguments. Since the practice of reading fiction is one usually located in the private sphere, the novel also speaks to the Woldwinites’ belief in the importance of intimate, local encounters as preparation for larger social transformations. With their hesitation about the dangers surrounding the isolated individual, the novel might seem an unfortunate choice for their energies, but the Woldwinites do not see the reading act as defined by the cloistered encounter of a sole reader and the text. Their sense of reading practices stands midway between the open-air, public reading of a sermon or balladic statement and the interiority of the nineteenth-century reading closet; they see a novel as an object distributed among small networks of acquaintances for group conversation. One may literally read alone, but one reads a text to distribute and discuss it amongst friends, not to consume its effects in isolation. Here again the distinction between the Woldwinites and later romantics is helpful, especially if the latter is seen as a response to the perceived failure of revolutionary ideals by the eighteenth century’s end. Sentimental naturalism becomes “romanticized” when it collapses the collective into the individual’s phenomenological perception of a nonsocial climatologic and geographic environment, and “simple” humans, like subsistence agrarians,

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are valued only to the degree that they are seen as innocent, mute bearers of ecological formations outside of the disappointments of recent political history. Because the Woldwinites see textuality as the transistor of communal configurations of civil virtue, they do not celebrate written notations as containers of isolated genius and hermetically sealed objects protected from the outside world’s contamination. Similarly, they have little concern for “art,” which is a core category that arrives in response to political containment and the loss of confidence in the prior radical generation’s projects. When the Woldwinites are at the peak of their creative production in the 1790s, they do not lack confidence about an open horizon of social change in ways that political defeat, internal exile, and group dissension would affect them and other bourgeois dissidents in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Brown, chronologically and positionally, stands in between the firstwave Woldwinites and their romantic inheritors. When Brown moves from producing mainly poetry to prose, he enters the field as one defined by Woldwinite claims. Yet Brown does not simply repeat the intellectual predicates of the English writers as he begins by highlighting the internal contradiction locked within the Woldwinites’ amendment of first-wave sensibility by their addition of corrective reason. While their complaint against the old regime was that it interfered with the nature of human relations, their own call for controlling passion through learned behavior and external regulation was itself an artificial intervention. The Woldwinites have difficulty explaining, or even at times recognizing, that the demand for natural rights is discordant with their dictate for reason’s modification of corporeal instincts deemed too rebellious for total autonomy. In contemporary terms, the Woldwinites unwittingly introduce the problematic of social construction. They fail to recognize that both the ancien régime and their own models of sovereignty and subjectivity are equally social constructions, as neither the seigniorial ranks of order nor the rationalized collective is simply “natural.” Denouncing the old regime as a self-interested intervention, the Woldwinites naively position themselves as innocent participants and fail to acknowledge their own model as a competing mode of social regulation. In doing so, they ultimately forgo any sense of durable strategy about institutionalizing practices that are necessary for a prolonged intervention within a politically mobile world. Brown’s fiction recognizes the political problematic of social construction as incompletely theorized in Woldwinite claims, and his narratives mainly attempt to think through the implications of this tension. By interrogating

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the terms of his own chosen position within the period’s available cultural field, Brown stands as a second-wave Woldwinite, a figure typifying a differentiated moment rather than simply a provincial attaché to a distant movement. He initially addresses the problematic through his methodological distinction between history and romance as two separate, but interlinked, authorial activities, a division that he repeatedly conveys in his magazine essays. For Brown, the primary distinction between history and romance is not their relative facticity, but their difference in explanatory potential. Brown imagines the difference between history and romance (tasks which can be often carried out by the same author) as that between the documentation and description of events and the analytical contemplation of the likely factors (the “hidden springs”) that congeal to produce the these performances or artifacts. The task of the historian’s labor is simply to mine the archive and transport the facts of past events to the attention of the present.15 With a perception that resonates with our contemporary experience of information overload, Brown recognizes that the accumulation of evidence by itself does nothing to increase human enlightenment. Without a critical narrative that mediates our reception of documents, more archival material is just a heap of rubble, an ever-burgeoning mass that increasingly becomes its own obstacle to human progress as we become exhausted, endlessly shifting through evidential detritus. The romancer, however, crafts an interpretation of this evidence and provides a context and possible motive for events. Romance is hypothetical ratiocination: a narrative experiment that explores the possible preconditions for historical events. A romancer “adorns . . . appearances with cause and effect, and traces resemblances between the past, distant and future, with the present. . . . He is a dealer, not in certainties, but in probabilities.”16 A romancer’s narrative is not judged by its relative factuality, but to the degree that it speculatively describes a course of events in ways that might guide the reader’s social interaction and future planning.17 15. Charles Brockden Brown, “[Review of ] the History of Pennsylvania by Robert Proud,” in Literary Essays and Reviews, ed. Alfred Weber and Wolfgang Schäfer (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1992), 25–27, here 26. Originally published in Brown’s edited Monthly Magazine and American Review 1, no. 3 (June 1799): 216 –17. For another discussion, see Mark L. Kamrath, “Charles Brockden Brown and the ‘Art of the Historian’: An Essay Concerning (Post)Modern Historical Understanding,” Journal of the Early Republic 21, no. 2 (2001): 231– 60. 16. Charles Brockden Brown, “The Difference Between History and Romance,” in Literary Essays and Reviews, ed. Alfred Weber and Wolfgang Schäfer (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1992), 83–85, 83. Originally published in Monthly Magazine and American Review 2, no. (April 1800): 251–53. 17. Brown, “Difference Between History and Romance,” 84– 85. Brown’s definitions and arguments are remarkably similar to an unpublished text by Godwin, “Of History and Romance.”

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The categorization that Brown makes here differs from our current classification of history and literature as both belonging to human sciences. Brown considers history to be akin to natural science, with its evidence verifiable by empirical observation. An event did or did not happen. Romance cannot claim the scientific proof that history provides because subjects are formed by manifold and complex relationships that are not immediately evident to our physical senses and thus impossible to frame as absolute conclusions. The argument here is close to the historiography that Dugald Stewart, in his 1793 review of Adam Smith’s method, calls “conjectural” or theoretical history as a means of speculating on an event’s causes.18 While the romancer constructs a hermeneutic framework (“convenient and magnificent fabrics”) used to appreciate social dynamics, Brown’s call for interpretive frameworks is not license for wild relativism. He insists that some explanations are more probable than others, and furthermore, his justification for advancing a romantic viewpoint is that it be useful in the perfectabilitarian sense of helping to achieve a more just and equal society.19 Though Brown does not tend to tendentiousness, he distinguishes novels from romances based on their different motives. A novel is an entertaining fiction that does not have sociological clarification and amelioration as its purpose. In this sense, Brown sees his long fictions as romances, rather than novels, and calling Brown’s longer fiction novels obscures the emancipatory project that motivates his tales. Where the Woldwinites might shy from admitting their own artifice by insisting on the grounding of rights in nature, Brown is more comfortable with the view of political justice as a necessary fabrication based on a “constructed” (i.e., nonnatural) legitimacy. He recognizes his beliefs as beliefs and yet does not consider them any the less worthwhile as such. For instance, the slogan that all humans are created equal is clearly a fiction, since the multiplicity of abilities and natal subjectivities makes for inequities that cannot be easily calculable

While Brown could not have seen or copied this text, the similarity indicates the consistency and coherence of the Woldwinite outlook. William Godwin, “Of History and Romance,” in Things as They Are or the Adventures of Caleb Williams, ed. Maurice Hindle (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), 359–73. 18. Dugald Stewart, “Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith,” in The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. W. P. D. Wightman and J. C. Bryce, vol. 3 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), 218 – 86: 293. 19. Charles Brockden Brown, “[Review of ] Joan of Arc: An Epic Poem,” in Literary Essays and Reviews, ed. Alfred Weber and Wolfgang Schäfer (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1992), 27–31, 28. Originally published in Monthly Magazine and American Review 1, no. 3 (June 1799): 225–29.

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and turned into equivalences for compensation. Yet simply because human equality is a fashioned falsehood, as its basis lies in human belief-systems rather than nature, does not mean that equality is any the less worth struggling to maintain as an ideal, no matter how impossible it is to achieve except through enactments based on a fiction of probable proximity. To clarify his practice amidst a fervid production of long fictions, he publishes what amounts to a founding manifesto: “Walstein’s School of History, from the German of Krants of Gotha.”20 The text describes Walstein, a history professor at Jena, and nine of his students, who form a self-aware “school” or group of scholars who train each other within a shared methodological outlook. Although Walstein is the elder and original author of this approach, he rejects professorial absolutism as his research collective is one of “good-will and fellowship,” where the scholars “cleaved to each other, and frequently met to exchange and compare ideas.”21 This group assiduously reads Walstein’s two histories— one about Cicero, the other about the Marquis of Pombal—not only for their specific claims, but also “as specimens of the manner in which history was to be studied and written.” Walstein’s historiographic innovations are twofold. Struggling to contextualize factual details with an explication of motives for events, Walstein combines history and romance as a means of promoting his readers’ “moral and political duty” even while, “conscious of the uncertainty of history,” since “we can only make approaches to truth,” he discounts transcendental claims to objectivity. Walstein understands that all perceptions are socially conditioned and that the manners and customs of the past are not to be devalued because of their deviation from present-day opinion, which is itself little more than another historically situated vantage point. The recognition that epistemological possibilities are constructed by the particularities of our current location within certain cognitive horizons has direct implications for his politics of training elites to assume “sovereign power . . . for the national good.” Recognizing historical variability, he chooses to narrate the lives of both Cicero and Pombal. Although both are men of virtue, they exist in “opposite conditions” and thus pursue the ends of virtue through different means based on their own sociohistorical position. 20. Charles Brockden Brown, “Walstein’s School of History, from the German of Krants of Gotha,” in Literary Essays and Reviews, ed. Alfred Weber and Wolfgang Schäfer (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1992), 31–39. Originally published in Monthly Magazine and American Review 1.5 (August 1799): 335–38 and 1.6 (September 1799): 407–11. 21. Ibid., 31.

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The purpose of romantic history, then, is not to pronounce immemorial platitudes of normative values but to indicate the ways in which the pressures of environmental factors determine our potential courses of action.22 Because future, more ideal, configurations of society are unknown, and unknowable by subjects within a different historical moment, Walstein proliferates portraits of virtue in hopes that something in the codex of history may usefully approximate conditions for later readers. Romance historiography’s archive is a toolbox of multiple instruments that might be helpful or irrelevant to its later consumers in ways that cannot be predicted by its academic producers. If the historian simply produces one kind of historical exemplar or prognostication, she or he has done a disservice to future generations by reducing their cognitive horizon through a myopic focus on singular instances as immemorial norms. The consequential post-Kantian implication is that any kind of cultural work ought not to be evaluated against intrinsic standards of taste but assessed for its potential utility for politicocultural intervention. Walstein’s second innovation is his claim that readers will not be energized by a mere recitation of historical facts. Romantic historians need to cultivate an engaging narrative style since a descriptive, theatricalized tale will “charm curiousity, and sway the passions” better than the numbing regurgitation of models and dates. Walstein’s call for a more entertaining performance goes beyond simply looking to gain the audience’s appreciation. For Walstein is Gramscian in spirit as he assumes that political transformation cannot occur unless preceded by a cultural one and the romance historian’s job is to complete what state politics alone cannot, as shown by the ultimate failure of his two chosen life-subjects. There are two ways in which genius and virtue may labor for the public good: first, by assailing popular errors and vices, argumentatively and through the medium of books; secondly, by employing legal or ministerial authority to this end. The last was the province which Cicero and Pombal assumed. Their fate may evince the insufficiency of the instrument chosen by them and teach us, that a change of national opinion is the necessary prerequisite of revolutions.23

22. Ibid., 33. 23. Ibid., 35.

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Legislative and executive fiats are useless to effect real progress if the fundamental matrix of behavior has been left untouched. Walstein thus invests history and romance writing with the responsibility of motivating revolution by forging new attitudes that initiate political alteration and make it experientially durable. Here lies Brown’s justification for writing romances after the initial containment of political revolution in the early 1790s. While one strand of literary culture loses faith in politics and positions writing as a self-contained, fetishized space that must be protected from contact with the social, lest it, too, be contaminated by failure, another approach sees writing as a plateau for critical reflection of the experience of recent events and a guerrilla staging point for a renewed attack on an incompletely vanquished old order. In the late 1790s, the Woldwinite attitude that Brown is initially formed by has not yet succumbed to despair, and their move into the writing cabinet is not a gesture of interiorizing retreat but a necessary prerequisite for the romancer, who must create a platform for the next round of an ongoing progressive campaign. Brown, however, indicates his second-wave elaboration of classical Woldwinism by describing a likewise shift in the school of Walstein. Walstein teaches the value of historical romance as a crucial ingredient to changing opinion, but it is his eldest student, Engel, who carries the problematic to its next level. Like Walstein, Engel believes that the style of one’s argument is crucial to its ability to effect widespread change, since the truths of political science need to be translated into a more appealing form to become widely disseminated. Walstein had already recognized this claim, but Engel extends the school’s position by arguing that the subject matter as well as the narrative form of traditional historiography needs to be changed so that romance can be redirected to a greater spectrum of the bourgeoisie. The “highest province of benevolence” is to “exhibit, in an eloquent narration, a model of right conduct.” But “duties are the growth of situations,” and by only relating the trials of “the general and the statesmen,” Walstein directed his lesson, and its ideal practice, to a “small number,” many of whom would fail to “comprehend, admire, and copy the pattern that is set before them.”24 Few of the text’s actually existing readers “may be expected to be monarchs and ministers,” even though Engel believes they all have latent power as “every man occupies a station in society in which he is necessarily active to evil or to good.” For 24. Ibid.

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romances to be effective in drawing forth these powers, they should not be histories of exceptional men, but narratives of situations that are comprehensible to “men, unendowed with political authority.” The better, and more reachable, audience is the one outside the upper elites: “It may seem best to purify the fountain, rather than to filter the stream; but the latter is, to a certain degree, within our power, whereas, the former is impracticable.”25 Because Engel wants to reach beyond the confines of the small factions engaged in partisan politics or the publicist press, he considers literary romance as a more important intervention than romance history. Romancers eschew historical biographies to emplot principles in pleasurable, literary narratives of contemporary matter to which the reader can relate—the romance of real life. Engel suggests two main themes for romance: property and sexual relations. Because monetary and erotic relations are “incident to all” and fundamental to human happiness, instructive narratives resonate widely if they work through these topics.26 Yet while money and sex are sure to attract audiences, the ensuing question for Engel is how to achieve the romance’s desired progressive effect, especially given that a more popular audience is a more heterogeneous one. To solve the problem of orienting reader reception, Engel argues that just as the hero of romance should not be a member of the elite, it is not necessary for the plot to focus on an ideal or regular life. Instead a romance should construct fictional situations that places mundane characters in exceptional scenarios, “which most forcibly suggest to the reader the parallel between his state and that described, and most strongly excite his desire to act as the feigned personages act. These incidents must be so arranged as to inspire, at once, curiosity and belief, to fasten the attention, and thrill the heart.”27 With Engel’s description, we have Brown’s motive for his use of gothic elements. Cultural performances that focus on personages from the elite past, like the nobility, are useless for effecting contemporaneous social change because each age requires its own tales that speak to their readers’ contemporaneity. Since there is no transhistorical norm of values, even classics of the past may have only limited didactic value. One era considers its own “habits and opinions [as] the standard of rectitude,” but these will inevitably “fall into oblivion and contempt of some future time.”28 Even if 25. Ibid., 36. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 37. 28. Brown, Charles Brockden. “Romances,” in Literary Essays and Reviews, ed. Alfred Weber and Wolfgang Schäfer (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1992), 142 – 43.

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tales of knights and emperors engage the cathartic emotions of the viewer, the status and social conditions of an older and obsolete (in Brown’s words, “exploded”) social mode are too incommensurate to present ones in order to function effectively as a means of modeling how the viewer/reader may change behavior in the everyday, let alone the risk that by reproducing these tales, they might simply reinscribe reactionary desires. In a piece condemning the staging of Shakespeare’s plays, Brown writes: “Kings and nobles, of some remote age, and acting upon maxims foreign to the experience of men of the present times and of middling classes, speaking a language as unintelligible as Greek, and raving about thrones and mistresses, are not very edifying examples to the multitude. . . . What is the tendency of these? . . . Do they rectify our mistaken notions of virtue and duty, and supply us with incitements to the practice of it? Or do they, on the contrary, generate the lust of power and riches, and diffuse the poison of dissipation and voluptuousness?”29 Because spectacles of the past tease passionate responses that are unfettered by moral purpose, these plays fail to better the audience and instead damage the receiver by allowing the viewer/reader to slip into delusional scenarios. Brown consequently rejects European settings and fantastic devices for his novels (what he calls “puerile superstition and exploded manners; Gothic castles and chimeras”) not for reasons of literary nationalism, but in search of devices that belong to the current social mode of readerly proximity so they can achieve the desired social effect.30 Brown does recognize that sensationally gothic narratives often engage the reader’s thrilled sympathy and intrasubjective identification with characters in ways greater than the historical epics of great men and politics. Historical tales may create sympathy and affinity for their characters in the reader, but this emotional bond has no educational value since it can do little but generate an Aristotelian catharsis of ambient mood that is absent of practical purpose or social education. Whatever we might feel about Caesar’s decision to cross the Rubicon, these feelings are pointless since most readers will never be called on to command an imperial army. Yet readers may, they suspect, slip into traumatic situations as a result of 29. Charles Brockden Brown, “On the Effects of Theatric Exhibitions,” in Literary Essays and Reviews, ed. Alfred Weber and Wolfgang Schäfer (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1992), 4 – 8: 5. Originally published Weekly Magazine and American Review 1, no. 12 (April 21, 1798): 357– 60. 30. Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker, ed. Norman S. Grabo (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), 3.

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the vagaries of money and sex. Properly used, the nightmare of a local, mediocre subject’s descent into crisis can configure the viewer’s identification with the figure’s distress as a moment of autodidactic self-interrogation. Brown believes that it is useful to employ gothic scenarios not because they encourage the reader to ask themselves what it is that they feel, since this is a redundant question: the reader is terrified, of course. Brown instead imagines that gothic narration forces the viewer/reader to ask, what would I do in this situation and why? Brown’s didactic purpose in the deployment of gothic forms can best be seen with his tendency to have his characters break into moments of forensic contemplation of the event’s cause and pathways of potential action, even while they are amidst urgent scenes of immediately impending damage. He places his characters in extreme conditions of personal distress (unexpected poverty, family violence, urban confidence games, and medical emergencies) to engage the attraction of a wider audience and then snaps his narrative flow of the terrific event to create an interstitial moment for the reader to reflect on how they might themselves overcome these damaging environmental conditions and empower a more “virtuous,” equal, and fulfilling society. Brown imagines that sensationalism can succeed, as Engel suggests, in getting the common reader to be a critical one, especially in other behavioral arenas. His use of self-directed juridical examination is often wrongly cited as evidence of an amateurish inability to maintain narrative rhythm. Brown desires no such limpidity and the intentional pause of his characters’ selfexamination is the attempt to get his common readers, who may dislike thinking in the arid terms of philosophical abstractions, to become critical ones by apprehending the complex issues of moral action. He condemns those terrific novels written in the style of Walpole and Radcliffe (though not these writers themselves) not because they generate “awful feelings” but because “they endeavor to keep the reader in a constant state of tumult and horror . . . fright succeeds to fright, and danger to danger, without permitting the unhappy reader to draw his breath, or to repose for a moment on subjects of character or sentiment.”31 Without an interruption wherein the reader can reflect, sensationalism has no legitimacy as a form for Brown. 31. Charles Brockden Brown, “Terrific Novels,” in Literary Essays and Reviews, ed. Alfred Weber and Wolfgang Schäfer (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1992), 143– 45: 144. Originally published Literary Magazine 3, no. 19 (April 1805): 288 – 89.

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Nothing then could be further from the intent of Brown’s crafted product than to read his sensational fiction as evidence of personal insufficiency or fragmented psychic corruption. Brown’s aesthetic is close to Brecht’s as both believe that readers can be maneuvered by the formal use of sensational devices into a more developed consciousness of the social forces at play, which are otherwise difficult for the individual to conceptualize, let alone respond to with action. Brown’s figures are never constructed to explore their intrinsic personality; rather they are placed under the crackling pressure of contending forces as an instrument of critical analysis for the reader to imagine what we might do in similar situations. Any reading of Brown’s fictions must approach them as trajectories of diacritical segments through which readers are carried so that they may think through a particular problem and its consequences. His romances typically begin with a critique of the current moment, often through the conflicting terms of class (“property”) and gender (“sex”), which is followed by a metacritical consideration about the formal conditions that the initial critique suggests and then concludes with a working hypothesis about the problematic that has emerged only through the novel’s narrative activity. In Wieland, this process involves questioning the social relations that Franklin emblematizes, a turn that considers Woldwinite claims as a potential replacement, and finally a postmortem on the failure of Woldwinite fiction writing within an emerging modernity. Brown’s fictions often build on each other. As we will see, Arthur Mervyn recursively takes Wieland’s conclusion as its starting point to reflect on the fate of progressive society in an increasingly reactionary age. Brown’s notion that the new forms of sensation can be usefully deployed as a means of gathering a larger audience for critical consciousness is an early theorized instance of comfort with what would much later be nominated as contemporary cultural studies. Brown neither looks to curry favor with the older theological elites, nor does he glorify mythological turns to a nationalizing, nativist folk culture, like so many others of his slightly later contemporaries, such as Scott or Cooper. Brown’s rejection of the elite-volk antimony and his reliance on the new generic forms made available by the rising consumer marketplace for novels and other leisure experiences makes his narratives forerunners of mass consumer culture. Brown’s romances are not, of course, really popular culture, since his imagined wider audience remains a bourgeois rather than a plebeian one. When Engel describes his model reader, “he” is a professional in law or medicine. Yet within the

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period’s frames, Brown can be considered as absent of anxieties about expanding the realm of readership. This agenda both links and dissociates Brown and Franklin as both share an interest in constructing new modes of subjectivity through cultural intervention. Brown, however, is deeply hesitant about Franklin’s use of this method as a modern form of control. This caution about Franklin’s agenda stands as the main concern that Wieland and Carwin seeks to address and redress.

Wieland and the Critique of the Moment In Wieland and its prequel, Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, Brown composes a tale about the historical transformation of subjectivity and its relation to forms of knowledge to make four interventions within the re-export republic’s intellectual field. First, he dissects Franklin’s universalizing claims for a seemingly neutral arena of public access as a middle-class, male strategy that uses covert institutionality to structure class and gender violence within the publicized amity of pluralist concerns. Second, Brown finds the Woldwinite cultural politics of rational sentiment as insufficiently attentive to the co-implication of class and gender inequities and naive in its belief that the main obstacle for progressive change is aristocratic privilege rather than the commercial interests of a market society. Additionally, because of the Woldwinites’ protoanarchist distrust of stable institutions, they failed to establish progressive institutions that could materially ensure the enactment of their ideals and thus left the social field open to be appropriated by the nascent business and professional interests. Finally, Wieland registers Brown’s own ambivalence about the suitability of the romance-form as a medium of cultural intervention due to the ensuing ideological appropriation of the conceptual tools on which the political long fiction was based. If “reason” fails in the novel, Brown’s point is not that epistemology is fragile, but that the Woldwinite cognitive field on which he grounds his critique was incapable of providing a strong foundation that could protect volunteerist claims for small-scale behavioral modification during times of conservative domination. Wieland is at once an attempt to advance the Woldwinite project and a postmortem on its ideals. Brown conveys these points by structuring Wieland with three historical segments, each of which ends with a paradigmatic death of a father by a lateral blow to the body that emblematizes that phase’s dominant mode of

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social regulation, along with an iconic explanatory text, which seeks to answer the question about the origin of violence within the terms available to each moment. Wieland’s first temporality concludes with the wounding flash of Wieland senior (chapters 1–2) at the temple he constructed for his vengeful God. After a restless night of dread, he ascends the sacred mount for what he assumes will be divine punishment. As his “right arm exhibited marks of having been struck” by something like a “heavy club,” the father’s ensuing spontaneous combustion characterizes a society dominated by notions of absolutist, repressive power and an authority that rules through coercive, extrinsic brands of terror with little regard for an individual’s integrity.32 Wieland senior exists in a realm of sovereignty defined by the subject’s extrarational submission to an omnipotent, wrathful divine, and, implicitly, a Leviathan, Hobbesian state. As Wieland’s prayer temple is built for solitary worship, his cosmology suggests the uselessness of sympathetic human communality. Wieland senior’s “scorched and bruised” body, absent of clothes, conveys his notion that the lonely individual is naked before the supernatural force of terrific judgment. His paternal text is the Manichean “doctrine of the sect of Camissards,” which frames his death as “the penalty of disobedience” by a divine ruler, who “enforces by unequivocal sanctions, submission to his will.”33 Wieland’s second, and main narrative, unit involves the postabsolutist age of the son, Theodore Wieland, a new model father, sibling to Clara, husband to Catharine, and friend to Pleyal. Theodore’s world rests on a model of sovereignty grounded on Lockean associationist (children’s) rights and Enlightenment principles of rational sensibility, typified by the section’s ur-text, Cicero’s jury speeches that Theodore continually studies and performs aloud. The vertical hierarchy of the elder Wieland’s mentality is replaced by a horizontal, republican-like equality among the new generation. Just as the manner of Wieland senior’s death exemplifies his era, so too does Theodore’s. As his father died from a side attack, Theodore falls after he plunges a knife into his neck, causing a “stream that gushed from the wound.”34 Yet since the idea of stabbing Wieland and the manual appropriation of a penknife quickly circulates between Clara and Theodore (and

32. Brown, Wieland, 16 –17. 33. Ibid., 8, 18. 34. Ibid., 212.

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both are stained by his gushing blood), the death characterizes their society as one based on principles of mutualist sensibility and the reorganization of power through emulative, shared behavior. The socioepistemological problem for this era is not that of the earlier generation, of having to decipher the obscure intentions of a wrathful God, but the managerial task of maintaining a balanced sensibility. Clara sounds the period’s typical question when she wonders if her brother’s violence was the result of corporeal derangement caused by an impaired sensibility. The novel’s third historical segment, Clara’s second letter (chapter 27), involves Clara Wieland’s recovery from suicidal depression and transportation from Mettingen to Montpellier. This section ends when Major Stuart, the father of the girl, Louisa Conway, who was first adopted and then macerated by Theodore, encounters the libertine Maxwell, who had seduced his wife and is attempting to do so with Clara. Stuart challenges Maxwell to a dual, but the trial of masculine honor does not take place, as Stuart is first murdered by a mysterious assassin’s stiletto. The covering text for this section’s violence is neither sacred nor civic, but medical. Clara’s maternal uncle, the surgeon Cambridge, cites Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life to define the mayhem in Mettingen as resulting from something like hereditary madness rather than from religious transgression or civil imbalance.35 The typology of laterally murdered fathers seems less stable in the third section as the bundled elements disaggregate. The dying father is now Major Stuart, who belongs to a family unrelated to the Wielands and represents a throwback to an obsolete social history as he embodies reactionary imperial military honor codes and not the radically transformative ones either of sacral asceticism or secular enlightenment. The epistemic sourcetext belongs now to an avuncular authority, rather than a patriarchal father or brother, and it is even initially cited out of its phase sequence by appearing before the break of Clara’s second letter, which separates the second from the third temporality. This apparent weakening of the schematic seems only to confirm what the majority of critics assume to be the novel’s greatest flaw and evidence of Brown’s inability to maintain the trajectory of a cohesive narrative structure: the inclusion of the apparently trivial Stuart-Conway family narrative in the novel’s last moments. Yet despite the pressure of

35. Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia; or, the Laws of Organic Life, 3rd ed. (London: J. Johnson, 1801).

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printer’s deadlines, Brown carefully considered the novel’s end and discussed the problem with Friendly Club associates even before the urgency of providing copy became real.36 Brown’s dislocation of the narrative’s signifying elements accurately conveys his perception about the onset of a modern form of social organization that can remap past relations through indirect connections. The nascent mode of social regulation operates through the institutional production of knowledge on a medicalized and interiorized subjectivity, a process that Brown conveys as the series of fatal blows become increasingly weightless and invisible—the bruising club turns into a gushing knife that becomes a stiletto’s bloodless prick. Wieland’s three histories of the father, son, and maternal uncle neatly correspond to the characteristics of Foucault’s exemplary tripartite sociopenal historiography involving the early modern period, organized around spectacles of regal-divine anger and the terrific monarch’s repressive power to take life; an eighteenth-century phase that invokes semiotic sensibilitarianism and rationalized equivalences; and a modern (late eighteenth-nineteenth century) society typified by disciplinary interiority alongside divisions between abnormality/normality in the classification of madness, disease, perversity, and criminality. Brown, however, does more than simply map out, avant la lettre, a by now familiar historical narrative. Wieland charts the passage from a postfeudal, early modern society and subjectivity to a present-ness initially defined by rational reflection and illuminated eighteenthcentury perfectabilitarian humanism and then a disciplined interiority so that Brown can interrogate the pressures on romance within incipient forms of a modern geoculture.

“It is true that I am now changed”: Wieland and the History of Subjectivity Wieland begins with a moment in the bourgeois separation from feudal society as the Wieland family’s unnamed grandfather is alienated from Saxon nobility due to his mésalliance with a merchant’s daughter. A male child is born, and the orphaned youth endures the dubious “freedom of the

36. For Smith, Dunlap, and Brown’s debate on what might be a suitable conclusion to Wieland, see James E. Cronin, ed., The Diary of Elihu Hubbard Smith (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1973), 458.

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city” in the dual sense of being liberated from association with a landed estate and free to be exploited in the metropolis’s cramped physical and psychic living conditions. Discovering a Grub Street – like religious tract, he becomes an acolyte of a “mournful and contemplative” sect of ascetic Protestantism.37 After sailing to America and failing to evangelize the native Indians, he settles on a suburban Philadelphia farm, named Mettingen after its first European owner, and builds a temple for solitary worship. When he experiences premonitions of divine retribution, he runs to the temple, and after being struck, spontaneously combusts, leaving little but ashes as the record of his morbid existence. After their father’s holocaust and their mother’s ensuing mournful demise, the younger Wielands, Theodore and Clara, fashion themselves in the Enlightenment’s postpatriarchal skepticism. Rejecting their father’s Hobbesian world of spectacular power, the children receive a Rousseauian autodidact education in Philadelphia, free from the “corruption and tyranny of colleges and boarding-schools.”38 On reaching their majority, the younger Wielands return to Mettingen and renovate it to signal their radical break with the past’s exploded values. The temple’s somber isolation becomes reformed as a “place of resort in the evenings of summer” where the younger generation “sung, and talked, and occasionally banqueted.”39 With the raising of a marble bust of Cicero, the temple’s deity becomes the spirit of convivial inquiry, rational sensibility, and cosmopolitan attitude, “modeled by no religious standard” but “the guidance of our own understanding and the casual impressions which society might make upon us.”40 Readers of German, Italian, and Latin texts, Theodore and Clara exult in the self-educative play of speech, and their conversations are generated by the mutual pleasure of debate rather than doctrinal controversies. Articulate and innovative, the younger Wielands freely experiment with performative effects, as Theodore endlessly reads Cicero’s speeches aloud “to discover the gestures and cadences with which they ought to be delivered.”41

37. For the French Prophets’ history, see Wolf Kinderman, Man Unknown to Himself: Kritische Reflexion Der Amerikanischen Aufklärung: Crevecoeur—Benjamin Rush—Charles Brockden Brown (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1993), 133– 44. 38. Brown, Wieland, 19. 39. Ibid., 22. 40. Ibid., 20. 41. Ibid., 22.

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Refusing to be predetermined by historical trauma, the Wielands recast their textual descent away from their father’s Bible to the poetry of their namesake, the German lyricist Christoph Wieland. In this light, Clara considers their father’s death as caused not by “the stroke of a vindictive and invisible hand,” but by “the irregular expansion of the fluid that imparts warmth to our heart and our blood, caused by the fatigue of the preceding day, or flowing, by established laws, from the condition of his thoughts.”42 Without the mental encumbrance of gothic fear and thanks to slave labor that grants them leisure, the young Wielands are able to transition from a lifeworld based on divine magic to one of secularized Enlightenment, but their ideals remain untested as they avoid contact with the outside world and its political turmoil. Eighteenth-century pedagogues recommended the study of “Roman eloquence” as training for the responsibility of statecraft, but Theodore’s love of Cicero’s cadences is merely for the delights of theatricalized verbal dexterity. Like Theodore’s “merely theoretical” study of agriculture, Mettingen’s political science is purely abstract.43 When Pleyel suggests that Theodore reclaim his ancestral rights in Saxony, so as to bring the practice of enlightened government to Europe, Wieland rejects the proposal by claiming that any contact with an obsolete mode of hierarchy is intrinsically corrupting.44 Yet Wieland’s philosophic hesitation also evades the ethical imperative to try and resurrect “Saxon liberties” in the homeland of republicanism’s mythic origin, the Gothic democracy of the German forest. Having alienated themselves from their father’s history, they assume they can be removed from history itself to form a utopian community free from the violence of social hierarchy. Brown puts these assumptions of trial by staging interrelated crises of disembodiment, where acts of telephony examine access to political emancipation through the rights to participate 42. Ibid., 18. The French articles that Brown cites consider alcoholism as the cause of combustion, and Benjamin Rush had written on the connection of internal agitation and alcoholism in a 1784 essay, “The Effects of Ardent Spirits upon Man.” I take it as a sign of Brown’s clarity about the sociohistorical typology that Wieland uses that he chose not to mention what would have been the received sense of the father’s alcoholism, since the theme of secret inebriation would suggest a personality defect, a deviancy that would confuse the early modern, eighteenth-century, and modern period separation on which the romance’s larger argument depends. Brown, Wieland, 18; Fred Lewis Pattee, “Introduction,” to Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland; or, The Transformation and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1926), xxix –xxx; Larry E. Arnold, Ablaze! Spontaneous Human Combustion (New York: Evans, 1995); Warren S. Walker, “Lost Liquor Lore: The Blue Flame of Intemperance,” Journal of Popular Culture 16, no. 2 (1982): 17–25. 43. Brown, Wieland, 19. 44. Ibid., 35.

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in public discussion by two kinds of subaltern: plebeian men and bourgeois women. With Carwin’s arrival in Mettingen and his ventriloquizing of Catharine Wieland’s voice, the romance challenges the republican liberal fiction about the amity of a system based on unmarked voices in the realm of disputation and decision making.45 Within this placid horizon, Carwin’s appearance in Mettingen sets off the question of class, where Carwin’s laboring-class body initially appears as a social grotesque to his social superiors. The disfigured sight of one like Carwin does not itself surprise Clara, since men like him “were frequently met with on the road and in the harvest-field.”46 Easily identified as an itinerant worker, Carwin is unusual to Clara because he has moved beyond a cultural boundary by appearing on her lawn, which is “only traversed by men whose views were directed to the pleasures of the walk, or the grandeur of the scenery.”47 The discrepancy between Carwin’s obviously embodied social location and the implication of his actual standpoint and mellifluous voice confuses Clara. Dazed by the incongruity between the evidence of Carwin’s social rank and signs of his aesthetic appreciation and verbal skill, Clara wonders if the separation between manual and mental labor can be maintained within Mettingen’s proclaimed tenets of sympathetic egalitarianism.48 Can Carwin’s body, which bears the marks of his lower-class status, remain unremarkable to allow his entry within Mettingen’s cultural establishment? The logical answer would be yes, but Clara literally draws attention to her anxiety about Carwin when she compulsively sketches his face after first seeing him, as if to insist on his debasing corporeality. She then begins singing about “the fate of a German Cavalier, who fell at the siege of 45. For Carwin as representing plebeian interests, see Ed White, “Carwin the Peasant Rebel,” in Revising Charles Brockden Brown: Culture, Politics, and Sexuality in the Early American Republic, ed. Philip Barnard, Mark Kamrath, and Stephen Shapiro (Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 2004), 41–59. 46. Brown, Wieland, 47. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. “Can an honest ploughman be as virtuous as Cato? Is a man of weak intellects and narrow education as capable of moral excellence as the sublimist genius or the mind most stored with information and science? . . . Poetry is the business of a few, virtue and vice are the affair of all men. To every intellect that exists, one or other of these qualities must properly belong. . . . If must be remembered that a vicious conduct is always the result of narrow views. A man of powerful capacity, and extensive observation, is least likely to commit the mistake, either of seeing himself as the only object of importance in the universe, or of conceiving that his own advantage may best be promoted by trampling on that of others.” William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Modern Morals and Happiness (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), 303–7. In many ways, Wieland can be read as putting Godwin’s claims here under pressure to see what its analysis does not recognize.

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Nice.”49 The allusion is to a battle in the First Crusade’s attempt to retake Jerusalem for Christian designs. Since Clara is herself of German descent, the metaphor structurally positions Carwin as an Orientalized Muslim, someone whose radical difference, in terms of racialized culture, makes it inappropriate for him to stand within the sanctity of valorized spaces.50 The fear telegraphed in Clara’s citation of the ballad is that if Carwin’s ugly looks and ambient social place can occupy the realm of fine taste, through the disembodied realm of aesthetic appreciation, then the lower class might go beyond achieving access into regions that had previously been denied them and seek either to dominate or destroy these institutions in acts conceptualized by their former controllers as those of cultural desecration. Clara’s fear is that the inclusion of others will not simply expand her lifeworld’s horizons, but radically and somewhat unpleasantly transform them beyond recognition. That Carwin’s alien presence typifies the unpleasant surfacing of class struggle within the republican liberal ideal is a notion signaled by Clara herself. When she first hears a ventriloquized plot on her life, Clara simultaneously assumes class antagonism to be the most likely cause and dismisses this idea based on a self-aggrandizing erasure of her own complicity within social privileges. Insisting that her frequent acts of charity mean that she is beloved by the region’s inferiors, Clara fails to question her implicit assumptions of caste-like hierarchies or consider how these advantages have been gained from property appropriated from the native Indians and now farmed by African slaves.51 Clara’s refusal to challenge the structure of class that forms the endoskeleton of her mental and material domain results in one of the narrative’s crucial missed opportunities. When Clara asks Carwin how he gained access to her private quarters to ventriloquize a plot on her life, Carwin answers that Clara’s female servant was easily seduced into being his accomplice as she came from a family of loose morals. The ease with which Clara accepts Carwin’s claim is disturbing not only because the servant Judith is never granted the opportunity to confront and deny Carwin’s claims, but also because the imputation of female vice originating from Carwin is precisely 49. Brown, Wieland, 51. 50. Kinderman, Man Unknown to Himself, 156 – 57. Kinderman notes that one effect of this crusade was a mass murder of German Jews, and Carwin’s bodily irregularity and denominational indeterminacy also connotes this other category of foreignness. 51. Brown, Wieland, 60 – 61.

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what Clara herself has been vehemently struggling against in her efforts to overcome the belief that she has been seduced by Carwin. While Clara is outraged by masculine assumptions about her own lack of female propriety, she tacitly accepts the same claims when applied to lower-class women. Had Clara interrogated the invisibility of her assumptions, by giving Judith a chance to testify in her own defense, Carwin’s ensuing imposture might have been determined and avoided. This is precisely Carwin’s point; he recognizes how Clara’s class prejudice will carry the alibi, since himself has always born the brunt of exclusion and the violence inherent in the Franklinian mythos, as Brown makes clear in Memoirs of Carwin.

Carwin and Aspirational Class Frustration Although written and published after Wieland, Carwin makes its context explicit as Brown uses the generic guise of a rogue’s exculpatory narrative to emphasize the acts of coercive violence embedded in the seeming neutrality of the public sphere that Franklin claims to support.52 One ought to hear Frank Carwin’s name as an abbreviated version of “Franklin.” In his own autobiography, Carwin describes himself as the second son of a domineering father on a western Pennsylvania farm. Like Franklin in Boston, Carwin finds his desires for education thwarted by a dull brother and a father whose verbal shaming, beatings, and destruction of the boy’s hidden books limits Carwin’s secularized, upward class mobility.53 The limits of Carwin’s cloistration within this old regime first erode during a primal Enlightenment scene that uses animal and topographical nature to insinuate the presence of an alternative source of power, which metaphorically suggests how other previously unrecognized bodies, like those of the aspirational bourgeoisie, might contain untapped yet explosive energies for social transformation. After seeing how a cow has managed to escape from his master’s pen by a strategic use of initial force —bashing the enclosure’s top rail, and then carefully managing his horns simply to lift the remaining rails out from one side of their sockets—Carwin receives a cameo about a revolutionary mechanism for liberty: a burst of necessary

52. Sydney Krause, “Historical Essay,” in Wieland; or, The Transformation: An American Tale and Carwin, ed. Sydney Krause (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1977), 311– 48, 336. 53. Brown, Wieland, 228.

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violence followed by a longer period of rationalized activity. Following the freed cow to a “gloomy recess” that recalls “goblins and specters,” the psychic apparatus of atavistic gothic authority, Carwin shouts into the canyon and hears his voice’s echo.54 As it presents a material explanation for magical beliefs, this desacralizing epiphany encourages Carwin to extrapolate from the action of the geologic crevice and discover the anatomical chamber trick of ventriloquism. The discovery of his second voice liberates Carwin from an early modern cognitive structure as it dissolves his awe of supernatural power and the patriarch’s associated authority. Gaining self-possession by instrumentalizing his body, Carwin realizes that the wonders of the world are mysteries only because their mechanism has not been deduced, and he quickly perceives how this ignorance can be used to manipulate the public realm of disembodied voices, as a metonym for an entire gamut of republican liberal agendas, to appropriate men’s “disposal of their industry, their property, and even of their lives.”55 Carwin sadly discovers his theory of modern power is not so easily materialized when he sneaks upon his sleeping father to ventriloquize his dead mother’s voice as a means of persuading his father to allow Carwin to move in with his wealthy aunt in Philadelphia. Just as he is about to enact this symbolic killing of the king, a bolt of lightning fills him with trembling dread and anxiety that traditional authority cannot be surmounted simply by an individual’s revolt. Historical change must be collectively organized. Fortunately for Carwin, his aunt’s threat to disinherit her relatives unless the boy is allowed to come to Philadelphia succeeds, and, like a translocated Franklin, Carwin gains the city’s freedom to follow his interests and choose his associates outside of clan oversight. When his aunt dies leaving a will that suspiciously grants her fortune to the maid, Carwin is left despondently wandering round the Schuylkill’s banks, as if trying to repeat the resource discovery of the glen’s prior revelation. This search for a new empowering “second voice” is rewarded when he meets the older and wealthier Ludloe, who proposes to pay for Carwin to accompany him to Europe. Like Franklin sailing into a foreign land with the help of benevolent older men, Carwin learns that the security of traditional structures can be abandoned only if new ones simultaneously emerge.

54. Ibid., 229. 55. Ibid., 243.

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In Europe, Ludloe suggests the presence of these structures when he hints at Carwin’s possible initiation into a utopian Enlightenment secret society if Carwin commits a series of impostures beginning with masquerading as a Catholic in Spain, posing as a librarian to gain a rich widow’s fortune through marriage, and confessing his past secrets. Carwin intuitively realizes this last item will reveal his ventriloquism, which he is reluctant to declare. Instead he becomes fascinated by the discovery of Ludloe’s secret library, which contains a book of maps indicating the secret society’s planned colony. After Carwin’s wandering in the glen and around the Schuylkill, his search for the book’s hiding place is the text’s third instance of a belief in the possibility of escaping his class origins through an epistemologized geography that contains a secret machinery for operating civil society. As the sequence of Carwin’s movements follows the Autobiography’s trajectory of Franklin learning personal skills that become increasingly socialized into disciplinary schemes of public institutions, Brown uses Carwin’s romantic history of property and sex to stage his initial critiques of Franklinian republican liberalism and its dependence on covert institutionality. In Brown’s eyes, Franklin’s confidence in the benevolence of secret institutionality legitimizes modern forms of corruption and violence. Ludloe praises “sincerity” while plotting more elaborate machinations, as his ideal of the equal distribution of wealth first requires that he become rich through fraud. Yet for Brown, contra Mandeville, no public good can emerge from private vice. Carwin uses his ventriloquism to thwart a stagecoach robbery but in so doing scares the horses, which overturn the carriage and cause more physical damage than would have been the case without his intervention. Furthermore, Brown does not see the decomposition of absolutist patriarchal regimes as removing power relays. Instead, the rise of new interests simply reformulates power. As the king/father’s absolutist hoard is undermined by a market of circulating wealth, the displacement of one economic mode for another is expressed in modernized gender terms, where capital appears as controlled by widows or females outside of the older sexual economy of the matrimonial traffic in women: Carwin’s aunt (who overrides the father’s plans for his son), the aunt’s female domestic (who is willed her mistress’s wealth), or the widow Bennington (who auctions off her dead husband’s collection of curiosities to liquidate their value). As women become represented as responsible for a market of mobile capital, Carwin details the ensuing perception that in order for men to succeed in the historical transition toward a liberal market, they must redominate

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women in terms conveyed as libertinage, where the misogyny of male persuasion typifies the new performances of imposture felt necessary to survive in a world made incoherent by the price-setting marketplace.56 As a figure between Godwin and Wollstonecraft, on the one hand, and Fourier, on the other, Brown represents a particular moment in the evolving criticism of gender relations. The Woldwinite critique of marriage as nonconsensual slavery analogized gender liberation as the freedom from repressive male force. Here elite women are collocutors with bourgeois men, a move seen in the dialogue in Brown’s earlier, Wollstonecraftian Alcuin, where both face the restrictions of old regime stratification.57 Fourier equates the vice of marriage with capitalist—not aristocratic—property relations, a move that foreshadows Marx’s and Engels’s critique of bourgeois domesticity. Brown is somewhere in the middle as he recognizes how women are structured as the main obstacle to the establishment of male bourgeois desire, while lacking a protosocialist critiques of bourgeois conjugality as a means of economic exploitation in the household. Last, Carwin’s ashamed hesitancy about revealing his ventriloquism suggests the onset of an interiorized self that is constructed through new modes of epistemological transparency even as it simultaneously erects barriers of privacy. Since the confession is to be linked to his entry into a fraternal institution guaranteed by acts of heterosexual domination, Carwin’s ventriloquism has the connotations of what the “personal secret” would later become, an indication of sexualized deviancy, which Ludloe’s institutionally backed oversight seeks to reform.58 The emergence of gender and sexual violence as that which enunciates and delimits the frustration of laboring-class men about their exclusion from the “space” of rational discourse is captured in Wieland when Carwin’s violation of Clara’s house seems to be a case of male sexual aggression. But this is just one of two bedrooms at stake here, and the most contested site is less Clara’s boudoir than Carwin’s, which is a grotto at the base of the temple mount. This enclosure is Clara’s preferred space, a “little demesne” that spatially implies the possibility of an alternative social zone in between

56. Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds, Private Property: Charles Brockden Brown’s Gendered Economics of Value (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997). 57. Charles Brockden Brown, Alcuin: A Dialogue; Memoirs of Stephen Calvert (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1987), 67. 58. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 74.

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the hyperbolic privacy of her house and the agoric temple’s open-air, public conversations. Its natural enclave suggests a utopian mediation between the competing behavioral demands of what will be seen as highly gendered spheres, a disjunction that Clara often represents in her nightmares of falling into gaps and crevices. Carwin is likewise drawn to the grotto as a therapeutic location that erases poverty’s “hardship and exposure,” caused by his sleeping mainly in the open air or in slightly insulated summerhouses. Following the sequence of the glen, belly, riverbank, and library, the grotto is a surrogate space that promises to lift away Carwin’s class position; there his “sadness was converted into peaceful melancholy,” his “slumbers were sound,” and his “pleasures enhanced.”59 Carwin’s unleashing of ominous acts of ventriloquism in Mettingen begins as a panic response only when the Wielands are about to intrude on this sanctuary and discover his class difference from their situation. Since Carwin recognizes that explicit revelation of his economic subject position will be quickly followed by a forcible eviction from the Wielands’ grounds and conviviality, his violence emerges as a preemptive gesture. As Shirley Samuels concludes from the narrative’s violence, “Wieland’s message may finally be that for the family to be a haven from the radical excess of radical democracy, deism, and revivalism, it must be inoculated, by way of these social institutions, at once with and against the ‘outside’ world.”60 Rather than arguing for a nativist prophylaxis against “aliens,” Brown implies the reverse: the actual roots of social violence originate from domestic resistance to new bodies and the conservative refusal to remove class asymmetries, despite the rhetoric of sentimental equivalence. When Clara finally sees Carwin in the act of ventriloquism, his face appears tensed and contorted.61 Steven Connor notes the orgasmic connotations of Carwin’s spasms as the act of throwing his voice alludes to a different kind of male lower body ejaculation.62 Yet the tortured look has another meaning prior to gendered aggression. At the moment of actual revelation about his real conditions, Carwin registers the pain caused within his attempt to achieve disembodied normativity as a marker of

59. Brown, Wieland, 186. 60. Shirley Samuels, “Wieland: Alien and Infidel,” Early American Literature 25, no. 1 (1990): 46 – 66, 63. 61. Brown, Wieland, 136. 62. Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 239.

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social equality. His facial discomfort makes manifest the hidden injuries of class resulting from his having to mask the disability of his background and conform to Mettingen’s behavioral manners, and his divided voice records and plays back the Wielands’ hypocrisy.63 Clara comes closest to recognizing Carwin’s dilemma, since she also encounters Mettingen’s contradictions within the register of gender.

Engendering Violence After Clara first sees Carwin, her “heart” overflows and she cries “unbidden tears.” Inviting the generic overlay of a seduction narrative, Clara retrospectively explains the events by saying that her “mind became the victim of . . . imbecility; perhaps because of . . . the inroad of a fatal passion” that is “incident to every female heart.”64 This tragedy is ostensibly a woman’s destiny — to be tyrannized by her sex in ways that violate the gendered expectations of virtuous female behavior. Throughout the novel Clara often bumps against the restraints of feminized gender, such as when she hesitates over proposing marriage to Pleyel, her brother-in-law, because she sees “with the utmost clearness that a confession like that would be the most remediless and unpardonable outrage upon the dignity of my sex.”65 Clara seems less worried about sexual attraction than the power of conventional femininity as a regulatory device. Clara’s weepy response to Carwin’s arrival allows Brown to pose the questions he had tentatively raised in Alcuin: can erotic affinities be disarticulated from the power hierarchies instituted within normative sex-gender roles so that men and women (and implicitly any other combination) are able to enjoy each other outside of the gothic codes that currently regulate physical intimacy?66 Is sexual desire between men and women “fated” to retreat into modes that can articulate erotic affinities only through the archaic narratives of mortal seduction and “true love” in ways that allow 63. Though David Lyttle does not explain his argument in terms of class resentment, he believes that Carwin’s anger at his father’s initial coercion is Wieland’s main focus. David Lyttle, “The Case Against Carwin,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 26, no. 3 (1971): 257– 69, 269. 64. Brown, Wieland, 76, 50. 65. Ibid., 75. 66. Bruce Burgett, “Between Speculation and Population: The Problem of ‘Sex’ in Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population and Charles Brockden Brown’s Alcuin,” in Revising Charles Brockden Brown: Culture, Politics, and Sexuality in the Early American Republic,

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these codes to reinforce other modes of power inequality, like that of class? Must difference and disempowerment be tautological or is there a third way, a third space, which can guide a progressive way beyond the antimony? Just as Carwin tried to escape from the codes of “rustic ignorance,” Brown similarly uses Clara’s seeming control of her address as a test, and best, case for the possibility for women to separate sex from gender and enter public discourse without the burden of “femininity.” As she stands on the cusp of breaking free from the past’s codifications, Clara woozily oscillates between images of love and death, where her fantasies of affective union often transpose into images of a precipitous fall or drowning.67 These images of incipient bodily distress presciently convey what she understands as the simultaneous attraction and risk of dispatching the corporealized category of her gendered subjectivity, just as Carwin’s disfigurement paradoxically also functions as the source of his attractiveness to Clara, since Carwin’s failure to embody bourgeois masculinity signifies his analogous complaint about class domination.68 The question of gender equality arises with the first crisis of telephony when Carwin initially ventriloquizes Catharine Wieland’s voice so that her husband, Theodore, hears his wife’s voice where he does to expect it to be: in the temple’s space of debate. This possibility of female disembodiment metaphorizes the problem of women’s entry into realms otherwise forbidden by their gendered location, a challenge mainly conveyed through Clara who attempts to bridge the gap between masculine competitive argument and feminine communal nurturing and silent domestic housework. Living in her own house, Clara maintains closely knit, nearly protolesbian, female affective relations with Mettingen’s other women. She feels the connection to her sister-in-law as if it was a personal doubling, and when the Wielands adopt the orphaned Louisa Conway, this suggestively consolidates an all-female household, indicated by the consonantal repetition (Clara-Catharine-Conway), displaces the need for Theodore’s paternity.69

ed. Philip Barnard, Mark Kamrath, and Stephen Shapiro (Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 2004), 122 – 48. 67. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (Briarcliff Manor, N.Y.: Stein and Day, 1960). 68. Andrew J. Scheiber, “The Arm Lifted Against Me: Love, Terror, and the Construction of Gender in Wieland,” Early American Literature 26, no. 2 (1991): 173–94. 69. Brown, Wieland, 25. It is another mark of Carwin’s feminization as a plebeian that his name includes him within the category of the gendered “C” (Clara, Catharine, Louisa Conway).

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Clara’s inclusion within this privatized female intimacy is matched by her willingness to appropriate the masculine privilege of self-definition. Unlike most female characters in the period’s fictions, who are frequently objectified in third-person narration and unable to establish signifying authority, as their personal letters are routinely either misdirected or destroyed, Clara initiates and, despite some challenging moments, maintains control of Wieland’s narration. In the literary equivalent of portraiture’s direct gaze, she introduces the tale by addressing her reader(s) unreservedly. Clara begins the romance’s dramatic events already on the verge of masculine prerogative: she overcomes the (gentry) custom of male primogeniture as she shares her father’s property with her brother and manages her own household economy. Clara is under no titular or contractual subordination to Theodore, even if she often defers to his opinion in times of crisis. She appears to be under no pressure to marry and complete the traffic of women’s exchange from father to husband. Like her brother, she appreciates fine rhetoric (this is initially what attracts her to Carwin), and the men recognize her as unique among the women for having a “masculine” temperament typified by the qualities of rationality and bravery.70 She alone among the women participates in the men’s conversations. Unlike Catharine, who remains unknowing and overwhelmed by the waves of violence, Clara desires to intervene in the events swirling around her, and she insists on the attempt at activity, rather than reactivity. Even the possibility that she might share the fatal biology of her father’s and brother’s madness is something of a sign that she could fully inherit her father’s traits and participate in masculinized mania, rather than be descriptively erased into her mother’s denarratived depression or the silence of Catharine’s corpse. Yet Clara, like Carwin, is unable to divest herself from the discriminating garb of her particular identity and assume the invisibility of equal rights without paying the supplemental cost of personal damage. Carwin’s efforts to rise socially results in his being shunted back into what Clara calls the “harmless pursuit of agriculture” as a reconsolidation of his “fatal” class origins. Wieland, likewise, consistently presents women’s contact with male discursivity as resulting in morbid female distress. While the novel’s middleclass men are celebrated for “bandying quotations,” as the ventriloquizing ability to inhabit, repeat, and subsume other people’s voices, women are characterized as violently silenced when attempting to do likewise. The terror 70. Ibid. 144.

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of Catharine’s independent voice and other instances of women’s agency sets off a trail of female carnage that literally mutes women. Louisa Conway’s mother passes away in “solitude and anguish” after her independent flight to America to escape accusations of infidelity; Pleyel’s fiancée, the Baroness de Stolberg, who attempts to seek out her lover, is not allowed a single word and is declared dead multiple times in the text; and Judith, Clara’s servant, is never given any right of reply to Carwin’s unverified accusation of her betrayal of Clara. Clara and Catharine can variously exculpate themselves only if they convince the men that they have never tried to speak in the first instance, and even then Catharine and Louisa end as bloodied pulp and Clara becomes dangerously anorexic. Theodore murders his wife because he believes that his god asked for her sacrifice. The divine injunction to take life did not, however, include a command to so convulse the women’s faces that, in Louisa’s case, “not a lineament remained,” and in Catharine’s, not flesh enough for Clara to plant one farewell kiss.71 The uncalled-for extreme violence suggests that it was the nongendered organ of women’s public voice that most unhinges Wieland.72 Consequently, the ungendered zone of speech must be destroyed so that women can now be recognized only by their secondary sex characteristics of breasts and other bodily features. Theodore’s violence returns women to the subordinating features of their sexed bodies.73 The extravagant violence unleashed as a response to Carwin’s and Clara’s border crossing is nothing more than the manifestation of New Mettingen’s interior tensions. For despite Mettingen’s rhetoric of sincere fraternity, it is replete with covert maneuvers of imposture and voyeuristic surveillance. Even before formal reasons emerge to doubt Carwin, he is constantly watched, probed, and deployed by Mettingen’s agents as a tool to gauge their response. Clara discovers that underneath the congenial surface of the Wielands’ verbal play and graceful leisure, there is grave competition for rank, and she finds out that the price for seeking equality is a series of epistemic, rapelike, invasions of her private quarters, personal affects, and private diary by Pleyel and Carwin.

71. Ibid., 145. 72. On rising male anger due to changing gender relations between the sexes in the 1790s, see Ed Hatton, “‘He Murdered Her Because He Loved Her’: Passion, Masculinity, and Intimate Homicide in Antebellum America,” in Over the Threshold: Intimate Violence in Early America, ed. Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy (London: Routledge, 1999), 111–33. 73. Scheiber, “‘The Arm Lifted Against Me,’”178.

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Even her brother, Theodore, otherwise disconnected from these schemes, symbolically repeats these procedures of invasive control both in his murderous appearances in her bedroom and as his trial narrative is placed, admittedly by Clara herself, amongst her “finer clothes,” a situation that continues the series of male science penetrating female interiority.74 Brown has Theodore, as the male least invested in Pleyel’s or Carwin’s masculinist games, wield the knife on his family to indicate that the horror Clara faces is one intrinsic to the current mode of social regulation and not an individual’s personality defect, a meaning carried by his increasing similarity in Clara’s mind to the other men. Her nightmare of being in a “theatre of uproar and confusion” where her “uncle, Wieland, Pleyel, and Carwin” all summon her to fall over a precipice indicates that she considers the cross-class alliance of patriarchy as greater than their class differences.75 So when Theodore appears to attack her, his tangled locks and dusty clothes repeat her first image of Carwin, as though all men ultimately share a fundamental physiognomy.76 Clara’s indication of the violence percolating within the realm of superficial equanimity signals Brown’s first agenda as it reveals how Franklinian republican liberal claims for the amiable conversion of competition into civic weal actually result in the Wielands’ catastrophe. As Clara increasingly realizes that the seemingly disinterested realm of neutral interaction is, in fact, a realm of covert alliances based on unrationalized inclinations, she educates herself in the rules of deception and vocal manipulation. A pivotal moment in this process appears when Clara discovers that Pleyel has prejudged her involvement with Carwin, and she rushes to his house to defend herself. Repeating the men’s invasiveness, she creeps up behind Pleyel and then performs a ballet of different poses (tears, moody silence, rage, imperious demands) that move in rapid succession from one emotional mask to another as she gauges the relative impact of her performance. This game of deception with Pleyel is noteworthy, not so much in that it perfectly duplicates Carwin’s masquerades and Pleyel’s traps, but as it reveals Clara learning the tricks of male conversational imposture. Assuming the men’s characteristic fusion of violence and information, Clara now “thirsted for knowledge and for vengeance” against Carwin’s “black conspiracy,” and she increasingly arms herself before conversational encounters with the

74. Brown, Wieland, 161. 75. Ibid., 216. 76. Ibid., 199.

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novel’s men, as if to manifest the invisible antagonisms within seemingly pacific dialogue.77 As Clara increasingly learns to deploy violence, she survives Mettingen’s wreckage, but Brown suggests that this should not be read as a happy end. Despite the expulsion of Carwin and another libertine, Wieland ends ambivalently and without readerly joy or satisfaction, despite the generic convention of comedic closure with Clara’s and Pleyel’s long-delayed married. What ought to have been a coherent trajectory of justice evades the reader as Carwin never appears before the bar, preventing us from evaluating his testimony within the juridical public sphere and gauging his relative culpability for events in Mettingen.78 Additionally, the symbolic promise of Mettingen’s enlightenment, as a society radically different from European tyranny and land-based absolutism, disappears as Clara’s second letter comes from Montpellier, where she plans to reside permanently. Her return to a European location, which a more lucid Theodore had rejected as a reactionary move, suggests that Clara has given up on the new world of her philosophic ideals. More specifically, she seems to have fallen back into an older social geography and temporality as she settles in a region associated with the evangelical sect that had inflamed her father’s imagination.79 The atmosphere of voided promise continues as Clara describes her marriage as more akin to a feudal alliance than one based on the consensual intimacy of mutual happiness. In Montpellier Clara’s narrative voice is more distant and less emotionally vibrant than it was in Mettingen, and the later Clara is more comfortable with delivering definitive decisions rather than forensic considerations. She has abandoned the values of transparency, sympathy, and mutuality that Mettingen Clara struggled to uphold, as well as the attempt to bridge the gender divide between masculine rationality and feminine sociability as Montpellier Clara relinquishes women’s solidarity by existing in a solely male world.80 Clara may have learned how to maneuver in the hostile waters, but her ethical transgendering and internalization of competitive isolationism means, for Brown, it is Clara’s ultimate

77. Ibid., 175, 174. 78. Laura H. Korobkin, “Murder by Madman: Criminal Responsibility, Law, and Judgment in Wieland,” American Literature 72, no. 4 (2000): 721–50: 742. 79. Kinderman, Man Unknown to Himself, 137. 80. For an empirical confirmation of this claim, see Larry L. Stewart, “Charles Brockden Brown: Quantitative Analysis and Literary Interpretation,” Literary and Linguistic Computing 18, no. 2 (2003): 129 –38.

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end in Montpellier, not the penultimate one in Mettingen, that is tragic. To survive she lost her ethical compass and became intellectually dispossessed. Having mistaken the acquisition of (male) power for the ideal of (female) liberation, Clara enacts a social ventriloquism far more substantively aggressive than Carwin’s garden-variety imposture.81 While Mettingen’s false promise of discursive equality was literally a dead-end for Clara, a possible alternative might have existed with the potential union of Clara and Carwin as mutual discontents and fringe members of New Mettingen’s male bourgeois sphere. Clara vaguely realizes this possibility of partnership as, despite her surface hostility to Carwin, she continually maintains an affinity for him, evidenced in her otherwise inexplicable willingness to meet him at her house even after events have led her to suspect the dangerous implications of doing so. With Clara’s and Carwin’s submarine concern for each other, Brown suggests that erotic attraction can act as a productive medium for solidarity by overcoming the social artifices that are constructed between bourgeois women and laboring-class men, a theme that Brown’s Alcuin had already broached and that Arthur Mervyn will reconsider. Because a potential Clara-Carwin mésalliance would have echoed Wieland senior’s own cross-class marriage, Brown implies that history does not have to be tragic, since every new phase has a chance to revisit and revise past mistakes, not in the superficial sense of Franklin’s errata-correction but through a substantive erasure of all strata divisions. Clara, however, only inchoately perceives the possibility of “believing” (in) Carwin, and turning the space in between masculine-defined discourse and feminine affect into a productive common grotto shared between middleclass women and male plebeians in a postbourgeois, postpatriarchal society. Clara fails to realize this solidarity because she ultimately holds too tightly to her subjectivity as a property owner and conflates the notion of female enfranchisement with the acquisition of private property and possessive individualism, a move today associated with liberal feminism.82 Clara’s and Carwin’s lost opportunity for coalition stands as Brown’s complaint at the petit bourgeois Woldwinites’ reluctance to forge cross-class alliances in their political practice and create stable counterinstitutions that could confront insurgent reactionary ideological formations. This gap

81. Andrew J. Scheiber, “‘The Arm Lifted Against Me: Love, Terror, and the Construction of Gender in Wieland,” Early American Literature 26, no. 2 (1991): 173–94, 191. 82. Hinds, Private Property, 101.

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would substantially diminish the actionable scope of Woldwinite ideals and the durability of the period’s progressive designs. Brown’s diagnosis on the recent failure of English and Continental radicalism was not that it was an immanent failure of progressive thought, but a practical one as bourgeois dissidents did not learn to institutionalize radical ideals as a means of supporting the inclusion of heterogeneous social elements. Clara vaguely senses the need for new networks of affiliation when she introduces the second seduction narrative of Louisa Conway’s mother to indicate her belief that Mettingen’s problem was a lack of comparative examples that could determine an empirical normative standard. In this view, her father’s mania was caused by an excessive reliance upon the narrow foundation of a single text.83 Pleyel and Theodore’s debate over what should be the ethical lesson learned from Cicero’s oration on Cluentius similarly flounders because it is “absurd” to depend on the image of a “single family” since it is difficult to determine if that family is typical or anomalous.84 Carwin likewise remains a seemingly unsolvable riddle to the Wielands because they had “no ground on which to build even a plausible conjecture” and cannot gather “satisfactory information” to judge Carwin’s “uncommon” behavior.”85 Clara’s anxiety about narrating her biography is that since no other tale can “furnish a parallel,” it faces the danger of seeming useless to her readers and even to herself. The problem of vulnerable singularity, which the Woldwinites warned against, arises after the Wielands rejected older models of sovereignty (their father’s) and refused the “corruption and tyranny” of existing educational structures. After condemning one mode of irrational power as corrupting, they distance themselves from taking responsibility for replacing it with a more egalitarian structure because they believe that a better society will naturally and spontaneously emerge. Their confidence in the Smithian “invisible hand” of social regulation means, however, that they are left in what Joseph Ridgely calls an “empty world” bereft of guidelines for responding to crises or analyzing testimony “before the bar” of reason that the Wielands often invoke.86

83. Brown, Wieland, 8. 84. Ibid., 28. 85. Ibid., 66. 86. Joseph Ridgely, “The Empty World of Wieland,” in Individual and Community: Variations on a Theme in American Fiction, ed. Kenneth H. Baldwin and David K. Kuby (Durham: Duke University Press, 1975).

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The failure to concretize an institutional framework means that they frequently retreat to individual responses. Each of the core trio in Mettingen relies on a particular mode for explaining their experience, but the idiosyncratic nature of these approaches means they fall back on the very errors from which the Woldwinites sought to escape. With his intensive reading, behavioral gravity, and belief in “moral necessity and Calvinistic inspiration,” Theodore is the one who most reaffirms his father’s solitary superstition. This pathway leads to mania. Pleyel is the extreme rationalist, “the champion of intellectual liberty,” who rejects “all guidance but that of his reason.”87 This Cartesian worship of his own reason leads to solipsistic “fury,” a lighter form of madness typified by a dogmatic unwillingness to consider the potential logical faults in his own explanation of Clara’s behavior by submitting them to dialogic conversation. Instead of “celestial interference” or pure reason, Clara relies on the force of associationist sensibility. When Theodore first hears voices, she initially fears that they result from his sense’s derangement, and her faith in the moral nature of sensations often leads her to comment on changing light or air conditions. During emergencies she will try to block the atmospheric matrix of sensation, either by shielding her eyes or fainting, as if the body’s intake of sensations, not the mind’s empirical observations, is what matters in forming a response. Her reliance on environmental causes, however, leads to an immobilizing lack of self-confidence in her intuition and inability to analyze the events around her in a rational and critical fashion. Since none of the proponents of belief, reason, or sense are willing to converge with the other’s mode of decision making, they are left unable to make any decision at all or move forward in crisis. Mettingen’s conversations are typically inconclusive, rarely achieve consensus, and frequently end with the participants even more disengaged and mutually suspicious than before. The clarifying purpose of speech is easily frustrated when it becomes evident that nothing can be said one way or the other to dislodge a certain prejudice, as when Clara fails to convince Pleyel of her innocence and Wieland of Carwin’s manipulation. Despite their frequent invocation of rational adjudication, the members of New Mettingen are usually unable to recognize the correct answer for events even when it is set before them. When voices preternaturally float 87. Brown, Wieland, 23.

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through their milieu, Carwin offers the explanation that it is a fraud based on vocal tricks.88 The confusion is caused by an eavesdropping ventriloquist (Carwin himself ), but the Wielands cannot recognize his answer’s validity. It does not occur to Theodore to see that that the much-rehearsed defense of Cluentius by Cicero provides obvious explanatory similarities to Mettingen’s events. After his successful defense of Cluentius against charges of poisoning his stepfather, Cicero boasted that he had “thrown dust in the eyes of the jurymen” by distracting them with complaints about the accusing mother’s sexual misbehavior and avoiding any attempt to clarify whether Cluentius had really plotted the murder or not.89 Wieland fails to see that Pleyel’s accusation of Clara’s licentiousness duplicates Cicero’s tactics and is himself likewise distracted from pursuing the actual agent of misbehavior—Carwin. Theodore does not learn the text’s lesson, which is that seemingly disinterested public speech can deflect analysis from pursuing the truth about violence in its social interior. As Brown sees it, the disastrous fragmentation of Mettingen’s lifeworld results from the Woldwinites’ failure to distinguish between social structure and social domination. Consequently, while the Woldwinites have a respect for the agency of the cultural, they failed to consolidate their cultural innovations by moving from the sociocultural back to the political; cultural standards did not become formal counterinstitutions based on a postideological, postpublic sphere mechanism, hinted at by Brown with the idea of a shared Clara-Carwin grotto, because the Woldwinites assumed that all forms of institutionality are equally tyrannical. Without cementing alternative structures of feeling within progressive institutions, the Woldwinites’ ideals, as staged in New Mettingen, are fragile, short-lived and easily collapsed backwards. Clara’s recognition of Mettingen’s need for more stable standards of evaluation points to Wieland’s last critique of the Woldwinites, which is that by failing to replace absolutist institutions with postabsolutist ones, they left the field open to be occupied by other nascent ideological groups, an argument conveyed in Wieland’s third, postMettingen phase of social history.

88. Ibid., 68. 89. Cicero, “In Defence of Aulus Cluentius Habitus,” in Murder Trials, ed. Michael Grant (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 113–253, 119, 123; W. Peterson, “Introduction,” in M. Tulli Ciceronis: Pro A. Cluentio Oratio, ed. W. Peterson (London: Macmillan, 1920).

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The Rise of Ideology Brown’s final intervention, which acts as a self-diagnosis in the status of romance itself in an age of ideological discipline, works through a technique that he develops. In a para-Woldwinite, proto-Brechtian manner, Brown stages an illustration of wrested authority within the narrative voice, where the speaker’s local instability and contradictoriness is not a matter of deceit or epistemological ambivalence but registers a dynamic struggle between competing social interests for sovereignty over individual subjectivity and hegemonic control over what constitutes a normative voice. This technique of wrested authority differs from a more familiar use of irony. The latter involves a stable narrative voice that knowingly deploys two levels of signification to convey meaning. Wrested authority refers to how the register of narration is contested by different social interests or perspectives that seek to appropriate control over the mode of commonsensical expression. Brown’s singular achievement is his elaboration of a narrative style that can represent the global conditions of transition at the level of aesthetic form. In this way, the changed tone between Clara’s two letters indicates how her earlier ideals have been appropriated and recodified by another set of informing interests. By alienating the reader’s tendency to sympathize with the narrator through the unappealing portrait of Montpellier Clara, the competitive survivor, Brown has a narrative device to convey his belief in the increasing containment of early 1790s progressivism by conservatism as a results of its failure to establish institutions that could protect and nurture their progressive ideals, thus allowing the new forces of disciplinary institutionality to opportunistically intervene in the vacuum created by the old regime’s obsolescence and a potentially ensuing one’s fragility. This appropriation by ideological forces appears with the arrival of figures who superintend Clara’s psychic reconstruction, the legal and medical authorities of Hallet and Cambridge. Hallet is the “magistrate and good citizen” who produces the “facts” of Carwin’s European criminality and superintends the crime scene, and Thomas Cambridge is the surgeon who treats Clara and interprets Wieland’s court testimony. These men represent the new kind of sovereignty grounded in the disciplinary fields of professional knowledge, with Cambridge’s name evoking the geography of institutional higher education. They seal their authority by seizing control of the right to explain Mettingen’s events through their own language of medicalized case history and legalized confession of motive.

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Whereas Theodore revised the totemic text that covers the Wielands from his father’s Gnostic psalter to Latin republican rhetoric, Cambridge relocates the Wielands’ literary descent to be from Erasmus Darwin’s medical directory as he explains the Wieland family’s errors through the category of mania mutabilis. Rather than seeing violence as caused by divine wrath or sentimental imbalances, Hallet suggests that it is a matter of congenital inheritance, a turn that deflates the need for legal scrutiny on Carwin.90 Cambridge does produce Theodore’s court testimony for Clara to examine, but only as it lends credence to his professional opinion about Wieland’s interior dysfunction. Brown represents this turn to the new disciplinary power with a different organization of the family. Wieland senior represents the regime of absolutist terror configured as analogical to the father’s repressive authority. Conversely, Theodore’s mode of elder masculinity is one of fatherhood without the father’s absolutism as it depends on a world of semiotic equivalences configured as the sibling realm of brothers and a boyish, autonomous daughter. The era of disciplinary knowledge is not based on either patriarchal coercion or sibling appeals to consensus but on the productive creation of categories, like madness, as a means of institutionalizing new forms of control. Brown conveys this transformation from patriarchal domination and fraternal equivalence to professional “benevolent” control as this period’s symbolic fathers and brothers are represented in terms of matrilineal avuncularity and cousinage. Hallet is a “distant kinsman” of Clara’s mother and Cambridge is the Wielands’ maternal uncle.91 Symbolically transferring the figure of authority from the unbroken paternal line of fathers and brothers to the ancillary maternal axis of uncles and cousins, Brown represents the latter’s authority as a light, lateral touch (the stiletto’s puncture of Maxwell) that encodes the shift to the “transparent” rule of disciplinary knowledge. While the father/brother axis represents the force of force, the maternal uncle/cousin axis represents the unforced force of regulatory institutional knowledge: ideology. The representation of ideology as avuncular power also captures Brown’s resistance to Franklin’s outlook. Christopher Looby and June Jordan describe how Franklin’s Autobiography looks to uncle power as an alternative to the older system of patriarchal subordination that decreases the father’s force by

90. Darwin, Zoonomia, 4:64. 91. Brown, Wieland, 142.

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dispersing it among several uncles.92 Franklin is named after one uncle and he looks to another, Thomas, as a model for how education can overcome class barriers. Whereas Franklin appreciates the tactical utility of avuncular ideology, Brown, as one inscribed under a (step)uncle’s name and its legal aura, sees it as no more democratic than what came before. While Brown famously abandoned his law apprenticeship by complaining about the legal profession’s duplicity, he soon began to question the innocence of fiction as well.93

Is Political Romance Viable? By the mid-nineteenth century, according to D. A. Miller and Lennard Davis, the novel-form has become a full-blown ideological, disciplinary institution in its own right, capable of regulating its readers.94 That achievement is only in its initial stage of development at Brown’s moment. Yet Brown suggests that the process of wresting knowledge from its original proponents has already begun during the 1790s. Cambridge’s use of Darwinian etiology to deliver a diagnosis of quasi-genetic interiority puts considerable pressure to deliver a content that is not entirely present in Darwin’s work, which is still rooted in eighteenth-century sensibilitarian physiology. By having Cambridge’s academic mistranscription revise Darwin in a more modern way, Brown indicates that a more serious recodification of the eighteenth century’s geoculture is occurring, mainly within American universities, the knowledge institutions that the Friendly Club members had initially moved away from but increasingly return to support, often as administrators, after the century’s turn. Throughout the 1790s, disregard for theological pedagogy was carried to an extreme by the period’s collegians, who were collectively energized by the modern library of the freethinking Enlightenment. Letters and memoirs of

92. Looby, Voicing America, 105; Cynthia S. Jordan, Second Stories: The Politics of Language, Form, and Gender in Early American Fictions (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 28 –30. 93. Harry R. Warfel, Charles Brockden Brown: American Gothic Novelist (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1949), 36 –37. 94. D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988); Davis, Lennard, “Who Put the the in the Novel: Identity Politics and Disability in Novel Studies,” in Bending over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 79 –101.

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the time attest to the galvanizing popularity on campuses of writers like Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Condorcet, Volney, and especially deist tracts like Paine’s Age of Reason.95 Having graduated from the academy, collegians kept up their fascination with deist concerns, a continuity that appears when the New-York Magazine, begins to regularly publish articles by Priestly, Wollstonecraft, and Godwin after 1793, when recent graduates took over its pages. But if conservative academics failed in their first attempts to resist and repress student interest in culturally radical ideas, they then shifted strategy by teaching the topics that students liked, but in a highly conservative redaction. While undergraduates proclaimed a version of sensibilitist moral sense philosophy that they imbibed through Paine and Godwin, the academics realized that there was little to this discourse in itself that made it intrinsically radical. Professors perceived that they could dilute student recalcitrance by splitting rational sentiment from its utopian political claims and proffering it back to students in an anodyne form. By the end of the eighteenth century and throughout the early nineteenth, universities broadly institutionalized a reconstructed version of Scottish moral sense that realigned its claims to support the institutional authority of the pedagogues and market society overall. A second-wave version of Scottish School sensibilitarian claims, known as moral or common sense, quickly became consecrated as they became canonical texts. Kames’s Elements of Criticism and Blair’s Rhetoric were massively reprinted, the latter thirty-nine times before 1835, and used as core texts on a required curriculum.96 Universities instituted a mandatory senior year course on morals, often taught by the college’s president, which safely relied on the professor’s interpretation of a single chosen text.97 As moral sense arguments became “institutionalized in American colleges,” whatever radicalism Scottish common sense might have had, especially in the Woldwinites’ hands, “had ceased.”98 The top-down version of moral sense read texts in such a way as to shift their arguments from the collective concerns of Smith and Ferguson towards the celebration of the isolated individual and his “immediate conviction of right and wrong, of the reality 95. Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 234. 96. Terence Martin, The Instructed Vision: Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and the Origins of American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961), 24; Andrew Hook, Scotland and America: A Study of Cultural Relations, 1750–1835 (Glasgow: Blackie, 1975), 75– 82. 97. Martin, Instructed Vision, 23. Jean V. Matthews, Towards a New Society: American Thought and Culture, 1800–1830 (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990), 39. 98. Martin, Instructed Vision, 4–5, 11.

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of the external world, freedom, etc. about which there was no need or warrant for debate or doubt.” By emphasizing the individual’s prerational perception of right and wrong, moral sense, as Merli Curti argues, was “admirably suited to the needs of conservative-minded intellectuals” because it undercut the conversational intersubjectivity on which Woldwinite and Painite formulations depended.99 By narrowing moral sense claims into ones about individual character, rather than a communal sensibility, ideological academics prepared the way for the rise of an interiority that could be disciplined by moralizing professional in ways suited to the emerging geoculture of high capitalism. “The principles of Common Sense were extended to the field of political economy, which was taught as a set of self-evident maxims about the laws of God and the duties of man in the material world . . . the doctrines of laissezfaire were taught in textbooks written by American clergymen, which simplified not only Smith’s economics but also his morality. Instead of Smith’s careful balance between justice and benevolence, the American texts taught the supreme virtue of competitive individualism as a part of the clear dictates of the conscience, implanted by the creator and apprehended through common sense.”100 The academy’s conservative appropriation of sensibility’s terms for the benefit of a new manner of competitive capitalism casts its shadow on Wieland as the wrested authority within Clara’s consciousness conveys Brown’s sense that his own terms of social imagination are themselves contested. For the appearance of the medicojuridical authorities, Hallet and Cambridge, not only represents the emergence of refashioned institutions that stage modern ideas, but also the ability of these authorities to ventriloquize the terms of progressivism for conservative propaganda. Theodore finds it difficult to “think” cogently about the cause of his confusion because he lacks a stable perspective that can validate his thoughts, but Clara cannot ultimately analyze the problem of Mettingen’s collapse because her own cognitive apparatus has been gutted by the new medical and legal authorities. Consequently, she becomes easily contained and repackaged in her Montpellier avatar. By charting how Mettingen’s common sense becomes smashed to bits, Brown himself doubts the larger efficacy of the weakly institutionalized romance as a force of change and finds it

99. Ibid., 3, 4. 100. May, Enlightenment in America, 349.

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increasingly harder to produce an intellectually robust narrative as the forces of reaction are busily reconstituting the terms of reference on which the Woldwinite narrative depends. The chaotic air of Brown’s narrative style conveys a gloomy recognition that his own medium of possible resistance is undergoing colonization even while some, like himself, are attempting to use it as a platform for culturally driven social change. In a contest over the politics of form, the romance is itself being forced to be compliant and become a form of entertainment: in short, to become a novel. Russell Reising acutely recognizes the proliferation of unexplained discourses within Wieland, its prolix insinuation of uncited medical, historical, and legal affairs, “sources, discourse, entire archives alluded to but absent from Brown’s narrative world.”101 The porous nature of the novel’s references ought to be read as representing something of a counterstrategy. If the proponents of an institutionalizing medicine and law are territorializing the conceptual grounds of the romance, then Brown attempts to withstand this contestation by raiding the bookshelves and searching for medical and legal elements that he might use to return the fire and balance out the conservative appropriation of once radical ideals. When Brown abandons writing romances, more or less, after 1800, this may be taken as his unhappy recognition that the romance’s progressive purpose is no longer sustainable within a social context that positions narrative exposition as part of the problem, not the solution. Yet such a reading mistakes how the conclusion of Brown’s Wieland becomes the starting point for Brown’s later fictions, like Arthur Mervyn. In these tales, Brown redefines romance’s function as being no longer simply a statement of radical intent and rational alternative, but now as a mechanism for driving through its own status as a textual object and indicating the presence of actually existing networks of oppositional cultural activity. Brown abandons the romance-form eventually, but not before he moves one step further in Arthur Mervyn, beyond his claims in “Walstein’s School,” to convey how geopoliticized narrative might work in the early moments of a reshaping world-system.

101. Russell Reising, Loose Ends: Closure and Crisis in the American Social Text (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 30.

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arthur mervyn and the racial revolution of narrative consciousness

In his earlier fictions, Brown unpacks civil society’s systemic violence and indicates the emerging form of social regulation by “therapeutic” medical and juridical institutions that seek to contain that violence by externalizing it on exceptional members as a matter of individual dysfunction. Although Wieland’s suburban enclave is not a self-evidently prime target for a geocultural approach, Brown uses Mettingen’s tight circumference for an initial conceptualization that his later fictions, like the two volume Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 (1799 –1800), build on to unpack the urban, coastal, and circumatlantic influences on Pennsylvania’s backcountry during the world-system’s internal transformation. For Brown to self-consciously represent this cognitive map, he learns to handle narrative space differently from the prior Woldwinite fictions that he otherwise draws on for narrative elements and scenarios. Godwin’s exemplary fictions still deploy a static moral geography, much like traditional picaresque allegory, where one setting appears only to illustrate a homogeneous slot in the linear spectrum of moral virtue and vice. Brown has the eponymous Arthur Mervyn move through a geography of economic and interpersonal exchanges that enmesh the individual within a multidimensional torus of dynamic relations. Brown also deploys his characters as fields through which sociohistorical forces collide. Mervyn’s motives seem hieroglyphic at times because Brown is placing pressure on familiar modes of narrative perspective to indicate the coming to dominance of commercial political economy as a historical passage that requires a different form of representation than is currently available to him. Additionally, these innovations in narrative technique provide Brown a formal means of moving beyond the modes of parainstitutionality and institutionality as they allow him to conceptualize the literary text as something in between these two orders. This procedure is used by Brown to craft a new relation between literary production and social transformation and suggest

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how progressives might intervene within a world that is rapidly altering toward conservative and capitalist predicates. In this light, Arthur Mervyn’s tale of mercantile fraud and the coercion of women and the lower social classes telegraphs the generic qualities of the later nineteenth-century novel of urban realism (Poe, Hugo, Balzac, Sue, Dickens, Collins, Zola, etc.). These tales often use tense relations between morally ambiguous characters propelling through the “mysteries of the city” as a device for staging capitalism’s amplification through its phase-changes. Because these relations cannot easily be presented twodimensionally, urban realism often relies on gothic elements of mental disequilibrium as an extradimensional representational method for a more satisfyingly complex depiction of the world-system’s logistical enactments. In Wieland, Brown distressed his diegetic narrative with horrific ruptures in its formal exposition to register the presence of social struggle through a technique I have called wrested authority and awaken an otherwise passive reader into a process of critical reflection (rational gothic as a variation of Woldwinite rational sentiment). Almost instantaneously, Brown perceives that this reactive registration of conflict can also work progressively through an allusive set of inferential meanings to index the extratextual presence of alternative networks of collective endeavor, which rarely get officially recorded by hostile dominant forces. In Brown’s post-Wieland fictions, he no longer uses formal disruption simply to summon a response by the privatized reader but as an exegetical device to urge readers to stop looking at the text’s pages as a closeted grotto of mental refuge (in Wieland’s terms) and recognize the sheets as barely covering, if not signposting, existing communities of opposition. Brown’s respatialization of Woldwinite narrative generates an aesthetic that goes further than conveying a set of politicized statements about liberty and reason to operate as a textual transistor for political activity, linking readers to semicovert acts done in a time when the horizon for social revolution is swiftly receding. The conditions for Brown’s narratological extension of the Woldwinite project were only possible within the 1790s larger indeterminacy as a semiperipheral temporality, a transition between two longer waves of social organization, which creates the space for otherwise suppressed possibilities to appear. Very shortly thereafter, the forms of a recrudescent historical romance (Irving, Scott, Cooper) blot out the political engagements that Brown’s fiction telegraphs. Because a new bourgeois constellation increasingly consolidates its dominance in the early 1800s, the middle class rewards

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itself with a revisionist historiography that recasts the past as informed by a bourgeois, rather than aristocratic, mentality (Ivanhoe’s petit bourgeois version of feudalism) in order to backdate their historical emergence and legitimize their rise as teleological. The spirit of Brown’s narrative project would be resurrected only when later moments shared the same rhythmic constellation as the period in which he writes. The revolutionary leap forward that Arthur Mervyn enacts can fortunately be easily gauged since it is, on the written record, the most explicitly theorized of Brown’s writing. “Walstein’s School of History” ends with Engel’s proposition that tales of property and sexual desire ought to be placed within recognizable settings and realizable, albeit extreme, circumstances as the best platform for delivering “moral benefit” to readers, as the “pleasure” of “curiosity and sympathy” will ease them into the critical process of ethically driven decision making.1 The essay concludes by describing Engel’s proposed romance, Olivia Ronsica, about a farm lad who is forced to leave his birthplace and travel impoverished to the cosmopolitan city, Weimar. His worldly innocence enmeshes him within “the misery of sensuality and fraud,” chiefly through the masquerades of the scoundrel, Semlits. Ronisca’s virtue overcomes Semlits’s impostures, and the villain is thought to later kill himself. Olivia returns to the countryside, travels back to the city, where he suffers from the plague, but is nursed back to health by a physician, whom Ronsica decides to emulate professionally after a short return to the countryside. This outline essentially summarizes the plot of Arthur Mervyn’s first volume, which Brown finished composing around February 1799 shortly before the August/September serialization of “Walstein’s School.”2 In a February 1799 letter to his brother James, Brown also describes the second volume’s marriage plot until what is about chapter 9.3 Yet Brown continued the romance beyond this outline to include segments involving the restoration of lost credit and trading capital as well as the unforeseen introduction of the exotic immigrant Achsa Fielding, a wealthy widow, whom Mervyn concludes the romance by marrying. 1. Charles Brockden Brown, “Walstein’s School of History, from the German of Krants of Gotha,” in Literary Essays and Reviews, ed. Alfred Weber and Wolfgang Schäfer (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1992), 31–39, 39. 2. Norman S. Grabo, “Historical Essay,” in Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793. First and Second Parts, ed. Sydney J. Krause and S. W. Reid (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2002), 449 –77, 458. 3. William Dunlap, Memoirs of Charles Brockden Brown, 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1822), 2:97–99.

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Brown’s development of Arthur Mervyn beyond his initial prospectus should not be taken simply as his having incompletely charted out the novel or a desire to leave the first volume’s ending open for a sequel if the market demand was favorable for its continuation, as he suggests to his brother. For Arthur Mervyn’s undeclared extensions mark Brown’s widening realization about the constituent role that slavery plays in the geocultural ecology of sensibility, sensational trade, and sentimental writing and this nexus’s reconfiguration by the agents of institutionalized ideology. By insisting on the centrality of race within class and gender struggles, Brown’s romance complicates our received history, in the wake of Foucault, about the linked rise of moral reform public projects, an interiorized sense of personhood, and the soft power of disciplinary institutions. In a footnote to Discipline and Punish, which mainly focuses on penal developments within France as representative of the passage into modernity, Foucault argues that he could have similarly drawn his conclusions from evidence taken from slavery, colonization, and child-rearing, but that these histories would have been redundant, offering nothing new or redefining to his account.4 With Arthur Mervyn, Brown argues that rather than new gender, racial, or subaltern codes being produced as parenthetical supplements, they are crucial ingredients within the circumatlantic’s infrabourgeois competition and thus key to his own intervention within this antagonism. Furthermore, while Foucault has highlighted the role of (penal, medical, educational) institutions as the factories for the production of new subjectivities, Brown emphasizes the role of parainstitutional spaces involving interpersonal relations. His focus on quasi-public, quasi-private household encounters can be read simultaneously as a strength and weakness. Certainly Brown was intimately aware of the new institutions, like Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Prison, which Foucault highlights as the cutting edge of the industrial-like creation of modern subjectivity, but even as he records their

4. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1977), 314. Other monoracial, gender-blind, nation-based accounts of this process with regards to prison and public welfare are: Raymond A. Mohl, Poverty in New York, 1783 –1825 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971); Michael Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750 –1850 (New York: Pantheon, 1978); John K. Alexander, Render Them Submissive: Responses to Poverty in Philadelphia, 1760–1800 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980); Michael Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760–1835 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

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presence in his fictions, he also downplays their significance. This relative lack of interest in the new institutions is partly a legacy of his formation by protoanarchist Woldwinite manifestos, which have not fully realized that modern institutions may operate in a different manner than their regal antecedents. In contrast, Brown believes that the production of identities is not limited to the factory-hospital-prison complex but also occurs in the zones involving the basic (re)production of human life through cross-gender interaction (the home) and extranational locales, like the Caribbean plantations. Brown’s interest in these other sites of racial and gender formation is that they are often where individuals initially register global changes through the language of bodily desires. Consequently, they can also be spheres where alternative worldviews can be consolidated and enacted upon. While the Foucauldian model seems to either offer only a limited model of resistance by taking up the negative terms of evaluation as badges of pride, Brown argues for a counterhegemonic practice , which violates the codes of proper behavior in less dangerous and openly confrontational ways. With Arthur Mervyn this tactic involves a narrative architecture that points to alternative social practices but often in highly inferential ways. This technique combines gothic effects with instances of narrative inauthenticity that knowingly inscribes historically incorrect versions of documentary details and contravenes generic formulas, as a Carwinesque ventriloquism of realism, to establish the romance as mixed para/institutional form, at once public and private, structured and autonomous. The mature Brownian fiction is neither wholly parainstitutional, since it remains authored by an individual’s signature, nor clearly institutional, as it insinuates the presence of weakly legitimized social networks. In Arthur Mervyn these enclaves primarily involve a strand of black-white abolitionist politics and the early stages of the Underground Railroad that smuggled runaway slaves beyond the reach of their tormentors. Brown’s technique has often left his writing unsatisfactory to later readers who find his work either too quirky to be either safely enrolled in a nationalist hagiography or celebrated as properly radical. Yet this incoherence is Brown’s intended strategic response to what may be feasibly enacted in a time of conservative containment of radical visions, as well as a desire to explore how those with power—bourgeois dissidents like himself— can relinquish this privilege, especially with regards to racial prestige. Arthur Mervyn is one of the first American narratives that both recognizes the incipient arrival of scientific racism as a tactic for containing class and gender insubordination

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and seeks to scramble its control through a de-ideologizing refusal of “whiteness” as an invisible but normative status category. Brown’s antiracism goes beyond already existing forms of abolitionist beliefs, which invoke humanitarian claims for the legislative end to the bound transportation of Africans and the ensuing coercion of their labor, to examine the larger question about the ensuing relation among the perceived races after slavery’s institutional delegitimization. Brown uses Mervyn’s mental transformation about nonwhites by the narrative’s end to investigate the supersession of the more intractable cultural barriers of what Benjamin Rush, in the 1780s, called negromania, the disturbance of the mind’s reason and physiological balance by the irrational fear and hatred of blacks.5 This informal, but no less socially conditioned, obstacle depends on the amplification of fear about ensuing violence in a postslavery society. Arthur Mervyn’s scenes of interracial violence amidst a chaotic, yellowfever-torn Philadelphia has led many readers to align Brown with recent claims that the Haitian Revolution’s racial violence frightened white radicals into abandoning cross-racial progressive politics.6 Yet the Caribbean uprising and massacre of Creole planters certainly did not prevent re-export merchants from clamoring to trade with and abet the black rebellion. New York and Philadelphia abolitionists, who counted Brown among their number, generally remained undisturbed about the Haitian Revolution’s massacres, which they saw as the comprehensible result of prolonged racial domination, and responded by developing parainstitutions, like the Underground Railroad, to further liberate slaves, including those that Ceole refugees brought with them.7 In Wieland, the cultural scripts of class and gender held Carwin and Clara in a state of mutual attraction and repulsion that ultimately reinforced these preexisting divisions; in Arthur Mervyn, Brown implies that this blockage may have been caused by their failure to incorporate a critique of racial hierarchy, especially as Mettingen’s leisure depends on the produce delivered by its African slaves. As Arthur Mervyn ends with the romantic pairing of a plebeian native (white, Christian) male and an exotic wealthy female, Brown

5. Donald J. D’Elia, “Dr. Benjamin Rush and the Negro,” Journal of the History of Ideas 30, no. 3 (1969): 413–22. 6. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London: Verso, 2000). 7. James Alexander Dun, “Dangerous Intelligence: Slavery, Race, and St. Domingue in the Early American Republic” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2004).

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proposes egalitarian miscegenation, rather than recolonizing the slaves back to Africa, as the best vehicle for overcoming racism in a postslavery society. In a sense, so much of the perception of Brown’s antiracist agenda depends on our recognizing the “oddity” of the romance’s conclusion. In contrast to his self-admittedly “doleful” tone of nearly operatic melancholy on which Brown’s other long fictions end, Arthur Mervyn finishes with a flourish of nearly pornographic, libertine ribaldry in which Mervyn compares his pen to his penis in order to differentiate the two.8 The memoir finishes by Mervyn explaining that he has recently married the widow Achsa and rhetorically asking if rematernity is the only thing that could add to her happiness beyond remarriage. He then apostrophizes his writing tool: “Lie there, snug in thy leathern case” as Mervyn will “abjure thy company till all is settled with my love. Yes: I will abjure thee, so let this by thy last office, till Mervyn has been made the happiest of men.”9 If an active pen means a composed penis, then the removal of this prophylactic, with the closing of the book, allows Mervyn to come to another kind of sheathing. Brown may have learnt to write this sort of flushed rhetoric of desire from the French pornography that his French émigré publisher, Hocquet Caritat, was selling in his New York bookstore, material alluded to when Arthur Mervyn walks into a brothel and sees “rent; blurred; stained; blotted; dog-eared” novels and plays in the downstairs waiting parlor.10 These books, “some on their backs, gaping open by the scorching of their covers,” suggest that their readers may have prematurely culminated their rehearsal for the other horizontal uncovering available upstairs. Mervyn’s aroused disregard for the proprieties of textual public address if it threatens goodwill situates a manifold refusal of behavioral restraints. Foremost, it acknowledges the disciplinary function of sentimental tales of female woe as a prosthetic of emotional control over male middle-class readers. Mervyn earlier complains that books are “cold, jejune . . . lifeless and monotonous” and lack the frictive excitement of physically present social intercourse.11 Additionally, he refuses the division between the disembodied

8. Dunlap Memoirs, 2:99 –100. 9. Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793. First and Second Parts, ed. Sydney J. Krause and S. W. Reid (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2002), 446. 10. Hoquet Caritat, Catalogue Des Livres Francais (New York, 1799); Brown, Mervyn, 315. 11. Brown, Mervyn, 427. “Books have by their very nature but a limited operation. . . . Books, to those by whom they are read, have a sort of constitutional coldness. We review the arguments

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public and gendered private roles that this psychic control both produces and depends on to regulate the mercantile traffic of commodities. If sentimentalism argues that the behavior of the libertine and coquette are disruptive to a bourgeois moral economy that preconditions the contractual exchange of affect as a parcel to market exchanges, Arthur Mervyn suggests that erotic play can redefine the markers, like consecrated matrimony, that the middle class use to maintain civil society’s composure within the process of property transfers. As Mervyn comes to Fielding’s bedroom window at night to arrange for an assignation and proposal in the fields at sunrise, he reenacts a generic seduction scene on the grass. Since the two plan on leaving for Europe after their marriage, their tacit elopement allows reckless desire to use the ceremony of domesticity as an enabling mask for the realization of outlandish and wayward pleasure, which also overturns the mythology of the marketplace’s disinterested sociability. Yet, who is seducing whom here? After Mervyn first sees Fielding having a tête-à-tête with a madam in her brothel (she claims to have visited the woman unaware of her profession, despite the disheveled books below and the woman’s casual dress), Fielding tutors Mervyn’s erotic education by steadily encouraging him to declare his passion for her and abandon the plainer woman to whom he has already proposed. In a cultural field defined by narratives where women are defined by tragic eroticism, as they are routinely seduced, abandoned, and left suicidal, the figure of a triumphant Fielding, waiting to realize the fruits of having maneuvered Mervyn into her bed, represents Brown’s refusal of the period’s cultural conventions as he envisions this rake and coquette as being shortly rewarded with a love child. The inversion of behavioral certainties on which the social reproduction of class privileges rests is staged by Fielding herself shortly before Mervyn proposes. Seeking to calm an anxious Mervyn, she hopes to enliven him by playing her favorite song. 12 The lines that she sings are slightly transposed

of an ‘insolent innovator’ with sullenness, and are unwilling to expand our minds to take in their force. It is with difficulty that we obtain the courage to strike into untrodden paths, and question tenets that have been generally received. But conversation accustoms us to hear a variety of sentiments, obliges us to exercise patience and attention, and gives freedom and elasticity to our disquisitions. A thinking man, if he will recollect his intellectual history, will find that he has derived inestimable benefits from the stimulus and surprise of colloquial suggestions; and, if he review the history of literature, will perceive that minds of great acuteness and ability have commonly existed in clusters.” William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Modern Morals and Happiness (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), 288 – 89. 12. Brown, Mervyn, 403.

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ones from Milton’s Comus (1634), a court masque that stages the encounter between a Lady, separated from male protection and lost in a forest, and Comus, the son of Bacchus and Circe. Even without the muscular force of male power, the woman is able to use the soft power of chaste virtue to withstand the potions and seductions of the untamed Comus. Despite being written in an aristocratic genre and presented for a noble audience, Comus subtly transmits Milton’s argument, in the years before the civil war, that the bourgeoisie’s ascetic virtue (figured as the unarmed Lady) ultimately does not require the protection of a warrior caste (her brothers and father). Just as Milton uses literary form against itself, by masking a protobourgeois message in the genre of a court masque, Brown does the same with Fielding’s use of Milton, since the lines she sings come not from the Lady’s refusal to submit to sensual desire, but from Comus’s inauguration of the forest’s carnivelesque revels. Consequently she invites Mervyn (and the reader) to partake of the burlesque pleasures of inverting dominant expectations of behavioral propriety. Throughout Arthur Mervyn, the middle-class professionals and their mercantile associates debate which is a better test of strangers: the surface affect of sentimental physiognomy or unseen bloodlines of kinship and patronlike business networks. This argument locates the conflicting desires of the new commercial factors to at once enlarge the market by using sentimental relays, while also limiting risk through the sureties of extended clan and denomination relations. Fielding’s channeling of Comus’s irresponsibility and his “orient liquor” that transforms the human head into that of an animal’s rejects both sentimental and lineage predicates as it removes the human visage on which sentimental emulation depends as well as the corporeal homogeneity that a system of blood relations requires. Throughout Arthur Mervyn Fielding is repeatedly described as being both physically unattractive yet somehow magically appealing. Her Comus/Circe-like charms functions not only to scramble the optical system of determining personal value but also to lure Mervyn away from the sexual regulation that buttresses stable family relations. By replacing one means of knowing subjects for another, Fielding undermines the commercial geoculture on which the period’s commerce depends and presents Mervyn with a means of escaping Franklinesque ideological formations. This ending has one more turn of the screw: Brown indicates that the union is a cross-ethnic one and quite possibly a mixed-race one, a miscegenation that Mervyn is both aware of and comfortable with enacting. Gazing on Fielding, who is described as being “tawney as a moor,” a period code for

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blackness, Mervyn announces that he recognizes Fielding’s true identity as a Jew.13 She then tells a story, describing herself as the converted daughter of a Portuguese Jewish merchant who married an English land-owning noble. After having had a son with this man, she watched him take a mistress, be imprisoned for debt, travel to France on his release, remarry, and become a delegate to the National Assembly before falling to the guillotine during the Terror. Because the fiction often uses “Portugal” as a metonym for the Atlantic trade in slaves and Caribbean products, Arthur Mervyn, especially alongside with Brown’s other writings, suggests that Fielding has freed herself not only from restrictive gender conventions of female purity and subordination by seeking her own way across the Atlantic, but also from racialized restrictions, either as a non-Christian (the explicit code) or as a nonwhite (the implicit one). Fielding’s ventriloquism of Comus also suggests a nonEuropean identity. While Comus wanders through the Catholic outlands of Ireland and Spain (much like Carwin), he is also mainly configured in terms of blackness, a creature of the night who comes from outside the European perimeter. Additionally, Fielding’s repeated association with pleasure grounds (the brothel, the manor’s gardens) alludes to a plantation exoticism, in which the slave quarters rule. With its “happy” end, Arthur Mervyn is one of the first antitragic mulatta novels, as it celebrates a mixed-ethnic or racial woman’s successful pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. Lastly, as the romance concludes with a proleptic description of implied activity in the bedroom, rather than a retrospective life-accounting of the characters (as happens in Wieland), Brown implies that this narrative’s action is not limited to what is formally enclosed within its pages but that it exists to indicate the presence of a larger set of acts that cannot be openly declared without damaging their survival, but which nonetheless exist even in the absence of direct explication.14 As Brown writes in a later essay on reading practices, good readers perceive that an author’s “genius” depends on how he creates intentional “obscurities,” where the text’s “obvious parts” exist “to conceal” others in ways that nonetheless insinuate their latent meanings.15

13. Ibid., 432, 415. 14. This technique also has a homoerotic element. See Stephen Shapiro, “In a French Position: Radical Pornography and Homoerotic Society in Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond or the Secret Witness (1798),” in Long Before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America, ed. Thomas Foster (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 357– 83. 15. Charles Brockden Brown, “Remarks on Reading,” in Literary Essays and Reviews, ed. Alfred Weber and Wolfgang Schäfer (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1992), 166 –71.

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An initial set of Arthur Mervyn’s critical readers used this ambiguity in Brown’s prose to query the stability of individual character as nationalist allegory: to what degree can Arthur Mervyn be comfortably consecrated as a typically mythopoetic American spirit?16 More recently, critics have turned to consider the narrative’s social contexts for the period’s gendered economy, epidemiology debates, and construction of scientific racism.17 These accounts frequently highlight Mervyn’s activity as a sign of Brown’s complicity in misogyny, liberalism, and racism. Just as one scholarly tendency imposed a nationalist determination in the absence of Brown’s social and intellectual context, an ensuing one makes claims about Brown’s ostensibly unexamined prejudices without acknowledging that our own unexamined gender and racial prejudices may imperfectly understand the work of an author writing in a time, so unlike our own, that was in active revolutionary ferment

16. Bill Christophersen, The Apparition in the Glass: Charles Brockden Brown’s American Gothic (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 88 – 89. For examples of this school, see: Patrick Brancaccio, “Studied Ambiguities: Arthur Mervyn and the Problem of the Unreliable Narrator,” American Literature 42, no. 1 (1970): 18 –27; James H. Justus, “Arthur Mervyn, American,” American Literature 42, no. 3 (1970): 304–24; George M. Spangler, “C. B. Brown’s Arthur Mervyn: A Portrait of the Young American Artist,” American Literature 52, no. 4 (1981): 578 –92; David M. Larson, “Arthur Mervyn, Edgar Huntly, and the Critics,” Essays in Literature 15, no. 2 (1988): 207–19. 17. Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); Karen A. Weyler, Intricate Relations: Sexual and Economic Desire in American Fiction, 1789 –1814 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004); Shirley Samuels, Romances of the Republic: Women, the Family, and Violence in the Literature of the Early American Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds, Private Property: Charles Brockden Brown’s Gendered Economics of Virtue (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997), 68 – 98; Jennifer Baker, Securing the Commonwealth: Debt, Speculation, and Writing in the Making of Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 119 – 36; Bryan Waterman, “Arthur Mervyn’s Medical Repository and the Early Republic’s Knowledge,” American Literary History 15, no. 2 (2003): 213– 47; Donald J. McNutt, Urban Revelations: Images of Ruin in the American City, 1790–1860 (London: Routledge, 2006); Bill Christophersen, The Apparition in the Glass: Charles Brockden Brown’s American Gothic (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992); Teresa A. Goddu, Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Edward Watts, Writing and Postcolonialism in the Early Republic (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998); Philip Gould, “Race, Commerce, and the Literature of Yellow Fever in the Early National Philadelphia,” Early American Literature 35, no. 2 (2000): 157– 86; Gesa Mackenthun, Fictions of the Black Atlantic in American Foundational Literature (London: Routledge, 2004); Andy Doolen, Fugitive Empire: Locating Early American Imperialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2005); Sean X. Goudie, Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). For a reading more in line with mine, see Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Black Gothic: The Shadowy Origins of the American Bourgeoisie,” in Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America, ed. Robert Blair St. George (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 243– 69.

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against political reaction and religious superstition. Similarly, both reading clusters misdirect themselves as they insist on reading Brown as a mainly allegorical writer, in spite of his self-professed desire to use events as technical devices to facilitate critical contemplation, not as fully parallel or ersatz meanings by themselves. For Arthur Mervyn, this has resulted in an obsession with revealing its description of the yellow fever plague as a message about commerce, the national imaginary, and so on. Despite its sensationalism, Brown uses the plotting of the plague just as “Walstein’s School” suggests: as a nonallegorical mechanism for staging and amplifying already existing social dynamics regarding property (class) and sex (gender) and their intersection in race. For instance, the majority of Arthur Mervyn’s account of Thomas Welbeck—his frauds, forgeries, seductions, murders, disappearance, and demise —has little contact with the events of the plague. Welbeck’s death is not in Bush Hill hospital but in a debtor’s prison, where his physical collapse and raving imply that he has a rapid-progressing venereal disease (as befits “a slave of depraved appetites”).18 The plague’s events do not actively continue into the second volume, and Mervyn’s status rise —by restoring bills of credit and his ensuing marriage proposal—also cannot be directly traced to the plague’s aftermath. The romance is replete with deaths, but the only main figure who succumbs to the yellow fever is the suburban farmer, Hadwin. The yellow fever is bracketed by other events in Arthur Mervyn, and is an event limited to the first volume because it mainly functions as a means of gaining readerly interest for thinking about the project described in “Walstein’s School”—how character is formed by the social environment—a theme initially raised by the narrative’s first inquiry into the role of moral reform as a means of controlling the increasing masses of Carwin-like poor in the harbor towns.

Deference and Disciplining the Poor Amidst a plague-town, Dr. Stevens, the romance’s initial narrator, begins with a Clara-like question of social inclusion. Seeing an emaciated man, suffering from the yellow fever and lying on the street, Stevens wonders if this unfamiliar man ought to be treated with dignity and taken inside for personal care or, as Stevens’s neighbors later insist, be left lying like trash, as “one . . . who 18. Brown, Mervyn, 221.

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most probably was worthless.”19 Although Stevens admits that Mervyn could be delivered to the public hospital, as an impersonal institution tasked to dispose of unwholesome bodies, Brown has Stevens quickly reject this option so that he can revisit Wieland’s starting point about including the lower classes in the middle-class sanctuary of the home, even while this realm is being acutely distressed by the violence of irrational events (floating voices, the plague). Yet Arthur Mervyn reconsiders the problem of social admission this time from the perspective of the poor. Guided by his wife’s injunction to “take the poor unfortunate wretch into our protection and care,” the doctor returns to find Mervyn’s doggedly insistent on remaining outside of Stevens’s domestic benevolence.20 The doctor overrules Mervyn’s recalcitrance but makes it clear that his offer of “all the kindness that it is our power to bestow” operates to invest Stevens with authority as Mervyn must “submit to directions . . . [with] good spirits and compliance,” even though all Mervyn actually needs is rest.21 Furthermore, the indigent’s initial obedience to the power of sympathy will not guarantee its durability as Stevens’s embrace is immediately challenged by the merchant Wortley, who insists on Mervyn’s unregenerate “unworthiness,” deduced by Mervyn’s prior employment by the swindler Thomas Welbeck. When Mervyn is reluctant to justify his origins and wishes to be evaluated only by his present acts, Stevens, masquerading free choice, threatens him with exclusion from the rewards of sociality if the youth does not take care to satisfy his superiors. Mervyn may stay silent and remain in the house, but Stevens will then refuse to give Mervyn the moral credit he needs to be incorporated within civil society if Wortley’s demands remain unfulfilled.22 By eschewing physical coercion for intangible shaming, Stevens tries to inculcate a Smithian “spectator within the breast” so that a docile Mervyn will regulate himself without the need for extrinsic coercion. As soon as the doctor takes Mervyn up, he starts a process of scripting the man’s interiority that begins by convincing Mervyn to confess his past, continues with Stevens’s decision that Mervyn should model him by learning to be a doctor, and ends with Mervyn having his own memoir literally written out by Stevens for Mervyn to complete later. While a cohort of critics procedurally align themselves with Stevens, as he tries throughout the text to verify the authenticity of Mervyn’s confessions, 19. 20. 21. 22.

Ibid., 8. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 13.

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Brown increasingly problematizes Stevens’s “protection and care” by investigating it as an instrument that administers the submission of those subjects marginally surviving on the streets for the benefit of the Wortley-esque mercantile burghers living in the newly erected townhouses. Stevens crafts Mervyn’s compliance as a treatment for Wortley’s own fear of commercial disestablishment. This therapy initially looks to regenerate deference among the poor so they will be willing to labor under conditions that create remonetarizing surplus value needed by tenuously solvent lower merchants. But Wortley’s particular interest in Mervyn is his link to the missing Welbeck, who has defrauded two merchants, Thetford and Jamieson, by falsifying their checks. For Stevens, Welbeck’s manipulation of Thetford’s and Jamieson’s fictitious capital is a fitting result for these haute capitalists, who are usurious speculators feeding off “the despair of honest men and the stratagems of rogues,” as smaller merchants, like Wortley, must borrow from them in ways that make them liable to be dragged within the riptide of their creditors’ downfall.23 Unlike Stevens’s strategy of creating interior shame within the poor, Wortley’s revanchist threat of physical violence on Mervyn externalizes the damage done to lesser merchants like himself as a result of infrabourgeois competition generated by the financial capitalism amplified by the rising re-export Caribbean trade, represented by Welbeck, Thetford, and Jamieson. Although Wortley blames Mervyn/Welbeck for his distress, this crisis would have been Wortley’s structural fate, since Welbeck is only a single manifestation of a much broader rehierarchizing of the bourgeoisie at the century’s end. Wortley’s desire to mystify the roots of his own emergency produces a mirroring effect as his claims of watching Mervyn’s “trembling consciousness” merely reflects his own fear of being smashed. Poor Mervyn often creates an uncanny sensation for his social superiors, who usually also have damaged finances, as he often appears like a doubling revenant of this fading bourgeoiseme’s fallen next generation. Mervyn is said to look like Clavering, the insane child of English rentiers, and the planter Vincentio Lodi’s son, who dies in the plague. Mervyn’s fantasmic mirroring of these recently deceased youths creates a recognition and repulsion-effect for this class fraction as they reflect on their own historic demise before a new wave of entrepreneurial traders. In turn, they can only steady their nerves by then proclaiming that he has a magnetic appeal to their souls, which 23. Ibid., 227.

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they explain in self-congratulatory terms as evidence of their sympathy. With the paradoxical reactions to Arthur, Brown charts out a social theorem: a bourgeoiseme’s fear of infrabourgeois antagonism is articulated by a contradictory gothic spectacularization of social others, who are then forced into a disciplinary emulation of this bourgeoiseme, so that they can feel that as they are loved by all they could not be allowed to fail. Stevens’s managerial intervention within these moments thus emerges from the encounter between an older (hence ostensibly respectable) mode of capitalism (Wortley’s) and a nascent (hence disreputable) one (Welbeck’s) that becomes mediated through the bodies of immiserated plebeians (Mervyn), who bear the burden of transcoding anxieties of economic redistribution into ones of cultural behavior. This claim is roughly congruent with Foucault’s signature argument that modern discipline works through the field of the body as institutionally based (medical, legal, and educational) professionals craft interiorized status identities, which differentiate individuals through taxonomic definitions of normalcy and deviancy achieved through a constant process of examination, in the dual sense of testing and optical surveillance. In Discipline and Punish, his most thorough treatment of this claim, Foucault indicates that late eighteenth-century Philadelphia, particularly, and the mid-Atlantic regions, generally, were the originating foundries of these soon-to-be globalized procedures, but he gives no explanation for why this might have been the case. This emergence most likely came about because of the specific conditions of the re-export harbors’ semiperipheral modernity that catalyzed a disciplinary chain reaction due to the convergence of three factors: the increasing demographic flows of deregionalized labor that could no longer be regulated in traditional ways; a middle class undergoing rapid internal transformation; and the presence of sudden money from the carrying trade that could finance new mechanisms of control with the material construction of large-scale institutions, like prisons and hospitals. The yellow fever plagues, a constant feature in the 1790s harbor towns, helped to accelerate the process of change as the poor seeking financial and medical care frequently had to certify their deference to superiors with a reference before they could receive assistance. While Brown clearly narrates the rise of disciplinary techniques in Arthur Mervyn, he chooses, however, not to give the same emphasis that Foucault does to the role of medical and penal institutions in managing the poor. Brown himself was personally familiar with doctors, like Benjamin

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Rush and Elihu Hubbard Smith, in and around Philadelphia and New York Quaker circles, who were energetic agents in these new institutions and their machinery of crafting virtuous subjects. Yet Arthur Mervyn foregrounds Dr. Stevens’s decision not to move Mervyn to the hospital when he first sees him and portrays Bush Hill hospital as chaotic and mismanaged, in ways that bear little resemblance to the actual reformation of that institution by Rush and others during the 1793 plague. Brown illustrates early 1790s medical organization and nursing practice in ways that he intimately knows are misrepresentations because he, unlike Foucault, does not see these official institutions as the main foundry of the new “informal” power relations. He focuses instead on the parainstitutional modes of bourgeois behavioral assumptions within “private” intercourse partly because he feels these zones to be more concentrated sites of power relays, as ones more attuned to circumatlantic flows, but also because he senses that they can conversely function as possible spaces for resisting ideological discipline in ways that the new institutions cannot. For this reason Brown looks to the language of seduction, in male commercial fraud and female lasciviousness, as a means of locating fractures within the disciplining codes covering the laboring class, a dislocation that Mervyn exploits to exit from Stevens’s mythology of bourgeois benevolence.

Corruption/Seduction: Engendering the Market Much like an industrial documentary that traces an object’s assembly from raw materials to a finished product sold on the shelves, Brown uses Arthur Mervyn’s tale to see what kind of “man” or typical subjectivity the social forces of the 1790s produce. Expropriated from his father’s farm, Mervyn immigrates to the city, quickly being cheated out of his savings and literally stripped bare of his clothes. Unlike earlier picaresque accounts that might narrate his journey as the tale of a man’s circuit on the wheel of fortune, Brown denudes Mervyn to see what becomes of a naked individual through the social cloaks and conditions provided for him. Far before the decimating onset of the yellow fever plague, Mervyn has been reduced to a bare life. His first task in Philadelphia is survival, the basic reproduction of human life. Going to a tavern in hopes of meeting a country merchant who might loan him money, he is treated to a meal by Wallace, a merchant’s young clerk. Offering Mervyn a place to sleep, Wallace

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takes him into a home and leads him upstairs to a darkened room, which he leaves after locking Mervyn inside. Mervyn discovers that he has been tricked into the bedroom of a young couple mourning their newborn’s death. Hoping to distract his wife’s grief, the father has placed a foundling in the room to be discovered by his wife. Mervyn overhears the man, Walter Thetford, discuss a plan to defraud a wealthy “gentleman” merchant, whose nickname, the Nabob, suggests a connection with the wealth from Caribbean plantations. As Mervyn recognizes the Carwin-like impossibility of legitimately declaring his presence without being immediately incriminated, he backs into a closet before escaping through a window, leaving his shoes behind as yet one more instance of human degradation. Deciding to leave Philadelphia, Mervyn wanders through a wealthy neighborhood on his way out. Realizing that he lacks money to pay the city’s exit toll, he asks money from a passing gentleman, Thomas Welbeck, who offers him a position as his secretary. Taken inside Welbeck’s mansion, Mervyn is given clothes in the new French style to wear. Admiring his remarkable transubstantiation in the mirror, Mervyn’s reverie is interrupted by a black servant summoning him to dine with Welbeck. The juxtaposition from a ragged Mervyn in Walter Thetford’s darkened bedroom to a dandified one in Welbeck’s mansion superficially seems to be in total opposition, but as suggested by the inversion of the occupiers’ initials (Walter Thetford, Thomas Welbeck) the scenes double each other, especially with regards to their interplay of property and sex. If Mervyn begins his Philadelphia sojourn hiding in Thetford’s to escape imprisonment as a burglarizing vagrant, he ends the first volume by being similarly forced to secret himself at Welbeck’s. Even before then, he has also backed into Welbeck’s bedroom through contractual coercion, since Welbeck’s initial offer of room, clothes, washing, and food rehearses the standard template of indenturement contracts.24 The actual practice of white indentured labor was already nearly obsolete in America by the 1790s, but Mervyn’s labor-power in the tale is rarely commodified as something exchangeable, in protoproletarianizing conditions of wage labor. Instead his body as a commodity, rather than the body’s quantified commodity labor, is transferred from place to place in conditions akin to slavery. As Mervyn repeatedly discovers himself squeezed in tight spaces (closets, coffins, attic crawl spaces), akin to live burials, these instances of cloistration

24. Richard B. Morris, Government and Labor in Early America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946), 393.

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convey how Mervyn finds himself unhappily enmeshed within restrictive labor practices that he cannot easily or innocently escape. Rather than experiencing commercial culture as a Franklinesque platform of opportunities or Smithian realm of mutually civilizing satisfaction, he suffers it as an asphyxiating and battering cell of containment through unfair exchanges.25 If Mervyn appears as a sly and ingenious character within its boundaries, it is because deceitful antagonism is the standard practice in actually existing mercantile society. The Philadelphia merchants whom Mervyn encounters are nearly all meshed together in various plots to cheat one another, and Welbeck’s forgery of banknotes and checks and his confidence games are extreme but not unusual events in this world. Even the “honest” farmer Hadwin and Dr. Stevens placate the commercial realm; Stevens is deferential to Wortley and Hadwin has mortgaged away his property and looks to his daughter’s marriage with the clerk Wallace, whose dubious integrity he never questions. While the period’s sensibilitarian fetish imagines that it can celebrate the purity of bourgeois civil society by separating it from the mechanisms of commercial profiteering that make the practice of that civil society feasible, the impossibility of maintaining this firewall plays out as with the routine overlap between financial and family affairs. By positioning the home scenes with Walter Thetford and Thomas Welbeck contiguously in the narrative, Brown indicates that the performance of bourgeois intimacy barely covers its brutality as the ostensibly separate realms of private (family, erotic) relations and public ones of profiteering through deceit have, in Karen Weyler’s felicitous phrase, intricate relations with one another.26 Practically no description of a family exists in the tale without an ensuing description of its internecine fits of anger and spite due to the misrule of commercial exchanges and vice versa. Mervyn, in Thetford’s closet, listens to Walter’s revelation of two frauds that mutually involve masquerades of property and sex. The first involves a plan to dupe Welbeck, who is the aforementioned Nabob, by relying on the decoy of trustworthiness between brothers to manipulate a shipping insurance claim. The second involves Thetford’s placement of the newborn in the bedroom so that his wife will be sentimentally moved to breast-feed the child. Neither Mervyn nor the reader is ever informed who the child’s actual mother might be, why it was abandoned, or 25. Brown, Mervyn, 45. 26. Karen A. Weyler, Intricate Relations: Sexual and Economic Desire in American Fiction, 1789 –1814 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004).

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the means by which Thetford has gained the child to then circulate it as like a commodity. The dual deceit of finances and foundlings that Mervyn witnesses in Thetford’s cabinet is immediately replicated at Welbeck’s house. Although Mervyn does not realize it, he has been brought inside by Welbeck because the trader wants to launch an unexplained confidence scheme on the mansion’s widowed rentier, Mrs. Wentworth, who is searching for her disappeared nephew, Clavering, whom Mervyn resembles. A second dissimulation involves one of Welbeck’s earlier thefts. Welbeck had cared for the unnamed sick son of Vincentio Lodi, who came from the Caribbean after having sold his father’s plantation. Before young Lodi dies, he entrusts Welbeck with 20,000 dollars for his sister, Clemenza. Welbeck takes Clemenza into his house, but never mentions the inheritance and instead impregnates her. Because Mervyn also looks like Lodi, Welbeck clothes him, possibly in Lodi’s own dress, to distract Clemenza from realizing her own helplessness or inquiring about the family fortune. The overdetermination of counterfeit business and familial relations manifests itself with the ubiquity of sexual infidelity and illegitimacy in the tale. Within Arthur Mervyn’s lifeworld, every woman is seducible and every man a libertine, if not in practice, then in the web of rumor. The newborn that Thetford finds was most likely abandoned as the unwanted product illegitimate sexual activity; Clemenza similarly carries Welbeck’s illegitimate child; and Mrs. Wentworth’s hyperbolic concern for the lost Clavering and desire that he should inherit her wealth suggests that she might be his unrecognized mother or lover, rather than his aunt. Recent studies indicate the period’s increasing lack of deference to older sexual codes, but Brown’s point is not to condemn women’s increasing sexual freedom, but to indicate how sly commerce refracts its impostures in terms of women’s immorality.27 Throughout the first volume, Mervyn, however, appears to internalize these moral precepts to gain establishment within a network of men by regulating women, usually by entering their bedrooms under the guise of ensuring the smooth flow of fictional credit and pronouncing himself as the proctor of women’s moral reconstruction. Yet by the second volume, Mervyn has refused these expectations by forgoing marriage with Eliza and 27. Clare Lyons, Sex Among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730–1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Richard Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).

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a career in medicine in favor of the sexually free, wealthy foreigner Achsa Fielding and expatriation to Europe without any pretence to occupational labor. Brown has Mervyn transgress these conventions as by the romance’s end he indicates that the conventional ending would mystify the horror of the underlying fraud on which these domestic arrangements and fortunes are built: Atlantic slavery.

De-Ideologizing Whiteness Arthur Mervyn’s much-less-commented-on second volume charts Arthur’s revolution of racial consciousness as he moves from participating within the mania of structurally racist privilege to abandoning a “white” status, which he comes to realize structures Philadelphia’s cultural and fiscal economy. Recent criticism of Arthur Mervyn has highlighted its treatment of race, especially given its depiction of black undertakers during the yellow fever plague, and this tendency mainly judges Brown harshly for these representations. As the first volume recounts Arthur’s being clubbed by a black carrier of the dead, who seemingly wants to accelerate the demise of the sick so that they can be quickly carted away and buried, the text appears to take sides in the pamphlet controversy between conservative white publicist Matthew Carey, who accused African Americans of extortionate rates and theft during their public service as nurses and undertakers, and African American ministers Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, who countered Carey with a spirited defense of their community.28 Because Mervyn never exculpates his attacker or pauses to reflect on the causes of black misbehavior with the same verve he does with the romance’s white rogues, this silence can be read as tacitly condemning black violence, especially as the narrative’s subtitle, “Memoirs of the Year 1793,” seemingly references the Haitian Revolution’s massacre of whites, which created an exodus of Creoles into Philadelphia and New York that year. Teresa Goddu, building on Bill Christophersen, notes that in Arthur Mervyn, “the specter of slavery lurks

28. Philip Gould, “Race, Commerce, and the Literature of Yellow Fever in the Early National Philadelphia,” Early American Literature 35, no. 2 (2000): 157– 86; John H. Powell, Bring Out Your Dead: The Great Plague of Yellow Fever in Philadelphia in 1793 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949); J. Worth Estes and Billy G. Smith, eds., A Melancholy Scene of Devastation: The Public Response to the 1793 Philadelphia Yellow Fever Epidemic (Philadelphia: Science History Publications, 1997).

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in every economic transaction.”29 Yet the meaning of this linkage remains unclear as Mervyn’s efforts to visualize the moral integrity of Philadelphia’s economic actors blurs into his increasing fascination with reading physiognomy in ways that suggest Mervyn is merely transferring the conditions of his class subordination into a racial register, where he can gain authority by joining hands with elite members of the mercantile community by having African Americans replace him as the object of the white community’s surveillance. Can such a maneuver by Mervyn be taken as evidence Brown’s belief in a hierarchy of racial taxonomy? Yet any claim for Brown’s failure to position himself against prejudice is difficult to reconcile with his personal activity, alongside several other Friendly Club members, in New York’s and Philadelphia’s abolition societies and his insertion of their positions within his magazine. An example of the latter involves Brown’s editorial choice in the September 1799 issue of the Monthly Magazine, between the composition of the first and second volume of Arthur Mervyn, to publish (after having most likely translated as well) Johan Friedrich Blumenbach’s “Observations of the Conformation and Capacity of the Negros” from the Magazin für das Neueste aus der Physik.30 Blumenbach was primarily known for his use of craniometry and anthropometry to support the theory of polygenesis, the idea that there are separate races of humans rather than variants of one. In his “Observations,” however, Blumenbach writes against his own prior arguments about Africans as belonging to a different race. Describing his visit to brothers who have returned from Haiti, Blumenbach notes that their attractive housekeeper has a physiognomy that only marginally differs from a European’s, despite her darker skin color. Blumenbach continues by admitting that after having examined the gross anatomy of several black bodies, he found the phenomic diversity among Africans to be as great as for other humans, thus questioning the stability of racial categories. He then insists that blacks are in no way mentally inferior and reminds his readers of Africans’ “astonishing memory, their great activity, and their acuteness in trade, particularly with gold-dust,” which even “the most experienced European merchant” must acknowledge. Recognizing several instances of “poetical genius” among both sexes of Africans, he cites a list of contem-

29. Goddu, Gothic America, 37. 30. Johan Friedrich Blumenbach, “Observations on the Conformation and Capacity of the Negroes. By Professor Blumenbach,” Monthly Magazine and American Review 1.6 (1799): 453.

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porary black artists and scholars and notes that the Parisian Academy of Science had “M. Lislet, a negro” as one of its correspondents. He concludes the essay by noting that “whole provinces of Europe” might find it difficult to produce individuals who could compare to these black “virtuosos, poets, philosophers, and correspondents of a learned Academy.” With Blumenbach’s piece in the Monthly Magazine, probably its first appearance in the United States, Brown seems to be seeking to publish challenges to taxonomic racism. The refutation of polygenesis was also a particular Friendly Club initiative as many of its members (Dunlap, Smith, Johnson, Miller, and Brown) were active in the New-York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves and Protecting Such of Them as Have Been or May Be Liberated. The New York abolitionist society had close personal and institutional links with the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, which also programmatically opposed notion of polygenesis and racial taxonomy.31 Elihu Hubbard Smith, as secretary of the society, joined with Dunlap to arrange the publication of Samuel Miller’s April 12, 1797, New York discourse, which rejects the notion that blacks are “an inferior race of beings,” since God has made of one blood all nations of men.” Although Miller does not immediately discount recolonization as a postabolition tactic, he thinks it impractical and argues instead for the creation of educational institutions that will enable ex-slaves to “exercise their rights, and discharge the duties of citizens.”32 A year later, Smith gave his own discourse, which forensically refutes the notion of polygenesis, claims that slavery is legitimized by the Bible, and the argument that Africans gain any “civilization” through slavery. Insisting that slavery is a “disease” of pre-Enlightened societies run by tyrants and priests, he condemns slave traders as “vendors of pestilence . . . manufacturers of plague.”33 Like Miller, Smith emphasizes that the phenomenology of freedom and citizen democracy will uplift former slaves. Four years earlier, Friendly Club member Theodore Dwight spoke to the Connecticut abolition society and justified the black violence in Haiti, despite its spread of blood over the face of the colony” and forced exodus of white Creoles, as the “language of freedom . . . the language of truth.” 34

31. Dun, “Dangerous Intelligence,” 255– 66. 32. Samuel Miller, A Discourse (New York: T. and J. Swords, 1797), 12, 31. 33. E. H. Smith, A Discourse (New York: T. and J. Swords, 1798), 11, 25. 34. Theodore Dwight, An Oration, Spoken Before the Connecticut Society, for the Promotion of Freedom and the Relief of Persons Unlawfully Holden in Bondage (Hartford: Hudson and Goodson, 1794), 18, 23.

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Since Mervyn’s transcription of ostensibly irrational violence by blacks stands against what Brown and his closest friends were publicly arguing while Brown was composing Arthur Mervyn, Brown’s purpose may be less to endorse Mervyn’s initial views, than to trace the de-ideologizing process of Mervyn divesting himself of an unquestioned, internalized racialism in order to liberate himself from slavelike conditions of economic bondage. Throughout the second volume, Mervyn admits a “revolution” is underfoot in his thinking about society.35 Although Mervyn does not yet understand the terms of this transformation, its roots begin after he resurfaces his body at Welbeck’s with the fashionable leathers and fabrics of French dress. Admiring his reflection in the mirror, he is then called for his mandatory meal with Welbeck by a black servant, Gabriel.36 At this point, Mervyn does not see any similarity between the figure of his own reflection in the mirror and that of the black man behind him, just as Wortley does not see Mervyn as his own mirroring image. To the contrary, Mervyn emphasizes the status gap between himself and blacks when he travels to Baltimore and a white widow orders her “two, sturdy blacks,” Bob and Cato, to remove him from the house he has entered. He stands his ground and assumes that these men’s “habitual deference for everything white, no doubt, held their hands from what they regarded as a profanation.”37 What, though, if this deference is occasional? What happens if blacks reciprocate the violence that has been done to them if given the opportunity in revolutionary times? This possibility has already entered Mervyn’s consciousness when he first sees black undertakers bringing bodies to the hospital. If Africans have been previously invisible to Mervyn, they gain a morbid materiality when he goes inside a house to look for a missing Wallace. In his blind spot, he glimpses “some appearance in the mirror,” this time not the finely dressed Gabriel, but a one-eyed, facially scarred, brawny man of “tawny skin” who strikes him with a blow so hard that he falls and, half-conscious, barely escapes being coffined alive, after being “fettered” for the trip to the potter’s field.38 As this thump knocks Mervyn and the reader out of a sequential perception of time, it acts as Brown’s “romantic” arresting device whereby readers can see how swiftly home manners may be overturned by the percolating anger in the wake of Atlantic slavery. 35. 36. 37. 38.

Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 71, 293, 314. Ibid., 51. Ibid., 379. Ibid., 148.

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As black servants and slaves appear on the margins of nearly all its depicted domestic scenes, Arthur Mervyn shows how closely intimate relations in Philadelphia are built on the infrastructure of slavery and the Caribbean economy and thus under threat of being “undone” by black rebellion. The repeated family emergencies in Arthur Mervyn are uniformly set off by crises of disappearing wealth that have their roots in the eruption of Caribbean slave revolts, especially the events of 1793 in Haiti, as slaves reappropriate the value of the labor lodged within their own bodies. The Maurice family of Baltimore faces bankruptcy when it cannot locate the bills of exchange that monetarize its Jamaican property, which had to be sold because “the Island [was] becoming hourly more exposed to the chances of war and revolution.”39 The main source of floating capital in the narrative, circulating bills that Vincentio Lodi’s son brings to Philadelphia, was likewise released from a plantation sale after Lodi was assassinated on the Guadeloupe streets by a vengeful slave, angry at the perceived failure of his master’s promise of manumission.40 The fear of racial revolt had already infiltrated Lodi’s imagination in his own composition of a historical romance about an outlaws’ rebellion that catalyzes a wider, popular uprising against the Sforza militarized aristocracy from which he believes he is descended.41 Similarly, Wortley’s marriage is threatened after Thetford’s and Jamieson’s accounts are damaged after Welbeck defrauds them to recover from his loss in his West Indies trading. Welbeck has watched his fortune vanish when his insurance against the ship’s confiscation is voided when “two French mullatoes” violate the vessel’s neutrality as they are caught smuggling arms to the West Indies, presumably for the revolution.42 The resulting cash crisis forces Welbeck to initiate a new wave of frauds that further unsettle private households. Brown underscores the insistent role of racialized violence sealed within domestic spaces when Mervyn achieves what seems to be a conclusive utopian escape from Philadelphia’s machinations after he becomes ensconced within the suburban farmhouse of the Quaker farmer Hadwin. While staying there, Mervyn fantasizes about marrying Hardwin’s daughter so that he can overcome his broken family history and settle as a self-sufficient farmer. This 39. 40. 41. 42.

Ibid., 241. Ibid., 92. Ibid., 126. Ibid., 101.

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aspirational pastoral is smashed when Mervyn decides to translate Lodi’s romance into English. As Mervyn proceeds with the translation, he comes to the journal’s midpoint and discovers that its pages are sealed together. Slicing the sheets apart he discovers the second half of Lodi’s money in bills hidden in the page’s interstices. Mervyn does not comment on the money’s source in racial coercion, but he decides to return to Philadelphia to deliver this money to Lodi’s sister and also look for Wallace, who has resisted leaving the plague city. Going to where he believes Wallace is hiding, Mervyn enters the house, is attacked by the black undertaker, and is almost buried alive with Lodi’s money, just as Maurice’s bills were initially interned on Watson’s body when Welbeck and Mervyn buried the sea captain. Money and bills seem cursed as the white noteholders of value sweated from black labor find themselves repeatedly thrown to the ground in ways that would conclusively take these markers of capital out of circulation. With Arthur Mervyn’s constant intersection of trade, slavery, domesticity, and violence, Brown suggests that no component of American society, even the Jeffersonian agrarian homestead or the interior space of Mervyn’s romantic imagination, can be insulated from the reverberations of Atlantic slavery’s accumulation by dispossession, since faraway commercial aggression will ultimately come home to roost. Mervyn believes that he is coming to Philadelphia to complete a circuit of domestic emotional and economic value, by returning the father’s money to his daughter, Clemenza, but he is caught within an international cycle of violence and retribution, as the Guadeloupe slave’s assassination of Lodi is doubled when Mervyn, now carrying the value from Caribbean slavery, is struck and nearly buried by the black undertaker, who is functionally preventing whites from continuing to profit from this capital soaked in blood. As value is brought in one floating vessel, the slave ships, it is transferred into another, the paper monetary instruments, which then become the currency for securing bourgeois marriages. In sharp rebuttal of Adam Smith’s ideal of commerce as generating a universalizing civil society as it pacifically evens out regional differences, Brown argues that the contradictions of mercantile accumulation in one sphere will float to reappear in another. Brown seems to insist that because the original moment of accumulation depends on violence on African bodies, this competitive force will be carried alongside the chain of exchanges manifested as acts of business fraud and forgery and the emotional deception in seduction. These spirals of deception

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will continue until the ex-slaves either regain their stolen value by acts of collective self-possession through revolt or destroy it by attacking whites and burying or burning the currency or credit bills that notarize the profits made from the flesh trade. In this strategy of devalorization, the sudden appearance of the foreigner Welbeck in mercantile Philadelphia and his wreaking havoc on it through his moral ambiguity, his ability to present a far different public face than his private one, and the corruption of the stability of Philadelphia’s moral and monetary markers can be read racially as the acts of a passing mulatto’s revenge on the world that circumatlantic slavery has created, much as Terry Eagleton argues that Heathcliff’s moody complexity in Wuthering Heights transmits Irish anger against English imperialism.43 Mervyn frequently notes Welbeck’s “foreign” physiognomy and accents, as if to imply Welbeck’s non-northern identity, much as he will later do with Achisa Fielding. With Welbeck’s insistence that his crimes result from the desire to maintain public honor and legitimacy, Brown transforms the classic Woldwinite plot into one that questions the obstruction of class and racial equality. In Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) and Holcroft’s Anna St. Ives (1792), the landed gentry’s reactionary insistence on honor codes, which cannot be rationally justified or juridically deliberated, leads the aristocracy into the passionate desire for tyrannical domination and the madness of private cabals, duels, and spectacles of consumer excess. Brown translates this condemnation of the old regime into a critique of the new mercantile elites, whose unquestioned assumption of privilege leads them to create a social environment based on fraud as a means of resolving the paradox generated by their seeking to establish a “free” market based on the Smithian leap beyond the crimes of early modern power regimes. Brown sees modern business as little more than a reformulation of feudalism in a bourgeois form, and this redirection of Woldwinite predicates initially shapes most of Arthur Mervyn’s “romantic” plot. Increasingly, though, Welbeck’s commission of crime to maintain public honor takes on another shade if a previously irrational compulsion for violence becomes legitimized when done in the service of reacting against the denial of (racial) dignity. Here Welbeck might be compared to the three-

43. Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London: Verso, 1995).

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quarters white son of Haitian trader Vincent Ogé. In Paris at the revolution’s outbreak, Ogé became increasingly bitter at his failure to convince the National Assembly to extend equality rights in the colonies to the free people of color. On his return to Haiti, a now more radicalized Ogé paid for arms to be smuggled from America and led a failed uprising of mixed-race men in 1790. Although he was quickly captured and brutally executed, Ogé’s uprising foreshadowed the later race rebellions. Like Ogé, Welbeck experiences the frustration of being nearly included within the sanctuary of bourgeois rights, but for a few marks of an unfortunate birth, which trips him into a desperate private revolt against the accepted conventions of dominant society. The explanation of racial revenge explains much of the mystery surrounding Welbeck’s motives throughout the romance. After Welbeck’s “father,” a Liverpool merchant, presumably involved in either the flesh trade or its support industries, goes bankrupt, Welbeck travels to Charleston, the main American port for slave importation, and becomes a currency counterfeiter, effectively weakening the slave trade’s currency. He murders Watson, which is an act of violence against a sea captain involved in the Caribbean trades and bearer of profits from slavery. Welbeck symbolically reverses positions with Watson: he buries the man in a shadowy basement much like a ship’s middle passage, while he himself escapes from a boat traveling between two shores. Welbeck’s seduction of Lodi’s sister, Clemenza, can be seen as his refusal of clemency on a child who was raised in the luxury provided by a slave owner’s wealth. In Wieland, Brown argued that Mettingen’s civil society was actually undone by its own contradictions, but he had not yet made the realization that a crucial source of this disruption was the circumatlantic geoculture seen with the Wielands’ dependence on African labor tending their fields. With Arthur Mervyn, Brown foregrounds these relations so that as Mervyn comes closer to realizing the inequities structured within moralized domesticity, he also slowly comes closer to recognizing the grotesquerie of racial hierarchy lodged within the terms of his status rise. The process is uneven, but the first pinprick of racial enlightenment comes when Mervyn is traveling to Baltimore to return money from the sale of a slave plantation. This trip, too, involves Mervyn’s attempted odyssey toward bourgeois respectability as it ends with his contemplating marriage after receiving a bounty reward. His journey south begins as he enters a carriage occupied by:

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a sallow Frenchman from St. Domingo, his fiddle-case, an ape, and two female blacks. The Frenchman, after passing the suburbs, took out his violin and amused himself with humming to his own tweedletweedle. The monkey now and then munched an apple, which was given to him from a basket by the blacks, who gazed with stupid wonder, and an exclamatory La! La! upon the passing scenery, or chattered to each other in a sort of open-mouthed, half-articulate, monotonous, singsong jargon. The man looked seldom either on this side or that; and spoke only to rebuke the frolics of the monkey, with a “Tenez! Dominique! Prenez garde! Diable noir!”44 The scene is reminiscent of Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through Italy and France, as Yorick, on his way to Paris, begins a polemic against Atlantic slavery after hearing a starling trapped in a cage singing, “I can’t get out,— I can’t get out.”45 The refugee Creole insinuates the same undertones of racial tension as he attempts to hold back the “black devil,” Dominique (Domingo/Haiti) trying now to get out. The La! La!, the there-ness, of racial conflict ultimately rebounds on Mervyn when he later decides to leave Philadelphia, this time, accompanied by a femme noir, Achsa Fielding, who Mervyn says has a “dark and almost sallow” complexion and Stevens describes as “tawney as a moor.”46 Achsa explains her skin tone as due to her Jewish origins, and Mervyn seems comfortable with this explanation of ethnic alterity. But he cannot hold back a subliminal reading with the appearance of Perrin, Achsa Fielding’s native British husband. A now French-looking Perrin enters Mervyn’s bedroom, and angrily confronts Mervyn before piercing him with a foil. The attack sends Mervyn to the floor until he awakens to realize that the entire episode was just a dream. But the scene’s woozy fall re-restages and condenses two prior scenes of black violence: the blow that Mervyn received from the undertaker and the carriage’s Francophone slaves’ La! (as the apparitional Perrin gives out an implied exclamation accompanying the sword’s penetrative thrust). As a continuation of these scenes, Perrin’s dreamy return suggests a darker shade to Mervyn’s relationship with Achsa, as intertextual references imply that 44. Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 370. 45. Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy by Mr. Yorick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 71–72. 46. Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 414, 432.

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Fielding may be using the unverifiable claim of her southern European Jewishness as a passing cover story for her (Caribbean) mixed race. That Achsa’s “tawniness” involves the same racial codification as the scarred undertaker’s is suggested by Brown’s contemporaneous interlinked writings regarding miscegenation, citizenship revolution, and resistance to the norms of nativist behavior, including the short story, “The Portrait of an Emigrant,” the longer fiction Ormond: or, The Secret Witness, both published in 1799 before Arthur Mervyn, and with the incomplete five-volume romance, Memoirs of Stephen Calvert (1799–1800), serialized in between the publication of Arthur Mervyn’s two volumes. In “Portrait of an Emigrant,” published in June 1799 issue of the Monthly Magazine, the story’s narrator has a conversation with a woman described as a local historian, given her close watch over her Philadelphia neighborhood. She describes a Caribbean Frenchman openly living as an equal with a mixed-race woman. The pair has also adopted a local, street-reclaimed, orphan girl, who is presumably black judging from her quoted dialect. Describing the couple’s careless existence of waking up late and working very little, despite their poverty, the local agent relates that the woman, now a circus pantomime, was an heiress to a large estate in Haiti and had been educated in France before she lost her fortune, a tale historically common as Caribbean female “free persons of color” often inherited considerable property that was used to secure marriage with a poorer white man.47 The couple’s “constitutional gaiety” and dedication to “the gratifications of sense, conjugal union, and of social intercourse” in spite of their poverty is admiringly related by the interlocutor, who is openly comfortable with interracial pairing and adoption, as she insists that the sensuous “French are the only people that know how to live.”48 The integration through sexual intimacy is further marked as the Creole is called Monsieur Lisle, a name that Brown’s readers would recall with Blumenbach’s celebration of “M. Lislet, a negro.” Brown reused the “Portrait” in Ormond’s description of a mysterious poor Frenchwoman, Martinette de Beauvais, who is seen living as a refugee during Philadelphia’s plague with an older white man thought to be her

47. Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 63– 64; Dorris Garraway, “Race, Reproduction and Family Romance in Moreau De Saint-Méry’s Description . . . De La Partie Françoise De L’isle Saint-Domingue,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 38, no. 2 (2005): 227– 46. 48. Charles Brockden Brown, “Portrait of an Emigrant. Extracted from a Letter,” Monthly Magazine and American Review 1, no. 3 (1799): 161– 64.

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father. Beauvais is secretly watched burying the man in her garden without notifying the city’s health officials and then suddenly disappearing. She later resurfaces, now under the name of Beauvais (she was previously known as Monrose) and living as a wealthy woman surrounded by black male servants who only speak French.49 Because the character has already masqueraded identities as she admits to cross-dressing during the French and American revolutions, all of Beauvais’s self-presentations may similarly be pantomimed masks. These serial impostures allow for the possibility that the dead man might not have been her father, but her lover, just as Welbeck had initially presented his liaison with Clemenza to Mervyn in the guise of paternity.50 Furthermore, the dark-skinned Martinette may also be a mixed-race woman, who might have freed herself from her master/lover by murdering him as a local enactment of the Haitian Revolution’s violence against whites (she came to the United States via Cap François and has already admitted killing other lovers). The yellow fever plague provides an alibi for a man’s sudden disappearance, and by later posing as a wealthy orphan with a retinue of servants, she can give protection to other Francophone Africans, who might likewise be self-freeing slaves in need of a disguise. If Martinette de Beauvais is intertextually related to Madame Lislet, she also doubles Achsa Fielding: they have roughly the same age and body shape, marry English gentry, lose husbands who became active Girondin politicians before being guillotined in the Terror, and mysteriously survive during the yellow fever plague by disappearing into the safety of their own communities. When Beauvais is asked how she could have survived after fleeing her house amidst the pestilence, when all doors would have been shut to runaway strangers, she replies that the French exile community would have welcomed any one of its own as a refugee regardless of the perceived risk.51 Martinette’s community, however, might be differentiated from native Philadelphia not only on regional, linguistic, and religious grounds, but also by its commitment to racial integration. This theme of Philadelphia having multiple social histories and communities living unbeknownst to another appears in the incomplete Memoirs of Stephen Calvert, which is a doppelganger tale involving the narrator’s

49. Charles Brockden Brown, Ormond; or, The Secret Witness (Peterborough: Broadview, 1999), 187. 50. Ibid., 201–2. 51. Ibid., 208.

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discovery that the source of confusion about his behavior lies with the return of his long-lost brother. The story of having your identity defined by the activities of a world, the existence of which you ostensibly remain unaware, is given an erotic charge as it is linked to Calvert’s sudden loss of desire to marry his American cousin, Louisa, in favor of an exotic foreigner, Clelia Neville, who has fled from her English noble husband because of his homosexual adulteries. Louisa is wealthy as well, but these riches come from her father’s cruel treatment of slaves, including the torture and murder of his own mixed-race daughter. As with Arthur Mervyn, Calvert’s rejection of a white woman seems to refuse sanitizing the results of slavery, and his turn to a foreign woman symbolically brings back Louisa’s half-sister to continue the family’s “black” lineage rather than that of the master’s “white” one as a better model for the future. Brown’s narrative treatments of mixed-race relations as a feature of and resolution to black revolutionary tumult stands as one aspect of his associates’ collective consideration of race. Throughout the period of Arthur Mervyn’s composition, Brown and his Friendly Club associates were preoccupied with the question of overcoming cultural prejudices against Africans, and they often indirectly carried out their arguments through comparisons to other historical and contemporary instances of ethnic hierarchies, like those involving anti-Semitism and other cases of Mediterranean subordination.52 For instance, in a May 1800 Monthly Magazine review of the Greeks under Turkish rule, the reviewer (most likely Brown himself ) insists that the contemporary “defects” of the Greeks are not congenital and mainly result from the occasional “humiliating state of depression” that the Ottoman empire holds them within. Once this “accumulated effect on the mind” is removed when the Greeks gain independence, then “the elasticity and vigour of the soul would have wide room for expansion.” The piece then ends by forecasting the effect of liberation, access to the rights of civic participation, and intimate equality by citing the example of England: “When one nation conquers another, and they become incorporated, by having the same rights, the same religion, the same language, and by being blended together by intermarriages, a long series of years renders them one people. Who can in England, distinguish the aborigines

52. See the exchange, Biblicus,“Queries Respecting the Jews,” Monthly Magazine and American Literary Review 3, no. 3 (1800): 184 and the reply, Charles Brockden Brown, “What Is a Jew?” Monthly Magazine and American Literary Review 3.5 (1800): 323–25.

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from the Romans, Saxons, Danes, Normans, and other foreigners? They are all Englishmen.”53 The idea of sexual congress as the most effective means of providing the platform for citizenship is also argued in the February 1800 issue of Brown’s Monthly Magazine by “H.L.” in “Thoughts on the Probable Termination of Negro Slavery in the United States,” which uses the example of ancient Rome’s acculturation of the descendants of slaves brought to Italy to argue that the odium of American slavery can be eventually removed by socially and sexually intermingling whites and blacks.54 If Achsa Fielding is another avatar in Brown’s series of sensual, dark women including Madame Lislet, Madame Beauvais, and Neville, Mervyn’s union with her conveys the claim that the traumatic history of Atlantic slavery and white fear of black agency can be removed in a time of revolutionary action through a new form of Woldwinite rational intimacy that withers away racial distinctions through education, citizen participation, and, most of all, sexual congress and the creolization of America. Arthur Mervyn’s argument for this convergence as a means of enabling both white and black liberation is more than simply an author’s statement of intent against the rise of the new disciplinary forces that divide through the classification of subjects. The romance’s turn against racial prejudice is enabled by Brown’s own familiarity with abolitionist networks, which provides him with a new model for progressive romance, as it suggests that fiction can indicate the existence of already operating oppositional parainstitutions, in this case the Underground Railroad, through inferential signs that readers may discern if they, like Mervyn, begin to look closely enough at the reflections before their gaze.

Inscribing the Underground Railroad During the 1790s, Philadelphia’s black community nearly doubled in size, overwhelmingly through immigration.55 The increase came both from the influx of Haitian slaves and servants who came with their former masters (500 in 1793 alone) and from Philadelphia’s status as the main site of refuge for runaway slaves, who relied on its network of white abolitionists 53. Charles Brockden Brown, “Interesting Account of the Character and Political State of the Modern Greeks,” Monthly Magazine and American Literary Review 2.5 (1800): 370 –74. 54. H.L. “Thoughts on the Probable Termination of Negro Slavery in the United States of America,” Monthly Magazine and American Review 2, no. 2 (1800): 81– 83.

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and free blacks to provide them with sanctuary and employment, especially in carting.56 With these increased numbers, Philadelphia’s blacks increasingly established their own residential neighborhoods and autonomous religious and social institutions, which also worked with white abolitionist networks.57 As an ideal location for runaway slaves, the city likewise became a magnet for slave catchers looking to reclaim “property.”58 Consequently, the City of Brotherly Love became a guerilla-like battleground between slave catchers attempting to kidnap runaways and abolitionists struggling to protect those seeking freedom by secreting them in safe houses. In February 1793, the federal government intervened to tip the scales by passing the first Fugitive Slave Act, which denied constitutional rights to runaways, made assisting the escape of a slave a federal crime, and established the juridical procedures by which a captured runaway could be taken before a local judge to be rendered back to her or his former master.59 The act set two countervailing tendencies in motion. On one hand, slave catching became a federally backed speculative industry, where kidnappers would buy the rights to a slave from a master for a fraction of the cost, hoping to profit greatly if the runaway was caught.60 On the other, the Underground Railway was more actively developed in response to the act.61 As one of the first major American parainstitutional organizations that brought together black and white abolition activists, the railroad’s early history has not been adequately recognized, partly because its participants’ reluctance to reveal its details has resulted in little evidentiary material. The only substantive accounts of the railroad are the recollections serialized in the abolitionist National Anti-Slavery Standard by one of its chief organizers, the Quaker tailor Isaac T. Hopper, which were later slightly revised and compiled by Lydia Maria Child in her 1853 biography of Hopper.62 But Hopper discussed events only from the 1790s and early 1800s, keeping silent about later phases, perhaps because unlike the earlier period its channels were still in use. Even with this material, the early phase of the Underground Railroad before 1800 has often been discounted by social historians who hesitate to 55. Gary Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 143; Dun, “Dangerous Intelligence,”89–96. 56. Nash, Forging Freedom, 135– 71; Richard S. Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2002), 83. 57. Nash, Forging Freedom, 164– 66. 58. Daniel Meaders, “Kidnapping Blacks in Philadelphia: Isaac Hopper’s Tales of Oppression,” Journal of Negro History 80, no. 2 (1995): 47– 65.

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explore black American history through sources mainly written by whites, a move that has led to the current trend of emphasizing the racism in white dissidents as part of a lapsarian narrative about progressivism’s ongoing decline rather than its continuity through adaptation. Such a gesture appears in Richard Newman’s comparative history of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (PAS) between 1780 and 1830s and the New England Anti-Slavery Society (NEASS).63 The PAS was one of the first institutions created to oppose slavery in the United States and was mainly composed of Quaker artisans and elite lawyers. With a highly formalized set of committees, the PAS’s public strategy involved petitioning the government for the abolition of slavery and a zealous prosecution of legal loopholes about habeas corpus and the time limits on which a slave could be held before gaining the right to freedom. Newman critiques this strategy of advocacy litigation as too self-congratulatory and focused on convincing political elites, rather than a mass-market audience, yet Newman is himself guilty of the charge that he places against the PAS. Although he acknowledges that not all of the PAS activists were bourgeois lawyers, he only parenthetically notes the role of the PAS’s “utility men”—Thomas Shipley, Thomas Harrison, Isaac Hopper, and Arnold Buffum —who did the manual labor of personal contact with blacks and traveling to get documents for the lawyers.64 By overly focusing on the archives of the PAS’s urban elites and being too solicitous of the PAS’s legal aspects as carried out by these elites, Newman overlooks the the organization’s other key role—its formation of the illegal Underground Railroad—mainly organized by the group’s urban artisans along with Philadelphia’s free black community and their churches and white, usually Quaker, suburban farmers throughout Chester County. The PAS certainly had a legal arm, but this transparent campaign provided the cover for a less legal one that would abet the runaway slaves who could not be protected by redress to the courts. This covert arm was run by artisans and farmers, who were more willing to engage in illicit activity, and they worked in conjunction with black leaders, like the ex-slave ministers John 59. Doolen, Fugitive Empire, 95. 60. Lydia Maria Child, Isaac T. Hopper: A True Life (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1853), 80. 61. C. W. A. David, “The Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 and Its Antecedents,” Journal of Negro History 9, no. 1 (1924): 18 –25. 62. Meaders, “Kidnapping”; Daniel Meaders, Kidnappers in Philadelphia: Isaac Hopper’s Tales of Oppression, 1780–1843 (New York: Garland, 1994). 63. Newman, Transformation of American Abolitionism. 64. Ibid., 31.

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Allen and Absalom Jones, who had studied at the PAS’s school for free blacks.65 Because of the Railroad’s illegality, little of its machinery was openly discussed by PAS members or written about in their committee reports. Consequently, the PAS has been an easy target for criticism, despite its commitment to refuting polygenesis and refusal to be frightened by events in Haiti. Even when the phrase “French Negro” became a synonym for the dangers of importing racial insurrection, the PAS continued to exert itself for the legal emancipation and covert transportation of Haitian blacks brought to the United States by Creole émigrés.66 When Philadelphians considered themselves to be at the vanguard of abolition, moving beyond their English colleagues, they did so based on their practical as well as theoretical attacks on the slave institution.67 According to Hopper, the railroad was initially formed by the Quaker tailor Thomas Harrison in the late 1780s. Harrison was no Grandee, but he was also not invisible since his name was included on the list of mainly Quaker elites to be deported for lack of patriotism and interned in Virginia during the War for Independence. Tipped off by one of the committee’s members, Harrison was able to escape capture by leaving town. He later returned and survived in hiding by living on work given to him on the sly.68 After the War for Independence, the PAS survived mainly because of Anthony Benezet, Harrison, and a handful of others, who worked with black Americans as much as for them. Benezet ran a free school for blacks, and Harrison, particularly, became the point of personal contact between the PAS and Philadelphia’s black community as his tailor shop functioned as the de facto office for free and runaway blacks seeking the legal or illegal help of the PAS.69 During the 1790s, Hopper was personally trained by Harrison in the Railroad’s operation, and he took over teaching the school from Benezet. He extended the Railroad’s network from Philadelphia’s black and white neighborhoods through its suburban counties by means of his reputation for probity and reliability and a system of codes signposted on farmhouses, so that the guides for runaways would know where it was safe to rest. 65. Nash, Forging Freedom, 68. Just as the PAS is tasked for being too restrained, so too is the first black institution, the Free African Society, formed in 1787 by Allen and Jones. Although routinely condemned for being little more than a mutual aid society, the FAS was most likely an early partner in the railroad’s construction. Nash, 98. 66. Dun, “Dangerous Intelligence,”171. 67. Ibid., 291. 68. Meaders, Dead or Alive, 278. 69. Nash, Forging Freedom, 90, 93.

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Because Hopper was so well known to slave catchers for his leadership of the Railroad, he would not use his own house as a sanctuary, lest a runaway there be vulnerable to recapture. But when a Maryland doctor accused Hopper with knowing where a runaway slave was hiding, Hopper replied that while he did not know exactly where the ex-slave had been secured, he could find out easily enough from his contacts in the free black community.70 Although Brown never explicitly mentions Hopper, it is inconceivable that he would not have been intimately aware of him and the Railroad. Hopper’s mentor, Harrison, was on the same list of Quakers to be interned in Virginia during the War for Independence as Brown’s father, and Harrison’s shop was around the corner from Brown’s residence, so that during his youth Brown would continually see free blacks congregating around Harrison’s ship in roles not related to service.71 Although Hopper was born neither in Philadelphia nor as a Quaker, he moved there in his early teens and soon thereafter joined the Society of Friends. Brown and Hopper were born in the same year and were literally next-door neighbors, living only a few numbers apart from each on Second Street.72 Both Hopper and Brown knew the same set of Philadelphia legal and medical elites, and as someone physically distinctive, not least for continuing to dress in the already obsolete style of early eighteenth-century Quakers, Hopper was not easily missed in the streets. In his fiction Brown often seems to include descriptions of his friends and colleagues. Elihu Hubbard Smith’s deism and supervision of a free black school in New York appears with the character of Waldegrave in Edgar Huntly.73 William Dunlap’s career shifts from painting to working in father’s business and then back to painting and his blindness in one eye appear with Ormond’s Stephen Dudley. Yet Brown does not use these embedded allusions as allegories about the person referenced, since there is no record that Dunlap, unlike Dudley, was ever a depressed alcoholic. These references seem mainly to exist as a means of drawing attention to something outside of the actual text’s narrative. This parenthetical indexing may also be the case

70. Meaders, Dead or Alive, 59. 71. Charles Brockden Brown lived (with his family) at 117 South Second Street while Harrison lived around the corner at 70 Third Street. James Hardie, The Philadelphia Directory and Register (Philadelphia: Jacob Johnson, 1794); Thomas Stephens, Stephens’s Philadelphia Directory (Philadelphia: Thomas Stephens, 1796). 72. Child, Hopper, 15. The city’s directories for 1794 have Hopper living (with his uncle) at 88/90 South Second Street in 1794, but in 1796 at 113 South Second Street in 1796, practically next door to Brown at 117 South Second Street. 73. Waterman, “Arthur Mervyn’s Medical Repository.”

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with Hopper, whose presence could be alluded to as Martinette Beauvais’s residence in Ormond, a house which also suggests that of the mixed-race Lislets, since Brown revised their tale for use in Ormond. Beauvais’s home is described as having been “the temporary residence of” William Penn.74 Hopper’s home, close by Brown’s, was also “formerly occupied by William Penn.”75 The Underground Railroad, moreover, seems specifically alluded to in two key scenes of Arthur Mervyn. The first appears when Mervyn enters a house searching for Wallace, with the idea of bringing him back to the Hadwin’s home as if he were a runaway. Reconnoitering the structure for the youth, Mervyn is smacked from behind by a disfigured black undertaker. Because Mervyn’s description of the undertaker’s scars duplicates what would have been used in a typical advertisement for a runaway slave, the man might not be as much a free man as someone who has made himself free by escaping from the brutalities of slavery elsewhere.76 This description implies the presence of an unrecognized historical aspect to the Philadelphia blacks’ service as undertakers during the yellow fever plague. As founders of the first black-run churches, the ex-slave ministers, Allen and Jones, who arranged for blacks to serve as officially recognized undertakers, perfectly understood the relation between political power and the need to concretize ideals within institutions. They had both formed some of the earliest black institutions and publicly fought the passage of the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act. They also understood the relation between parainstitutionality and politics, since their churches became key organizing nodes for the Underground Railroad. When the yellow fever broke out in 1793, Allen and Jones contacted PAS activist Dr. Benjamin Rush and offered their community’s help in carting and nursing the plague’s victims. This civic virtue needs to be considered in light of the ministers’ long-standing political expertise. As the Fugitive Slave Act had been passed a few months earlier, their offer might have had a twofold tactical purpose. The decision to provide the black community’s service might have been guided by the need for a new moral argument for a later campaign to get the act revoked.77 The certification of black undertakers

74. Brown, Ormond, 86. 75. Child, Hopper, 15. 76. Simon P. Newman, Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 96 – 97. The undertaker’s scar may also indicate village ritual markings, which suggests the undertaker may be African born. 77. Nash, Forging Freedom, 186 – 88.

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could also have been a tactic wherein runaways disguised as “undertakers” or “sick patients” could be moved openly through the city in daylight, accompanied by protecting whites. Free blacks undoubtedly did act as undertakers, but the events of the plague also provided a rare window of opportunity for accelerating the railroad’s traffic as it gave an ideal means for runaways to be moved about in a time when official oversight was weakened as the town’s leaders were preoccupied, absent, or silently supportive of the Railroad during the general chaos. Yet even then slave catchers continued to pursue runaways. Such a context helps explain why the scarred undertaker attacks and binds Mervyn. If Mervyn is functionally acting like a kidnapper as he goes into the house searching for a “runaway”—Wallace—the undertaker may have assumed that Mervyn was a slave catcher looking to recapture a black fugitive. Rather than the attack on Mervyn being an instance of irrational violence, this act could be a blow that hopes to bury, literally, those who would deny freedom to former slaves. The second subliminal mention of the railroad occurs at the first volume’s end when Welbeck leaves Mervyn alone in his mansion to be caught as either a thief or captured as a plague-carrier. Echoing his first claustration in Wallaces’s bedroom, Mervyn backs upward in the house to hide. Going to the top floor, he discovers and climbs into an attic crawl space, a recess narrow and low, where “one studious of concealment, might rely on its protection with unbounded confidence.”78 Mervyn barely escapes from this hideaway and his account to Stevens of his struggle ends the first volume. Despite the fact that Stevens has otherwise forced him to reveal secrets, and Mervyn professes to hate mysteries, he tells the doctor that he will neither describe the objects that he saw in the recess nor what can be inferred from their presence, since it is his “duty to pass them over in silence” until the time “when no inconvenience will arise from minute descriptions of the subjects.”79 For readers familiar with slave narratives, Mervyn’s reluctance to speak about the crawl space suggests that he has stumbled on one of the safe spots for hiding runaways. If Martinette’s sudden reappearance as a rich woman with black servants is read as a lighter-skinned, mixed-race woman’s alliance with darker-skinned slaves, a coalition then transpiring in Haiti’s rebellion, then Welbeck’s sudden appearance in Philadelphia as a rich man with black servants and his renting a house that has hiding places

78. Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 212. 79. Ibid., 213.

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can similarly be considered as an instance of racialized imposture for emancipatory ends. Mervyn’s (or Brown’s) reluctance to be explicit about the space functions ambivalently: it both withholds details about the Railroad while also indicating its presence to those who might recognize the implied meaning. If Mervyn has just indicated Welbeck’s mansion as a station on the Railroad, a similar move might be the case with the description of Mervyn’s journey outward and into Chester County, which could refer to the suburban route outward on the Underground Railroad. Such a claim is admittedly speculative, but it could be upheld in light of Brown’s knowing deployment of the gap between what he writes in the text and actual events. For instance, Brown was closely associated with Benjamin Rush and his involvement in debates about the plague, its etiology, and cure. Yet Arthur Mervyn’s description of a Rush-organized Bush Hill hospital and the scheme of black undertakers seems to attack Rush and other progressives. The discordance would have been immediately clear to Brown’s intended audience of professionals and merchants, who would know the real history, not least from reading about it in the pages of Brown’s magazine. Similarly, the character of Dr. Stevens seems to be drawn on the figure of Dr. Edward Stevens, a physician who came to Philadelphia from St. Croix in 1793 and was consulted by Rush during the plague for suggestions on treatment. Unlike Rush, who favored aggressive bloodletting and induced vomiting, Stevens favored a more gentle, reparative course of treatment, much like the one that Arthur Mervyn’s Stevens uses on Mervyn.80 More interestingly, he was the consul general of the United States to Santo Domingo in 1799, while Brown was writing the second volume of Arthur Mervyn. By this time, the Federalists had begun to realize the importance of Haitian commerce, and Stevens was instructed to encourage and support Toussaint’s revolution.81 Because Brown waits until the second volume to name the physician, who speaks anonymously in the first person throughout volume one, Brown’s use of Stevens as an appellation signals his readers to think of the recent governmental support for the black revolution. A likewise

80. Paul E. Kopperman, “‘Venerate the Lancet’: Benjamin Rush’s Yellow Fever Therapy in Context,” Bulletin of Historical Medicine 78 (2004): 539 –74. 81. Tim Matthewson, Pro-Slavery Foreign Policy (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003), 83– 84; Michael Zuckerman, “The Power of Blackness: Thomas Jefferson and the Revolution in San Domingue,” in Almost Chosen People: Oblique Biographies in the American Grain (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 175–218.

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maneuver, but this time in reverse, occurs as the only specific address mentioned in Arthur Mervyn is Achsa Fielding’s at 40 Walnut Street.82 In 1793, this was the residence of Sharp Delany, the collector of Philadelphia’s port, who drew up the list of individuals, like Brown’s father, to be questioned for possible internment in a Virginia detention camp during the War for Independence.83 In Brown’s romance, he appropriates the home of his father’s persecutor against its occupants’ xenophobia by turning it into the residence of a cosmopolitan woman with little interest in or commitment to American nationality. Given that Brown was writing for a knowing audience, these divergences must be seen as another use by Brown of formal disruption as a technical device to encourage readers to recognize the split between what is described on the romance’s pages and what is allusively suggested between its lines, the truths that an author wishes to convey by concealment. In Arthur Mervyn, this technique of narrative misdirection, imposture, and inference has a greater purpose than what was initially suggested in “Walstein’s School” as Brown recognizes that his text can also operate as a counterhegemonic parainstitution by encoding the location of already existing social alternatives for the reader to pursue. Donald McNutt notes Arthur Mervyn’s interplay between architecture and narrative: rooms often seem to be organized around secret or hidden texts, and texts often seem to indicate hidden spaces.84 This spatialization of narrative is more than just a trick of textual perspective as its vanishing point locates the presence of French, Quaker, and black parainstitutional networks of political action active in the coastal towns during the 1790s. Brown’s romance is not “writing from the bottom up” in the sense of giving a medium for non-elite voices to indicate the history of their exclusion from official accounts. Instead it might be a case of “writing outward from within,” as it indicates the presence of collectives that might allow readers to extricate themselves from captivity within dominant ideologies of race, class, and gender and become engaged with the politics of racial emancipation and human liberation. In Wieland, Brown registers the Franklinesque infiltration of the public sphere by the “secret” institution’s recoding of radical language. If reactive forces have begun to territorialize the 82. Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 354. 83. Peter Kafer, Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution and the Birth of American Gothic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 1; Hardie. Philadelphia Directory and Register. 84. Donald J. McNutt, Urban Revelations: Images of Ruin in the American City, 1790–1860 (London: Routledge, 2006).

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spaces of opposition, like the romance, Brown’s reply in Arthur Mervyn is to encode the romance in ways that allows his readers to move beyond the romance’s literal pages and join oppositional networks of egalitarian desire. If the description of Mervyn’s pedestrian entry into Philadelphia echoes Franklin’s own arrival in The Autobiography, then Mervyn proceeds to show how one might walk out of this world as well. In Arthur Mervyn, this turn emphasizes the abolition of racial (“white”) privilege and Negrophobia that the domestic narrative closure of marriage with Eliza Hadwin would otherwise consolidate. With his marriage to Achsa, Mervyn has symbolically learned to look beyond his fine image in French clothes at Welbeck’s and see the black servant (and the black undertaker) reflected behind him as part of his social horizon. The superimposition of Gabriel and Mervyn in the mirror becomes materialized in Mervyn’s erotic union with Achsa. Mervyn’s farewell joke about putting away the pen also urges the text’s readers to likewise refuse doleful discipline and put down the book in search of alternative communities outside of the reading closet. If Wieland shows Brown’s ambivalence about the limits on the progressive romance’s actions, Arthur Mervyn indicates his later sense that even though the terms of fiction may have been contested, they still present a means for staging alternative projections, albeit in ways that have forced the text to become more complicated and mysterious. Arthur Mervyn fails to provide readers with the normative happy end, preferring a ribald one of motley intercourse. For many readers the lines of Mervyn’s politicized dissent through this revolution of narrative consciousness are not precisely clear, since the intent of Brown’s conclusion seems overly encrypted. The paradox here is that Brown’s method of encoding dissent does not differ tremendously from that of Franklin’s social control. Perhaps it could not be any other way, since the paradoxes that lie at the end of Arthur Mervyn are, in the last instance, ones generated for the early American novel as it emerges from the transition between two phases of the world-system. Yet within these pressures, Arthur Mervyn slyly suggests that it is still possible to make our own histories — even if the initial terms are not ones of our own choosing — and refuse the limits of dominant social narratives, the regularizing prejudices that undermine progressive social transformation.

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afterword: early nineteenth-century american studies and the world-systems perspective

Shortly after 1800, American political economy, culture, and power shifts once more in relation to an altering world-system. Although the last phases of the long eighteenth century continue throughout the Napoleonic Wars, the new long wave’s constellation was already beginning to emerge. A key feature of this British-dominated phase involves the reshaping of imperial contours away from the Atlantic. The decline of sensational consumption in favor of textile and other machine-produced commodities was in tandem with the European powers’ decreasing focus on the Caribbean islands in favor of other lands. While the British abolished African slavery, it was not superseded by industrialized domestic wage labor but by a modified system of contractually coerced South Asian “coolie” labor transported around the globe. In the United States, the world-system’s inflection away from the Atlantic had three main effects. The British and French retreat from the Caribbean allowed the United States to organize its own mini-world-system by turning the Western frontier into a domestic periphery to the Eastern core, which could profit from the management of self-enclosed triangular trades much as Europe had done with the Atlantic. Without the foundation of this internal ecology, America’s industrial turn would have foundered. Second, the formal abolition of Atlantic slavery by the nations responsible for shipping Africans to the New World meant that the southern states had to move from importing labor to “producing” it locally with female slaves. The domesticization of capitalist demography and pediatrics provided a way for states like Virginia to be reincorporated as the culturalist South now had something to offer the inland cotton states: the articulation of a regional identity girded by increasingly theorized racial codifications. Finally, the renewed threat of British hegemony also quickened the reorganization of middle-class alliances in more northern states as the fraction that rose through re-export now directed the formation of a new coalition of

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middle-class interests. A “passive revolution” is the name Antonio Gramsci gives for a period of heightened stridency in political discourse, which masks the subterranean construction of a new consensus by former antagonists in order to prevent a radical overturning of class authority.1 Such an event begins in the last years of the eighteenth century and unfolds through the first decades of the next. The first noticeable sign of this fusion came with Jefferson’s election, which transpired as a result of the new merchants’ defection from the Federalists and their internal reconstitution of the Democrat-Republican party. The Federalists and their Whig descendents were unable to compete for so many years because they ineptly failed to recognize the tidal shifts during the 1790s and stop the erosion of their constituencies to the new coalition. While the re-export boom continues until the 1807 embargo, this continuity disguises the presence of a periodizing rupture in the century’s first years. As the re-export traders begin to invest and incorporate themselves within the institutions that had initially marginalized them, they reconstitute the framework of bourgeois society to better handle the conditions of the incipient nineteenth-century long wave. This complex refashioning, which involves constructing terms of inclusion for former enemies, requires new cultural forms that can support this labor of mediation. One effect of this passive revolution would be the demagnetization of the novel-form, now seen as too self-evidently an artifact of the last century. The cultural work of this phase’s writing now appears in the shape of belles-lettristic inquiries into what we consider the social sciences: history, medicine, economics, and the geography of travel accounts and environmental, topographical, and botanical studies. None of these texts should be considered as any less fictional than the preceding novels; the channeling of statements into one generic category rather than another indicates a sociocultural shift, but not a difference in epistemological rigor. The tactical maneuvers leading to a new middle-class consensus in the early part of the nineteenth century requires a study in its own right, and its description needs more space than is here available. One theme of this book has been the argument that our current understanding of the nineteenth century, including the phenomena that we take as signifying its newness—like urbanized disaffiliation from the agrarian

1. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 106 –14.

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hinterland — does not begin in the Jacksonian period but has its roots much earlier in the years closing the eighteenth century. The elision of modernity’s context in the late eighteenth century has been made easier to uphold as the interconnecting culture of the first two decades of the nineteenth century remain terra incognita for America studies. Any substantial understanding of the nineteenth century must be based, however, on a more thorough engagement with this period’s passive revolution, which laid the foundation for American growth. Yet any sense of this internal architecture will, in turn, require a more satisfying perception of the 1790s as the transitional period that establishes the terms of separation and continuity from the long eighteenth century. I hope the arguments presented here can provide the rudiments of a critical orientation that will enable a clearer gaze into the ensuing decades. The methodological approach used in this book has been a cultural materialism informed by a world-systems perspective. Such an approach is relatively new to literary studies, which must experiment with its predicates to determine its strengths and weaknesses for cultural analysis. Mine is just one such assay. A world-systems perspective brings two particularly useful features to the table. Because of its sensitivity to infrabourgeois struggles, it provides a more nuanced conceptual framework for analyzing social history than has often been the case. Cultural studies, or at least its British-descended variety, has relied on Marx’s economic writing for its compass, but this has resulted in overly relying on the stark binaries found there. His historical writings are considerably more attuned to the intricate nature of class fractions, bourgeoisemes, and plebeian splinters. As worldsystems analyses move away from a simplified model to one based on manifold interactions, it can help us move beyond the rigidities of some cultural materialist writings. World-systems analyses also allow for a new kind of comparative sociohistorical study different from the dominant models of cultural synchrony and stage development. Rather than only examining how one subunit compares to another at the same point in chronological time, a world-systems approach might compare one subunit to another at the same location within the recurring rhythmic cycle. For instance, nineteenthcentury India might be reviewed alongside fifteenth-century England as both regions express their entry into the global capitalist world market through similar alterations in precapitalist caste, belief, and narrative systems. As a world-systems perspective considers the spirals of capitalism’s logistic, it may overcome the current divide between studies of “postcolonial” lands

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and those involving the language traditions of the former imperial nationstates by encouraging us to recognize their shared captivity within the prison house caused by the restless accumulation for accumulation’s sake. Viewed in this light, my description of the re-export republic ideally can speak to other times and places as well. In this book, the events and artifacts of American origin were only my evidentiary materials. Historical capitalism’s logistic, bourgeois society, and its contradictions were the objects of study, and the desire to find a more comprehensive means of analyzing its cultural effects was the motive.

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abolitionism in Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, 264 in Friendly Club, 159, 279, 280 Haitian Revolution and, 264 in Philadelphia, 290 –91 Underground Railroad in, 290 –99 absolutism in Brown’s Memoirs of Carwin, 239 in Brown’s Wieland, 230, 247, 251, 253 and public sphere, 190, 192 rise of, 54 sensibility and, 54, 58, 59 in Woldwinism, 213, 217 academics. See education, higher Adams, Charles, 153 Adams, John, 18, 100, 113 Adorno, Theodor, 59 African Americans. See black Americans Africanization, of slavery, 83, 84 Africans as race, 279 – 80 as slaves (see slavery) suicide among, 90 tribal identity of, 88 – 89 Age of Reason, The (Paine), 159, 255 agriculture in southern economy, 110 traditional staples in, 110 –12 alcohol, processing of, 81 alcoholism, 234 n. 42 Alcuin (Brown), 240, 242, 248 alienation, in capitalism, 182 – 83 Allen, John, 292 –93, 293 n. 65, 295 Allen, Richard, 278 almshouses, 133–34 Alsop, Richard, 153 American Indians smallpox among, 73–74 in sugar production, 83– 84

American Review and Literary Journal, 162 American Revolution Brown’s family in, 164, 170 Brown’s views on, 2 consumption patterns in, 75 economic contraction after, 99 –101, 118 –19 in Franklin’s Autobiography, 180 American studies Atlanticism in, 22 elites as focus of, 5 on Franklin’s Autobiography, 176, 181 liberalism-republicanism debate in, 14 nationalism in, 8 –14 nineteenth-century, 301–3 traditional paradigms of, 8 Anderson, Benedict, 9 Anglo-French world-system, 51–95 blueprint of, 51 major geocultural elements of, 40 – 42, 51 sensational consumption in, 72 –73 slavery in, 84 sugar production in, 84 Anglo-Jacobinism, 147– 48 Anna St. Ives (Holcroft), 284 Annals of Europe and America (Brown), 1–2, 165 anthropology, structural, 41 n. 63 apprenticeships, 131 architecture in Brown’s narrative technique, 298 urban, 126 –27 aristocracy, bourgeois response to, sensibility in, 52 –58 Armitt, Elizabeth, 165 Armitt family, 164 Armstrong, Nancy, 7 Arrighi, Giovanni, 30

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Arthur Mervyn (Brown), 44, 45, 259 –99 disciplining of the poor in, 270 –74 ending of, 264– 65, 267– 68, 299 eroticism in, 248, 265– 66 gender roles in, 264– 68 narrative technique in, 259 – 60, 298 –99 original plan for plot of, 261– 62 racism in, 262, 263– 65, 278 –90 romance’s function in, 257, 298 –99 seduction in, 266, 274–78 slavery in, 45, 262, 278 –90 Underground Railroad in, 263, 264, 295–99 violence in, 264, 281– 83 “Walstein’s School” and, 261, 270 whiteness in, 45, 264, 278 –90 yellow fever in, 270, 274, 295 artisanship, re-exportation’s effects on, 130 –32, 136 –37 Asiento, 84, 107 associationism, 57, 92 Astor, John Jacob, 123, 157 Atlantic states, mid. See also specific states cultural institutions in, 115 population growth in, 114 re-exportation shifting power to, 5– 6, 109 –10 rise of, 113–17 Atlantic world-system in Brown’s writings, 162 – 63 major geocultural elements of, 40 – 42, 51 semiperiphery in, 40 sensational consumption in, 72 –73 transition between phases in, 40, 42 Atlanticism, new, 22 –27 circumatlanticism, 24–25 meanings of, 22 methodology of, 26 –27 object of, 26 –27 origins of, 22 –23 paradigm of, 22 –27 problems with concepts in, 23–24, 26 rebellions in, 25–26 slavery in, 24–25 transatlanticism, 23–24 audience. See readers authority, wrested, in Brown’s Wieland, 252, 256, 260 Autobiography (Franklin), 43, 169 –208 arrival in Philadelphia in, 172 –76 bourgeois sovereignty in, 43, 177, 207– 8 Brown approached through, 167, 169

index in Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, 299 Brown’s link to, 170 –72 in Brown’s Wieland, 171–72, 209 –11 civil society as revolution in, 177–78, 180 – 81 consensual persuasion in, 177–79 family in, 195–98, 253–54 ideology in, pursuit of, 181 institutional ideology of, 43, 199 –208 libraries in, 205– 6 Mandeville and, 199 –203 novelistic techniques of, 169 perfectibility in, 193–94, 199 political events in, 180 public opinion formation in, 206 –7 public sphere in, paradox of, 181, 189 –99, 206 – 8 publication of, 209, 209 n. 2 Puffy Roll scene of, 173, 175–76, 181, 189 readers of, ideal, 208 relevance of, 167, 169 secret societies in, 204–5, 207, 239 sociocultural trends in, 43, 167, 210 vice in, 199, 202 – 8 Baltimore in Brown’s writings, 163, 281, 285 population growth in, 114 re-exportation in, 109, 113–15 Baltzell, E. Digby, 115 bankruptcies, among patriot bourgeoisie, 118, 120 banks bourgeois speculation in stock of, 118 –21 expansion of, 114 Baucomb, Ian, 89 –90 belles lettres, 151 Belles Lettres Club, 162, 170 Bender, Thomas, 152 Benezet, Anthony, 293 Benjamin, Walter, 28 bettering houses, 134 black Americans in Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, 278 –90 in Philadelphia, 290 –91 as undertakers, 278, 281, 283, 286 – 87, 295–96 white fear of, 264 Blair, Hugh, Rhetoric, 255 Bleecker, Ann Eliza, The History of Maria Kittle, 144

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index Bleecker, Anthony in Friendly Club, 153, 157–58, 159 in The History of Maria Kittle, 144 Bleecker, Margaretta, 144 blood lineage, versus sensibility, 56 –57 Blumenbach, Johan Friedrich, “Observations of the Conformation and Capacity of the Negroes,” 279 – 80 bookkeeping, 142 – 43 books availability of, growth in, 128 in Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, 265 booksellers Caritat as, 143, 159 – 60, 265 French, 146 – 47 Boston cultural institutions in, 115 Franklin’s life in, 195–96 Franklin’s move from, 174–75, 196 power shift away from, 113–14 re-exportation in, 109, 113–15 bourgeois marketplace, in liberalism, 17, 19 bourgeois society. See civil society bourgeois sovereignty Franklin on, 43, 177, 207– 8 Habermas on, 181 bourgeoisie. See also middle class agglomeration of, 58 –71 competition within, 117–26 consumer revolution among, 74–76 cosmopolitan, 121–26 in English Civil War, 54–55 in Glorious Revolution, 56 institutions of, establishment of, 172 origins of, 54–55 patriot, 117–26 sensational consumption by, 74– 82 sensibility in, 52 –71 social transformation within, 117, 125–26 social welfare institutions used by, 70, 138 –39 and urbanization, 126 –39 young men of, 140 –50 Brecht, Bertolt, 228 Breen, Timothy, 75 Bridewell detention center (New York), 134 Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, The (Miller), 161 n. 205 Britain in Atlanticism, 23, 25–26 capitalism in, Marx on, 29 –30 in Caribbean trade, 4–5, 100, 301

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Civil War in, 54–55, 58 –59 contraction phase of, 97 and cosmopolitan bourgeoisie, 121, 122 French conflicts with, 1–2, 4–5, 97–98 Glorious Revolution in, 56 Jacobinism in, 147– 48 nineteenth-century domination by, 301 novels of, 10, 148 – 49 semiperiphery in, 39 slavery in, end of, 301 slavery in, psychological responses to, 91 trade balance with U.S., 99 –100, 103, 118 –19 trade influenced by, international, 1–2, 4–5 in transatlanticism, 23 British-centric novel studies, 7– 8 Brockden, Charles, 170 –72, 205 Brontë, Emily, Wuthering Heights, 284 Brown, Charles Brockden, 44– 45, 162 – 67. See also specific writings abolitionism of, 279, 290 accessibility of, 44 Caritat as publisher of, 146, 160 culture in works of, 161– 62 death of, 165 education of, 165 on eighteenth century, boundaries of, 1–2 family of, 162, 163, 164– 65, 170 –71 fictional writings of, 162 – 63 financial status of, 164– 65 on Franco-British tensions, 1–2 Franklin’s influence on, 170 –72 in Friendly Club, 12, 43, 150, 153, 155–56 geographical settings used by, 162 – 63 gothic themes of, 44, 164, 225–27, 260 on history versus romance, 220 –23 magazines edited by, 151, 153, 162, 163– 64, 165 methodology of, 164, 216 –29 Monthly Magazine under, 151, 162, 279 – 80 narrative rhythm of, 213, 227, 260 in Philadelphia, 161 n. 205, 162, 294, 294 n. 71 poetry by, 170, 171 re-exportation in works of, 165– 66 romances abandoned by, 257 structure of feeling in works of, 43 and Underground Railroad, 294 on Wollstonecraft, 44, 161 n. 205 youth of, 162, 164– 65

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Brown, Elijah, 164 Brown, James, 261 Brown, Mary Armitt, 164 Bruchey, Stuart, 105 Buffum, Arnold, 292 Bunyan, John, The Pilgrim’s Progress, 169, 178 –79 Burgett, Bruce, 16 –17 Burke, Edmund, 147, 217 Bushman, Richard, 128 Caleb Williams (Godwin), 212, 284 Camilla, “Negro Trade—A Fragment,” 50, 91, 95 Campbell, Colin, 78 –79 cannibalism, African fear of, 90 Capital (Marx), 29 –30, 185 capitalism analytic levels of, 29 –30, 36 in circumatlanticism, 25 cyclicality of, 34 definition of, 182 Engels on, 186 – 87 friendship in, 60 – 61 ideology in, 182 – 83 language regarding, 19 in liberalism, 15, 19 Marx on, 29 –30, 182 – 83 nationalist, 118 overproduction in, role of, 93 rationality versus emotion in, 59 sentiment versus domesticity in, 22 slavery in, 85–91 social impact of, 184– 87 sympathy in, 59, 61– 62 Tocqueville on, 187– 88 tools versus machines in, 184– 85 world-systems perspective on, 30 –35 capitalist world-system, 32 –35 commodities in, 32 –33 definition of, 2 Carey, Matthew, 278 Caribbean trade, 99 –109. See also re-exportation Anglo-French embargoes in, 4–5, 100 Anglo-French retreat from, 301 cosmopolitan bourgeoisie in, 122 illegality in, 107– 8 opening of, 101–5 shipping trends in, 103–5 staples in, demand for, 136 Caritat, Hocquet bookshop of, 143, 159 – 60, 265

index Brown published by, 146, 160 career advice from, to John Davis, 140, 142, 143 emigration to U.S., 159 library of, 159 – 60 Carolinas power shift away from, 109 –10 Virginia’s coalition with, 112 carrying trade. See re-exportation Catlin, Lynde, 153, 157 centralization, political, bourgeois support for, 119 Chandler, Alfred, 66, 69 Charleston, re-exportation in, 109 –10 Chase-Dunn, Christopher, 30, 33 n. 53, 34, 39 Chernow, Barbara A., 121 n. 75 Child, Lydia Maria, 291 Chinard, Gilbert, 160 Christophersen, Bill, 278 chronovoric consumption, 79 – 82 Atlantic slavery as, 86, 89 characteristics of, 79 – 82 definition of, 79 of luxury goods, 80 churches, black, 295 Cicero, 222 –23, 233, 234, 249, 251 circulatory system, of world-systems, 38 –39 circumatlanticism in Brown’s writings, 162 – 63 origins of concept, 24–25 cities. See also specific cities architecture of, 126 –27 artisans in, 130 –32 bourgeoisie in, 128 –30 class divisions in, 126 –39 lower classes in, 132 –39 population growth in, 114, 126 as public space, 127–28 re-exportation’s effects on, 42, 126 –39 in semiperiphery, 39 sensational consumption in, 128 –30 social welfare institutions in, 138 –39 Cities of the Dead (Roach), 24–25 citizenship, in republicanism, 18 City Dispensary (New York), 159 City Hall Park (New York), 134 City Hotel (New York), 159 – 60 city-states, Italian, 71 city-systems, 33 civic humanism, sensibility and, 41– 42, 58 civil society definition of, 166

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index formation of, 19, 177, 181 ideology in, 181 as revolution, Franklin on, 177–78, 180 – 81 sensibility in, 52 –58 trade’s effect on, 47 Civil War, English, 54–55 civility, definition of, 56 class divisions. See also specific social classes in Brown’s Memoirs of Carwin, 237– 42 in Brown’s Wieland, 235–37, 248 – 49 in capitalism, 185– 87 in cities, 126 –39 racism in, 262, 263– 64 selfishness in, 201 sensational consumption and, 76 –77 in sentimental fiction, 146 slavery as, 86 in Woldwinism, 248 – 49 Clauder, Anna Cornelia, 107– 8 clerks, 142 clubs. See conversational clubs coffee British versus French, 104, 104 n. 26 processing of, 80 – 81 re-exportation of, 102 social consumption of, 82 coffeehouses news at, 66 – 68 as public sphere, 192 sensational consumption in, 81– 82 colonialism re-exportation in, 103 slavery in, 83– 84, 86 sugar in, 82 – 84 Columbia College, 160 Columbian Centinel, 102 –3 commerce. See trade commercial writing noncommercial writing stemming from, 143–50 origins of, 141– 43 commodities in capitalism, 182 – 83 in re-exportation, 102 semiperiphery’s handling of, 37–38 in world-systems, 32 –33 commodity fetishism Marx on, 38, 63, 183 slavery and, 87, 89 common sense, Scottish School of, 60, 255 commonwealth, in republicanism, 14 competition, within bourgeoisie, 117–26

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Comus (Milton), 267, 268 Congregationalism, 115 Congress, U.S. on Jay’s Treaty, 107 on national university, 13 Connor, Steven, 241 consensus, in Franklin’s Autobiography, 177–79 conservatism, in higher education, 254–56 constitutionalism, bourgeois support for, 119 consumer revolution, 74–76 consumption. See also sensational consumption emulation in, 74–78 historical changes in patterns of, 74– 82 re-exportation affecting, 42 Contrast, The (Tyler), 146 conversational clubs. See also Friendly Club; Junto literary development in, 150 –52 magazines of, 152 –53 and public sphere, 152 –53 “coolie” labor, 301 cooperation, in Franklin’s Autobiography, 178 Cope, Thomas, 165 core zones definition of, 33, 33 n. 53 in European world-system, 73 semiperiphery in relation to, 37–39 Coromantees, 88 corporations, cosmopolitan bourgeoisie and, 123 corporeality sensational consumption and, 81– 82 sensibility and, 55–57, 67– 68 of sentimental narratives, 94 of slavery, 91 corruption, in Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, 274–78 cosmopolitan bourgeoisie, 121–26 cultural practices of, 124–26 definition of, 121 economic influence of, 124 versus patriot bourgeoisie, 121–26 rise of, 121–23 and slavery resurgence, 138 social status of, 138 social welfare institutions used by, 138 –39 wealth of, 123–24 young men in, 140 –50

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cotton rise of, 110 –11 slavery in production of, 110, 111 cotton gin, 110 –11 counterpublic spheres, 192 crafts system, 130 –32, 136 –37 credit after American Revolution, 100 cosmopolitan bourgeois access to, 121 sensibility and, 53, 58 –59, 66, 68 – 69 Creoles, Haitian, immigration of, 129 –30, 278 criticism. See literary criticism Crusades, 73, 236 Cuba, opening of trade in, 105– 6 cultural history, of merchants, 45 cultural materialism structures of feeling and, 29 and world-systems, 27–30, 303 cultural nationalism, 9 cultural production. See also novel(s); sentimental fiction in new Atlanticism, 22 –25 cultural studies based on Marx, 303 merchants’ role in, 45– 46 culture in Boston versus Philadelphia, 115 Brown’s writings on, 161– 62 of cosmopolitan bourgeoisie, 124–26 of Haitian refugees, 129 –30 origins and emergence of, 46 – 48 re-exportation’s effects on, 115–17 trade’s link to, 45–50 in world-systems, 35 Curti, Merli, 256 Curtin, Philip, 86 Darnton, Robert, 69 Darwin, Erasmus, 253, 254 Davidson, Cathy, Revolution and the Word, 16 Davis, John, 140, 142, 143 Davis, Lennard, 7, 254 death(s) in Brown’s Wieland, 229 –32 social, in slavery, 85– 86, 87 debts, state, bourgeois speculation in, 118 –21 deference, in Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, 270 –74, 281 DeLancey, James, 118 n. 65 Delany, Sharp, 298

index democracy in Brown’s Wieland, 210 –11 in republicanism, 18 Democracy in America (Tocqueville), 187– 88 Democrat-Republican Party creation of, 112 in nineteenth century, 302 re-exportation and, 107, 109 Virginian elites in, 112 Dennie, Joseph, 164 Descartes, René, 59 dialogue, in Woldwinism, 217 diet, American, 128 discipline in Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, 270 –74 Foucault on, 188 – 89, 262, 273 Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 262, 273 Discourse on the State and Prospects of American Literature, A (Mitchill), 12 –13 disease. See also yellow fever among American Indians, 73–74 urbanization and, 127, 135 documentation in re-exportation, 141– 42 in Underground Railroad, 292 Dodgshon, Robert A., 33 n. 53 Doerflinger, Thomas M., 122 domestic novels, 21 domesticity evolution of concept, 21 sentiment associated with, 21–22 Douglass, Ann, 16, 146 Duer, William, 119, 120, 121 Dunlap, William abolitionism of, 280 Brown influenced by, 163 in Brown’s fiction, 294 on Brown’s financial status, 165 in Friendly Club, 153, 154 n. 174, 155, 156, 159, 161 n. 205 Dwight, Theodore abolitionism of, 280 in Friendly Club, 153, 154 n. 174 Dwight, Timothy, 154 n. 174 Dwight, Timothy, IV, 160, 161 Dwight, Timothy, V, 160 Eagle Bank, 161 Eagleton, Terry, 284 East consumption in, 77 trade with, in European world-system, 71–73

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index economic history, in world-systems perspective, 30 economies, world, 31–32 economies of scale, 32 economy, American agriculture in, 110 competition in, within bourgeoisie, 117–26 contraction of, after Revolution, 99 –101, 118 –19 re-exportation’s effects on, 102 – 6 in South versus North, 110 Edgar Huntly (Brown), 294 “Editor’s Address to the Public” (Brown), 153 education, higher. See also universities; specific schools for bourgeois young men, 42 – 43, 140 – 41 expansion of, 42 – 43, 140 Friendly Club’s involvement in, 154–55, 160 – 61 moral sense in, 255–56 in New England, 115 sensibility in, 254–56 education, political, through literature, 44 eighteenth century Brown on boundaries of, 1–2 Marx on characteristics of, 51 three revolutions of, 177 Elements of Criticism (Kames), 255 Elias, Norbert, 67 elites in Atlanticism, 26 patriot bourgeois, 118 –21 re-exportation’s effects on, 6 in republicanism, 18 as romantic heroes, 225–26 in Underground Railroad, 292 Virginian, 111–12, 115–16 Ellis, Markman, 52 embargoes, Anglo-French, 4–5, 100, 101 emotion in capitalism, 59 and credit, 69 –70 gender associated with, 20 –21 in sensibility, 59, 67, 69 –70 in sentimental narratives, 94 empires, world, 31–32 emulation, in consumption patterns, 74–78 Engels, Friedrich, 186 – 87 England. See Britain English Civil War, 54–55, 58 –59 Enlightenment, 73

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“Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue, An” (Mandeville), 200 –201 entrepreneurship, among cosmopolitan bourgeoisie, 123 epidemiology, 127 equality as fiction versus ideal, 221–22 gender, 243– 45, 248 eroticism in Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, 248, 265– 66 in Brown’s Wieland, 242 – 43, 248 errata, Franklin on, 193–94 estrangement, in capitalism, 182 – 83 ethics, situational, in Franklin’s Autobiography, 194 ethnic groups, trade within, 68 ethnie definition of, 83 n. 56 in sugar production, 83 Europe. See also specific countries nationalist paradigm in, 10 psychological effects of slavery in, 89 –91 staples in, demand for, 136 world economy in, 32 European world-system, origins of, 71–72 exclusion, from public sphere, 191–95 exportation. See re-exportation; trade Fable of the Bees, The (Mandeville), 199 family in Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, 276 –77 connections, of patriot bourgeoisie, 123 in Franklin’s Autobiography, 195–98, 253–54 FAS. See Free African Society Faugeres, Peter, 144 Fäy, Bernard, 147 fear of blacks, among whites, 264 of white cannibalism, among Africans, 90 Federalist Party decline of, 108 on Haitian Revolution, 105, 109, 297 in nineteenth century, 302 re-exportation and, 5, 6, 107, 108 –9 feeling. See also emotion in capitalism, 59 structures of, 27–29, 38, 43 fellow-feeling as cognate of sensibility, 52, 58, 60 and credit, 69 Smith on, 63– 65

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Fellows, John, 159 femininity. See also gender in Brown’s Wieland, 242 – 43 in literature, 144– 45 Ferguson, Adam, 60 feudal labor versus slavery, 85 versus wage labor, 85 fiction. See also novel(s); sentimental fiction social sciences as, 302 by young bourgeois men, 143–50 flour prices, 136 folktales, 27, 38 foreign relations, American, 108 –9 Foucault, Michel and Brown’s Wieland, 232 on discipline, 188 – 89, 262, 273 Discipline and Punish, 262, 273 on modernity, 139, 190 Fourier, Charles, 240 France British conflicts with, 1–2, 4–5, 97–98 in Caribbean trade, 4–5, 100, 301 contraction phase of, 97 expansionism in, 2 Federalist relations with, 108 –9 and international trade, 1–2, 4–5 Jacobinism in, 147– 48 National Convention of, 5, 101, 104 novel production trends in, 10 Francophone immigrants sensational consumption by, 129 and sentimental fiction, 146 – 47 Frankenstein, Victor, 217 Franklin, Benjamin, 43, See also Autobiography on bourgeois sovereignty, 43, 177, 207– 8 Brown influenced by, 170 –72 Brown’s critique of, 44 in Brown’s Memoirs of Carwin, 237–39 Brown’s poem on, 170 family of, 178, 195–98 as founding father, 167, 170 friends of, 197 institutional ideology of, 43 Poor Richard’s Almanac, 204 Franklin, James, 178, 196 –98 Franklin, Josiah, 195–97 Free African Society (fas), 293 n. 65 freedom, in capitalism, 182 – 83 French Revolution in rise of American novel, 4–5, 10 and young bourgeois men, 147

index French-language publications, 146 – 47 Friendly Club, 12, 150 – 62 abolitionism in, 159, 279, 280 Brown in, 12, 43, 150, 155–56 commercial activities in, 156 –58 connections among members of, 153–59, 154 n. 174 in educational institutions, 154–55, 160 – 61 magazines run by, 151 membership of, 151, 153–59 politics in, 154–55, 161 n. 205 on racism, 289 social heterogeneity of, 151 split of, reasons for, 161 n. 205 vocations in, 154, 155, 156 –58 friendship in marketplace, 60 – 61 in Woldwinism, 218 Fugitive Slave Act (1793), 291, 295 Gardner, Jared, 3– 4 gender in Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, 264– 68 in Brown’s Memoirs of Carwin, 239 – 42 in Brown’s Wieland, 242 –51 in capitalism, 185– 86 racism in struggles over, 262, 263– 64 in sentimental fiction, 144– 46 in traditional paradigms, 20 –22 in Woldwinism, 218, 240 gentlemen, bourgeois, 56 –57, 121 geoculture, 51–95 in Brown’s writings, 162 – 63 definition of, 35–36 major elements of, 40 – 42, 51 of world-systems, 35– 40 geography Brown’s use of, 162 – 63 human, in Atlanticism, 22, 25 political, in world-systems perspective, 30 geopolitics, geoculture compared to, 35, 36 Ghost-Seer, The (Schiller), 213–14 Gilroy, Paul, 24 Gin Lane (Hogarth), 76 Girard, Stephen, 123 Glorious Revolution, 56 Göchhausen, E. A. A., 215 Goddu, Teresa, 278 –79 Godechot, Jacques Leon, 22 –23 Godwin, William Brown’s critique of, 44

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index and Brown’s Wieland, 235 n. 48 Caleb Williams, 212, 284 on French events, 147, 148 Friendly Club views of, 161 n. 205 history of mentalities in, 212 n. 7 moral geography of, 259 popularity of, in higher education, 255 in Woldwinism, 212 Wollstonecraft’s relationship with, 218 gold trade, 71–74 Goldin, Claudia D., 103 n. 20 gothic themes, Brown’s methodology of, 164 motive for using, 44, 225–27 and urban realism, 260 Gramsci, Antonio, 207– 8, 302 Great Awakening, 58 Great Britain. See Britain Greece, 289 grief, in circumatlanticism, 24–25 Habermas, Jürgen and Franklin’s ideology, 181 on public sphere, 16, 20 n. 32, 68, 152, 189 –93, 203, 207 Haiti illegality in trade with, 108 opening of trade in, 104–5 Haitian Revolution European interests in, 26 Federalists on, 105, 109, 297 racial violence in, 264 refugees from, 129 –30, 290 trade during, 104–5, 104 n. 29 Harrison, Thomas, 292, 293, 294 Hedges, William, 162 Heilman, Robert, 10 heroes, of romances, 225–26 higher education. See education Hillhouse, James, 161 historical capitalism commodities in, 32 geoculture and, 36 Marx on, 29 sentiment in, 19, 22 world-systems perspective on, 31, 32 history, American cultural, merchants in, 45 foreign wars influencing, 1–2 phases of, 1–2 trade in, 1–2, 49 history, versus romance, 220 –22 History of Maria Kittle, The (Bleecker), 144

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Hobbes, Thomas, 200 Leviathan, 54, 177 Hogarth, William, Gin Lane, 76 Holcroft, Thomas, Anna St. Ives, 284 homoeroticism, 268 n. 14 honor codes, 57, 284 Hopkins, Terence, 30 Hopper, Isaac T., 291, 292 –95, 294 n. 72 Horkheimer, Max, 59 household production, versus sensational consumption, 128 –29 housing boom in, 127, 134 for poor, 134, 135 rising cost of, 135, 136 human geography in circumatlanticism, 25 in new Atlanticism, 22 humanism, civic, and sensibility, 41– 42, 58 Hume, David, 60, 92 Hunt, Freeman, 45– 49 Hutcheson, Francis, 60 Iberian world-system decline of, 84 silver and gold in, 71–72 slavery in, 83– 84 sugar in, 82 – 83 Ibos, 88 ideology in Brown’s Wieland, 252 –54 as fetishism, 183 in Franklin’s Autobiography, 43, 181, 199 –208 Habermas’s arguments against, 181 Marx on, 182 – 83 meaning of term, 181– 83, 188 – 89 pursuit of, 181 of whiteness, in Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, 264, 278 –90 imaginary, nationalist, 8 –14 imagination, in sensational consumption, 79 immigrants Francophone, 129, 146 – 47 Haitian, 129 –30 imperialism. See colonialism indentured labor, 275 independence, political in nationalist paradigm, problems with, 8 –10 non-Western struggles for, 9 India, sugar in, 82

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360 indigenous populations smallpox among, 73–74 in sugar production, 83– 84 individualism, possessive, 14 individuality, rise of, Tocqueville on, 187– 88 industrialization artisanship and, 131, 137 mass production in, 137 slavery as form of, 86 tools versus machines in, 184 information. See news infrastructure, urban, 127 institutionality bourgeois move toward, 172 covert, Brown on, 44, 229, 239, 251 cultural, 115 culture and economics in contact through, 166 in Franklin’s Autobiography, 43, 199 –208 functions of, 166 versus parainstitutionality, 59 – 60 as theme of American novels, 166 insurance industry, 124 intellectual overproduction, 141 intelligence, of Africans, 279 – 80 intimate sphere, 181, 190 –91 irony, 252 Italian city-states, 71 Jacobinism, 147– 48 James, C. L. R., 104 n. 29 Jay’s Treaty, 107, 108 Jefferson, Thomas, 109, 113, 302 Johnson, Horace, 157 Johnson, Seth, 157, 160 Johnson, William, 153, 157 Jones, Absalom, 278, 293, 293 n. 65, 295 Jordan, June, 253–54 journalism, young bourgeois men in, 143 Judaism, in Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, 268, 286 – 87 Junto club, 171, 204–7 Kafer, Peter, 164, 172 n. 9 Kames, Elements of Criticism, 255 Keats, John, 214 Kent, James, 153, 158, 160, 161, 161 n. 205 Kinderman, Wolf, 172 n. 9, 214, 236 n. 50 knowledge, in Brown’s Wieland, 210 –11 Knox, Henry, 120 Kramnick, Isaac, 18

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index labor in capitalism, 182 – 83 “coolie,” 301 feudal versus wage, 85 indentured, 275 slave (see slavery) labor studies, nativism in, 23 land. See property rights land appropriation, in colonialism, 83 land speculation, by patriot bourgeoisie, 118 –21 language in Brown’s Wieland, 244– 45, 250 of capitalism, 19 of patriots versus merchants, 6 of republicanism, in social transformation, 18 of sentiment and domesticity, 21–22 Larrain, Jorge, 182 law. See legal careers left-right politics, in paradigm debate, 15 legal careers Brown’s rejection of, 162, 165 young bourgeois men in, 141 leisure, in republicanism, 18 Lemisch, Jesse, 23 n. 35 Letters of the Republic (Warner), 16 Leviathan (Hobbes), 54, 177 Lewis, Frank D., 103 n. 20 liberalism evolution of concept, 15, 19 meaning of term, 18 –19 origins of, 15 possessive individualism in, 14 public sphere in, 16 and republicanism, paradigm debate between, 14–20 versus republicanism, difference between, 15–17 Tocqueville on, 187 n. 33 libraries Caritat’s circulating, 159 – 60 Franklin’s subscription, 205– 6 lightning, 177 Linebaugh, Robert, The Many-Headed Hydra, 24, 25–26 Linn, William, 159, 160 Literary Assembly, 161 n. 205 literary criticism by Franklin, 179 nationalism as criteria in, 11–14 Literary Magazine, 153 literary world, merchants in, 143

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index living, cost of, 136 Locke, John, 14, 57 logical boundaries, 34, 39 logistical analysis, 41 n. 63 London, semiperiphery in, 39 Looby, Christopher, 180, 253–54 Loshe, Lillie Deming, 2 –3 love, companionate, 57 lower classes re-exportation’s effects on, 132 –39 sensational consumption by, 76 –78, 82 sympathy for, 65 Loyalists, emigration of, 117, 118 n. 65 loyalty oaths, 164, 170 Lukács, Georg, 59 luxury goods. See also sensational consumption chronovoric consumption of, 80 desire for, as social good, 47 in origins of trade, 46 – 47 plebeianization of, 78 sugar as, 76 transformation to staples, 128 in world empires, 32 in world-systems, 32 Lyttle, David, 242 n. 63 Machiavelli, Niccolò, The Prince, 177, 180, 207– 8 machinery, versus tools, Marx on, 184– 85 Macomb, Alexander, 120 Madison, James, 92 madness, in Brown’s Wieland, 231, 232, 244, 250, 253 magazines of conversational clubs, 152 –53 of Friendly Club, 151 young bourgeois men writing for, 143 Malthus, Thomas, 93 Mandeville, Bernard, 199 –203 “An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue,” 200 –201 The Fable of the Bees, 199 manifest destiny, 1 manufactory artisanship and, 131 rise of, in eighteenth century, 51 Many-Headed Hydra, The (Linebaugh and Rediker), 24, 25–26 Marat, Jean-Paul, 147 marginalia, 3– 4 marketplace bourgeois, in liberalism, 17, 19

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friendship in, 60 – 61 invisible hand of, 63, 172, 199 sensibilitarian expansion of, 58 –71 marriage arranged versus companionate, 57 in Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, 261, 264– 68, 299 in Brown’s Wieland, 242, 247 in Woldwinism, 240 Marx, Karl Capital, 29 –30, 185 on commodity fetishism, 38, 63, 183 cultural studies based on, 303 on eighteenth century, characteristics of, 51 Hunt compared to, 48 – 49 on ideology, 182 – 83 on machinery versus tools, 184– 85 Mandeville compared to, 201 and semiperiphery, 38 on slavery, 85 and world-systems perspective, 34 masculinity, in Brown’s Wieland, 243– 44 Mason-Dixon Line, 116 Masons, 203, 215 mass production, rise of, 137 McKendrick, Neil, 74 McKeon, Michael, 7 McNutt, Donald, 298 Medical Repository, 151, 155 medicine, in Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, 271–74 Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist (Brown), 44, 237– 42 class divisions in, 237– 42 gender relations in, 239 – 42 Philadelphia in, 238, 288 – 89 race in, 287, 288 – 89 Memoirs of Stephen Calvert (Brown), 171 mentalities, history of, 212 n. 7 merchants. See also bourgeoisie cultural history of, 45 friendship among, 60 – 61 language used by, 6 in literary world, 143 re-exportation’s effects on, 42 after Revolution, economic problems of, 118 –21 Meredith, Hugh, 197 metals trade, 71–74 methodology of Atlanticism, 26 –27 of Brown, 164, 216 –29

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methodology (continued) for studying American novel, 7– 8, 15, 303 metropolitan experience, 126 –27 middle class. See also bourgeoisie absolutist state used by, 54 competition within, 117–26 core compared to, 33 definition of, 33 domesticity in, 21–22 higher education for, 42 – 43 nineteenth-century changes to, 301–2 in novel’s emergence, 7– 8 variety within, 7 Middle Passage in Atlanticism, 24 historical precedence for, 85 rise of, 84 Miller, D. A., 254 Miller, Edward, 151, 153, 155, 159 Miller, Samuel, 153, 160, 161 n. 205, 280 millionaires, 123–24 Milton, John, Comus, 267, 268 minisystems, 31 Mintz, Sidney W., 76, 77, 78 miscegenation, 287–90 in Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, 265, 267– 68, 287 in Brown’s Memoirs of Carwin, 288 – 89 in Brown’s Ormond, 287– 88 in Brown’s “Portrait of an Emigrant,” 287 in Monthly Magazine, 289 –90 misogyny, in capitalism, 186 mistresses, 130 Mitchill, Samuel L. at Columbia College, 160 A Discourse on the State and Prospects of American Literature, 12 –13 in Friendly Club, 12, 153 in Literary Assembly, 161 n. 205 Medical Repository edited by, 151, 155 modernity definitions of, 139 Foucault on, 139, 190 semiperipheral, 35– 40 monarchy, republicanism on, 17 monopoly, in slave trade, 84 Montesquieu, 92 Monthly Magazine, 151, 162, 279 – 80, 287, 289 –90 moral sense, 255–56 morality, selfishness in, 199 –201

index Moreau de St.-Mery, 129, 130 n. 109, 146 Morris, Robert, 118, 119, 120, 121, 121 n. 75 Mughal empire, 73 Mumford, Thomas, 153, 154 n. 174 music, consumption of, 79 – 80 Nancrede, 146 narcotics. See sensational consumption narration, in Brown’s Wieland, 244, 252 narrative technique, Brown’s in Arthur Mervyn, 259 – 60, 298 –99 disruption in, 213, 227, 260, 298 narratives. See specific types nation building, patriot bourgeoisie in, 118 National Anti-Slavery Standard, 291 National Convention, French, 5, 101, 104 nationalism in Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, 269 Brown’s lack of, 164, 213–14 capitalism and, 118 definition of, 11 in Europe, 10 language of, versus re-exportation, 6 as literary criteria, 11–14 in novels, lack of, 4, 13–14 public versus private spheres in, 12 slavery and, 89 traditional paradigm of, 8 –14 nationality, origins of concept in slavery, 89 nation-states, 11 in Atlanticism, 22, 26 core and periphery zones of, 33 formation of, in state romances, 213–14 in world-systems perspective, 33–34 native Americans. See American Indians nativism, in Atlanticism, 23 natural science, history as, 221 Navigation Acts, 100 NEASS. See New England Anti-Slavery Society “Negro Trade—A Fragment” (Camilla), 50, 91, 95 negromania, 264 Nelson, Benjamin, 60 neo-stoicism, 42 Nettels, Curtis P., 110, 120 –21 neutrality, oceanic, 107 new Atlanticism. See Atlanticism New England culture in, 115 higher education in, 115 merchant emigration from, 124–25, 125 n. 90

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index power shift away from, 5, 109, 113–17 re-exportation’s effects on, 5, 109, 113–17 New England Anti-Slavery Society (NEASS), 292 New England Courant, 178 New Historicism, 25 New York abolitionist society of, 280 almshouses in, 134 artisans in, 131–32 in Brown’s writings, 163 Friendly Club of (See Friendly Club) Haitian refugees in, 129 housing in, 127, 134, 135 infrastructure of, 127 merchants in, number of, 123 news in, 114–15 population growth in, 114 poverty in, 133–35 re-exportation’s effects in, 109, 113–15 after Revolution, condition of, 126 –27 sensational consumption in, 128 slavery in, resurgence of, 137–38 staples in, cost of, 136 New York Hospital, 159 Newman, Richard, 292 news re-exportation and, 114–15 sensibility and, 66 – 68 sources of, 66 – 68 newspapers French-language, 146 serialized fiction in, 10 young bourgeois men writing for, 143 New-York Magazine, 144, 255 Nicholson, John, 120 North. See also New England; specific states economy of, versus South, 110 nineteenth-century changes in, 301–2 re-exportation’s effects on, 113–17, 137–38 slavery in, resurgence of, 137–38 wealth in, versus South, 112 North, Douglass C., 102, 110, 136 novel(s), American in 1790s, rise of, 2 –3 after 1800, decline of, 2 –3, 155, 302 in 1820s, rise of, 3 emulation in consumption of, 78 French Revolution influencing, 4–5, 10 institutionality as theme of, 166 methodology for studying, 7– 8, 15, 303 by new writers, 3

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versus other forms of fiction, 3 reasons for studying, 3– 4 versus romances, 3, 221, 257 trade and, 4–5, 6 –7 traditional paradigms for, 8 by young bourgeois men, 143–50 novel(s), English, 10, 148 – 49 obscurity, in Franklin’s Autobiography, 181 “Observations of the Conformation and Capacity of the Negroes” (Blumenbach), 279 – 80 Ogé, Vincent, 285 Oliver and Thompson, 105 Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, The (Engels), 186 – 87 Ormond: or, The Secret Witness (Brown), 287– 88, 294, 295 Osbourne, Charles, 171 Ottoman empire, 73, 289 overproduction in capitalism, 93 intellectual, 141 Paine, Thomas, 44, 147 The Age of Reason, 159, 255 Palmer, Elihu, 159 Palmer, R. R., 22 –23 paradigms, traditional, 1–27 Atlanticism in, 22 –27 liberalism and republicanism in, debate over, 14–20 list of, 8 methodology and, 7– 8, 15 nationalism in, 8 –14 need for revision of, 27 problems with, overview of, 8 public sphere in, 20 –22 sentiment in, 20 –22 versus world-systems perspective, 30 –35 paradox of public sphere, in Franklin’s Autobiography, 181, 189 –99, 206 – 8 of sensibility, in sentimental fiction, 92 –95 parainstitutionality bourgeois support for, 172 in Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, 262 – 63 culture and economics in contact through, 166 functions of, 166 versus institutionality, 59 – 60 sensibility and, 60

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PAS. See Pennsylvania Abolition Society passive revolution, of nineteenth century, 302 –3 patriot bourgeoisie, 117–26 versus cosmopolitan bourgeoisie, 121–26 definition of, 117 economic problems of, 118 –21 and political centralization, 119 in social welfare institutions, 138 patriotism. See also nationalism Brown’s lack of, 164 language of, 6 re-exportation and, 5– 6 Penn, William, 295 Pennsylvania Abolition Society (PAS), 280, 292 –93, 295 perfectibility, in Franklin’s Autobiography, 193–94, 199 periodical fiction, 3– 4 periodization debate over, 15 definition of, 15 periphery definition of, 33, 33 n. 53 in European world-system, 72 –73 semiperiphery in relation to, 37–39 personality, in African tribal identity, 88 persuasion, consensual, in Franklin’s Autobiography, 177–79 Philadelphia abolitionism in, 290 –91 black community of, 290 –91 Brown living in, 161 n. 205, 162, 294, 294 n. 71 in Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, 274–76 in Brown’s Memoirs of Carwin, 238, 288 – 89 in Brown’s Wieland, 209 in Brown’s writings, 163 cultural institutions in, 115 economy of, postwar, 101 Franklin’s arrival in, 172 –76 Franklin’s life in, 196 –97 Haitian refugees in, 129, 290 population growth in, 114 poverty in, 134–35 re-exportation in, 109, 113–15 staples in, cost of, 136 Underground Railroad in, 292 –95 Walnut Street Prison of, 134 yellow fever in, 295–97

index Philips (English slaver), 90 Phyfe, Duncan, 131 Pilgrim’s Progress, The (Bunyan), 169, 178 –79 Pitkin, Timothy, 137 plebeians. See lower classes pluralism, and liberalism, 15 poetry, by Brown, 170, 171 political geography, in world-systems perspective, 30 political parties, re-exportation and, 5– 6, 106 –9 political romance, viability of, 254–57 politics centralization in, bourgeois support for, 119 in Franklin’s Autobiography, 180 in Friendly Club, 154–55, 161 n. 205 in public sphere, 191 re-exportation’s effects on, 5– 6, 106 –9 selfishness in, 203 in sentimental fiction, 147– 49 Virginian elites in, 111–12, 115–16 polygenesis, 279 – 80 Pombal, Marquis de, 222 –23 Poor Richard’s Almanac (Franklin), 204 popular sovereignty, in liberalism versus republicanism, 16 population growth, in cities, 114, 126 populism, of republicanism, 17 pornography, 265 “Portrait of an Emigrant, The” (Brown), 287 Portugal gold and silver in, 71–72 slavery in, 83– 84 possessive individualism, 14 post offices, 10 post-Enlightenment, 11–12, 210 potatoes, 78 Potts, Stephen, 197 poverty in Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, 270 –74 cost of staples and, 135–36 public assistance for, 133–34 (See also social welfare) urban, re-exportation creating, 42, 130, 133–39 powers, separation of, 92 Price, Jacob, 75, 131 Prince, The (Machiavelli), 177, 180, 207– 8 Princeton University, 160

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index private sphere in Franklin’s Autobiography, 189 –99 gender associated with, 20 –22 in nationalism, 12 sentiment associated with, 20 –21 processing in sensational consumption, 80 – 81 of slaves, 86, 89 profit(s) in capitalism, Marx on, 182 from re-exportation, 106 –7 from sensational consumption, 71–72, 83 progressivism, Brown on, 45 property rights, sensibility and, 57 Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber), 176 psychological effects of slavery, on Europeans, 89 –91 public assistance, rise in need for, 133–34 public good, private vice and, 199 –203 public health, urbanization and, 127 public opinion, formation of, 206 –7 public sphere cities in, 127–28 conversational clubs in, 152 –53 exclusion of groups from, 191–95 gender associated with, 20 –22 Habermas on, 16, 20 n. 32, 68, 152, 189 –93, 203, 207 in liberalism versus republicanism, 16 in nationalism, 12 paradox of, in Franklin’s Autobiography, 181, 189 –99, 206 – 8 politics in, 191 traditional paradigm of, 20 –22 transparency versus obscurity in, 181 public welfare. See social welfare publishing industry cultural nationalism and, 9 Francophone influence on, 146 – 47 gender in, 144– 46 men’s influence on, 144 and nationalist paradigm, 9 –10 Puffy Roll scene, of Franklin’s Autobiography, 173, 175–76, 181, 189 Puritans, 129 Quakers in abolitionism, 292, 293 in Brown’s family, 162, 164– 65, 170

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in New England, rise of, 115 in Underground Railroad, 293 Queen’s College, 160 race in miscegenation, 265, 267– 68, 287–90 polygenesis theory of, 279 – 80 racism in Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, 262, 263– 64, 278 –90 in capitalism, 186 in geoculture, 36 in slavery, 84, 86, 87 after slavery’s end, 264– 65 taxonomic, 279 – 80 radicalism, in higher education, 254–56 Randolph, John, 12 rationality in Brown’s Wieland, 210, 250 in capitalism, 59 in Franklin’s Autobiography, 176, 194 in public sphere, 191 sensibility and, 59 in sentimental narratives, 94 in Woldwinism, 216 –18 Raynal, Abbé, 72 Read, Deborah, 173, 175, 189, 193–94 readers Brown’s involvement of, 225–28, 260 of conversational club magazines, 152 –53 of Franklin’s Autobiography, 208 gender of, 144– 46 reading, act of Brown’s views of, 268 in Woldwinism, 218 realism, urban, 260 rebellions, in Atlanticism, 25–26 Rediker, Marcus, The Many-Headed Hydra, 24, 25–26 re-exportation, 97–167 Brown’s writings on, 165– 66 Caribbean in, opening of, 101–9 and class divisions, 126 –39 in colonial era, 103 commodities involved in, 102 consumers affected by, 42 cosmopolitan bourgeoisie in, 121–26 cultural effects of, 115–17 economic effects of, 102 – 6 geocultural foundations for, 42 merchants affected by, 42

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re-exportation (continued) New England affected by, 5, 109, 113–17 in nineteenth century, 302 origins of, 5, 101 political effects of, 5– 6, 106 –9 poverty from, 130 profitability of, 106 –7 and rise of American novel, 6 –7 and sensational consumption, 128 –30 social transformation caused by, 5– 6, 109 –13 South affected by, 5, 109 –13 and urbanization, 42, 126 –39 wealth from, 5, 102 –3, 109, 130 young bourgeois men working in, 141– 43 Reformation, 58 refugees French, 146 – 47 Haitian, 129 –30, 290 regionalism in nationalism, 11 in novel’s emergence, 4, 8 Reising, Russell, 257 religion and cultural institutions, 115 sensibility and, 57–58 representations in circumatlanticism, 25 structures of feeling in, 27–29 republicanism commonwealth in, 14 elites in, 18 and liberalism, paradigm debate between, 14–20 versus liberalism, difference between, 15–17 meaning of term, 17–18, 20 public sphere in, 16 reinvention of, 17–18, 20 Restoration, 54–55 revolts, in Atlanticism, 25–26 revolution(s). See also specific conflicts civil society as, Franklin on, 177–78, 180 – 81 consumer, 74–76 of eighteenth century, 177 of nineteenth century, 302 –3 Revolution and the Word (Davidson), 16 Revolutionary War. See American Revolution Rhetoric (Blair), 255 Rice, Grantland, 179

index Ridgely, Joseph, 249 Roach, Joseph, Cities of the Dead, 24–25 Robespierre, 147, 148 Rogers, Moses, 157, 159 romances Brown’s abandonment of, 257 functions of, 257, 298 –99 heroes of, 225–26 historical, 222 –25 versus history, 220 –22 methodology of, 216 –29 versus novels, 3, 221, 257 political, viability of, 254–57 state, 213–14 themes of, 225 romanticism, 217–19 Rome, ancient, 290 Rousseau, Jacques, 59, 69, 200, 217 Royal African Company, 84 rural areas, emigration to cities from, 126 Rush, Benjamin, 101, 161 n. 205, 264, 273–74, 295, 297 Samuels, Shirley, 241 Santo Domingo, 105 Savary, Jacques, 90 Schiller, J. C. F. von, The Ghost-Seer, 213–14 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 77 science, history as, 221 scientific racism in Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, 263– 64 in slavery, 86, 87 Scottish School, 60, 255 secret societies in Brown’s Memoirs of Carwin, 239 in Franklin’s Autobiography, 204–5, 207, 239 seduction narratives bourgeois use of, 95, 146 in Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, 266, 274–78 in Brown’s Wieland, 236 –37, 242, 249 self-determination, myth of, 1 self-interest, in sensibility, 61– 62, 93 selfishness Franklin on, 202 –3 Mandeville on, 199 –201 societal effects of, 199 –203 Woldwinism on, 217 self-representation, by young male writers, 145– 46 semiperiphery, 36 – 40 in Atlantic world-system, 40 boundaries of, 38 –39

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index in European world-system, 73 geocultural calibration by, 37–39 structure of feeling in, 38 United States as, 40 Senate, U.S., 107 sensational consumption, 71– 82 acceleration of, 128 –30 chronovoric, 79 – 82 cultural significance of, 78 decline of, 301 emulation in, 74–78 examples of, 40, 51, 72 versus gold and silver trade, 72 –74 historical changes in patterns of, 74– 82 by lower classes, 76 –78, 82 as major geocultural element, 40 – 41, 51 processing and, 80 – 81 profits from, 71–72, 83 re-exportation influencing, 128 –30 slavery linked to, 84, 91 Sensational Designs (Tompkins), 16 sensational goods cosmopolitan bourgeoisie in, 122 re-exportation of, 102 slavery in production of, 84 sensibility, 52 –71 civic humanism as feature of, 41– 42, 58 in civil society, 52 –58 in conversational clubs, 151 and corporeality, 55–57 definition of, 52 –53 in higher education, 254–56 as major geocultural element, 40 – 42, 51 and marketplace expansion, 58 –71 paradox of, 92 –95 and property rights, 57 and religion, 57–58 sensational consumption linked with, 81– 82 and slavery, European responses to, 91 sociocultural claims of, 53 stoicism in, 41– 42 sentiment evolution of concept, 21–22 gender associated with, 20 –22 in historical capitalism, 19, 22 private sphere associated with, 20 –21 rational, 216 –18 stoicism and, 42, 94 traditional paradigm of, 20 –22 in Woldwinism, 216 –18 sentimental fiction, 92 –95 Friendly Club in, 150 – 62

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gender in, 144– 46 as major geocultural element, 40 – 41, 51 paradox of sensibility in, 92 –95 politics in, 147– 49 stoicism in, 94 by young bourgeois men, 143–50 Sentimental Journey Through Italy and France, A (Sterne), 286 serialized fiction, 10 Seven Years’ War (1756 – 63), 1–2, 97 sexism in capitalism, 186 in geoculture, 36 sexuality in Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, 265– 68, 277–78 in Brown’s Wieland, 242 – 43, 248 Haitian refugees and, 130 in romances, 225 in Woldwinism, 218 Shaftesbury, 42, 53, 57, 59, 199 Shakespeare, William, 226 Shays’s Rebellion (1786), 119 Shelley, Mary, 216, 217 Shields, David S., 151 Shipley, Thomas, 292 shipping growth of industry, 124 illegality in, 107– 8 profitability of, 106 –7 trends in Caribbean trade, 103–5 shoes, exportation of, 137 silver trade, 71–74 situational ethics, in Franklin’s Autobiography, 194 slave trade in Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, 283, 285 capitalist versus mercantile, 85 end of, 301 marketing of traits in, 88 – 89 Middle Passage in, 24, 84, 85 monopoly rights in, 84 psychological effects of, 90 –91 slavery, 82 –92. See also abolitionism Africanization of, 83, 84 and artisanship, 137 Atlantic versus other historical modes of, 84– 86 in Atlanticism, 24–25 in Britain, 91, 301 in Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, 45, 262, 278 –90 capitalist reformulation of, 85–91

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slavery (continued) as chronovoric consumption, 86, 89 in cotton production, 110, 111 definition of, 84– 85 as major geocultural element, 40 – 41, 51 miscegenation and, 289 –90 psychological effects of, on Europeans, 89 –91 racism in, 84, 86, 87 re-exportation affecting, 137–38 rise of, 84 and sensational consumption, 84, 91 social death in, 85– 86, 87 society after end of, 264– 65 in sugar production, 83– 84, 86 – 87, 137 suicide in, 90 Underground Railroad in, 263, 264, 290 –99 smallpox, 73–74 Smith, Adam adaptation of morality of, 256 on class divisions, 201 on common sense, 60 on good of commerce, 19 on invisible hand, 63, 172, 199 on sensibility, 61– 65 on sympathy, 61– 62 The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 61– 65 on underconsumption, 93 Wealth of Nations, 64 Smith, Elihu Hubbard abolitionism of, 280 Brown influenced by, 162, 163, 164 and Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, 274 in Brown’s fiction, 294 in Friendly Club, 153, 154 n. 174, 155–56 medical career of, 155, 158 –59 Medical Repository edited by, 151, 155 on Wollstonecraft, 161 n. 205 social class. See class social construction Brown on, 219 –20 in Woldwinism, 219 social consumption, of sensational products, 82 social sciences, 302 social transformation within bourgeoisie, 117, 125–26 in capitalism, 184– 87 novels as indicators of, 4 re-exportation causing, 5– 6, 109 –13 republican language in, 18

index structures of feeling in, 27–29 urbanization and, 126 –39 social welfare institutions bourgeois use of, 70, 138 –39 in modernity, 139 need for modernization of, 42, 134 in urban areas, rise in need for, 133–34 South. See also specific states nineteenth-century changes in, 301 power shift away from, 5, 109 –13, 115–16 re-exportation’s effects on, 5, 109 –13 South Asian labor, 301 sovereignty bourgeois, 43, 177, 181, 207– 8 popular, 16 Spanish colonies, opening of trade in, 105– 6 Spanish Succession, War of (1701–14), 2 Spanish world-system gold and silver in, 71–73 slavery in, 83– 84 specie shortages, 68, 72 –73, 101, 119 Spectator, 199 staples rising cost of, 135–36 traditional agricultural, 110 –12 transformation of luxury goods into, 128 in world-systems, 32 state debts, bourgeois speculation in, 118 –21 state romance, 213–14 statism, rise of, 10 –11 Sterne, Laurence, A Sentimental Journey Through Italy and France, 286 Stevens, Edward, 297 Stewart, Dugald, 221 stock exchanges, emergence of, 66 stoicism sensibility and, 41– 42 sentiment and, 42, 94 Story, Thomas, 171 structuralism, 41 subjectivity, history of, in Brown’s Wieland, 232 –37 sugar as necessity versus luxury, 76 price of, decline in, 76 processing of, 80 profits from, 83 re-exportation of, 102, 104 rise in consumption of, 75–76, 80 social consumption of, 82

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index sugar production, 82 – 84 and artisanship, 137 British versus French, 104, 104 n. 26 as capitalist laboratory, 86 – 87 in colonialism, 82 – 84 origins of, 82 slavery in, 83– 84, 86 – 87, 137 suicide, by slaves, 90 surplus-value, 182 surrogation, 24–25 Swords, J., 144 Swords, T., 144 sympathy in capitalism, 59, 61– 62 and credit, 69 for lower classes, 65 Smith on, 61– 62, 65 Taussig, Frank William, 106 taxonomic racism, 279 – 80 tea consumption patterns of, 76, 77 re-exportation of, 102 social consumption of, 82 sugar combined with, 76 Teutsche Merkur, Der, 214–15 textile consumption, 81 Theory of Moral Sentiments, The (Smith), 61– 65 time management, in sensibility, 67– 68 tobacco consumption patterns of, 81 processing of, 81 Tocqueville, Alexis de, Democracy in America, 187– 88 Tompkins, Jane, Sensational Designs, 16 Tontine Coffee House, 157, 158 tools, versus machines, 184– 85 trade in American history, 1–2, 49 American-British balance of, 99 –100, 103, 118 –19 benefits of, 19 culture’s link to, 45–50 origins of, 46 – 47 and rise of American novel, 4–5, 6 –7 and self-determination, myth of, 1 in world empires, 31–32 in world-systems, 32 transatlanticism, problems with concept of, 23–24 transparency, in Franklin’s Autobiography, 181

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tribal identities, of slaves, 88 – 89 Tschink, Cajetan, The Victim of Magical Delusion, 213–14 Tuesday Club, 161 n. 205 Tyler, Royal, The Contrast, 146 unconscious, sensibility and, 64– 65 Underground Railroad in Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, 263, 264, 295–99 origins and development of, 291–93 in Philadelphia, 292 –95 undertakers, black, 278, 281, 283, 286 – 87, 295–96 Union College, 160 universalism, in geoculture, 36 universities. See also education; specific schools establishment of, 42, 140 Friendly Club’s link to, 160 – 61 national, 13 upper classes. See also elites consumption patterns of, 74–76 urban realism, 260 urbanization. See also cities Brown influenced by, 163 re-exportation’s effects on, 42, 126 –39 value transmission, through semiperiphery, 37–38 vanity, 201–3 Vaughan, Benjamin, 202 vegetarianism, in Franklin’s Autobiography, 194 ventriloquism in Brown’s Memoirs of Carwin, 238 –39, 240 – 41 in Brown’s Wieland, 235–36, 243, 248 vice in Franklin’s Autobiography, 199, 202 – 8 private, and public good, 199 –203 Victim of Magical Delusion, The (Tschink), 213–14 Vindication of the Rights of Women, A (Wollstonecraft), 217 violence in Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, 264, 281– 83 Brown’s critique of, 44 in Brown’s Memoirs of Carwin, 237–38, 240 – 41 in Brown’s Wieland, 209, 242 –51 in circumatlanticism, 24–25

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Virginia political elite in, 111–12, 115–16 power shift away from, 5, 109 –12, 115–16 virtue female, threats to, 95, 144– 46 public, and private vice, 199 –203 visual arts, 94 vocations of Friendly Club members, 154, 155, 156 –58 of young bourgeois men, 43, 141– 43 voice, narrative, structures of feeling in, 28 Voltaire, 59 wage labor, versus feudal labor, 85 Wallerstein, Immanuel on capitalist world-system, 2 on geoculture, 35–36 on semiperiphery, 37 on sexism and racism, 186 on world-systems, 30 –32 Walnut Street Prison (Philadelphia), 134 “Walstein’s School of History” (Brown), 222 –25, 257, 261, 270 war American history influenced by, 1–2 trade influenced by, 1–2 Warfel, Harry R., 164 Warner, Michael, 192 Letters of the Republic, 16 Washington, George, 120, 170 Watson, Joseph, 171 Watt, Ian, 7 Watts, Steven, 211–12 wealth among cosmopolitan bourgeoisie, 123–24 from re-exportation, 5, 102 –3, 109, 130, 134–35 social welfare institutions and, 42 in South versus North, gap in, 112 urban, 130, 134–35 Wealth of Nations (Smith), 64 Webb, George, 197 Weber, Max, 59, 176 welfare. See social welfare Wells, John, 153 West, Benjamin, 156 West, versus East, 73 Western frontier, 118 –21, 301 Weyler, Karen, 276 wheat prices, 135–36

index Whetmore, Prosper, 154 n. 174 Whig Party, 302 white slavery, 83 Whitefield, George, 178 whiteness, de-ideologizing of, in Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, 45, 264, 278 –90 Whitney, Eli, 161 Wieland, Christoph Martin, 214–15, 234 Wieland; or, The Transformation (Brown), 44, 209 –57 Brockden (Charles) in, 171–72, 205 class divisions in, 235–37, 248 – 49 as critique of Franklin’s Autobiography, 171–72, 209 –11 disruptions in narrative of, 213, 260 ending of, 247 gender in, 242 –51 historical segments of, 229 –32 ideology in, rise of, 252 –54 methodology of, 216 –29 Philadelphia arrival in, 209 and political romance, viability of, 254–57 race in, 264 slavery in, 285 versus state romances, 213–14 and subjectivity, history of, 232 –37 theme of, 211 title of, 214–15 violence in, 209, 242 –51 Woldwinism and, 211–13 wrested authority in, 252, 256, 260 Wilcocks, Alexander, 162, 165, 171 Williams, Eric, 86, 137 Williams, Raymond, 27–29, 30, 38 Woldwinism axioms of, 216 Brown’s place in, 211–13, 219 –20, 224 characters’ situations in, 212 class divisions in, 248 – 49 gender relations in, 218, 240 on institutionality, 251 methodology of, 216 –21 narrative technique of, 259, 260 rational sentiment in, 216 –18 sentimental fiction in, shift to, 148 – 49, 218 use of term, 148 n. 165 Wollstonecraft, Mary Brown on, 44, 161 n. 205 on French events, 147 Friendly Club views of, 161 n. 205 on gender relations, 218, 240

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index Godwin’s relationship with, 218 popularity of, in higher education, 255 on rational sentiment, 217 reviews by, 148 A Vindication of the Rights of Women, 217 women. See also gender as readers, 144– 46 threats to virtue of, 95, 144– 46 in workforce, 132 as writers, 144– 45 Woolsey, George Muirson, 153, 154 n. 174, 157 Woolsey, Theodore Dwight, 160 Woolsey, William W., 153, 154 n. 174, 157, 159, 161 working class. See also lower classes re-exportation’s effects on, 132 –39 world economies, 31–32 world empires, 31–32 world-systems. See also specific systems circulatory system of, 38 –39 definition of, 2, 31 modern, 32 in nineteenth century, 301–2 types of, 31–32 world-systems perspective, 30 –35 advantages of, 303– 4 core zones in, 33 cultural materialism in, 27–30, 303 definition of, 30 –31 geoculture in, 35– 40

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and Marx, 30 minisystems in, 31 periphery in, 33 semiperiphery in, 36 – 40 wrested authority, in Brown’s Wieland, 252, 256, 260 writers first-time, 3 women, 144– 45 Wuthering Heights (Brontë), 284 xenophobia, in capitalism, 186 XYZ affair, 107 Yale University, Friendly Club’s connection to, 154, 160 – 61 yellow fever in Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, 270, 274, 295, 297 in cities, rise of, 127, 135 and deference, 273 in Philadelphia, 295–97 and Underground Railroad, 295–97 young bourgeois men, 140 –50 commercial writing by, 141– 43 demographics of, 141 and female virtue in distress, 144– 45 fictional writing by, 143–50 French influences on, 146 – 47 higher education for, 42 – 43, 140 – 41 vocations available to, 43, 141– 43

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nnnnnnnnnnnn continued from front flap

Shapiro

American Studies across time. Rather than relying on contiguous time, a

u

world-systems approach might compare the cultural production of one region to another at the same location within the

The Culture

recurring cycle in an economic reconfiguration. Shapiro offers a way of

and

thinking about the causes for the emer-

the pennsylvania state university press

of the

university park, pennsylvania

Early American Novel

gests a fresh approach to the paradigms

of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.

www.psupress.org

n

Stephen Shapiro is Associate Professor

Taking his cue from Philadelphia-born novelist Charles Brockden Brown’s Annals of Europe and America, which contends that America is shaped most noticeably by the international struggle between Great Britain and France for control of the world trade market, Stephen Shapiro charts the advent, decline, and reinvigoration of the early

u

Commerce

gence of the American novel that sug-

shaping American Studies.


nnnnn


American novel. That the American novel “sprang so unexpectedly into published existence during the 1790s” may be a reflection of the beginning of the end of Franco-British supremacy and of the power of a middle class riding the


Stephen Shapiro

crest of a new world economic system.

Shapiro’s world-systems approach is a relatively new methodology for literary studies, but it brings two particularly useful features to the table. First, it

Jacket illustration: John Vanderlyn, Sampson

refines the conceptual frameworks for

Vryling Stoddard Wilder, oil on canvas, c.

analyzing cultural and social history,

1808 –12. Courtesy Worcester Art Museum,

such as the rise in sentimentalism, in

Worcester, Massachusetts. Gift of Lawrence Alan Haines in memory of his father, Wilder Haydn Haines.

relation to a long-wave economic histoisbn 978-0-271-03290-0 90000

penn state press

ry of global commerce; second, it fosters a new model for a comparative

9 780271 032900 continued on back flap

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Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel: Reading the Atlantic World-system

Reading the American Novel 1865-1914 (Reading the Novel)

The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

The Early Modern Atlantic Economy

Reading the Early Republic

Crusade, Commerce and Culture

The Novel and the Globalization of Culture

The American Novel Now: Reading Contemporary American Fiction Since 1980

The Fisherman's Cause: Atlantic Commerce and Maritime Dimensions of the American Revolution

Reading American Novels and Multicultural Aesthetics: Romancing the Postmodern Novel

Reading American Novels and Multicultural Aesthetics: Romancing the Postmodern Novel

Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture

The Twilight of American Culture

The Twilight of American Culture

The Great American Novel

Bridging the Early Modern Atlantic World

The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture

The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture

The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture

The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture

Commerce and Print in the Early Reformation (The Northern World)

Reading and Writing the Latin American Landscape

Atlantic American Societies

The Culture of Vengeance and the Fate of American Justice

Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible

The Afro-American novel and its tradition

The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition

Native American Culture (The Native American Sourcebook)

Tradition and the Black Atlantic

Between Empires: Brazilian Sugar in the Early Atlantic Economy, 1550-1630 (The Atlantic World)

Mercy, Mercy Me: African-American Culture and the American Sixties (Race and American Culture)

Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel: Reading the Atlantic World-system

Reading the American Novel 1865-1914 (Reading the Novel)

The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

The Early Modern Atlantic Economy

Reading the Early Republic

Crusade, Commerce and Culture

The Novel and the Globalization of Culture

The American Novel Now: Reading Contemporary American Fiction Since 1980

The Fisherman's Cause: Atlantic Commerce and Maritime Dimensions of the American Revolution

Reading American Novels and Multicultural Aesthetics: Romancing the Postmodern Novel

Reading American Novels and Multicultural Aesthetics: Romancing the Postmodern Novel

Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture

The Twilight of American Culture

The Twilight of American Culture

The Great American Novel

Bridging the Early Modern Atlantic World

The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture

The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture

The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture

The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture

Commerce and Print in the Early Reformation (The Northern World)

Reading and Writing the Latin American Landscape

Atlantic American Societies

The Culture of Vengeance and the Fate of American Justice

Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible

The Afro-American novel and its tradition

The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition

Native American Culture (The Native American Sourcebook)

Tradition and the Black Atlantic

Between Empires: Brazilian Sugar in the Early Atlantic Economy, 1550-1630 (The Atlantic World)

Mercy, Mercy Me: African-American Culture and the American Sixties (Race and American Culture)

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