Dissertation Abstract
Infected Regions: Marriage Metaphors and Illness Plots in Antebellum Cross-Regional Fiction
By Lynda Jenea Prewitt Davis
Department of English
Texas Christian University
Dissertation Advisor:
Sarah Robbins, Lorraine Sherley Professor of Literature, Acting Dean, J.V. Roach Honors College
Infected Regions: Marriage Metaphors and Illness Plots in Antebellum Cross-Regional Fiction extends the timeline for regional fiction to the antebellum era, widening the critical lens enabling the recovery of many once-popular novels. As early as three decades before the start of the Civil War, the writers in this study produced fiction that provides today’s scholars insight about existing regional, social, and racial anxieties that destabilized national unity. I maintain that during these unstable decades regional tensions between the North and the South prompted a regional subgenre I call “cross-regional fiction” and a rhetorical trope I call “the illness plot.” The authors who make up this study all held claim to a multi-regional identity and wrote fiction in which characters crossed into unfamiliar locations seeking to uncover provincial prejudices. Analyzing these texts as examples of Body Politic rhetoric, I demonstrate how these writers metaphorically alluded to existing tensions as a national illness and incorporated sick, allegorical characters to disrupt marriage alliances, ultimately leading to North/South marriage unions. These unions symbolize healing and illustrate that building cultural understanding across the North and the South could heal regional discord and strengthen national unity.
In generating definitions for cross-regional fiction and illness plots, I selected novels with both marriage and illness plots involving couples from two contentious regions—the North and South—and inspired by three critical eras leading up to the Civil War: The Nullification Crisis of the 1830s, the Financial Crisis of 1837, and the slavery debates of the 1850s. The primary texts for this analysis include William A. Caruthers’s The Kentuckian in New York (1834), Catharine Sedgwick’s The Linwoods (1835), Maria McIntosh’s The Lofty and the Lowly (1853), and Caroline Lee Hentz’s The Planter’s Northern Bride (1854). This fiction provided antebellum readers and writers a dialogical space where opposing regions could, theoretically, come together and work out, or rather act out, their differences.
Conference Abstracts:
Society for the Study of American Women Writers, September 2009 – “To Make a Lady of”: Allegorical Marriages and Transnational Studies in Martha Meredith Read’s Margaretta
In a January 1807 review of recently published literature, The American Register argues that: “Among the host of novels continually issuing from the American press, we have been able to discern only the two following native productions: The late W. H. Brown’s Ira and Isabella, or the Natural Children: published at Boston [and] Margaretta, or the Intricacies of the Heart, by a lady in Philadelphia (sic). This statement highlights two points of interest concerning early American literary studies. First, the article clearly attributes the author of Margaretta as an American; second, the article denotes a tone of concern about the lack of published literature by American authors. Two hundred years later, Stephen Shapiro echoes similar concerns. In The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel, Shapiro wonders “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?” (2). Despite the dearth of American literature during this pivotal time when the newly organized United States struggled to establish its own identity, Margaretta, or; The Intricacies of the Heart, published in 1807, remains, to this date, unrecovered. While Cathy Davidson notes Margaretta’s unique take on the sentimental formula and Joseph Fichtelberg, Critical Fictions, discusses Read’s feminist influences, Read’s Margaretta warrants more attention from the academic community specifically because it can tell scholars of varying disciplines so much about the post-Revolutionary climate in America during this tenuous period of our history. Read’s position in the heart of the new United States political elite (her father was a Revolutionary War officer, her father-in-law signed the Declaration of Independence, and her husband facilitated in passing the Jay Treaty) merits a close transnational reading of her novel Margaretta.In my paper, I examine how Read uses marriage plots as allegorical devices in order to discuss America’s transnational relationships with both Great Britain and France. Reading Margaretta in a transnational diasportic paradigm reveals Read’s Federalists beliefs, which supported America’s filial relationship with Great Britain over France, and her belief that the states’ security rested in the re-establishment of ties with the British while maintaining American independence. This concept is mirrored by the American Margaretta’s marrying the suitor of her choice and her reconnection with her aristocratic British mother and father. The marriage plots throughout the novel allegorically parallel contemporary history in which the United States needed, according to Federalists like Read, to renew its bond with its patriarchal “father,” Great Britain, in order to receive protection from the French, who Federalists argued posed a threat to the states both morally and physically. Indeed, it is not until that familial bond is re-established, and Margaretta is “made a lady of,” that she can pass freely by land and by waterways. In this same way, when Federalists pushed through the Jay Treaty, Americans were then allowed to pass freely over borders and carry on international trade and commerce with the West Indies and Great Britain. Society for Early Americanists (SEA). Bermuda. March 2009. – Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Public’s Struggle to De-Romanticize the Pirate Charles Gibbs
In November, 1831, the recently arrested Charles Gibbs, a pirate, “expressed a desire” to make known his crimes and life story to police marshal Henry W. Merritt and police magistrate James Hopson. Because of his notoriety, Gibbs found himself thrust into a heterotopic space, which ironically provided him a venue in which to battle public opinion. His confession and biography later appeared in newspapers and broadsheets (sold at his execution), and even some anthologies as far away as London. These narratives reveal that the condemned pirate had not only been a one-time war hero, but also that Gibbs confessed to murdering over “FOUR HUNDRED INNOCENT HUMAN BEINGS!” Shortly after these publications, competing biographical narratives revealed that Gibbs had not only lied about his name but also about his naval exploits. The sensational aspect of Gibbs’ “confession,” due in part to the shockingly huge number of confessed murders, spurred many printers to “cash in” on the public’s obsession and print, reprint, and recreate various versions of the Gibbs narrative. Some narratives reveal society’s anxiety that America’s youth might become infatuated with its anti-authoritative nature and romanticize pirating as an idea way of life, as portrayed by Twain’s Tom Sawyer, who contemplated turning pirate and becoming the “Black Avenger of the Spanish Main!”In light of society’s concern with its more impressionable youth, it is significant to note that in these published narratives there are at least two opposing versions of Gibbs’s scaffold confession. In one narrative, Gibbs confesses his guilt and repents to God, asking for forgiveness; in the other version, Gibbs states that he is innocent of the murder of Mr. Roberts, for which he stood trial, and that God, whom he should shortly meet, knows the truth. Since Gibbs, by his own confession, was guilty of many murders (although, as he claims, not Roberts’), and since the jury declared him guilty and condemned him to death, why was it important to the public that they know the “truth” about Gibbs’s story? Why falsely create a scaffold confession? And lastly, what is at stake for the public if Gibbs died unrepentant?
In researching and writing my paper, I address these questions and, using Michel Foucault’s theories of subject and power, explain how the public sphere willingly “created” its own “penitent” version of Gibbs’ confession in order to combat romantic notions of piracy and promote civil conformity to traditional Christian values and mores. In fact, these competing scaffold confessions were not concerned with uncovering an unambiguous truth but with the promoting of a “perception” of truth. As Michel Foucault argues, the fact that something can be judged “true” is to imply that power is directly linked with truth, and truth cannot exist without power. The public sphere’s struggle to manipulate public perception of Gibbs’s life narrative reflects the public attempt to maintain power over the acceptable norm. Gibbs’s struggle to use the public’s fascination with sensation to bring notoriety to himself, reflects his struggle to gain immortality through the printed word.
Department of EnglishTexas Christian UniversityTCU Box 297270Fort Worth, TX 76129lynda.davis@tcu.edu
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All of your scholarship, all your study of Shakespeare and Wordsworth would be vain if at the same time you did not build your character and attain mastery over your thoughts and your actions”
Mahatma Gandhi
