Attachment, Place, and Otherness in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: New Materialist Representations 9781138673267, 9781315562056

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Attachment, Place, and Otherness in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

This interdisciplinary study examines the role interpersonal and place attachment bonds play in crafting a national identity in American literature. Although there have been numerous ecocritical studies of and psychoanalytic approaches to American literature, this study seeks to integrate the language of empirical science and the physical realities of place, while also investigating non-human agency and that which exists beyond the material realm. Murphy considers how writers in the early American Republic constructed modernity by restructuring representations of interpersonal and place attachments, which are subsequently reimagined, reconfigured, and sometimes even rejected by writers in the long nineteenth century. Within each narrative American perceptions of otherness are pathologized as a result of insecure ­human-to-human and human-to-place attachments, resulting in a restructuring of antiquated notions of difference. Throughout, Murphy ­argues that in order to understand fully the contextually varied framework of human bonding, it is important to emphasize America’s “attachment” to various constructions of otherness. Historically, people of color, women, e­ thnic groups, and lower-class citizens have been relegated—socially, politically, and ­culturally—to a place of subordination. Refugees escaping the French and Haitian Revolutions to American cities encouraged writers to transform social, cultural, and political attachments in ways that the ­American ­Revolution did not. The United States has always been part of an extended global network that provides fertile ground from which to imagine a future American identity; this book thus gestures toward future readers, educators, and scholars who seek to explore new fields and new approaches to understand the underlying ­human motivations that continually inspire the ­American imagination. Jillmarie Murphy is Associate Professor of English and Director of the ­Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program at Union College, ­Schenectady, NY. She has published books, journal articles, and essays that ­focus on Puritan poetics, literature of the early American Republic, prominent and lesser-known antebellum literary figures, and transatlantic novelists who span the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her publications generally employ the psychosocial paradigm of attachment theory, drawing on topics considering parenting, gender, race, class, and ethnicity, as well as publications that consider the evolution of literary history and how certain authors and texts resonate long after their heyday.

Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com.

80 Storytelling and Ethics Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative Edited by Hanna Meretoja and Colin Davis 81 Multilingual Currents in Literature, Translation and Culture Edited by Rachael Gilmour and Tamar Steinitz 82 Rewriting the American Soul Trauma, Neuroscience and the Contemporary Literary Imagination Anna Thiemann 83 Milton and the Early Modern Culture of Devotion Bodies at Prayer Naya Tsentourou 84 TransGothic in Literature and Culture Edited by Jolene Zigarovich 85 Latin American Gothic in Literature and Culture Edited by Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno and Inés Ordiz 86 Mediating Memory Tracing the Limits of Memoir Edited by Bunty Avieson, Fiona Giles, and Sue Joseph 87 From Mind to Text Continuities and Breaks Between Cognitive, Aesthetic and Textualist Approaches to Literature Bartosz Stopel 88 Attachment, Place, and Otherness in Nineteenth-Century American Literature New Materialist Representations Jillmarie Murphy

Attachment, Place, and Otherness in NineteenthCentury American Literature New Materialist Representations Jillmarie Murphy

First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of Jillmarie Murphy to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data CIP data has been applied for. ISBN: 978-1-138-67326-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-56205-6 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

To Tessa Bailey and Liam Edward

Contents

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction 1 1 Dispossession, Diseased Attachments, and the Transmogrifying Self in Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn

16

2 Fugitivity and Displaced Bodies in Leonora Sansay’s Secret History; or, the Horrors of St. Domingo

45

3 George Lippard’s Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall and the Transformational Place of Mid-Nineteenth-Century Urban Fiction 68 4 Atavistic Attachments, Anti-Landscapes, and the Precarity of Place in Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Frank Norris’s McTeague 95 5 African-American Place Attachments and the Chains of Modernity in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Sport of the Gods Index

127 155

Acknowledgements

Many thanks go to my friends and department colleagues Patricia Wareh and Claire Bracken for their continual support and encouragement. I would also like to thank the other members of the Union C ­ ollege ­English Department, especially Jordan Smith, Kara Doyle, ­Judith Lewin, and Bernhard Kuhn, who consecutively and skillfully served as department chairs during the time I was working on this manuscript; Andrew ­Burkett, Katherine Lynes, Jennifer Mitchell, Jenelle Troxell, and ­Bunkong Tuon, whose place at the helm is on the horizon; Hugh Jenkins, who previously fulfilled his chairly obligations; and finally Jim McCord, ­A nastasia Pease and Jeannette Sargent. Thank you as always to the guy who hired me, my friend, mentor, and former department chair, Harry Marten, who read and commented on parts of this book and who chose to stick around one day, just to make sure. I would also like to thank Union College President Stephen Ainlay, Dean of Faculty Therese ­McCarty, and Dean of Academic Departments Wendy ­Sternberg for providing me with support and the space needed to complete this project. Debbie Catharine, Andrea Foroughi, Christine Henseler, Erika Nelson, and Stacie Raucci deserve thanks for their generous emotional support and stimulating conversations. Thanks to Jeffrey Corbin for passing it forward with style. Thanks as well to Avery Novitch and Erin Wade for thinking I’m wonderful. The feeling is quite mutual. Thanks are also in order for Ronald A. Bosco, whose mentoring, support, and friendship, coupled with his amazing wit and brilliant mind, have enhanced my life in more ways than he will ever know. I would also like to thank Jeffrey Walker who read far too many grant proposals than I had a right to ask him to read and who has demonstrated to me the value of a well-executed bon mot. Heartfelt thanks are in order for the wonderfully caring professionals at Routledge—Jennifer Abbott, Veronica Haggar, and Assunta Petrone. Your kindness, humanity, and goodwill are greatly appreciated. Thank you to Taylor, Tristin, Teagan, Tessa, and Liam for all of the joy you have brought into my life. Finally, I would like to express sincere gratitude to my remarkable mother, Lorraine Murphy, whose courage, strength, dignity, perseverance,

x Acknowledgements and bravery in the face of horrendous personal tragedies and significant attachment losses never cease to amaze me. An earlier version of Chapter 5 appears as “Chains of Emancipation: Place Attachment and the Great Northern Migration in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Sport of the Gods,” in Studies in American Naturalism 8.2 (winter 2013). I would like to acknowledge the editors of the journal and University of Nebraska Press for providing me permission to use the essay in this book. I would also like to acknowledge Rowman & ­Littlefield Publishers for permission to use some key excerpts from my book ­Monstrous Kinships (University of Delaware Press, 2011) in Chapter 4 of this study. I am also very grateful for the support I received from the Union College Humanities Faculty Research Fund, which enabled me to conduct research at the American Antiquarian Society and the ­Huntington Library.

Introduction

…the strength of government does not consist of anything within itself, but in the attachment of a nation, and the interest which the people feel in supporting it. When this is lost, government is but a child in power. —Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Part II

When Thomas Jefferson declared America’s independence from the “long train of abuses and usurpations” suffered under the “absolute Despotism” of the British monarchy, he listed among several facts the King of England’s “Appropriations of Lands.” The king had, according to Jefferson, “plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns” and in the process, had also “destroyed the loves of our people.” King George III was a bad father and Mother England ruthless, a destructive parental pairing with no remorse for attempting to annihilate the “Life, Liberty, and… Pursuit of Happiness” of their children—a monstrous kinship, indeed. America’s declaration of independence was, in essence, the first successful Proclamation of Emancipation from familial attachments, a deattachment of sorts from ‘parental’ cruelty. In spite of “our common kindred,” says Jefferson, Americans had the right to be free and to absolve themselves from all “Allegiance to the British Crown.” Jefferson’s focus on both material and affective places of attachment and the injuries Americans endured as a consequence of the king’s plundering and destroying of physical and emotional spaces underscores the attachments Americans have always had to various concepts of place. In its most obvious manifestation, place represents physical spaces, areas set aside for a specific purpose—homes, buildings, neighborhoods, lands— but place can also be a position or function one holds, or a situation in which one finds oneself. Moreover, place can be an abstract mental location, or it can refer to affect, one’s moods, feelings, ­emotions—love, hate, sadness, or anger, for instance. The “loves” to which Jefferson refers and that the British monarchy had attempted to destroy are themselves places, conceptual structures of feeling that individuals cultivate as they develop emotional bonds to people and places.

2  Introduction These two constructs of attachment—interpersonal and place— frame my current study of American literature in the long nineteenth century. I contend that in the literature under consideration the characters’ attachment needs illustrate the important role human-to-human and ­human-to-place bonding occupies in crafting a national identity. American concepts of security and freedom help shape my discussion as I investigate how writers in the early American Republic constructed modernity by restructuring representations of interpersonal and place attachments, which are subsequently reimagined and reconfigured by writers in the long nineteenth century. Each narrative examined in this study provides descriptions of constructive and destructive affectional bonds that help highlight the importance of interpersonal and place attachments in defining a national identity. The interpersonal and place attachment anxieties represented in each work illustrate the developing notion of modernity in rural and urban landscapes and mirror the transitional elements of the early American Republic: the past set against the future, age confronting youth, and possession versus dispossession. Moreover, within each narrative, American perceptions of otherness are pathologized as a consequence of insecure human-to-human and ­human-to-place attachments, which I argue is an attempt to restructure antiquated notions of difference. It is my contention that in order to understand fully the contextually varied framework of human-to-place bonding, it is necessary to consider America’s “attachment” to various constructions of otherness. During the early national period, people of color, women, ethnic groups, and lower-class citizens continued to be relegated—socially, politically, and culturally—to a place of subordination. While some politicians sought to unify American citizens through various representations of modernity, there were members of the political elite who continued to employ archaic conventions when setting policy; thus, as the nation sought to encourage patriotic sentiments after the American Revolution, some politicians held the same despotic views they had only recently struggled against. Couched within those traditions were antediluvian notions of ethno-racial, gender, and class subordination that were often debated within the period’s literature and the dominant political culture. Because the French and Haitian Revolutions were ongoing throughout the early national period, both wars and the influx of refugees escaping these conflicts to the United States often helped writers transform representations of early national social, cultural, and political attachments in ways that the American Revolution did not.

Theories of Attachment—Place and Affect Because attachments are emotional bonds, they inevitably shape human identity, create meaning, and facilitate actions. Interpersonal attachment

Introduction  3 bonding, known as attachment theory, is a psychoanalytic paradigm developed in the early twentieth century by British psychoanalyst John Bowlby. Combining ethology, neurophysiology, psychoanalysis, developmental biology, and cognitive psychology, attachment theory considers human-to-human affective interactions and the way in which those interactions either bond us to others or cause disruptions in bonding. Primary attachment bonds are those typically established between infants and parents (or parental surrogates) and serve as the foundation for the variety of human-to-human bonds developed throughout one’s life. Disruptions in early attachment bonds and both positive and negative interactions with others affect how humans socialize with others throughout the lifecycle. Bowlby is renowned primarily because of his theoretical framework; however, it is his empirical approach, quite unique at the time, which sets him apart from other early twentieth-century psychoanalysts. ­Bowlby’s emphasis on one-on-one discussions with and direct observation of his patients was disparaged by many of his contemporaries. In fact, both Sigmund Freud and his daughter Anna believed that children were unanalyzable, a belief Bowlby challenged as he began working directly with children and seeking interviews with child patients in a variety of children’s hospitals during the 1930s and 1940s. By the time Bowlby undertook his groundbreaking work with children, some psychoanalysts had already diverged from traditional Freudian psychology, which identifies human bonding in terms of psychic energy and drive theory. Object relations theorists Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott, and Ronald Fairbairn, for instance, repudiated Freud’s emphasis on aggression and sexual drives as primary motivating forces and began stressing human relationships as the principal motivating inspiration in an individual’s life. Although object relations theorists emphasized a relational and structural psychic paradigm in which an “object” is the focus of a child’s interpersonal needs, Bowlby took these ideas further, arguing for the importance of direct observation of his patients. Consequently, he became increasingly troubled by the attention many psychoanalysts paid to their patient’s fantasy worlds rather than to their tangible, observable experiences. While Bowlby acknowledged the innovative work developed by object relations theorists and ego-psychologists, such as Anna Freud, he believed that there was an intergenerational transmission of attachment relationships. As a result of interviews he had with parents of apathetic and unstable children, Bowlby soon realized that the parents’ own childhood attachment relationships influenced their parenting style, which subsequently had a substantial impact on their children’s attachment disorders. Since its inception, the theory of attachment has developed beyond Bowlby’s initial construct of filial attachment bonds to include studies of attachments between friends, neighbors, romantic partners,

4  Introduction students and teachers, humans and animals, co-workers, individuals and their concept of God, and countless other attachments people develop with others throughout their lives.1 That said, interpersonal attachments address only one aspect of the bonds humans cultivate during their lifetime; consequently, during the second half of the twentieth century, environmental psychologists, human ecologists, and sociologists began developing theories related to various conceptions of place. “Place identity,” a substructure of the psychoanalytic concept of “self-theories,” examines how people develop beliefs about themselves in relation to their physical surroundings. Environmental psychologist Harold Proshansky was particularly instrumental in defining place identity, contending that place identity is more than physical stimuli or objects, for, as Proshansky contends, a “concern with the physical environment in all its complexities must be matched with a concern with the individual or groups of individuals in all their complexities.”2 Proshansky’s argument, in effect, syncretizes the theories associated with human-to-human and human-to-place attachments. While ‘place identity’ is situated within the field of environmental psychology, the theory of ‘place attachment’ is a psychosocial construct traditionally defined as a multidimensional concept comprised of community attitudes, racial and ethnic identity, length of residence, home ownership, and/or local stressors, all of which work together either to enhance or diminish one’s attachment to a particular place. In 1992 Irwin Altman and Setha Low published their landmark book Place ­Attachment as part of a series on Human Behavior and Environment. Altman and Low’s basic concept of place attachment—“the bonding of people to places”—has since developed from a concept to an applied science that focuses on issues related to biophysical spheres, housing and community design, and environmental concerns. Lynne C. Manzo and Patrick Devine-Wright’s multidisciplinary book Place Attachment: Advances in Theory, Methods, and Applications (2014) presents a framework for the most contemporary multidisciplinary concepts, ­approaches, and applications developed by leading place attachment scholars from around the globe. Their collection of essays discusses multiple theories of place attachment related to memory, mobility, and community; various methodological approaches, such as photo-based research and narratological methods; and applications that study environment, displacement, climate change, and community design. Each perspective places a different emphasis on the importance of place stability and the potential consequences of place attachment disruptions. In a fundamental sense, places, in and of themselves, do not embody a single identity; rather, human interaction with place constructs multiple identities. Thus, as humans develop affectional bonds to places, both humans and the places they inhabit shift. Places are not stationary

Introduction  5 enclosures with clearly delineated boundaries; rather, they are liminal entities that shift, change, and develop with time. But what is particularly noteworthy about defining humans’ emotional connection to place is how human-to-place attachment theories parallel the basic tenets of human-to-human attachment theory. Because the theory of attachment originates in the interpersonal realm and draws on the variety of relationships that exist between people situated within places, place attachment and interpersonal attachment work in tandem. As such, place attachment is much more than preference for a particular place because attachment suggests affective reactions and emotional responses that are necessary to create meaning out of thoughts, feelings, and memories. Leila Scannell and Robert Gifford structure the various definitions of place attachment within a three-dimensional framework that ­considers the individual and collective meanings humans attach to places, the materiality of place, and the psychological—emotional, behavioral, ­cognitive—manifestations of place. 3 According to Gerard Kyle, et  al. “places are more than geographic settings with definitive physical and textual characteristics; they are fluid, changeable, dynamic contexts of social interaction and memory.”4 Thus, interpersonal attachments occur not only within the realm of tangible places (objects in the world)—­bedrooms, homes, schools, playgrounds, streets, pubs, places of ­worship—but they also move beyond materiality, creating affective places in which materiality and emotionality conflate, thus exposing an indistinguishable interiorized self that continually shifts and changes as one navigates within, beyond, and through interpersonal and place attachments. Hence, interpersonal attachments are ineluctably linked to place, and while physical space can exist without living beings, place has no meaning without human involvement.

Attachment, Literature, and Nation-Building Literature reflects cultural shifts, fears, and anxieties and helps shape societal expectations. In “Theory of Attachment and Place Attachment,” Maria Vittoria Giuliani emphasizes that humans’ attachment to place “not only permeates our daily life but very often appears also in the representations, idealizations and expressions of life and affect represented by art products—in the first instance literature.”5 In effect, Giuliani is suggesting that art, particularly the reiterative power found in literature, underscores humanity’s basic attachment needs and the importance ­person-to-place bonds have in the development of the human psyche. My current study, however, extends attachment theorists’ focus on the individual human psyche and emphasizes, as well, the way in which literary depictions of person-to-person and person-to-place attachment bonds help cultivate a national psyche. In much the same way that the interior, individualized self becomes modified as one moves through life, so

6  Introduction too do national, political, and cultural identities alter as a nation moves through its own history. Humanistic geographer Yi-Fu Tuan claims that “Place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other.”6 These notions of security and freedom underpin the foundational ideas in each of the novels under consideration in this book and encourage an investigation of how writers in the early American Republic employ the concept of modernity to restructure representations of interpersonal and place attachments, which are in turn reimagined, reconfigured, and sometimes even rejected by writers throughout the long nineteenth century. Hence, this study considers how characters’ emotions are shaped by contact with others and with objects, the way in which the affective structure of attachment engenders pain when desired objects are difficult or impossible to attain, and the dialectic nature of place as both an affective and materialist force. When constructions of racial and gender difference are embedded within the formation of a new nation, and then class difference is tied into success and inserted into those discussions, it creates bubbles that prevent groups from mingling together and comprehending difference. Attachment bonding functions as an important tool in bringing differences together and constructing iterations of modernity; therefore, by exploring the structural, relational, and performative aspects of attachment in literature, this study demonstrates in contextual detail how systematized inequities have been characterized and challenged in American literary history as writers in the long nineteenth century envision, reject, or reconfigure a national identity that confronts narrow representations of otherness. In the late eighteenth century, as America moved from a place of insurgency to one of independence, the nation constructed an identity that was set against an archaic and decaying British other. Americans experienced a sense of newness and had an eye toward futurity. It was an exciting moment filled with infinite promise. The old constraints of paternalism, agrarianism, monarchy, and colonial dependence were recast in the forward thinking principles of urban modernity. In the national literature of the period, these antiquated ideas were frequently juxtaposed with the advantages and disadvantages associated with urban modernity. As early national writers began advocating the use of American materials in literary fiction, many writers focused on the materiality of America’s non-human and human landscapes to celebrate and highlight the country’s rich topography, stimulate nationalistic attachments, and interrogate the new nation’s political and social spheres. For example, novels such as Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry (1792) and Tabitha Gilman Tenney’s Female Quixotism (1801) both draw on the Quixote myth as a way to negotiate American landscapes; however, while in Modern Chivalry Captain Farrago moves through a range of

Introduction  7 American places to question, and in some ways reverse, the privilege associated with the country’s cultural and political elite, in Female Quixotism, Dorcasina Sheldon navigates both a literal and psychological landscape, quixotic places that are set within a patently American framework. Similarly, other writers of the period incorporated in their fiction internal sociopolitical upheavals, such as Shays’ Rebellion and the Barbary Wars, to provide contemporary context to their literary works. For instance, British naval treaties with North African states had protected American ships from Barbary pirates up until the ­A merican Revolution when this practice was terminated; hence, Royall Tyler frames his novel The Algerine Captive; or the Life and Adventures of Doctor Updike Underhill (1797) around the very real threat of attack from ­Barbary corsairs. While the nation as a whole had disengaged itself from monarchical control, America was still very much attached to various perceptions of marginalized others. People of color, women, ethnic groups, and lower-class citizens continued to be relegated—socially, politically, and ­culturally—to a place of subordination. Although attempts were made to create a national unity set within a modern framework, the political elite often resorted to pre-Revolutionary traditions as a way to construct that unity; in other words, while attempting to maintain feelings of nationalistic pride after the Revolution, many elite politicians invoked the very monarchical structures they had only recently deposed. However, Gordon S. Wood points out that by the early nineteenth century, the “weakening of the older hierarchy and the erosion of the traditional belief in elite rule made the rise of political parties both necessary and possible”; in fact, “being a gentleman or professing the characteristics of a gentleman, even having gone to college”7 placed wealthier political candidates at a disadvantage in certain areas of the country, a socio-­political phenomenon that has endured well into the twenty-first century. Although Federalists were comprised of elite, educated, white males, many opposed slavery, called for fair treatment of Native Americans, sought to include women in the political process, and believed that government was a crucial safeguard to protecting the rights of vulnerable people. Conversely, Jeffersonian Republicans, many of whom were slave owners and members of the southern planter elite class, promoted limited government. In organizing the Republican Party, Jefferson and Madison did so reluctantly, primarily because they were attempting to prevent the United States from becoming a “Federalist-led British-backed monarchy.”8 Consequently, both political approaches, while progressive in different ways, depended on antiquated ideologies as they sought to promote feelings of nationalism. In order to establish a foundational place that marks a new departure, modernity depends on the very past it aspires to expunge in order to construct a departure from its own history; by representing the past as a way to generate nationalistic pride, elite

8  Introduction politicians inadvertently compelled many progressive writers of the period to recast enlightened perceptions of otherness in their descriptions of human-to-human and human-to-place attachments. As a place where modernity is constructed, urban centers served as geographic regions in which dispossessed French and Haitian refugees, people of color, women, and lower-class citizens could transform traditional notions of marginalized others. Although immigrants were physically detached from their native lands, when they settled in and developed attachments to new places in America they brought with them, as might be expected, social, cultural, and affective attachments to their native countries. Indeed, many French citizens escaping from France and Haiti settled in American cities and remained politically active, even setting up newspapers and agitating for their political causes. And while farming communities did not appear to represent sites of futurity, some dispossessed refugees, such as the d’Autremont, LeFevre, and de ­Boulogne families who set up the Asylum and Butternut settlements in rural Pennsylvania’s Bradford and Chenango Counties, were drawn to rural spaces, creating ethnic farming communities in which they influenced diverse rural identities. Writers such as Charles Brockden Brown and Leonora Sansay employed conceptions of both rural (agrarian) and urban landscapes to construct modernity, frequently invoking characters’ positive and negative attachments to each place as a way to foster nation building and create a national identity that included marginalized and culturally dispossessed groups. Consequently, these writers engaged concepts of place to raise questions about the conceptual places to which difference is relegated, and in particular how the notion of otherness operates in a society recently constructed under the auspices of liberty and freedom. In Europe the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions helped to abolish the old order. The deconstruction of ancient traditions thus provided European writers with two distinct opportunities for literary action: one, in which an image of order is reestablished through conventionalized figures—the man of reason prevailing over the Jacobin brute, for instance; and the other, in which the writer aligns him or herself with a revolutionary figure, a character of feeling and humanity who equates art with passion, beauty, and truth. Conversely, in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America there was an ongoing process of adjustment that forced writers to continually restructure, reevaluate, and reappraise American ­conditions. Whereas European writers were situated atop the wreckage of established cultural and social traditions, American writers were obliged to explore new moral, ethical, political, and cultural places of attachment in opposition to European decadence. Early national writers were, in effect, imagining the United States into being, while simultaneously reinterpreting both American and European conventionalized

Introduction  9 images and myths as a way to establish a new national identity. Thus the call emanating from writers in the early Republic is often structurally dichotomous as it seeks to expunge the recent past that it in fact needs in order to pass into the future. As Paul de Man suggests: The continuous appeal of modernity, the desire to break out of literature toward the reality of the moment, prevails and, in its turn, folding back upon itself, engenders the repetition and the continuation of literature. Thus modernity, which is fundamentally a falling away from literature and a rejection of history, also acts as the principle that gives literature duration and historical existence.9 The myths and ideals change; the contemporary redefines itself. New and Old become slippery things, and the old is sometimes rediscovered as the new and so on. That’s what makes the shifting ideas of place and space so fascinating. By ‘re-evoking’ established myths and ideals and drawing on contemporary events, many early national writers simultaneously restructured old and erected new physical and affective places of attachment as a way to conceptualize and reimagine difference. As a powerful spokesperson for literary nationalism in the sociopolitical polemics of the day, Charles Brockden Brown, for example, drew on both urban and frontier landscapes as places in which to situate ­attachment paradigms experienced by people of color, women, French ­émigrés, and Native Americans. Drawing on the technique of “explained ­supernatural,” Brown incorporated native material into his gothic ­fiction, ­focusing on realities with which his American readers would be familiar. In Arthur Mervyn; Memoirs of the Year 1793 (1799/1800), for instance, Brown portrayed attachment pathologies as a tool to construct new ­identities through vivid descriptions of gendered and racialized ­brutalities, dispossession, familial violence, the inhumanity stemming from ­capitalist greed, and the stench and horror of decomposing bodies arising from disease. Other writers of the period considered the way in which ­A merican citizens experienced military conflicts that took place outside of the United States and how racial and gender inequities were sanctioned in those places. In Secret History; or the Horrors of St.  ­Domingo (1808) Leonora Sansay draws on her own experiences living in Saint Domingue during the Haitian Revolution. Her pseudo-fictionalized narrative features a variety of seduction plot techniques as a way to renegotiate racial and gender boundaries and hegemonic social conventions. As the nation moved into the nineteenth century, there were increased anxieties about and awareness of interpersonal and place attachments, and throughout the century many writers attempted to dramatize on a grander scale the influence of attachment experiences, both positive and negative, on United States’ citizens. To be sure, the scope and complexities of nineteenth-century literature varies significantly, both in subject

10  Introduction matter and literary techniques. American antebellum writers who drew on representations of non-human landscapes often revealed nineteenth-­ century anxieties over industrialization and rapid urbanization. Integrating social criticism with appeals to leave the modern world behind, these writers often encouraged readers to turn toward the natural world as a physically, mentally, and spiritually restorative setting. Indeed, in order to recognize the recuperative qualities of physical nature one need only read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature (1836), in which he declares: “In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,—no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair.”10 Nature, according to Emerson here, heals our wounded pride, alleviates our misfortunes, and restores our sanity. While some early nineteenth-century writers focused on nature as an analeptic force, other antebellum writers directed their attention toward the social inequities characteristic of urban places. Novelists, such as George Lippard in Quaker City; or the Monks of Monk Hall (1845), helped set the stage for later nineteenth-century realist and naturalist fiction writers who began to employ the scientific principles of objectivity and detachment in order to study the effects of urban socioeconomic forces on human nature. Stephen Crane’s sketches of New York City’s Bowery in Maggie; A Girl of the Streets (1893) and Paul Laurence ­Dunbar’s descriptions of New York’s Tenderloin District in Sport of the Gods (1901) underscore the hopelessness experienced by women and ethno-racial others at the turn of the twentieth century. The urban culture of late nineteenth-century San Francisco described in Frank Norris’s M ­ cTeague (1899) demonstrates that the savage side of humanity exists even in the expansive landscape of America’s Western frontier. ~~~ In Chapter 1, “Dispossession, Diseased Attachments, and the Transmogrifying Self in Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn,” Brown’s interest in American landscapes as source material and inspiration for character development complicates various scenes in Arthur Mervyn. A dispossessed figure at the novel’s beginning, the eponymous character in Arthur Mervyn develops multiple emotional attachments while repeatedly shifting between Pennsylvania’s rural Chester County and Philadelphia’s urban center, the focal point of United States political activity at the time and a major destination for many dispossessed French and Haitian refugees seeking asylum from the French and Haitian Revolutions. Brown allegorizes paternalistic models of agrarian independence and idealizes the world of late eighteenth-century commerce, providing an important connection to the way in which urban refinement and rural culture can serve as both destructive and benevolent attachment forces in emerging models of liberal progress.

Introduction  11 Mervyn’s unhealthy affectional bonds with people are exposed in the novel’s descriptions of urban and agrarian places, both of which are replete with disease and death. Indeed, murder, disease, and deception threaten Mervyn’s interpersonal attachments, generating feelings of abjection and motivating Mervyn’s desire to detach from urban modernity. However, Mervyn’s ostensible regression ‘backward’ to his rural beginnings in Chester County, a place that parodies the death, ruin, and duplicity from which he is attempting to escape, actually propels him forward once again toward urban modernity where he continues his transformation from a gullible, inexperienced country youth to a self-educating, enlightened modern citizen. Moreover, otherness is characterized in Brown’s representations of Philadelphia’s marginalized and dispossessed inhabitants who perform important roles during moments of crisis. Chapter 2, “Fugitivity and Displaced Bodies in Leonora Sansay’s Secret History; or, the Horrors of St. Domingo” highlights desire, obsession, fixation, and aggression to characterize attachments to both people and places in post-Revolutionary America and revolutionary Haiti, with particular emphasis on gender, race, class, and ethnicity. The sororal attachments between the main characters in Sansay’s narrative, Clara and her sister Mary, parallel other heterosexual and homosocial attachments they form on their way from Philadelphia to Saint Domingue, Cuba, Jamaica, and finally back to Philadelphia in the novel’s conclusion. Displacement and dispossession dominate Sansay’s pseudo-fictionalized world and inform real-life Haitian refugees’ lack of social structure resulting from economic disorder, displacement, and the Revolution’s extreme political oppositions. Chapter 2 juxtaposes Sansay’s narrative to an anonymous short story set during the same time period and in the same geographic place as Secret History. “Theresa—A Haytien Tale” (1828) is narrated from an Afrocentric viewpoint and provides a racially conscious interpretation of the place attachment traumas people of color experienced during the Haitian Revolution. While both Secret History and “Theresa” emphasize the racial atrocities many African and mixedrace slaves, particularly women, faced during the height of Haiti’s revolution, “Theresa” provides a uniquely personal racial perspective on the events happening during the war. Collectively, Arthur Mervyn and Secret History anticipate post-­ Revolutionary ambivalence about modernity, demonstrating healthy and unhealthy attachments to both urban and rural places, and reveal an awareness of the place in which otherness is situated in the new nation. Chapter 3, “George Lippard’s Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall (1845) and the Transformational Place of Mid-Nineteenth-Century Urban Fiction,” demonstrates how Lippard’s novel serves as a link among the earlier novels discussed in Chapters 1 and 2 and the treatment of “low-life” urban naturalism discussed in Chapters 4 and 5. Dedicated to

12  Introduction Charles Brockden Brown, Quaker City incorporates the revolutionary political themes and elements of sentimentalism found in Arthur Mervyn and Secret History, while at the same time serving as a precursor to the low-life, urban fiction exemplified in Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), Frank Norris’s McTeague (1899), and Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Sport of the God’s (1901). Although his writing style is clearly aligned with other mid-nineteenth-century Romantic writers, Lippard was acknowledged in the 1848 edition of Godey’s Lady’s Book as having “struck out on an entirely new path… stand[ing] isolated on a point inaccessible to the mass of writers of the present day.”11 Similar to Brown’s and Sansay’s candid exposure of societal inequities, Quaker City, according to David S. Reynolds, “crystallizes nineteenth-century social issues with a directness unseen in more familiar writers like Melville and ­Hawthorne.”12 The candor with which Lippard addresses social injustice is eventually restructured in American naturalism some half century later. By refocusing literary representations of ethno-racial, gendered, and class-based attachments, the fiction considered in Chapter 4, “Atavistic Attachments, Anti-Landscapes, and the Precarity of Place in Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Frank Norris’s McTeague,” and Chapter 5, “The Place of Southern Reconstruction and the Chains of Modernity in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Sport of the Gods,” does more than expose the failures of urban modernity. I argue that each author’s examination of humanity’s darkest depths and the alienating forces of urban modernity’s harshest realities, exposes the moral failures arising from destructive, unreliable, and corrupted attachments to materiality, other people, and urban spaces. Since environment often plays a dominant role in naturalist fiction, Chapters 4 and 5 expose modernity’s failures by paying particular attention to the variety of secure and insecure attachments individuals develop to their physical surroundings. The basic premises of attachment theory are in many ways analogous to the literature set forth by critical realists and naturalists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. When considering a novel’s inherent aesthetic and communal value, realist and naturalist novelists emphasize the obligation writers have to study humanity and environment directly. Similarly, attachment theorists value the breakthroughs provided by direct observation of behavior in natural settings above the analysis of internalized psychic struggles that played out among the id, ego, and superego.13 Attachment theory helps explain the way in which involuntary loss of and separation from both caring relationships and one’s sense of place can create emotional stress and personality disorders, including fear, rage, despair, and emotional indifference, all of which are realized in varying degrees in the characters inhabiting the novels under consideration in Chapters 4 and 5. Chapter 4 provides a comparative analysis of the ethnic struggles inherent in urban immigrant communities in Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of

Introduction  13 the Streets and Norris’s McTeague. In Maggie Crane attempts to explore low-life fiction and its concentration on familial violence, sexual taboos, and alcoholism and succeeds in authenticating the brutalities of place associated with late nineteenth-century urban tenement life in New York City. Alongside the trauma associated with place, the ­Johnson children also face the volatility of alcoholism and parental cruelty, which generates ineffectual attachments to both people and places and leaves them vulnerable to self-destructive urges as a way to compensate for their perceived weaknesses. Norris’s McTeague, set in turn of the century San Francisco, likewise focuses on ethnic trauma, while also drawing on naturalism’s interest in an atavistic past, which Norris unites with a recognizable present. Rather than situating his characters within an already damaged space, as Crane does in Maggie, Norris’s characters initially inhabit a more secure social place only to be dispossessed of status and exiled into the darkest places of human habitation. McTeague’s deterioration reveals his human-to-human and human-to-place attachment pathologies and, in a broader sense, the primitive violence that exists just below the surface of late nineteenth-century urban culture. Although representations of marginalized others inhabit the novel’s borders from the beginning, it is the McTeagues’ moral deterioration into the ­lower-class realm of San Francisco’s urban culture that ultimately exposes the tragic victims of modernity. Finally, Chapter 5 discusses the pathology of African American’s attachment to place and the familial disruptions many former slaves experienced during the nadir of race relations in the United States. Published in 1901, Sport of the Gods focuses on various attachment issues that are amplified for African Americans as a consequence of a historical lack of faith in their surroundings, their sense of place identity, their challenges maintaining interpersonal bonds, and their expectation of rejection in the dominant sociopolitical arena of whiteness. The novel’s exposure of an urban landscape has been treated as the thematic foundation for many theoretical readings of Dunbar’s narrative, in which the moral and epistemological complexities that support autonomy and egalitarianism are dislocated when the Hamilton family is forced from their place of residence in South. Unlike Brown’s Mervyn or Sansay’s Clara and Mary, who are enlightened as a result of their hardships, the characters in Maggie, McTeague, and Sport of the Gods are led helplessly and unwittingly toward “curious postures of submission to something.”14 While Brown and Sansay construct material and affective places toward which the main characters will reconstruct their lives, there is nothing that will elevate the characters in Maggie, McTeague, or Sport of the Gods out of their surroundings. Their efforts to transcend the realities of place are portrayed as hopeless and tragic. ~~~

14  Introduction Gordon Wood suggests that as we become more aware of each generation’s “illusions and conjuring up of its own identity,” we come to appreciate that, those in the past were restricted by forces that they did not understand nor were even aware of—forces such as demographic movements, economic developments, or large-scale cultural patterns. The drama, indeed the tragedy, of history comes from our understanding of the tension that existed between the conscious will and intentions of the participants in the past and the underlying conditions that constrained their actions and shaped their future.15 Twenty-first-century literature provides larger, more globally intersecting connections within a contextually varied framework, a structure inhabited by multi-ethnic, expropriated, laboring bodies, protesting economic and political dispossession. Indeed, the United States is part of an extended global network that provides fertile ground from which to imagine a future American identity. Although this study begins with a novel published in 1799 and concludes with one published in 1901, all of the literary works under consideration are in fact continually contemporary in an intense and fundamental sense. They invite constant rereading and recontextualizations, a reification of attachments to emphasize the important ­historical and private moments that structured and continue to structure an American national identity. The significance of human-to-human and human-to-place bonding and how those relationships construct and inform otherness within both public and private psyches persists into the future and thus will continually restructure and reframe American’s affective attachments to place. Attachment, Place, and Otherness in Nineteenth-Century American Literature thus gestures toward future readers who seek to explore new fields and new approaches in order to understand the underlying human motivations that continually inspire the American imagination.

Notes 1 See Jillmarie Murphy, Monstrous Kinships: Realism and Attachment Theory in the Ninteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Novel (University of Delaware Press, 2011). 2 Harold Proshansky, “Theoretical Issues in Environmental Psychology.” The School Review 82 (August 1974): 542–543. 3 Leila Scannell and Robert Gifford, “Defining Place Attachment: A ­Tripartite Organizing Framework,” in Journal of Environmental Psychology 30 (March 2010): 1–10. 4 Gerard Kyle, et al. “Effects of Place Attachment on Users’ Perceptions of Social and Environmental Conditions in a Natural Setting,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 24 (2004): 213. 5 Maria Vittoria Giuliani, “Theory of Attachment and Place Attachment,” in Psychological Theories for Environmental Issues, edited by Mirilias Bonnes, Terrence Lee, and Marino Bonaiuto (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 137.

Introduction  15 6 Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 3. 7 Gordon S. Wood, The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States (New York: Penguin, 2011), 203, 204. 8 Wood, The Idea of America, 245. 9 Paul de Mann, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edition (Routledge, 1986), 162. 10 Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. ­Albert R. Ferguson, Joseph Slater, Douglas Emory Wilson, and Ronald A. Bosco, eds. 10 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971–2013): 1:10. 11 “Editor’s Book Table,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 35 (1848): 67. 12 David S. Reynolds, “Introduction,” in George Lippard, Quaker City; or, The Monk’s of Monk Hall, edited by David S. Reynolds (Amherst: ­University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), viii. 13 See Murphy, “Introduction,” Monstrous Kinships, 1–36, for a discussion of the way in which attachment theory was informed by the tenets of realist and naturalist fiction. 14 Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, edited by Kevin J. Hayes (­Boston, MA: Bedford, 1999), 39. 15 Wood, The Idea of America, 22.

Bibliography de Mann, Paul. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edition. New York: Routledge, 1996. “Editor’s Book Table,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 35 (1848): 67. Giuliani, Maria Vittoria. “Theory of Attachment and Place Attachment,” in Psychological Theories for Environmental Issues, edited by Mirilias Bonnes, Terrence Lee, and Marino Bonaiuto. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003: 137. Kyle, Gerard, et al. “Effects of Place Attachment on Users’ Perceptions of Social and Environmental Conditions in a Natural Setting,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 24 (2004): 213–225. Manzo, Lynne C. and Patrick Devine Wright. Place Attachment: Routledge, 2014. Murphy, Jillmarie. “Introduction,” in Monstrous Kinships: Realism and Attachment Theory in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Novel. Newark: University Delaware Press, 2011: 1–36. Proshansky, Harold M. “Theoretical Issues in Environmental Psychology,” The School Review 82 (August 1974): 541–555. Reynolds, David S. “Introduction,” in George Lippard, Quaker City; or, The Monk’s of Monk Hall, edited by David S. Reynolds. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995: vii–xliv. Scannell, Leila and Robert Gifford. “Defining Place Attachment: A Tripartite Organizing Framework,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 30 (March 2010): 1–10. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977. Wood, Gordon S. The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States. New York: Penguin, 2011.

1 Dispossession, Diseased Attachments, and the Transmogrifying Self in Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn Although young, he has long sensed that we are all in exile, not only from each other, but most pointedly from ourselves, and thus we embark on a journey of self-discovery. —Kimmo Rosenthal, “Reading Murnane at 4am (The Consolation of Possibility),” 2014

On 13 August 1802, Charles Brockden Brown wrote to his future ­sister-in-law, then nineteen-year-old Rebecca Linn, indicating that he hoped her recent journey was not “very disagreeable.” To be sure, the task of riding in a coach, “crowded with eleven persons, carrying [her] fifty miles, over rugged roads, on a sultry day in August,” seems anything but pleasant, particularly as Rebecca was leaving Philadelphia in haste, as were many other wealthier inhabitants of the city, to avoid the perils of the late-summer yellow fever season. Brown’s main concern, however, is not with the hardships Rebecca endured during her travel; rather, Brown seems decidedly more troubled that her journey has taken her “to a place [she] never saw before, with no friendly and tenderly remembered face to shine a welcome on [her],” a thought that leads him to ask Rebecca, “how dare I even hope that your journey was a pleasant one?”1 Brown’s emphasis on the “very disagreeable” emotions people, particularly young people, experience when they travel to unfamiliar places and meet unfamiliar faces is one he had recently explored in his twopart novel Arthur Mervyn; or Memoirs of the Year 1793 (1799/1800), in which, after being exiled from his family farm in rural Chester County, Pennsylvania, the eponymous character travels back and forth between his rural origins and Philadelphia’s urban center. Compelled to journey away from the only home he had ever known, Arthur Mervyn does not ride in a crowded carriage, as does Rebecca Linn, but instead walks alone. Moreover, his travels do not take him out of Philadelphia; rather, Mervyn walks directly into the city on the brink of one of its worst ­yellow fever epidemics. Bereft of family, friends, social position, and money, Mervyn confronts more than merely unfamiliar faces when he arrives in Philadelphia; indeed, he encounters disease, death, and deception which

Dispossession, Diseased Attachments  17 complicate his already vulnerable position as a poor, rustic youth and accentuate his feelings of abandonment, dispossession, and isolation. Further distinctions may be made when considering that, while Linn’s father (Brown’s soon to be father-in-law, William Linn, Jr.) was a highly respected and gifted minister who served as a chaplain during the ­A merican Revolution and later became president of Queens ­College, Brown fashions Arthur Mervyn’s father, Sawney, as an uneducated Scotch-Irish immigrant farmer—hence, a member of an ethnic group considered at the time to be socially inferior. Undoubtedly, R ­ ebecca Linn experienced a degree of trepidation as she traveled to an unfamiliar place; however, we learn in a letter Brown writes to Rebecca approximately two months later that she had once again “reached home in safety and in due season… under the paternal roof.”2 In contrast to this beloved daughter’s happy return to her ancestral dwelling, displacement, loss of primary attachment figures, and intense and fundamental feelings of difference dominate Arthur Mervyn’s life throughout the novel. His mother’s premature death, his father’s remarriage to a woman whose “interest” was “irreconcilably hostile” to his own, and his father’s “intimations” that his son was “old enough to provide” for himself, leave Mervyn “fully impressed with the necessity of removal” from his family’s farm, and thus he becomes at once dispossessed of his foundational attachments to both people and places. That his father was “a man of slender capacity” only accentuates Mervyn’s loss of a mother from whom he “enjoyed unlimited indulgence.” Consequently, Mervyn is left to fend for himself in a post-Revolutionary world that still relies on a paternalistic reward system. As the “only child of [his] father,”—his siblings having all “died successively as they attained the age of nineteen or twenty”—Mervyn had “reasonably hoped to succeed to his patrimony.” However, after his father’s hasty marriage to Betty Lawrence, the family “milk-maid and market woman,” Mervyn quickly realizes that “the house in which I had lived was no longer my own, nor even my father’s,”3 a situation that effectively upends the classical notion of patria potestas, whereby the male head of family exercises complete control over his family and property. Thus, rather than controlling matters under his dominion—his family, land, and other assets he owned—Sawney, the pater familias, relinquishes his authority to Betty who reshapes the power structure of the Mervyn family. In the context of post-Revolutionary America, the duty and authority to regulate women’s behavior fell to family patriarchs; hence, as she steps into the place of female head of household, the matria familias, Betty serves to complicate, destabilize, and delegitimize the period’s perception of patriarchal rule. Because place is comprised of both geographic locations and social systems within those locations, places function as complex structures of economic, social, and physical relationships. Mervyn’s forced exile from

18  Dispossession, Diseased Attachments “the roof under which I was born”4 generates multiple interpersonal and place attachment pathologies that influence his decisions throughout the novel. He has been both exiled from and dispossessed of everything and everyone he has ever known. Unlike voluntary migration, exile creates a specific type of journey because, as Nancy Caro Hollander explains, it is often “shorn of hope and aspiration.”5 Mervyn has no specific goal or object before him and realizes he “knew not whither to go, and what kind of subsistence to seek.”6 Studies on place attachment generally support the notion that psychological safety and stability depend on one’s ability to search for and maintain familiar, dependable bonds with other individuals. Based on these studies, Mervyn’s trek away from what he had formerly believed was a stable and cohesive rural home and toward an unfamiliar urban setting would logically heighten the strange social environment of the city for him, particularly during his initial entry into Philadelphia’s urban boundaries. Deprived of the prospect of someday gaining control over his father’s property, Mervyn is forced to leave behind everything that is familiar to him. Divested of the materiality of place, he perceives the vulnerable nature of his position and realizes that all of the attachments that had bound him to his childhood home were “dissolved” and that he no longer held a place of perceived importance in the world. Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou contend that being forced into a place in which one is “not the center,” engenders a reaction that “gives rise to action and resistance.”7 Mervyn realizes he must sublimate his attention away from the solitary “manual occupations” of farm life and “bend [his] course” toward the masses inhabiting Philadelphia’s urban spaces. Similar to Rebecca Linn’s temporary loss of familiar interpersonal and place attachments that Brown describes in his letter to her, Mervyn is obliged to travel to a place where he “knew not a human face, and was a stranger to its modes and dangers.”8 However, while Linn’s trek away from home is only temporary and driven by her family’s interest in her welfare, Mervyn’s is not. Rebecca Linn returns home to her family where she will live out a prearranged existence, but Mervyn has no home or family to which he can return and therefore must forge a new identity and a new existence. His performative stance will thus enable him to reestablish a possession of self in which he refuses to become a disposable, disenfranchised subject; what emerges then is a complex, cognitive identity demonstrated by a shift in his attitudes, values, beliefs, and thoughts. Mervyn’s interactions with others and his sense of belonging must be negotiated beyond familiar affective and place attachments in order that he may construct a new, rational self-identity. Initially, though, Mervyn believes that rather than journeying toward a better life, his situation has actually compelled him to journey away from the ‘presumed’ security of a “thousand agreeable visions” and “innumerable projects”9 with which a paternal inheritance would have

Dispossession, Diseased Attachments  19 provided him. However, Mervyn’s emotional and physical emancipation from interpersonal and place attachment bonds is crucial to his personal development and the future attachment bonds he will eventually cultivate. Undoubtedly, displacement disrupts the geographic and social complexities of place attachment, yet, as terrifying as displacement can be, displaced subjects often have the opportunity to construct new interpersonal and place attachments, which can prove particularly important for individuals who have been living under oppressive circumstances. Rob Imrie highlights various studies that explore the social, physical, and psychological effects ‘home’ has on individuals, noting that for many individuals home is often a place that serves as a “powerful extension of the psyche,” a place in which individuals develop a social context; or where they feel a sense of “mental well-being… a place to engender social, psychological, and cultural security”; or where they can experience “personal control… a mirror of personal views and values.”10 In Mervyn’s case, however, ‘home’ becomes a destabilizing place where he is made to feel unwelcome and which ultimately serves as a source of repression. Hence, he is compelled to revise his attachment bonds and build new relationships with different people and places. In her discussion of how displaced individuals renegotiate place attachment, Mindy Thompson Fullilove identifies a four-stage process11 that begins with the ‘antecedent phase,’ in which individuals recognize pressures that can lead to place dispossession, followed by the ‘uprooting phase,’ in which interpersonal connections are severed. The rupture of Mervyn’s interpersonal and place attachments unfurls first when he acknowledges his father’s limited intellectual capacity and marriage to Betty Lawrence as threats to his sense of place stability. Consequently, his interpersonal and place attachment bonds are severed and he is forced to relocate. For Mervyn, uprooting actually occurs in several stages—first, when he loses his siblings, then his mother, and finally his father and home. The rupture of these interpersonal bonds, however, enables him eventually to gain self-empowerment through the rejection of paternal authority. He leaves his home “without asking,” and “sallie[s] forth into the high road to the city,” acknowledging that he “left nothing behind.” With the “fearlessness of youth,” he goes forward to “try the city in the first place.”12 After uprooting comes the ‘transition phase,’ which is the physical relocation from one place to another. Mervyn enters this phase when he relocates to Philadelphia; however, this period of Mervyn’s renegotiation of place also occurs in phases, as he shifts back and forth between rural and urban settings, establishing new interpersonal and place attachments with each move. Ideally, exiled individuals experience a final ‘resettlement phase,’ a renegotiation of place that is dependent on the degree to which others welcome a displaced person into a new place and how readily others assist in helping an individual make a new place a home.

20  Dispossession, Diseased Attachments Mervyn’s resettlement, though, includes experiences with other characters who embrace or reject, empower or disempower, affirm or repudiate him. Initially, when Mervyn crosses the border into the city for the first time, he quickly realizes just how tenuous his position is, as greedy tavern owners who quickly recognize Mervyn’s gullibility rapidly swallow up his scant resources, setting the stage for his subsequent exposure to the corruptive influences of the city. Mervyn’s simple life is replaced by the complexities of human interaction with strangers, and he finds himself embroiled in the cosmopolitan world of commerce and finance capital inhabited by an assortment of dishonest merchants and speculators, particularly Welbeck, whose corrupt dealings expose Mervyn to a web of deception, seduction, and murder. It is worth noting, however, that although the city is replete with “perils and deceptions” which give Mervyn “a distaste to a city life,” he does not immediately return to his “ancient occupations.” Instead, it is not until Welbeck murders Watson and enlists Mervyn’s help in burying Watson’s body, that Mervyn realizes, “The country was my sole asylum.” Yet even the “thousand imaginary charms”13 of a rural life turn into a nightmare for him after he returns to the country. His ‘sole asylum’ ultimately reveals the duplicity, greed, and deception of a seemingly bucolic community. Hence, genuine resettlement only begins to occur for Mervyn toward the latter section of the novel’s second part when he formalizes his familial affections for Achsa Fielding as his wife and Eliza Hadwin as a surrogate sister. Although Mervyn’s resettlement is marked by frequent disruptions, they eventually bring him closer to a rational, liberal identity. As Butler and Athanasiou suggest, “ethical and political responsibility emerges only when a sovereign and unitary subject can be effectively challenged.”14 Because he is divested of a place he believed rightfully belonged to him and his attempts at resettlement are persistently challenged, Mervyn is in fact able to choreograph his own personhood, to demand regard, and, in the process, cultivate a political and affective awareness of others, particularly those he perceives of as different from him. As he acquires—and periodically resists—new attachments in ­Philadelphia, for the first time in his life, Mervyn confronts alterity in the form of various urban ‘others’ whose lives intersect with, inform, and challenge his experiences. As Sean X. Goudie points out, Mervyn has a “proclivity for objectifying the people he encounters, and who encounter him,” signifying the “formation of his character, his attitudes toward race, and his intellectual proclivities for the future.”15 That Mervyn depersonalizes others, however, is not unusual, particularly considering he had not yet “attained the age of nineteen,” he grew up on a “small farm” in a racially homogenous community, and he had achieved minimal formal training or proficiency beyond “that of the pen.”16 Though himself a dispossessed subject, Mervyn initially objectifies and critiques expropriated others who deviate in some way from his own narrow

Dispossession, Diseased Attachments  21 perceptions; however, the challenges with which he is faced throughout the novel compel him to question his own limited observations of otherness and ultimately move him toward an enlightened future. In a letter written to his brother James shortly before the publication of Arthur Mervyn, Part I, Brown explains that Mervyn’s “virtue” coupled with his “pennyless [sic] condition” is necessary to “wind up the reader’s passions to the highest pitch.”17 Affective responses from the novel’s readers aside, Mervyn’s initial state of abjection is essential to his personal transformation throughout the story. Brown’s descriptions of Mervyn’s attachment issues within both rural and urban settings allegorize paternalistic models of agrarian independence and fetishize the world of late eighteenth-century urban commerce, providing an important connection to the way in which attachments to both urban refinement and rural culture can create conflict, social disorganization, and destructive attachments within emerging models of liberal progress. Despite his adverse experiences, Mervyn renegotiates his interpersonal and place attachments through a sphere of optimism. Thus, while Mervyn appears despondent, despairing, and full of dark thoughts throughout much of the novel, he responds to each tragic event with a growing confidence. Despite death, disease, corruption, and the loss of both interpersonal and place attachments, Mervyn never categorically abandons hope, regardless of what he verbalizes to others, and it is this persistent optimism in the midst of tragedy that provides him with a potential future. Lauren Berlantz maintains that the impulse to “repeat optimism,” which she argues is another way to define desire, “is a condition of possibility that also risks having to survive, once again, disappointment and depression, the protracted sense that nothing will change.”18 However, alongside this risk lies what I contend is the circumstance of potentiality, which includes the possibility ‘everything’ will change and that pleasure and contentment can be as much a part of life as frustration and disillusionment. Indeed, once one is on the other side of disappointment and depression, there is a greater awareness of potentiality and the knowledge that one can actually survive intensely painful experiences. Although he has a tendency to be pessimistic, particularly early in the novel, Mervyn consistently models the circumstance of potentiality because he never surrenders to adverse situations. When he begins his narrative in Part I, Chapter II, he tells Dr. Stevens, the physician who nurses Mervyn back to health after he contracts yellow fever, that he believes he “may reasonably look for the same premature fate” of his siblings; however, by the time he completes his narrative at the end of Part I, even though his “perturbed senses… hindered [him] from discerning the right way,” he is “not disheartened.” Instead of leaning into a place of pessimism and doubt, he “dismissed all fear,” and ends his narrative looking toward “futurity” and an emerging desire to demonstrate for Dr. Stevens that “the being whose life you have prolonged,

22  Dispossession, Diseased Attachments though uneducated, ignorant and poor, is not profligate and worthless.” Mervyn has an enlightened sense of duty “not [to] dedicate that life… to mischievous or contemptible purposes”19 but rather to become a more informed and compassionate human being. Despite the many setbacks he experiences, Mervyn continues to cultivate optimism through interpersonal and place attachment experiences, even destructive ones, because he recognizes that “the force of attachment has more righteousness than anything intelligibly or objectively ‘true.’”20 For instance, in Part II, Chapter XVI, when Mrs. Wentworth characterizes Mervyn’s association with the profligate Welbeck as “unfortunate,” Mervyn promptly disagrees, telling her: “My knowledge of Welbeck has been useful to me. It has enabled me to be useful to others. I look back upon that allotment of my destiny which first led me to his door, with gratitude and pleasure.” Although Mervyn understands that in his dealings with Welbeck “no injury to fortune and fame, and innocence and life, had been incurred by others greater than has fallen upon my head,” he also realizes it enabled him to “derive some consolation and some hope.” Indeed, his repetitive optimism sustains his attachments and brings him closer to an enlightened identity because he comprehends that his negative experiences have “done away with a part of my ignorance of the world… [and have] led me to the situation in which I am now placed.”21 Mervyn’s exile from his rural birthplace, his subsequent poverty, and his exposure to commercial corruption, premature death, murder, and the ravages associated with yellow fever, alongside his introduction to the fatal consequences of seduction, thus facilitate his subsequent transformation into a rational, educated, and independent citizen. Furthermore, by underscoring Mervyn’s and other marginalized characters’ vulnerability throughout the novel and then highlighting Mervyn’s subsequent enlightenment by the novel’s conclusion, Brown successfully exposes America’s destructive attachments to traditional representations of privileged white, male authority. Consequently, Mervyn’s personal metamorphosis parallels America’s transition from a system of monarchical control to a sovereign nation. These countervailing forces of paternalism and autonomy are reflected in recent scholarly discussions of place attachment and mobility. To be sure, a paternalistic reward ­system depends on and encourages affective attachments to place; however, those emotional bonds sometimes prove to be detrimental. Humanto-place bonding has the potential to engender a sense of s­ ecurity and ­belonging, but place attachments can also generate feelings of obligation, causing regression or creating anxiety and fear. Even so, sociologists, environmental psychologists, attachment theorists, and humanistic geographers have emphasized that familiar surroundings, even those with negative associations, are often preferred over unfamiliar environments because of the likelihood of maintaining close relationships with others.

Dispossession, Diseased Attachments  23 Attachment studies frequently demonstrate that attachments to the ­materiality of place, the development of fixed cultural roots, and maintaining strong communal bonds are often essential to personal happiness. Nevertheless, while this may be the case for some individuals, for others, attachments to fixed places can be so detrimental as to destroy their quality of life. While the fundamental concepts of attachment treat place rootedness as an ideal model for emotional stability and personal contentment, some scholars are quick to point out the advantages associated with mobility, even when mobility is compulsory. For instance, Liisa Malkki argues for the importance of rethinking identity and place entrenchment primarily because people are in fact “chronically mobile and routinely displaced.”22 Chronic mobility and displacement have always existed in American culture; hence, the concept of mobility is fundamental to an American identity. Per Gustafson maintains that, while a body of research suggests that “places matter to people and that place attachment is associated with life satisfaction,” place is also important “even in societies characterized by a high degree of mobility.” While some studies indicate that individuals engaged in a nomadic lifestyle often express lower levels of attachment to place than individuals who are rooted to one specific place for an extended period of time, Gustafson argues that these studies may overlook the fact that “[t]hose who are mobile may perceive places as meaningful for different reasons, and develop different types of attachment, than long-time residents.”23 Indeed, recent studies on migration tendencies indicate that certain types of personality dimensions are associated with migratory intentions. Hence, researchers found that individuals who expressed the desire to migrate away from their primary dwelling space reported “higher achievement,” which researchers linked “to greater willingness to take risks, such as those associated with migration.” Further findings suggest that individuals who are motivated to migrate have a “decreased affiliation motivation”; in other words, they are less attached to other people and places, which facilitates their experiences while renegotiating place attachments. 24 Mervyn’s formerly secure attachments to place were “converted into something which repelled [him] to a distance from it. [He] was a guest whose presence was borne with anger and impatience.”25 Hence, Mervyn’s affective landscape—what I refer to as an emotional geography of place—necessitates his physical alienation from the emotional security of familiar interpersonal and place attachments, and his willingness to take this risk leads Mervyn toward a greater awareness of himself and others. In truth, the disruption of Mervyn’s interpersonal and primary place attachment bonds, sets him on a nomadic journey in which he is able to experience a kind of incipient freedom that allows him to act indeterminately, outside the bounds of materiality. As Elizabeth Grosz contends,

24  Dispossession, Diseased Attachments “[i]ndetermination is the ‘true principle’ of life, the condition for the open-ended action of living beings, the ways in which living bodies are mobilized for action that cannot be specified in advance.”26 When Mervyn is displaced, his future becomes aleatory; there is no predictable outcome, no set course for him to follow, but it is the very uncertainty of his future that generates unlimited potentialities for him. Although early in his narrative Mervyn appears to lament his forced exile into the unknown, in Part II of the novel he reminisces about an early predilection toward mobility and exploration when he recounts details of his rural upbringing to Dr. Stevens, proclaiming, “I loved to leap, to run, to swim, to climb trees, and to clamber up rocks, to shroud myself in thickets, and stroll among woods.” Here, the psychological significance of his early experiences—his desire “to obey the impulse of the ­moment”—signifies his aversion to being “classed” or to being forced to travel “to and fro in the same path.”27 Thus, not wishing to be rooted in one physical place or one ideological mindset, Mervyn is able to build on his experiences and construct a future identity that will lead him toward an enlightened place.

Gendered Geographies and the Legalities of Place Mervyn’s situation, his place in the world, mirrors the sociopolitical conflicts that were in flux during the late eighteenth-century circum-­ Atlantic period. The disruption of attachment bonds between America and England produced a national indeterminism that helped distance the United States from the corruptive influences of an antiquated E ­ ngland. Mervyn’s exile, displacement, and fragmented attachments, illustrate the variety of attachment issues many individuals living in the United States experienced during the early years of the new Republic. Attachment pathologies were especially heightened for marginalized individuals, particularly lower-class citizens, women, free and enslaved people of color, and the many émigrés escaping the horrors of the French and Haitian Revolutions. Thus, in order to examine the experiential nature of place and displacement for various dispossessed others during the early American Republic, it is important to draw on concepts of interpersonal and place attachment paradigms illustrated in Arthur Mervyn. One of the by-products of Mervyn’s progressive education is his enlightened awareness of dispossessed others, which enables him to participate in a civic and cultural intelligibility of otherness. Similar to many of his essays and letters, Brown’s novels are frequently immersed in the period’s cultural and sociopolitical debates regarding racialized and gendered place identities. Thus, by illuminating Mervyn’s interpersonal and place attachment conflicts alongside his attempts to master his own destiny, Brown reveals the shared attachment experiences of various dispossessed figures in the circum-Atlantic revolutionary world.

Dispossession, Diseased Attachments  25 The character of Betty Lawrence, in particular, reveals some of the dramatic shifts in women’s place in late eighteenth-century American culture, as well as how the geographical place into which one is born can define and further marginalize women. Mervyn denigrates Betty who, along with other female characters Mervyn encounters throughout the novel, must use the scant resources available to women in her social sphere in order to elevate herself within a decidedly masculine space. According to two accounts—Mervyn’s and Mrs. Althorpe’s—Betty is responsible for Mervyn’s exile and the eventual dissolution of the Mervyn family farm. That both Mervyn and his father have simultaneously been dispossessed of land and property ownership, which for both constitutes a perceived locus of control, is an intriguing inversion of circumstance, particularly as Betty represents a classic example of a conventionally dispossessed subject. She is a poor, uneducated, property-less female, who resides in contraposition to the period’s American ideal of a dominant white, property-owning, male subject. Though not in legal possession of Sawney Mervyn’s property, Betty exercises complete mastery over her unwitting husband and converts his fixed possessions into expendable legal tender. After Mervyn’s exile, she convinces Sawney to sell “his place” and “try his fortune in the W ­ estern Country,” a failed venture that prompts Sawney to seek ­“consolation in the bottle” in “haunts of brawling and debauchery,” which eventually leads him to prison and an untimely death. Mrs. Althorpe, a former neighbor of the Mervyns, describes Betty as an “artful profligate” who has traded her “paste-board bonnet and linsey petticoat” for “ribbons and shining trinkets.” Mrs. Althorpe gleefully reports to Dr.  Stevens that she had recently recognized Betty sitting in a theater with women whom she claims are “of the infamous class.” Although Mrs. ­A lthorpe’s insinuation that Betty is a prostitute is intended as an insult and confirmation of Betty’s contemptible place in society, in actuality, Mrs. Althorpe provides here a timeless illustration of an alienated female positioned in a place in which expendable materiality—the body, in Betty’s case—equals success. Much to Mrs. Althorpe’s disapproval, Betty has transformed Sawney’s land, the “rood of ground upon [the] Schuylkill,” which was worth “ten fold better than an acre on the Tenessee [sic],”28 into a consumable commodity. Yet Betty, like other women in her position, chooses instead to make the most of her existing value while it is still available, rather than defer gratification for opportunities that, for her, will likely never be realized. Other characters interpret Betty’s choices as confirmation that she is low and sordid; however, a careful review of her options indicates that Betty’s decision to sell Sawney’s property, take his money, and go to the city to live as a prostitute—albeit a decision that is not without some of its own negative consequences—is perhaps the most expedient and practical one available to women in her economic and social place at the

26  Dispossession, Diseased Attachments time. In Arthur Mervyn, Brown positions characters in places in which they are impelled to interact with the period’s range of social, economic, and civil discourses. Throughout the early national period women were managing family properties, expanding female educational opportunities, and drawing attention to and demanding the individual liberties on which the new government was built. Despite these advances, however, the decades following the Revolution were replete with widespread political and legal unrest, as the United States attempted to distance itself from association with British laws. In Arthur Mervyn, female characters, such as Betty Lawrence, Clemenza Lodi, Eliza Hadwin, Achsa Fielding, and Mrs. Villars and her daughters, illustrate in varying degrees the cultural and legal inconsistencies with regard to place identity women in the early Republic encountered. Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro point out that the “immediate victims of commercial misdeeds” are the “wives and daughters of the commercial class”29 who, I argue, are victimized primarily through human-to-human and human-to-place attachment disruptions. For instance, Achsa’s father loses his fortune after the “failure of the great mercantile houses of Frankfort and Liege” and subsequently commits suicide; hence, when her father kills himself, Achsa not only loses a primary attachment figure, but she also loses her family’s “wealth” and consequently the societal place her family’s affluence enables her to inhabit. The “security,” “pomp and luxury” into which she had been born, is “suddenly exchanged for poverty,”30 and consequently Achsa is forced to renegotiate her place in the world. Clemenza Lodi’s father also engages in business transgressions shortly after transforming himself from a “Merchant at Leghorn” to a “planter in the Island of Guadaloupe.” In the midst of his greed, the elder Lodi “flattered a slave with the prospect of his freedom,” but then sold the slave as part of the Lodi estate. Prompted by revenge, “the slave assassinated Lodi,” and his sudden death eventually places Clemenza at the mercy of degenerates like Welbeck. Although Clemenza’s brother, Vincentio, inherits his father’s estate, when he journeys to Philadelphia, where he hopes to find, protect, and care for his sister, he contracts yellow fever. On his deathbed, he entreats Welbeck to “search out his sister, whose youth and poverty and ignorance of the language and manners of the country might expose her to innumerable hardships,” and unfortunately entrusts Welbeck with his “pocket-book [where] were found bills to the amount of twenty thousand dollars.” Although Clemenza was the “rightful claimant”31 of what would be considered at the time a fortune, Welbeck appropriates the money for himself and, following the period’s traditional seduction motif, takes Clemenza, too, impregnating her, and promptly depositing her in a brothel where she gives birth to a child who dies shortly thereafter. It is important to note, though, that while many women in the novel are victimized by male members of the commercial class, Eliza Hadwin,

Dispossession, Diseased Attachments  27 whose father is not part of an international commercial network of deceit but is instead an honest yeoman farmer, is also wronged by laws that obstruct her ability to inherit peaceably her father’s property following his untimely death. However, Eliza responds to the legal oppression of the period using a decidedly independent approach. After learning that her father’s property was “bequeathed” to her and that her uncle Philip Hadwin was named executor of her father’s will and Eliza’s guardian till she “should be twenty years old,” Eliza is agitated with “the deepest consternation.”32 Realizing that her father’s will in effect places her under the care of a profligate man with whom she “could not live,” Eliza performs an act, which Barnard and Shapiro describe as “Eliza figuratively break[ing] her patriarchal bonds.”33 Tearing her father’s will “in several pieces” and throwing the “fragments into the fire,” she tells Mervyn, “I am free.” Thus, her performative stance, like Mervyn’s and Betty’s, moves Eliza from a place of “simplicity and helplessness” to a place that signifies a “force of mind.” Eliza’s independent spirit is demonstrated at the end of novel when she goes to live with Achsa who, as a surrogate “elder sister,” will “watch over her happiness” and “provide for her subsistence and education.” After Eliza has been under the protection of Achsa for an extended period, Mervyn remarks on her “native and intuitive refinement and sagacity of mind”; however, because of his own rational improvement he also recognizes that the “graces” Eliza is developing have an opportunity to flourish because she has been removed from a “cold and churlish soil” and transplanted to “a genial element” where she receives a “polished education, and intercourse with the better class of society.”34 Although there were gradual legal shifts being made at the time, property laws rarely favored women. In fact, colonial coverture laws, borrowed from centuries old British common law, prevented married women from owning property, and even after a husband died, women often did not profit very much from dower rights, which were typically limited to a third of a husband’s real property at the time of his death. As Joan Hoff explains, “dower settlements… often benefited creditors more than widows and almost always ignored ‘emotional attachment to a certain piece of property.’”35 Thus, if a man were to die in debt, his wife or daughter could likely lose her home and property regardless of her material and sentimental attachments to them. The place in which Betty is positioned as Sawney’s considerably younger second wife, who has a reputation in her rural community as an immoral schemer, leaves her particularly vulnerable to the range of social and legal challenges to place possession many women of the period faced. Although male authority within the family system was diminishing and there were legal tendencies toward spousal equality, many laws, particularly those involving modifications in property rights and legal status, remained unsolidified during the last decade of the eighteenth century. Furthermore,

28  Dispossession, Diseased Attachments as Pauline E. Schloesser notes, alongside an erosion of dower laws during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, “children began to receive an equal share with their mothers.”36 As a surviving son, Mervyn could have laid claim to certain property rights after his father’s death, which would have effectively eradicated any claims Betty would have had to Sawney’s property. Perhaps cognizant of this possibility, Betty shrewdly encourages Sawney to sell his land and place the money from the sale “in her keeping.”37 True, Betty may be described as manipulative and calculating, but in light of the bleak prospects her future held, she is in reality rather pragmatic and resourceful in her attempts to survive. That said, while Betty is one of the most marginalized and socially tarnished female characters in the novel, she by no means endures the most tragic consequences resulting from interpersonal and place attachment disruptions. In fact, in terms of material success, Betty’s circumstances steadily rise throughout the course of the novel. Mervyn describes Betty as “a wild-girl from the pine forests of New-Jersey.” The pine forests are known more familiarly today as the Pine Barrens, a heavily forested section of New Jersey with a rather sordid history. Mervyn’s disparaging reference to Betty’s place of origin and his condescending descriptions of Betty as having “coarse” features, a “robust” frame, and “a mind totally unlettered” are in fact ironic, first because the Pine Barrens is, like Mervyn’s Chester County, a rural place, but, more importantly, while Mervyn considers himself socially superior to Betty, the Mervyn family clearly does not inhabit an elevated social position within his own rural community. In fact, Mrs. Althorpe condescendingly describes Sawney in very similar terms to Mervyn’s description of Betty, stating that he was a “Scotch peasant, whose ignorance was so great that he could not sign his name.”38 While Betty hails from an area whose residents, known by the derogatory term ‘pineys,’ were considered loathsome, intellectually inferior societal outcasts, she manages, at least from a material standpoint, to advance her circumstances in life. Interestingly, the Pine Barrens is comprised primarily of a species of pine tree known as “pitch pine,” which, like Betty herself, is able to survive in several different soil types and under extreme conditions. There are also several carnivorous plants in the Pine Barrens, such as the sundew, that lure unsuspecting insects onto its sticky stalks, and then capture and digest these insects. Similar to these carnivorous plants of her native place, Betty lures Sawney into her trap, captures him—or more importantly his land—forces him to sell his land, and subsequently converts that land into currency, which she quickly spends (digests) in order to improve her pecuniary status. Another noteworthy point is that Betty’s surname “Lawrence” is derived from the Italian male given name “Laurentius,” which originates from Laurentium, the “city of laurels,” in Italy. The laurel is a symbol for victory, and considering her lowly origins, Betty appears to be quite victorious in the contest between her husband and herself.

Dispossession, Diseased Attachments  29 Interestingly, the surnames of several other female characters also reference geographic places. “Lodi,” for example, is a city in Lombardi in northern Italy. It is also the site of Napoleon’s first battle after he successfully invaded Italy in May 1796, shortly before Brown published ­ Clemenza” Arthur Mervyn. Of further import is the fact that the name “ comes from the Latin clementia, “meaning not just forgiveness but mercy for those subject to punishment.”39 Hence, though her body has been “invaded” and her wealth stolen by the nefarious Welbeck, Clemenza Lodi is merciful, and even in the midst of her “distress for her [dying] child,” she expresses “concern for the fate of Welbeck.” The surname ­“Fielding” also derives from a geographical place for a dweller of cleared or open land. Indeed, by the end of the novel, Achsa’s money clears the way for Mervyn to pursue his plan to become a physician. F ­ inally, the name “Villars” is also a locational surname of French-­Norman origin, derived from the Latin villare, meaning an outlying farm. There is also a related adjective villaris, which means “of or belonging to a ­country-house.” Welbeck describes the Villars’ brothel as a “rural retreat, lonely, and sequestered.”40 Mrs. Villars, her occupation, and her relegation to the lower edges of society thus suit her place setting within the novel. Also worthy of note is that the name “Althorpe,” a locational surname of Danish-Viking origin from “Olla throp,” also translates as an outlying farm. Although Mrs. Althorpe literally hails from an outlying farm in a rural county, her place in society is quite different from Mrs. ­Villars’; however, Achsa’s and especially Clemenza’s stories are important ­reminders of how quickly one can move from a place of culture and respectability to one of disgrace and degradation. Undoubtedly Mrs. Althorpe’s uncharitable remarks regarding Betty highlight her ignorance of or indifference toward the brutalities women in Betty’s social position at the time faced. Betty is disparaged first by Mervyn and then by Mrs. Althorpe; however, under the circumstances, by taking the most personally advantageous course available, Betty is able to transform herself from a place of material deprivation to one of ostentatious exhibition. This display is described principally through Mervyn’s and Althorpe’s references to Betty’s clothing, which reveal the various social places she inhabits. As sociologist Gilles Lipovetsky argues, fashion has always “blurred the established distinctions and made it possible to confront and confuse social strata,” while it continually reestablishes “the timeless logic of signs of power, brilliant symbols of domination and social difference.”41 After his mother’s death, Mervyn observes a change in Betty’s style of dress, which “was of gayer hues and more fashionable textures.” On the day she and Sawney are married, Mervyn states Betty was “dressed in the gayest manner” and “decked with the most gaudy plumage.” While Mrs. Althorpe—from her self-­ defined place of privilege—may disapprove of Betty’s decision to take Sawney’s money and run “away to the city” with it, Betty “flaunting

30  Dispossession, Diseased Attachments with ribbons and shining with trinkets” appears to have advanced quite well from her previous social position, where she “deal[t] out pecks of potatoes and… cantilopes [sic] in the Jersey market”42 and donned the course fabric and cheap material worn by the working class. Betty’s change of dress indicates a change in place and highlights the political, sociohistorical, and cultural dynamics of the early Republic, effectively transforming American fashion into a type of power structure in which bodily performance is continually on display. Betty successfully underscores the period’s focus on commodities and exchange of goods represented by urban places. Barnard and Shapiro point out that as the notion of commerce became a more legitimized feature of society during the early Republic, it transformed an “ageold suspicion of moneymaking into a wholehearted celebration of its potential to generate new values and social relations.”43 The patriarchal power structures of the period, however, attempted to limit women’s freedom by restricting the complete scope of options for autonomy that it provided men. Nevertheless, as Betty gets further away from her rural beginnings and closer to an urban place—the edge of human and material realms—her prospects for personal autonomy and economic freedom appear to increase. In Part II, Chapter XIV, readers learn that prior to working for the Mervyn family Betty had lived in the city “for ten years,” which “gave her an audacious and inquisitive spirit.”44 Working as a prostitute in an urban environment provides Betty with a potential freedom she could not experience in the country; hence, as soon as she garners an opportunity to do so, she travels from rural Chester County back to a place where she formerly experienced a degree of autonomy. That the last time Betty is seen in the novel she is surrounded by other women and not men is an indication that she has moved beyond a closed phallocentric economy, and, while men may serve as her customers, her world does not appear to be dominated or controlled by men. As Elizabeth Grosz argues, [i]f freedom is located in acts rather than in subjects, then the capacity to act and the effectivity of action is to a large extent structured by the ability to harness and utilize matter for one’s own purposes and interests.45 Both Mervyn’s and Mrs. Althorpe’s descriptions construct Betty as a sexualized subject, Mervyn stating that Betty was “quite a supportable companion in the hay-field or the barn-yard,” and Mrs. Althorpe stating that Betty was “a prostitute” who had engaged in a “criminal intimacy” with Mervyn.46 While rural others may subjectify and disparage her, within an urban setting, which is the last place readers are told she lives, Betty can effectively act, successfully appropriating and exploiting the material goods at her disposable. Grosz maintains

Dispossession, Diseased Attachments  31 that freedom is not really allied with “choice” as much as it is with “autonomy,” which in turn is connected to one’s capacity to make activities one’s own, “to integrate the activities one undertakes into one’s history.”47 Given the “choice,” Betty may not have elected to be a sex worker; however, because her options are so limited, she chooses a path that furnishes her with the greatest sense of autonomy and ­material gain. While earlier in the novel Mervyn sets Betty’s “gross and perverse taste” conspicuously against the figure of his “revered mother,” who is full of “gentleness and fortitude,” in Part II several other important female characters are variously placed in situations in which their moral integrity is at times ambiguously defined. For instance, Mrs. Villars initially “passed for the widow of an English officer,” yet her “manner and mode of living were specious.” She and her three daughters, who were “well trained in the school of fashion, and elegant in person, ­manners, and dress,” received from their neighbors the “respect to which their education and fortune appeared to lay claim”; nevertheless, it was not long before the “fallacy of their pretensions… appeared.” Ironically, Mrs.  Villars’ brothel—which is a place or ‘villa’ of prostitution she ­establishes “in a remote quarter of the city”—is the first place Mervyn encounters Achsa Fielding, a woman he eventually marries. And it is in the Villars’ brothel that the depraved merchant Thomas Welbeck deposits Clemenza Lodi whom he impregnated, “robbed and betrayed.” Although he meets Achsa for the first time in this “temple of voluptuousness,” Mervyn almost immediately assumes from her “countenance and carriage” that Achsa embodies “purity, innocence and condescension.” The dissonance he encounters between Achsa’s apparent “tokens of virtue” and her place in the Villars’ brothel prompts Mervyn to strive for internal consistency, as he repeatedly justifies her presence there and wonders if Achsa had not been “apprized [sic] of the character of her associates.” Likewise, he rationalizes Clemenza’s situation and attempts to remove her from the Villars’ and relocate her to Mrs. Wentworth’s house, yet Mrs. ­Wentworth argues against admitting “under my roof a woman, notoriously dishonored, and from an infamous house” and even calls her “Welbeck’s prostitute.”48 Although Mervyn vilifies Betty in Part I because she is poor and lacking family connections, he readily defends Clemenza for being in similar circumstances, imploring Mrs. Wentworth to come to Clemenza’s aid: Poverty is not the only evil that oppresses, or that threatens her. The scorn of the world, and her own compunction,… and the witness of her shame, are not the worst. She is exposed to the temptations of the profligate; while she remains with Mrs. Villars, her infamy accumulates; her further debasement is facilitated; her return to reputation and to virtue is obstructed by her new bars.49

32  Dispossession, Diseased Attachments There are several plausible explanations for the disparity between Mervyn’s compassionate responses to Achsa’s and Clemenza’s situations here and his rather callous descriptions of Betty, the woman who took the place of Mervyn’s revered mother. To begin with, similar to Mervyn, Clemenza and Achsa are exiles from their native places, and both, like him, have experienced the tragic death of family members. Both women appear to have a degree of refinement that Betty does not possess, and, although Welbeck misappropriates Clemenza’s material wealth, both she and Achsa, unlike Betty, come from fairly prestigious family backgrounds. Mervyn also views Betty as a sexual, disposable object, whereas Clemenza and Achsa embody his romantic, idealized fantasies. As Berlantz argues, “Fantasy is what manages the ambivalence and itinerancy of attachment”;50 hence, to avoid the potentiality of defeat through loss of attachment, Mervyn’s romantic fantasies enable him to deconstruct the quixotic nature of his attachments and “forget” the losses he claims he “cannot remember without agony.” Mervyn regularly demonizes, romanticizes, or idealizes the women he encounters because of his own fear of attachment to the female body, a fear that is embedded in the loss of attachment he experiences with respect to his mother’s death. This loss is quickly followed by his forced de-attachment to place, which occurs, at least from his perspective, because Betty aggressively employs her sexuality to garner his family farm. As Sara Ahmed argues, it is “the futurity of fear,” the very real potential that one may lose a beloved object, that makes “what is fearsome all the more fearsome.”51 The loss of attachment to his mother, the primal subject who has secured his relationship with the world, is a driving force that accentuates Mervyn’s anxious expectation of a threatening but intangible dread of the female. Betty, because of her low social standing, is denied respect and a formal education, and Clemenza, instead of being removed to a place where she will be protected and supported, is deposited in a brothel “forlorn, betrayed, and unhappy.”52 Both women are juxtaposed to characters such as Eliza and Achsa in order to draw attention to the period’s diverse gender and sexual interactions that Brown inserts with regularity throughout Arthur Mervyn. In contrast to the late eighteenth-century seduction novel’s didactic approach, in which ‘young ladies’ are warned against engaging in premarital sex, lest they find themselves pregnant and abandoned by an unworthy profligate, Brown develops a variety of multidimensional female figures to accentuate the period’s economic, social, political, and legal conversations related to gender. Brown illustrates the period’s narrow-minded perception of gender inequities through indistinct representations of feminine virtue and debauched womanhood. Throughout the novel, Mervyn’s fears manifest as mechanisms of defense against potential loss; consequently, his tendency to objectify others arises from his fear of loss and displacement. Although the

Dispossession, Diseased Attachments  33 situations in which female characters are placed in Arthur Mervyn repeatedly demonstrate the way in which the female body becomes bounded by male fears, anxieties within the novel over ethno-racial otherness help underscore the threat of white male privilege and, as the next section demonstrates, the period’s hegemonic misreading of dark bodies.

The Pathology of Race and Place From a historical perspective, forced exile and displacement were often common experiences for many marginalized groups in America. Victims of the African slave trade, indigenous peoples who were forced from their own lands, and foreign refugees seeking asylum in the United States often had little choice when it came to detaching from place. Crucial political figures in America’s war of independence were often ambivalent at best when confronted with the brutality of place associated with ethno-racial groups. Notably, the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) generated multiple anxieties for American slave owners who saw the uprisings in Saint Domingue (Haiti) as a warning of what could occur in the United States if slaves were to engage in rebellion. Many whites living in Haiti during the earliest uprisings fled the island to avoid the brutal conflicts that began in the 1790s. For many abolitionists, the Haitian Revolution exemplified the possibility that slavery could indeed be abolished, and consequently white slaveholders in the United States reasonably feared the arrival of dispossessed black and mixed-race refugees in American towns and cities. During the 1790s, people of color experienced several place disruptions, which led to an enormous growth in Philadelphia’s black population. Although the arrival of thousands of free and enslaved people of color from Haiti engendered great fear in some inhabitants of the city, the necessary roles these individuals and other marginalized figures performed throughout the early national period caused many United States’ citizens to reexamine the nation’s foundational institutions and historical attachments to hierarchical views of Anglo-male privilege. Philadelphia’s gradual emancipation laws throughout the 1790s resulted in many free blacks traveling north seeking to escape the South’s increasingly oppressive laws that restricted economic and political opportunities for free people of color. Abolitionists and other humanitarians in Philadelphia often promised protection for and economic security to many African Americans. The Haitian Revolution also produced a surge of immigration to America that, for the first time, eclipsed the previous immigration numbers of Anglos. According to Gary B. Nash, although there was only a minor increase in Philadelphia’s white population during the 1790s, the city’s black population actually grew from 2,078 in 1790 to 6,436 in 1800.53

34  Dispossession, Diseased Attachments Moreover, recently emancipated U.S. slaves joined other free blacks in various working-class Philadelphia neighborhoods, establishing households alongside Irish and German immigrants, further complicating underlying social maladies already in existence. Working as unskilled laborers, domestic servants, artisans, small business owners, and other wage laborers, free people of color often found themselves competing for employment with other displaced immigrant groups. Nash points out that free blacks, “along with arriving Irish, English, and German immigrants and city-born white laborers,” experienced a “punishing decrease in real wages and a substantial narrowing of employment opportunities.”54 The heightened visibility of people of color in the city coupled with a decrease in jobs and reduction in wages occurs during the period in which Brown is writing Arthur Mervyn. Thus, it stands to reason that Brown would raise questions related to early Republican debates about the ethno-racial status of people of color and dominant social hierarchies based on white, male privilege. Philadelphia’s surge of mixed-race and black Haitian refugees may be, according to Barnard and Shapiro, “part of the context for Brown’s affirmation of mixed-raced unions”55 in the novel’s conclusion. The delayed disclosure of Achsa Fielding’s Jewish ethnicity and Mervyn’s decision ultimately to pursue marriage with her as opposed to the younger, Anglo, peasant girl, Eliza Hadwin, retroactively sanctions the presence of other dark bodies situated throughout the novel and also signifies the development of Mervyn’s rational, progressively minded identity. The United States’ involvement in the period’s rising global commercial network is greatly affected by the Haitian Revolution and the wealth that is realized from the exchange of racialized bodies tied to the Caribbean slave trade. This legalized form of violence is revealed in the disordered social system of the novel’s action, as racial tensions are staged within a city ruptured by the ravages of its worst yellow fever epidemic. Barnard and Shapiro point out, however, that within the “diseased environment” of Philadelphia the “carriers of destruction are not African bodies, not French refugees, but the [white] merchants who traffic in the goods provided by slaves.”56 By setting the destructive, self-centered cruelty of white characters against ethno-racial examples of civic integrity and charity, Brown reminds readers of Richard Allen and Absalom Jones’s polemical response to Mathew Carey’s, A Short Account of the Malignant Fever, Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia (1793), in which Carey denigrates black volunteers who had served as nurses and undertakers during the epidemic. Allen and Jones, two leading African-American abolitionist ministers in Philadelphia’s free black community during the 1790s, played a central role in defending disenfranchised blacks in their pamphlet Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, during the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia,

Dispossession, Diseased Attachments  35 in the Year 1793: And a Refutation of Some Censures, Thrown upon Them in Some Late Publications (1794). Written in response to Carey’s accusations that “some of the vilest of the blacks” had “extorted” large sums of money while serving as nurses to yellow fever victims, and that some “were even detected in plundering the house of the sick,”57 Narrative emphasizes the beneficent acts in which black members of the city were engaged during the epidemic. Though collectively expropriated of materiality, political power, and interpersonal and place attachments, members of the black community thus challenged their dispossession through a unified stance against the dominant sociopolitical arena of whiteness. Brown emphasizes the physical intimacy that existed between diseased (white) bodies and healthy blacks who, despite ongoing p ­ olitical and racial conflicts within the city, served as nurses, caregivers, and ­undertakers during the height of the epidemic. By setting the story within the context of Philadelphia’s 1793 yellow fever epidemic, Brown underscores the way in which disease and death pathologize human-to-­ human and human-to-place attachment bonding among displaced and marginalized individuals. As the fever epidemic raged on, the city was faced with an ever-increasing supply of diseased, dying, and dead bodies, and city officials—those who actually stayed in the city—recognized the necessity of disposing of the dead and even near-dead victims of the disease. Ahmed argues that white’s fear of black bodies “re-establishes distance” between those bodies and “establishes an ‘apartness’ of white bodies.”58 However, prominent physicians at the time, such as Benjamin Rush, believed blacks had a natural immunity to yellow fever (though this was later disproved) and therefore encouraged blacks to renegotiate the physical distance that had previously existed between black and white bodies. Hence, by caring for diseased and dying victims of yellow fever and disposing of dead white bodies, blacks participated in some of the most intimate bodily attachment activities in which human beings can engage, and in reality were placed in a position of power that integrated the politics of both spatial and bodily fears. The pathology of attachment is perhaps most readily observed in the trading of black bodies and the profits that flowed from Caribbean plantations, which parallels the contagion-filled movement of epidemics. Yellow fever is mobile—epidemics move quickly. Similarly, slaves are displaced, face forced mobility, and are transmitted through a diseased network of transatlantic commercial exchange. When Mervyn is displaced and then travels into the city, he too is conveyed into a web of commercial, political, and social malignancy. When he contracts yellow fever, he is forced into a cessation of activity, a type of immobility and rootedness. Yet, even as yellow fever forces his body into stasis, the disease continues moving within his body. The movement of a potentially deadly disease often causes living things to cease moving. The disease

36  Dispossession, Diseased Attachments moves through the body while at the same time causing the body to stop while the disease ravages the corporeal self. Freedom, argues Grosz, “is linked to the body’s capacity for movement, and thus its multiple possibilities of action.”59 In the context of Brown’s fictional world, both slavery and yellow fever impede freedom because both force the body into some form of inaction. The terror resulting from the uncontrollable movement of disease echoes the fears arising from dispossession and loss of attachment. The violent nature of yellow fever, displacement, and rootlessness disrupts ontological speculations and illustrates the diseased aspect of slavery. Life is ephemeral. The materiality of the body and place is transient. The illusion of freedom is that it is not an absolute right. Enslavement, dispossession, death, and disease signify yet another bond with materiality and remind us of our lack of free will. Regardless of our mobility, our autonomy, and our freedom, the quantifiable nature of our physical selves eventually deprives living beings of the power of motion; both death and enslavement signify immobility, stasis, and fixity, as one is deprived of the power of motion. Thus yellow fever takes the form of another agent that engages in the transmogrification of the flesh. The disease and the body become a communal entity; there is an imperceptible distinction between the body and the disease. By conflating race and disease, Brown successfully draws attention to the complicated characteristics of freedom in the new Republic.

Transmogrified Bodies and the Transference of Rational Thought Julia Kristeva writes that the corpse is “cesspool, and death,” causing violent upset. Without the concealment of animation, corpses demonstrate what the living “permanently thrust aside in order to live.”60 Compelled to exist in a place in which corpses continually mock the living, ­A rthur Mervyn must defy and normalize the nonliving bodies he confronts throughout the novel. Brown’s fictional world suggests that death is not merely a universal function of life, but it is also an obstruction that goes beyond the foulness of abjection. In Arthur Mervyn, Brown ‘composes’ decomposition as a way to aesthetically flush out the horror of contamination with which living bodies are threatened. Whether it is the “ghastly and rueful” countenance of Watson’s corpse or the earth “heaped” upon the lifeless “limbs” of the beloved Susan Hadwin to “cover… them from human observation,”61 Brown repeatedly emphasizes the deterioration of the dead body as a contaminating abjection upon the living. Yet each time Mervyn confronts death he is conveyed even further toward an enlightened identity, and his divergent responses to Watson’s and Susan Hadwin’s dead bodies suggest a dawning progressivism in his character. When he first views Watson’s corpse, Mervyn’s initial “impulse” is to “shut this spectacle from my view.” He acknowledges some “fear” of

Dispossession, Diseased Attachments  37 Welbeck and “with that of the dead,” yet because of Welbeck’s apparent kindnesses toward him in his time of need, Mervyn recognizes that desertion would appear a “thankless and dastardly deportment.” Thus, he makes “no preparation to depart” from Welbeck nor does he “verbally assent” to Welbeck’s proposal to help him bury Watson. Mervyn objectifies Watson’s dead body as a “murderous catastrophe,” a “breathless corpse,” a “ghastly burthen,” “this object,” and “the murdered person.” He describes the sight of Watson’s corpse as “ghastly, and still exhibiting the marks of convulsion and agony!”62 When Welbeck “cast his burthen on the ground,” the covering is loosened from Watson’s face, and his corpse becomes “a border that has encroached upon everything” in Mervyn’s world.63 While Mervyn asserts that he is generally calm in normal situations, he confesses, “the imagination of man is naturally abhorrent of death.” Watson’s death and the sight of his corpse thus disturb Mervyn’s identity and stability. Welbeck, after “glancing a furious eye at the corse,” cries out, “[t]his worthless and miserable scene shall last no longer. I will at once get rid of life and all its humiliations,” and accordingly he carries the corpse to “dark-some and murky recesses,” digging but a “shallow bed” and throwing only a “slight covering of clay” over the “hapless Watson.” Welbeck’s “movements were hurried and tremulous” and his features so intense and fixed that Mervyn suspects the “subversion of his reason.” The “place of [Watson’s] interment”64 and Welbeck’s callous treatment of Watson’s corpse fittingly mirror the brutal termination of his life, and this burial scene serves to traumatize and desensitize Mervyn. Watson’s death and Mervyn’s proximity to it is the first in a series of dead bodies Mervyn encounters, but it is the distinction between his descriptions of Susan Hadwin’s and Watson’s burials that provides a striking reversal in Mervyn’s responses to their deaths. Mervyn is highly agitated that he “knew not wither” Welbeck intended to convey ­Watson’s corpse, and while he acknowledges that Welbeck had talked of burial, he is troubled that “no receptacle had been provided” to house the dead man’s body. Mervyn’s performative acts during Watson’s burial essentially reverse gender roles. Like the forlorn female of a traditional seduction novel, Mervyn is left abandoned, frightened, and incapable of either leaving or resisting Welbeck, who repeatedly comes into and goes out of Mervyn’s life. Because Mervyn “did not verbally assent to ­[ Welbeck’s] proposal” to bury Watson, Welbeck interpreted his silence into “acquiescence.” Welbeck even leaves Mervyn alone and helpless at one point during the burial, “snatch[ing] the candle from [his] hand” and leaving him in “unrespited (unrelieved) gloom.”65 In the case of Susan, though, Mervyn is the one who must make the decision of how to dispose of her remains. However, unlike his anxiety over finding a suitable final resting place for Watson’s corpse, he ignores convention when it comes time for Susan’s burial. The “lovely but unhappy”

38  Dispossession, Diseased Attachments Susan is “a being so devoutly pure, so ardent in fidelity and tenderness” that the sight of her corpse created in Mervyn “feelings that were awful and sublime.” But instead of following proper burial traditions, he hastily concludes that her body needs to be buried almost immediately after her death. Because of her spotless innocence, Mervyn reasons that “something was forthwith to be done with regard to the unhappy girl that was dead,” acknowledging that her remains must be deposited with “as much solemnity and decency as time would permit.” However, although he contemplates “proper” burial practices, which he outlines in some detail, he believes this is a case “in which it is [his] duty to omit them,” startlingly describing them as “toilsome, tedious, and expensive.” Hence, he decides simply to lay the “daughter by the side of her parent.”66 Because Susan’s corpse is no longer the young woman, the sister, the lover, the friend, Mervyn considers it his duty to keep Susan’s remains from the view of her sister Eliza. The descriptions of Eliza’s first contact with Mervyn when he returns to the Hadwin farm and the landscape imagery surrounding Susan’s death reflect in many ways Mervyn’s increased sexual attraction to Eliza. Just prior to Susan’s death, when Mervyn returns with news of her fiancé Wallace’s demise, Eliza rushes into his arms “breathless.” He refers to her as his “gentle girl,” who leans on his “bosom… resign[ing] herself to passionate weeping.” While Mervyn claims he does not restrain Eliza’s outpouring of emotion because he believes that “its influence would be salutary,” he is immediately conscious of the “thrilling sensibility and artless graces of this girl,” ­describing these “new proofs” of her affection as both “mournful and delightful.” It is precisely at this moment when thoughts of Eliza “pressed with new force upon [his] heart, and [his] tears, in spite of [his] fortitude, mingled with hers,” that the pair are distracted by “a faint scream… from above.” The “pale, emaciated, haggard, and wild” figure of Susan appears, and upon realizing Mervyn was not her beloved Wallace returning, she could not endure the “fatal disappointment of hopes” and thus “sunk upon the floor without signs of life.” At this point Mervyn recognizes with “horror” that the formerly “lovely frame” of Susan now “evinced the last stage of decay.” While Mervyn states that his first impulse was to “summon a physician,” he curiously decides that this act would be pointless, and instead he “sat beside the bed of the dying till the mortal struggle was past.” Perhaps revealing his hidden desire to possess Eliza completely, Mervyn states at the beginning of Chapter IX that the “death of Hadwin and his elder daughter,” while producing “keen regrets,” is “outweighed by reflections on the personal security” of the still living daughter.67 Subsequent to her sister’s demise, Eliza “[o]verpowered by fatigue and watching,” sinks into a “profound slumber” and becomes softer, more supple, and compliant. More important though is that because filial barriers have essentially been removed as a result of the death of her father

Dispossession, Diseased Attachments  39 and now her sister, Eliza also becomes an available sexual object, whom Mervyn eroticizes in his description of the landscape, which changes from “ground that had lately been frozen and covered with snow… into gullies and pools.” The brook is “swelled by the recent thaw,” and the weather is “temperate and moist.” The makeshift bridge that he had placed over the brook has “disappeared,” and he must therefore “wade through” the gushing water. The landscape’s condition, from a practical standpoint, renders the ground softer than it had formerly been, but its ability to yield is also what makes it more treacherous. The description of the natural environment here is antithetical to the climate at the time of Watson’s death, when Mervyn complains of “the heat of the weather” and seeks to relieve himself with a bath. Mervyn depicts the scene with Watson as an uncomfortable stasis “which was aggravated by the condition of [his] thoughts” that “beguile” the “tormenting interval,”68 as he waits for Welbeck’s return. While nature seems to be budding into existence at the time of Susan’s death, the stifling heat Mervyn experiences right before Watson’s murder suggests an inertia that seems to prevent Mervyn from moving forward. After Susan’s death, Mervyn acknowledges “the attractions of this girl,” Eliza, and admits that not only had an “affection… stolen upon [him],” but he also flatters himself that he would “not be denied a suitable return.” The “impediment” that had formerly existed to prevent their union is now removed. He recognizes that their union would no longer risk the resentment or sorrow of her excellent parent. She had no longer a sister to divide with her the property of the farm, and make what was sufficient for both, when living together, too little for either separately. Yet Mervyn chooses not pursue his marital/sexual relationship with Eliza for a variety of reasons, not the least of which are his own youth, ignorance, and immaturity, the acknowledgment of which also leads him to question Eliza’s inexperience, which was “indeed, great [and]… could justly be said even to exceed [his] own.”69 This internal discourse, which Mervyn later shares with Eliza, inspires her to shift her thoughts away from conventional expectations and toward radical ideals of passion and the power of liberty. Thus, as Eliza gradually adjusts her thinking and progresses toward her own enlightened identity, Susan accordingly comes to represent feminine self-sacrifice, the traditional sentimental figure whose short life is full of pain and suffering. Susan’s death and Mervyn’s decision not to marry Eliza encourage her to seek liberty. The transgressive Eliza survives, while the conventional Susan dies. She is sacrificed for the image that Eliza comes to represent. There is a price for Eliza’s freedom, however, which is separation from traditional spheres. Yet as she renegotiates her disrupted interpersonal

40  Dispossession, Diseased Attachments and place attachments, Eliza becomes increasingly better able to transition toward personal autonomy. She successfully develops new familial attachments in the form of Mervyn and Achsa when she physically relocates to ­Achsa’s home, and these new bonds will support and encourage her progressive education. By the novel’s conclusion, both Eliza and Mervyn have shifted away from the inertia reflected in the climate at the time of Watson’s death to the melting of conventional ideals and shift toward liberal values brought forth after Susan’s death. ~~~ As Brown’s fictional world comes to an end, readers may reasonably expect that Arthur Mervyn will remain on his progressive path toward freedom, autonomy, and future enlightenment. Conversely, Brown’s ­sister-in-law, Rebecca Linn, satisfies her family’s expectations that she will marry well and live her remaining years fulfilling societal conventions. Linn’s ‘prearranged reality’ is thus accomplished only a few months after her lonely August 1801 journey out of Philadelphia. In a letter congratulating Rebecca Linn on her impending marriage to attorney W ­ illiam Keese, Brown writes, “Little did either of us dream… that, in less than a quarter of a year, all obstacles to your felicity would be removed.” While Rebecca’s new attachment will facilitate a “joyous fancy,” as she looks toward a “futurity teem[ing] only with bright and golden views,”70 one might assume that, unlike Mervyn, Rebecca will spend her remaining years following the period’s established societal rules. By the end of the novel, Mervyn’s future, like Rebecca’s, is full of “joy,” “rapture,” and a “future happiness,” but, instead of convention and inertia, Mervyn’s future will include a “swarm of new images” that will continually set him “instantly in motion.”71 Mervyn’s journey, dispossession, and interpersonal and place attachment disruptions, have enabled him to break free of convention, and thus his future is unimpeded by established rules. As one of the earliest examples of an American urban gothic tale, Arthur Mervyn foregrounds the new nation’s emerging attachments to urbanism and urbanity and its ambivalence towards the somewhat archaic values represented by rural culture. Thus, Brown’s inquiry into the relationship between modernity and antiquity and specifically Arthur Mervyn’s focus on historical representations of the other and the pathology of place attachment raises useful but challenging questions that bare on twenty-first-century readings of subsequent nineteenth-century texts. Historical attachments to American landscapes and their relationship to the politics of sympathy are situated in the narrative discourse that emerges in the ethos of nineteenth-century writing. Brown’s Arthur Mervyn suggestively highlights the political and social attachments of an emerging American identity and the personal psychology of the individual in the throes of social transformation.

Dispossession, Diseased Attachments  41

Notes 1 Charles Brockden Brown, “To R[ebecca Linn], 13 August 1802,” in Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown: Letters and Early Epistolary Writings, 1:7, edited by Philip Barnard, Elizabeth Hewitt, and Mark L. Kamrath. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2013: 584. 2 Brown, “To R[ebecca Linn], 13 August 1802,” 587. 3 Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793, edited by Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2008), 16–17, 14, 16. 4 Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 16. 5 Nancy Caro Hollander, “Exile: Paradoxes of Loss and Creativity,” in Psychodynamic Perspectives on Abuse: The Cost of Fear, edited by Una McCluskey and Carol-Ann Hooper (Philadelphia, PA: Jessica Kingsely, 2000), 81. 6 Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 17. 7 Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), xi. 8 Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 18, 17. 9 Ibid., 16. 10 Rob Imrie, “Disability, Embodiment and the Meaning of the Home,” in The People, Place, and Space Reader, edited by Jen Jack Gieseking, William Mangold, Cindi Katz, Setha Low, and Susan Saegert (New York: Routledge, 2014), 156. 11 See Mindy Thompson Fullilove, “The Frayed Knot,” in Place Attachment: Advances in Theory Methods and Applications, edited by Lynne C. Manzo and Patrick Devine-Wright (New York: Routledge, 2014), 141–153. 12 Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 20. 13 Ibid., 36, 92, 36. 14 Butler and Athanasiou, Dispossession, ix. 15 Sean X. Goudie, “On the Origin of American Specie(s): The West Indies, Classification, and the Emergence of Supremacist Consciousness in Arthur Mervyn,” in Revising Charles Brockden Brown, edited by Philip Barnard, Mark L. Kamrath, and Stephen Shapiro (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004), 66. 16 Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 17. 17 Charles Brockden Brown, “To James Brown, 15 February 1799,” in Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown: Letters and Early Epistolary Writings, 1:7, edited by Philip Barnard, Elizabeth Hewitt, and Mark L. Kamrath (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2013), 453. 18 Lauren Berlantz, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 121–122. 19 Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 162–163. 20 Berlantz, Cruel Optimism, 122. 21 Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 265, 266, 265. 22 Liisa Malkki, “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees,” in Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, edited by Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 24. 23 Per Gustafson, “Place Attachment in an Age of Mobility,” in Place Attachment: Advances in Theory Methods and Applications, edited by Lynne C. Manzo and Patrick Devine-Wright (New York: Routledge, 2014), 38. 24 Benjamin C. Campbell and Lindsay Barone, “Evolutionary Basis of Human Migration,” in Causes and Consequences of Human Migration: An

42  Dispossession, Diseased Attachments

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 4 4 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

Evolutionary Perspective, edited by Michael H. Crawford and Benjamin C. Campbell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 47. Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 17. Elizabeth Grosz, “Feminism, Materialization, and Freedom,” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 149. Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 254. Ibid., 177, 290, 177. Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro, “Introduction,” in Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793, edited by Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2008), xxviii. Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 309. Ibid., 72, 73, 74. Ibid., 215, 214. Barnard and Shapiro, “Introduction,” n. 1, 216. Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 216, 301, 303. Joan Hoff, Law, Gender, and Injustice: A Legal History of U.S. Women (New York: New York University Press, 1991), 27 Pauline E. Schloesser, The Fair Sex: White Women and Racial Patriarchy in the Early American Republic (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 31. Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 177. Ibid., 14, 15, 179. F. S. Naiden, Ancient Supplication (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 220. Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 244, 78. Gilles Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy, translated by Catherine Porter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 31. Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 16, 177. Barnard and Shapiro, “Introduction,” xxv. Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 257. Grosz, “Feminism, Materialization, and Freedom,” 148. Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 176. Grosz, “Feminism, Materialization, and Freedom,” 152. Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 16, 14, 168, 267, 240, 241, 267. Ibid., 267. Berlantz, Cruel Optimism, 122. Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 255, 65. Ibid., 245. Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2003), 137. Nash, Forging Freedom, 145. Barnard and Shapiro, “Introduction,” xxxii–iii Ibid., xxxiv. Matthew Carey, A Short Account of the Plague: Or Malignant Fever Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1794), 63–64. Sarah Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 63. Grosz, “Feminism, Materialization, and Freedom,” 152. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 3. Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 85, 213.

Dispossession, Diseased Attachments  43 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

Ibid., 84, 66, 84, 85, 65. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 3. Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 86, 66, 85, 88. Ibid., 84, 86. Ibid., 123, 205, 213, 211. Ibid., 207, 208, 209, 219. Ibid., 209, 210, 63. Ibid., 219, 220. Brown, “To R[ebecca Linn], 13 August 1802,” 601–602. Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 329, 323.

Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004. Barnard, Philip and Stephen Shapiro. “Introduction,” in Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793, edited by Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2008: ix–xliv. Berlantz, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Brown, Charles Brockden. Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793, edited by Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2008. ———. “To James Brown, 15 February 1799,” in Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown: Letters and Early Epistolary Writings, 1:7, edited by Philip Barnard, Elizabeth Hewitt, and Mark L. Kamrath. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2013: 453–455. ———. “To R[ebecca Linn], 13 August 1802,” in Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown: Letters and Early Epistolary Writings, 1:7, edited by Philip Barnard, Elizabeth Hewitt, and Mark L. Kamrath. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2013: 584–586. ———. “To R[ebecca Linn], 9 October 1802,” in Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown: Letters and Early Epistolary Writings, 1:7, edited by Philip Barnard, Elizabeth Hewitt, and Mark L. Kamrath. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2013: 587–588. Butler, Judith and Athena Athanasiou. Dispossession: The Performative in the Political. Cambridge: Polity, 2014. Campbell, Benjamin C. and Lindsay Barone. “Evolutionary Basis of Human Migration,” in Causes and Consequences of Human Migration: An Evolutionary Perspective, edited by Michael H. Crawford and Benjamin C. ­Campbell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014: 45–64. Carey, Matthew. A Short Account of the Plague: Or Malignant Fever Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Printed by the Author, 1794. Dubois, Laurent. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. Fullilove, Mindy Thompson. “The Frayed Knot,” in Place Attachment: Advances in Theory Methods and Applications, edited by Lynne C. Manzo and Patrick Devine-Wright. New York: Routledge, 2014: 141–153. Geggus, David Patrick and Norman Fiering. The World of the Haitian Revolution. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. Goudie, Sean X. “On the Origin of American Specie(s): The West Indies, Classification, and the Emergence of Supremacist Consciousness in Arthur

44  Dispossession, Diseased Attachments Mervyn,” in Revising Charles Brockden Brown, edited by Philip Barnard, Mark L. Kamrath, and Stephen Shapiro. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004: 60–87. Grosz, Elizabeth. “Feminism, Materialization, and Freedom,” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010: 139–157. Gustafson, Per. “Place Attachment in an Age of Mobility,” in Place Attachment: Advances in Theory Methods and Applications, edited by Lynne C. Manzo and Patrick Devine-Wright. New York: Routledge, 2014: 37–48. Hoff, Joan. Law, Gender, and Injustice: A Legal History of U.S. Women. New York: New York University Press, 1991. Hollander, Nancy Caro. “Exile: Paradoxes of Loss and Creativity,” in Psychodynamic Perspectives on Abuse: The Cost of Fear, edited by Una McCluskey and Carol-Ann Hooper. Philadelphia, PA: Jessica Kingsely, 2000: 81–99. Imrie, Rob. “Disability, Embodiment and the Meaning of the Home,” in The People, Place, and Space Reader, edited by Jen Jack Gieseking, William ­Mangold, Cindi Katz, Setha Low, and Susan Saegert. New York: Routledge, 2014: 156–162. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Lipovetsky, Gilles. The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy, translated by Catherine Porter. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Malkki, Liisa. “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees,” in Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, edited by Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001: 52–74. Naiden, F. S. Ancient Supplication. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Nash, Gary B. Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840. Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2003. Rosenthal, Kimmo. “Reading Murnane at 4am (The Consolation of Possibility),” Prime Number: A Journal of Distinctive Poetry and Prose 53 (April– June 2014). Accessed January 17, 2014. www.primenumbermagazine.com/ Issue53_Fiction_KimmoRosenthal.html. Schloesser, Pauline E. The Fair Sex: White Women and Racial Patriarchy in the Early American Republic. New York: New York University Press, 2002.

2 Fugitivity and Displaced Bodies in Leonora Sansay’s Secret History; or, the Horrors of St. Domingo

In a letter written to Aaron Burr from Cape Francois on 16 May 1803,1 six months prior to French General Rochambeau’s final defeat in Haiti, Philadelphia native Leonora Sansay describes a carnivalesque scene that vacillates between boredom and intrigue, dinner parties and military conflicts, desire and trauma, and deception and naïveté. Sansay is at first “dazzled & bewildered” by the theatrical spectrum of the island landscape, yet she admits to feeling “coop’d up in the hollow bason [sic] in which the town is built.” She describes General Leclerc, Napoléon Bonaparte’s brother-in-law, as a veritable buffoon who is “deceived by his officers, imposed on by the black chiefs,” and who appears to be in constant “danger[,] which his own imprudence had occasion’d.” When he dies suddenly “of a fever,”2 Sansay melodramatically concludes it was “the best thing he could do.” She mocks Leclerc’s wife, Pauline, a woman she describes as “small, with a common laughing face, that announces neither dignity, nor wit,” and then cheerily passes on island gossip about Pauline’s alleged affairs with other men, relating how, after her husband’s death, the farcical Pauline, “play’d so well the part of a disconsolate wife” that she made “every body laugh.” With expert stagecraft, Leonora Sansay describes herself to Burr as an idealized alter ego, using the pseudonym “Clara,” whom, she reminds Burr, “you once lov’d.” Thus, Sansay skillfully constructs a romanticized portrait of herself as an imaginary other who has grown “fairer” and more “charming,” and who has an “air truly interesting.” This and other letters Sansay writes pseudonymously to Burr from Haiti form the basis for what would become Sansay’s first novel, Secret History; or, the Horrors of St. Domingo (1808), a pseudo-fictionalized, semi-autobiographical epistolary narrative that memorializes Sansay’s experiences while living in Haiti during the final days of French rule and illuminates the period’s systemic violence toward women and people of color. In the novel, Clara’s story is revealed primarily through another pseudonymous voice, that of Mary, who is situated as Clara’s sister. While the sisters signify bisected parts of Sansay’s identity, they are in fact a unifying force, as revealed when Mary writes to Burr: “My fate is so intimately connected with that of my sister, that every thing concerning her

46  Fugitivity and Displaced Bodies must interest you, from the influence it has on myself.”3 This dual narrative and fragmented characterization serves to de-attach Sansay from the story’s action and thus constructs an intricate, bifurcated autobiography of Sansay’s own experiences amidst the war-torn island of Haiti. Sansay further detaches herself from the novel itself, signing it simply as, “A lady at Cape Francois,” which affords her a degree of personal distance from her narrative’s complex sociopolitical critiques of Eurocentric military aggression and negrophobic fears following Napoléon’s 1801 campaign to reclaim Haiti and re-enslave its lawfully liberated black population. Displacement and dispossession dominate Sansay’s narrative and inform real-life Haitian refugees’ lack of social cohesion resulting from economic disruption, geographic displacement, and the Revolution’s extreme political polarization. Studies of both interpersonal and place attachments recognize that involuntary loss of and separation from caring relationships and from one’s homeland can create emotional anxiety and psychic disorders, including fear, anger, hopelessness, and apathy. Nancy Caro Hollander points out that displacement is “perhaps the human experience in adulthood that most closely recapitulates the infant’s experience of attachment, separation and loss,” but Mary’s and Clara’s individual emotional losses and geographical displacements are only one aspect of the story they tell. Mary, in particular, also relates the atrocities many African and mixed-race slaves, particularly women, experienced during the height of Haiti’s revolution. Moreover, Sansay’s own eyewitness account of racialized and gendered violence during the final days of French rule in Saint Domingue challenges the philosophic rhetoric of the Age of Revolution. The egalitarianism upon which the ­A merican and French Revolutions were theoretically constructed could not be sustained in the practice of slavery and gender, class, and racial subjugation. Hence, Sansay’s Secret History effectively underscores America’s sociopolitical contradictions, which are exposed in the new nation’s attachments to enslavement, gender disparity, and class distinction.

Chains of Liberty—Haiti, the U.S., and White Patriarchal Power As the newly formed United States began to move past the destabilizing traumas of the American Revolution to become what many hoped would be a decidedly freer, more stable, and enlightened nation (we are still waiting), the circum-Atlantic world remained unsteady, unpredictable, and volatile. Many refugees displaced during the ongoing French and Haitian Revolutions moved from place to place seeking asylum, which, for those individuals, generated multiple attachment issues that were compounded by dispossession, resettlement, relocation, and colonization. The politics of place, borne out in continual shifts in cultural and national boundaries and the physical and emotional disturbances

Fugitivity and Displaced Bodies  47 inherent in large-scale social and cultural movements, inflicted suffering on these vulnerable individuals. Principally, dispossessed women and children, people of color, and the economically disadvantaged suffered the most, since they all lacked legal power and security in the new nation. The circum-Atlantic world was turbulently balanced between the timeworn structure of an archaic society that had already begun to crumble and the dawn of the modern era. Although the colonial system of slavery was challenged in the ideological rhetoric of the American Revolution, the United States Constitution fell short of abolishing slavery, and, while French scholars had been criticizing slavery since the 1740s, as David Geggus points out, their critiques “had no impact on France’s bourgeoning involvement in the Caribbean slave trade.”4 The economic incentives promised by the fertile landscapes of Caribbean islands like Haiti encouraged France’s increasing attachment to the notion of enslavement. Consequently, with respect to slavery, the sociocultural and economic ramifications of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) were significantly more transformative than the consequences of either the American or French Revolutions. As Laurent Dubois notes, what began as a “challenge to French imperial authority by colonial whites,” quickly became “a battle over racial inequality, and then over the existence of slavery itself.”5 It was the first revolution of its kind, one that profoundly influenced the perception of citizenship beyond racial, ethnic, and cultural boundaries, and therefore generated multiple anxieties for A ­ merican slave owners who saw the uprisings in Haiti as a warning of what could occur in the United States if slaves were to engage in rebellion. Between 1791 and 1803 tens of thousands of Saint Domingue’s inhabitants fled the island seeking refuge throughout the Caribbean basin and port cities along the United States’ eastern coast, most notably southern Louisiana and to a lesser, but still substantial extent in Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, Charleston, Norfolk, Savannah, and Spanish Florida. During the earliest days of insurrection, many white plantation owners, such as Sansay’s husband Louis, escaped the island to avoid the brutal conflicts of the revolution, which raised concerns for American slaveholders who were particularly interested in St. Domingue’s white flight to U.S. cities. According to John Meacham, throughout the 1790s, slaveholding Americans “feared that the example of St. Domingue would lead to the long-dreaded slave war, possibly with the explicit help”6 of the more than 15,000 refugees who came to United States from Haiti. White refugees, and many light-skinned, mixed-race refugees were often able to navigate successfully through a renegotiation of place and subsequently resettled in various urban centers along the eastern seaboard, finding employment, starting businesses, marrying and starting families, and eventually achieving a successful resettlement of place through a denial of racial identity. Conversely, refugees of color were particularly vulnerable to demagoguery and racial violence. Most southern states

48  Fugitivity and Displaced Bodies adopted laws “forbidding the entry of Haitian slaves and free mulattos,”7 which meant that people of color often experienced greater difficulty transitioning from Haiti to the United States and much less acceptance and assistance during the resettlement phase. That said, while many free Haitian refugees of African descent found it difficult and sometimes impossible to retain their liberty in the United States, free people of color in antebellum Louisiana often enjoyed legal rights and privileges that free blacks in other areas of the United States at the time did not customarily receive. Kenneth R. Aslakson argues that, “for free people of color, especially displaced refugees whose freedom was precarious, property ownership was one of the most important ways of securing liberty.”8 In their discussion of property, dispossession, and possessive individualism, Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou question the notion of human beings as types of property. The “idea that we have property in our own persons”9 is intriguing in that individuals can own themselves or be owned by others, an idea that originates within the capitalist formation of slavery and its negation of independence for subjugated others. During the early Republic, because only free individuals could own property, slaves, who were themselves considered property, were “prohibited by law from owning property.” Hence, ascertaining one’s “legal rights to certain property was equivalent to establishing one’s status as free,”10 which meant that owning a slave was an ironically viable legal option for people of color who sought to establish their free status. Of particular interest during this period is the status of free Haitian women of color, many of whom relocated to New Orleans during the height of the Haitian Revolution. While in Saint Domingue, some free women of color served in the combined role of professional property manager for and personal/sexual companion of French plantation owners. Known as menagerie, many of these women emigrated to New Orleans during the Haitian Revolution, where some became conspicuous figures in “slave property disputes in New Orleans City Court,” acting as defendants in these cases “twice as many times as they were petitioners,” which implies they were “most often the person in possession of the slave(s)” when the lawsuit was filed.11 Thus, by establishing themselves as property owners, these women were able to ascertain their freedom. As a heteronomic prerequisite for independence, dispossession restricts “the autonomous and impermeable self-sufficiency of the liberal subject through its injurious yet enabling fundamental dependency and relationality.”12 At its epicenter, the act of dispossession imposes pain and suffering and, ultimately, the suppression of another’s self-rule. Because one of the political goals of both the American and French Revolutions was to distribute equality only to property owners—not uniformly to all citizens—it is noteworthy that New Orleans City Court played such a prominent role in reconciling liberty and equality for free women of color through the granting of property rights.

Fugitivity and Displaced Bodies  49 For abolitionists in the United States, the Haitian Revolution was inspirational, but for those who sought to safeguard slavery, the implications of racial equality seemed catastrophic. Geggus and Norman Fiering note that for years historians either neglected to mention Haiti’s role in the insurrections that dominated the circum-Atlantic revolutionary world or “eschewed until very recently giving extensive consideration to the cruel and tragic history of St. Domingue.”13 Indeed, Haiti’s war of independence was, as Dubois affirms, “the largest slave revolt in the history of the world, and the only one that succeeded.” However, although the United States had only recently preceded Haiti to a place of independence, the new Republic, along with some of the most powerful European empires of the time, “were deeply involved and invested in slavery’s continuing existence”14 at the center of a rapidly growing and quite prosperous system of merchant capitalism that continued in earnest for years after the conclusion of the American Revolution. Although tens of thousands of refugees escaped from Haiti during the revolution, many of its inhabitants—black, white, and ­mixedrace—were unable or unwilling to leave the island, which, according to one newspaper report, had become a “country… filled with dead bodies, which lie unburied.”15 According to Geggus and Fiering, during the 1791 uprising, French troops were often “indiscriminate in their attacks against slaves they suspected of being involved with or supporting the uprising,” and slaughtered “noncombatants, including many children and elderly slaves.”16 Michael J. Drexler asserts that the “ideology of African ­infrahumanity—the view that ­Africans were not wholly human, and were thus inferior to whites—could comprehend slave resistance only as the barbaric, impulsive response of caged animals.”17 In practice, however, it was not only notions of racial inferiority that challenged the theory behind the period’s revolutionary discourse, but also the acceptance of gender, class, and ethnic abasement. Sansay’s Secret History “illuminates the early republic’s ‘unknown known’—its political unconscious—with incredible precision. It makes manifest the young republic’s dominant but repressed problem: a republic founded on liberty that held a vast population in bondage.”18 This “repressed problem” of enslavement, dispossession, gender disparity, and class distinction that Sansay highlights essentially contradicts the modernity implied in the genesis of the new American republic. ~~~

Biographical and Performative Places Leonora Sansay was known throughout her life by a variety of names—­ “Honora Davern,” “Mary Hassal,” “Eleonora ­H assal,” “Madame D’Auvergne,” and, in her correspondence with Aaron Burr, “Clara.” Joan Dayan, one of the earliest scholars to uncover details about ­Sansay’s life, suggests that Sansay changed “names as she changed

50  Fugitivity and Displaced Bodies places and status,”19 but as Joseph Hillis Miller contends, naming is an “initiatory performative utterance,” a ‘calling’ or performative expression that is “based or grounded on nothing but the call from the other,” the one which names. 20 According to Giorgio Agamben, every speech act is a “desubjectification,” which provides a “potentiality” that is “implicit in the very act” of naming. 21 In Sansay’s case, each act of renaming provides a complex arrangement of personal selves that decenters Sansay’s initiatory self, yet renaming also allows her to reposition her interpersonal and place attachments and facilitates her ability to rename and re-identify herself as she performs her various roles as daughter, writer, wife, socialite, and lover. Drexler indicates that much of what is known about Sansay’s life derives from her intermittent appearances in Burr’s memoirs and private journals, in which Burr identifies her as “Madame Sansay, too well known under the name of Leonora.”22 Here Burr’s ‘call to the other,’ the act of naming, creates a foundational meaning that proposes several potentialities: “Madame,” as a performative utterance, suggests Sansay’s status as a desubjectified entity, an object owned by another. Yet Burr’s second ‘speech act’ also renames her as an untethered subject, “Leonora,” an individual with her own identity, a naming that seems to suggest a degree of autonomy, except for the fact that she is ‘too well known,’ which is yet another type of naming or ‘call to the other’ that signifies one whose identity is public, excessive, unwieldy, and uncontrollable. A verb, as Miller points out, “generates a different species of performative utterance” that requires a “separate analysis”; however, the adverb “too,” which Burr uses to describe the ‘well-known’ Leonora, produces a similar type of “interminable analysis.”23 It takes on a life of its own and creates different meanings in different contexts, which has the potential to overwhelm. Hence, as ‘Leonora,’ Sansay may be “also well known,” “excessively well-known,” or “well-known to a regrettable degree.” Each of these adverbial alternatives engenders ­limitless— but also limiting—potentialities, in that the subject “Leonora” is simultaneously reinterpreted and thus delimited by each reinterpretation. Moreover, that “Leonora” is ‘well known,’ as opposed to ‘wellknown,’ suggests she is known ‘too well,’ or excessively as ‘Leonora,’ as opposed to being very ‘well-known,’ or famous, which, as Burr ‘calls’ it, indicates that what is known about ‘Leonora’ is somehow disproportionate to what should be known about her. According to Drexler, Sansay was Burr’s “sometime mistress” and likely his “confidante,” who was “capricious, witty, and inconstant in her attachments.” Interestingly, each of these signifiers emanates from external sources—Burr and Drexler—which serves to desubjectify Sansay, who has no control over how her naming is interpreted by others. Her use of various names throughout her life may in fact be a willing dispossession that simultaneously displaces and uproots both her public and private identities,

Fugitivity and Displaced Bodies  51 while also empowering her to reposition herself within the public sphere and thus simultaneously reclaim her private, self-identity. Sansay signs Secret History as simply “a Lady,” who wishes to reveal “secrets” for the “benefit of public history,” yet, as Drexler points out, she was also a “public woman, a coquette,” and a fairly well-known (as opposed to ‘too well known’) Philadelphia writer and social critic. 24 Burr writes in his Memoirs that Sansay “excited [his] curiosity to an extreme,”25 which suggests an intimate connection that undoubtedly augmented her public persona. The act of renaming in the context of her novel thus transforms her identity based on the social, public, and private evaluations of herself in relation to others. Sansay likely met Burr at her father’s tavern, Sign of the Half Moon, where many of Philadelphia’s most prominent politicians met informally. Perhaps at Burr’s suggestion, Leonora married Louis Sansay, 26 a French émigré from Saint Domingue, who sold his plantation to the black revolutionary Toussaint Louverture and subsequently fled to New York around 1796. The description of Clara’s marriage to St. Louis in Secret History seems a palpable reconstruction of Sansay’s own marriage to Louis, which was decidedly unstable, a fact borne out in an impassioned letter Louis sent while Leonora was with Burr in Washington. In this letter Louis entreats Burr to send Leonora home to him: I tremble that her intention is to abandon me and I myself have decided to abandon everything, and even to sacrifice my life, rather than leave her in the possession of another… I am not in the position to master and vanquish the love, friendship, and attachment I have for her. I beg of you to urge her to return as soon as possible. 27 Here, Louis Sansay, like Burr, also imposes possession on Leonora. He is in control—he may choose to sacrifice his own life if he cannot control hers. Leonora subsequently returned to her husband, perhaps at Burr’s insistence, and the couple henceforth set sail for Le Cap Français, Saint Domingue, in June 1802. In her subsequent May 1803 letter to Burr, Sansay is already considering the possibility of publishing her letters to him, inquiring of Burr, “should the story of Clara… be written in a pretty light style, could it be printed in America?” Although Secret History contains what Sansay calls “many subjects for romance,” neither the novel, nor the letter that inspires it, can be described as “pretty light style.” Indeed, Secret History is a complicated stratification of interpersonal and place attachments, mediated by “a train of amusements,” multiple voices, theatrical scenes, and histrionic renderings. The biographical information available on Sansay (limited though it may be) signifies a life driven by reinterpretations of self, which are mirrored in the narrative structure of Secret History and other novels28 Sansay wrote during her lifetime. In  her

52  Fugitivity and Displaced Bodies discursive movements, Sansay sought to protect herself, to place herself “off-stage,” while simultaneously living at the very heart of action, thus observing her life as she experienced it. The configuration of her secret movements brings insight to bear on the pathologization of women’s sexualities in eighteenth-century revolutionary culture, and the ways in which it is managed and controlled by violence and phallocentrism. Secret History effectively facilitates the unbodied, clandestine places Sansay experienced in her own life—her emotional pain, domestic trauma, loneliness, and grief. This is evident in Mary’s first letter to Burr in which she conveys a sense of hope intermingled with pain and disappointment. Although she “suffered horribly from sea-sickness, heat and confinement” aboard ship during her “passage of forty days” to Le Cap, she tells him she is “delighted with the profound tranquility of the ocean.” The French families traveling with her—those who had left the island when the revolution began—were now, like Clara’s husband, St. Louis, returning to Saint Domingue “full of joy,” “anticipation,” and “newly awakened hopes” at the idea of “again possessing the estates from which they had been driven by their revolted slaves.” Mary tells Burr that she and Clara “arrived safely here” and that the company of her fellow passengers was “so agreeable” she often “forgot the inconveniences” she faced. However, she is quick to lament that the “uninterrupted view” of the ocean and the “beautiful horizon” have “separated me from those I love.” Unlike the French passengers who look forward to re-occupying their former plantations, Mary is “obliged to follow” her sister Clara and Clara’s “precipitately chosen husband”29 to a place that is foreign to her, one in which her only positive familial connection is a sister who has impulsively married a man who will later abuse her. Mary makes it clear in her letter that she does not share her fellow travelers’ joy, anticipation, and hope, though she attempts to make the most of her journey when she travels to and lands in Le Cap. Located on the primary Atlantic sailing routes and bordered by the fertile northern plain, Le Cap—also referred to at the time as Cap Français—was Saint Domingue’s largest city. Dubois and John D.  ­Garrigus describe it as “a truly Atlantic city,” where most French colonists and African slaves “first touched Caribbean soil.” It was in fact “more connected to France than the official colonial capital, Portau-Prince.”30 However, when Mary and Clara arrive in Le Cap, the city is “a heap of ruins,” and Mary can scarcely imagine a “more terrible picture of desolation.” The streets are “choaked [sic] with rubbish,” inhabitants are living in makeshift tents, homes have been destroyed, and “unfortunate people have suffered” to such an extent that to hear it would “fill with horror the stoutest heart, and make the most obdurate melt with pity.”31 Similar to the titular hero of Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, who travels toward the death and destruction in Philadelphia at the height of the 1793 yellow fever epidemic, Mary

Fugitivity and Displaced Bodies  53 journeys to an unknown place where images of death and destruction abound. Moreover, like Mervyn, Mary describes how she felt compelled to abandon a place that had been a home for her, where she formerly felt protected and safe, and now must journey toward a place that was filled with terrifying imagery. Revealingly, however, much of the horror and devastation Mary relates throughout the novel is a direct result of the French reinvasion of Saint Domingue in 1802, which proved most injurious to Saint Domingue’s free and enslaved people of color and other members of the disadvantaged classes inhabiting the island. Many of these residents were born in Saint Domingue and experienced the greatest suffering from dispossession and place attachment traumas during the revolution. According to Mindy Thompson Fullilove, place attachment as a “community practice” is profoundly linked to the “economic, physical and social capacity of the place” and the extent to which it is functional enough to “support human life.” War and military conflict generate emotional, economic, and sociocultural traumas that are often intergenerational. When individuals lose all or part of what I refer to as their affective bionetwork—the emergent emotional responses generated by one’s biological system—they experience what Fullilove terms “‘root shock’—the traumatic stress reaction to the loss of all or part of one’s emotional ecosystem.”32 Cathy Caruth suggests that “trauma unsettles and forces us to rethink our notion of experience.”33 The “Horrors of St. Domingo” that Mary describes address the Haitian Revolution’s multiple traumatic disruptions, forced displacements, and interpersonal losses that are unfurled through repetitive events. The progression of this repeated upheaval has been reenacted for people of African descent throughout much of their history in the Americas, which has forced many African Americans to reorganize their attachment experiences. Secret History thus functions as an elaborate masque, in which Sansay filters her perceptions of trauma through the performances of ­others—Mary and Clara—and essentially repositions herself as a spectator, rather than a performer in Haiti. This intensifies the clandestine performativity of Sansay’s experiences and empowers her to transpose and redirect the dominance of the male gaze, thus placing Sansay in a position of power. Joanne Tompkins argues that while the characteristics of place have a “capacity to recontextualize performance,” performance can also “reformulate how we perceive and experience space and place.”34 In other words, the features inherent in the places where people “perform” their lives induce them to behave or perform in a particular way. How people perform can change the way they experience the places in which they act out their lives and help them reinterpret the specific traumas they experience within those places. Ostensibly couched within the boundaries of a typical sentimental framework, the novel dramatizes traditional

54  Fugitivity and Displaced Bodies representations of desire, obsession, and paranoia, while also presenting images of graphic violence, aggression, and corrupt attachments to both people and places in post-Revolutionary America and revolutionary Haiti. Sansay, from the safety of her position offstage, creates a hybrid performance of her life through the voices of Mary and Clara, thus executing a symbolic disruption of power relations that enables her to successfully and surreptitiously denude the trauma and hypocrisy of racialized and gendered dispossession.

Gendered Privilege and Black Voices Both Mary’s and Clara’s viewpoints unfold in Secret History through several subdivisions, generating a rhyzomatic tale that critiques an eclectic assortment of women in Saint Domingue. Nevertheless, while the psychosocial paradigm of attachment theory helps broaden an awareness of the period’s racialized and gendered attachment pathologies, in Secret History Sansay’s white privilege actually restricts and delimits her discussion of female, Afrocentric trauma. Clara’s transnational marriage to St. Louis and Mary and Clara’s hegemonic advantage as white Americans enable them to negotiate successfully within the confines of French imperialism and violent images of black and mixed-race revolutionary activity. Although female empowerment is frequently negated amid the confluence of ‘domestic subjugation—autonomy,’ ‘black re-­ enslavement—emancipation,’ and ‘sexual trauma—sexual license,’ it is black emancipation that ultimately frees Clara from domestic bondage and acts as a conduit to self-awareness for Mary and Clara. Nevertheless, both characters condemn the island as a place ill-adapted to their independence, a criticism that in many ways destabilizes the period’s traditional notion of female abolitionism. Indeed, the novel intertwines multiple paradoxes around the concept of freedom and liberty; hence, as it is described in the novel, ‘black enslavement fosters white freedom,’ ‘black freedom generates white fear,’ ‘white male privilege engenders female subjugation,’ and ‘white female entitlement prompts black female trauma.’ It is actually Mary and Clara’s entitlement as white citizens of the United States that facilitates their successful flight from Haiti as they seek to renegotiate their interpersonal and place attachments, traveling from Haiti to Cuba to Jamaica and, at the novel’s conclusion, presumably back the safety of Philadelphia, where they will be successfully reintegrated into their former place of residency. The main characters’ white privilege in Secret History thus raises important questions about female liberty, black emancipation, and class distinction that remain unanswered in the novel’s conclusion—specifically, what were the consequences that emerged for those women who lingered in Haiti, those who were unable or disinclined to leave the island, those who called Haiti home and who felt a sense of attachment to the island,

Fugitivity and Displaced Bodies  55 namely, the African, mixed-race mulatto, and Creole women born in the Caribbean? Melissa Adams-Campbell argues that Sansay “revolutionizes our expectation about the shapes of women’s stories and how those stories… shape women’s lives,”35 but does Sansay—can she—create an intersectional narrative that adequately addresses the lives and stories of all women? As a white United States’ citizen, can Sansay truly transform the period’s assumptions about women whose lives barely intersect with her own? Although Sansay capitalizes on sensational accounts of both white and black violence in Secret History, her perspective—her covert emplacement in the novel and in dominant white culture—impedes her ability to speak knowledgeably about those women living in Haiti whose lives, thoughts, feelings, and emotions only tangentially overlap with hers. Adams-Campbell points out that, as women, Mary and Clara “grasp the arbitrary nature of gender power and gender performance” and during their stay in Haiti learn the “profound truth that there is more than one way to be a woman.”36 Yet neither character, nor Sansay as writer, can entirely comprehend the racially motivated physical, sexual, and domestic violence directed toward women of color, nor can they completely empathize with the traumatic attachment disruptions associated with slavery. Because Sansay’s perspective falls short of characterizing the full impact of racialized violence directed toward women of color in Haiti, it is important to reinforce Sansay’s narrative with one that—at the very least—derives from an Afrocentric place of awareness. Approximately twenty years after the publication of Secret History and a quarter century after Jean Jacques Dessalines declared Haiti’s independence from French rule, Freedom’s Journal, the first American newspaper published by African Americans, began serializing an anonymous, short fictional work that concentrates on the specific traumas Haitian women of color experienced during the Revolution. Narrated from an Afric-perspective and focusing entirely on the place attachment traumas of characters of color, “Theresa—A Haytien Tale”37 (1827) is set during the same time period and in the same geographic place as Secret History. “Theresa” is similar to Secret History in style and arrangement in that both stories imitate the period’s sentimental narrative structure, and, much like Sansay’s account, the fictional tale is sated with emotional appeals to readers and features scenes of long-suffering ‘ladies,’ whose courage, conduct, and virtue sustain them in the face of adversity. In both stories, attachment to place is distorted by war-ravaged images of unhealthy affectional bonds, loss of place and intimacy, and fear of sexual trauma, yet the testimonial efficacy of these two discursive acts is unique to each, and because of their differences the critical reception of each narrative logically engenders different responses. Although white male writers of the period, such as Charles Brockden Brown, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, and Royall Tyler, closely scrutinized

56  Fugitivity and Displaced Bodies the new nation’s sociopolitical attachments to archaic perceptions of gender, class, and/or ethno-racial identities, it is important to keep in mind that these writers were members of a protected and well-connected class, which empowered them to write without fear of repercussion. This was not always a reality for women writers, like Sansay, who chose to publish her work anonymously, and it was especially not the case for minority groups—particularly women of color—who had little to no legal protections or social safeguards and were often silenced and restrained from visibly protesting their restricted social and political place in the United States, France, or Haiti. In the context of knowledge, power, and subjectivity, it is essential to recognize that when rethinking the histories of liberal western governments, dispossessed and displaced individuals were often lacking the benefits of democracy, citizenship, and shared agency. As property-owning, self-governing citizens, white male writers voiced their ideas with impunity, while many women and people of color remained voiceless subjects, living precariously and fearful of repercussions. Although “Theresa—A Haytien Tale” was published anonymously, it is reasonable to assume the author, identified simply as “S,” was African American. Freedom’s Journal was founded as a channel through which individuals of African descent could, as Frances Smith Foster maintains, “speak for themselves about themselves primarily to themselves but also to any who would hear them.” One argument Foster uses in support of a male author of the story is that the editors of Freedom’s Journal were all men, and because many editors at the time (particularly those in charge of compiling material for fledgling periodicals) also served as contributors, 38 supports, but does not prove, the possibility the author of “Theresa” was male. Foster conjectures that Prince Saunders, “a New England teacher of African descent who moved to Haiti after the Revolution to organize an education system (and to convert Haitians to Protestantism)” was the author of “Theresa.” That said, Foster also contends that “women writers (or at least writers with feminized pseudonyms) appeared in the paper’s earliest issues, and gender and women as subjects and agents were common,”39 so it is entirely possible “S” was a woman writer of African descent. Yet, even without definitive evidence of the author’s gender, the fact that “Theresa” was published in an ­African-American periodical, focuses exclusively on characters of African descent, and was more than likely written by someone of African ancestry reinforces the intimate nature of the narrative’s account of domestic disruptions for people of color during the height of violence in Haiti.

Racialized Violence and Clandestine Places The story “Theresa—A Haytien Tale” is set in the midst of the “long and bloody contest, in St. Domingo,” and recounts how the “sons of Africa”

Fugitivity and Displaced Bodies  57 have been roused to defend themselves against “French barbarity.” Madame Paulina, the wife of one of those “patriot brethren” fighting for “liberty and independence,” is left “a widow, unhappy—unprotected, and exposed to all the horrors of the revolution,” a situation that delivers an important contrast between “Theresa” and Secret History. Readers of the short story are told that Paulina lost her husband who was fighting to protect his family’s land and freedom. In contrast, St. Louis, Clara’s husband in Secret History, would have been one among the many abusive French barbarians responsible for Paulina’s loss. Finding “no security” in her home in Saint Nicholas, and facing “unpleasant reflections on her pitiable situation,” Paulina considers an appeal to her brother living in Cape Marie, yet she soon learns “with horror” that he too “breathed out his valuable life in the cause of freedom, and for his country.” Bereft of all succor, Paulina “hurried herself in the execution of her plans for escaping,” and, with her daughters by her side and “protected by the mantle of night, hastens on her way to safety and quiet.” “Theresa” is carefully constructed around dark bodies’ attachment to and forced disengagement from place in order to demonstrate how the trajectory of black attachment—in terms of family, neighborhood, community, land, and the dominant sociopolitical arena of whiteness— creates the conditions for insecure attachment that are subsequently subdued as a result of Madame Paulina’s strong interpersonal and familial attachments to her daughters. Paulina’s reluctance to leave Saint ­Nicholas, even though the village was in the midst of “general uproar,” where the “shrieks of the defenceless [sic],” the “horrible clashing of arms,” and the “expiring groans of the aged” were all around her, signifies intense attachments. As she abandons Saint Nicholas with her two daughters, “driven by cruel ambition, from their peaceful abodes,” ­Paulina frequently turns her eyes “towards her ill-fated village” and “bathed with the dew of sorrow… heave[s] her farewell sigh.” Louise Chawla argues that because place forms the “circumference of our experience,” individuals will become attached to place “for better or worse.”40 During moments of major military conflict there is a “shadow side” of place attachment that can form from negative experiences of place, which involve, as Lynne C. Manzo argues, “a dynamic tension between phenomena, such as belonging and exclusion, and positive and negative affect.”41 In fact, the emergence of Attachment Theory derives in part from twentieth-century psychoanalyst John Bowlby’s interest in the psychological welfare of British post-World War II children and their affective responses to separation from primary caregivers as a result of death, severe injury, and psychological disturbance; their experiences living in wartime institutions, such as hospitals and orphanages; and the terror many children experienced during the Blitzkrieg. According to Mathew Thomson, one of the consequences of wartime experiences is an increased emphasis on “security, protection, and the importance of

58  Fugitivity and Displaced Bodies attachment to home and family.”42 Although Paulina was “occupied by fearful doubts and anxiety,” she makes “plans for escaping… the enemies of her country, and the destroyers of her peace.” At the conclusion of installment one of “Theresa,” Paulina leaves Saint Nicholas with “a soul oppressed with mingled grief and joy,” yet she embraces her daughters with “maternal affection” and thus “felt herself more secure.” Judith Kay Nelson argues that expressions of grief often engender the very thing attachment behavior is designed to do: “establish and maintain a close bond with others.” When one feels a sense of attachment, there is “hope for a resolution of grief as well as for maintaining a connection to whatever or whomever has been lost.”43 Paulina’s interpersonal attachment to her daughters thus provides her and them with comfort during a time of crisis and helps her maintain a connection to her dead husband. Her familial attachments also provide her with hope as she severs her attachments to a place in which she had lived her entire life. The story of “Theresa” exposes a war-ravaged landscape to highlight the moral and epistemological complexities that reinforce freedom and equality, which are subsequently destabilized by loss of interpersonal and place attachments. The narrator skillfully refocuses the period’s conventional emphasis on black-on-white violence in Haiti and instead draws attention to “unity in diversity”—the similar affective responses, familial attachments, and yearning for freedom and autonomy that subsist among individuals of all genders, races, creeds, and ethnic and religious identities. As a channel through which to analyze both stories, an attachment paradigm helps explain the way in which unintentional loss of and estrangement from both caring relationships and one’s place of residence can create psychological anxiety and emotional disorders, including apprehension, anger, hopelessness, and emotional apathy, all of which are realized in varying degrees in both Secret History and “Theresa.” Exploring these texts through an attachment lens helps demonstrate that in each narrative the complexities resulting from sexual violence, racial turmoil, the commodification of female bodies, and loss of attachment bonds are arbitrated from distinct and sometimes conflicting places. Attachment theory thus broadens the implications surrounding racism and gendered violence, which are embodied in each narrative’s familial relationships, particularly in the relationships among people of color, and the spatial attraction that is exemplified in the island landscape.

Placing Relational Attachment Losses Although Secret History also unfolds amid a war-torn backdrop, S­ ansay avoids a stereotypical representation of black violence and white female sexual trauma and instead distillates the action around Clara’s and Mary’s domestic traumas. For instance, in “Letter V” of Secret History,

Fugitivity and Displaced Bodies  59 Mary reminds Burr of the “clouds of misfortune” that have “obscured my life”—she was an “orphan without friends, without support,” separated from her sister Clara “from infancy.” Moreover, she tells Burr that at an age when “the heart is most alive to tenderness and affection,” the “unrelenting hand of death” took from her a man who had taught her to “feel all the transports of passion.”44 Bowlby notes that when a bereaved adult reacts to the loss of an attachment figure, she is “responding to loss as a child does to the temporary absence of [her] mother.”45 According to Judith Kay Nelson, the system of attachment “relies on the caregiving system of an attachment figure”;46 thus, when her loved one died, Mary declares she was “[c]ast aside on the world without an asylum, without resource,” but when she met Burr, he became a “stable, consistent caregiver.” She tells him, “You raised me—soothed me—whispered peace to my lacerated breast,” yet she now laments that she is “removed from the influence of [his] immediate presence” and exists only in the “hope of seeing [him] again.”47 Loss of a loved one typically generates despair, and in those cases where there is extended and unresolved grief, a sense of detached depression may develop. Mary exclaims at one point, “I cannot be happy!” signifying the degree of misery that she carries with her throughout the course of the novel. In many ways, Burr becomes for Mary (or, in reality, Sansay) a surrogate attachment figure, someone who acts as a secure base for her and performs the role of a stable parental figure who helps relieve her trauma and allay her fears. In “Theresa,” Madame Paulina suffers similar misfortunes when she loses her husband and brother to “French barbarity.” According to Leila Scannell and Robert Gifford, an individual will usually monitor an environment for threats and if one is detected it activates an “attachment system,” at which point the individual will monitor the availability of an attachment figure. If an attachment figure is “available and responsive,” then the individual will seek “proximity… and security is achieved.”48 In Mary’s case, although her lover has died and Burr, as an attachment surrogate, is physically unavailable, she can still write to him, knowing of the potentiality of reuniting with him; however, when Madame Paulina is under threat and seeks the two most important attachment figures previously available in her life—her husband and her brother— they are dead. Bowlby maintains that the death of a primary attachment figure is “one of the most intensely painful experiences any human being can suffer,”49 yet Paulina’s interpersonal attachment losses are further magnified for her by the traumatic place disruptions she experiences. She recognizes there is “no security” for her, her daughters, or, for that matter, any of the “oppressed natives of Saint Nicholas,” a place that is “still dear” to Paulina, despite the fact that “it was become a theater of many tragic scenes.” When an attachment figure is unavailable, individuals will often seek an alternate strategy. Some individuals will engage in hyperactivation,

60  Fugitivity and Displaced Bodies whereby they will either demand the responsiveness of the attachment figure through exaggerated threats, or, if an attachment figure has died, as is the case for both Mary and Paulina, they will find an attachment replacement, which can be a person, place, thing, or even an addiction. However, Paulina instead engages in a form of deactivation, whereby she creates distance from her surroundings and becomes overly self-­ reliant. Hence, Paulina and her daughters “depart from the endeared village of her innocent childhood,” where the formerly “verdant plains” are now “crimsoned with the blood of innocence.” She and her daughters leave their “humble dwellings,” which had previously been a “place of plenty and happiness,” but has now become “the unfortunate village, first to be devoted to the resentful rage of the cruel enemy.” Paulina’s loss is magnified to an abnormal degree, as she experiences loss of security and both interpersonal and place attachment bonds amid the traumatic disruptions of revolutionary Haiti.

Re-Appropriating Places and Female Bodies The spectacle readers are provided in Secret History portrays the French coming to “reclaim” their land; however, the French are in fact the invaders, trespassers, and dispossessors. From Mary’s perspective, members of the “French fleet [that] appeared before the mouth of the harbour,” are returning to recover what they believe is their lost property, as opposed to re-appropriating land that did not belong to them in the first place. She describes Henri Christophe, “the Black general,” as a maniacal brute, insensitive to the plight of others, ordering all of the women in La Cap to “leave their houses” and burning the town to the ground. The narrator of “Theresa,” however, presents a contrasting clarification of the French invasion, describing the sun “fast receding to the west, as if ashamed of man’s transactions, boasting itself in the dark mantle of twilight.” Instead of Christophe burning homes to the ground, as portrayed in Secret History, it is “Gen. Le’ – [Le’Clerc], [who] fired the few dwellings” that were then “remaining in the village.” Mary’s description of the women of Le Cap, “bearing their children in their arms, or supporting the trembling steps of their aged mothers,” indeed presents a sympathetic image, yet so does the image of Paulina and her daughters escaping in the middle of the night from the only home they ever knew. The violence of the landscape in Secret History is underscored, as the women Christophe exiled from the village are described climbing “over rocks covered with brambles, where no path had been ever beat[;] their feet… torn to pieces and their steps marked with blood.” However, when the women and children began “descending the mountain” after the “negroes evacuated the place, and the fleet entered the harbour,” racial insensitivity is brought to the fore as Mary relates that General Leclerc, thinking the women were “the negroes coming to oppose his

Fugitivity and Displaced Bodies  61 landing,” was about to fire on them when he was informed “they were the white inhabitants,” and thus a mistake “too shocking to be thought of” was prevented. The message implied here of course is that, if the individuals were blacks attempting to protect their land, it would have been acceptable to shoot them down. Despite the concern over possibly annihilating a throng of white women, Mary does relate some examples of the way in which both white and black women’s bodies are pathologized. At one point, Mary describes the Creole ladies living a “delightful existence,” in which they pass away the time in “voluptuous indolence,” wandering over ­“flowery field of unfading verdure, or through forests of majestic palm-trees” (73). The heat is “intolerable and the season so unhealthy that the people die in incredible numbers” (63), yet there are “several public squares which add greatly to the beauty of the place” (95). French men, Mary says, “appear to understand less than any other people the delights arising from an union of hearts. They seek only the gratification of their sensual appetites. They gather the flowers, but taste not the fruits of love.” From infancy onward, French men see females as the “enchanting form of ministers of pleasure.” In Haiti, Mary says, “female virtue is blasted in the bud,” and she provides an unnerving example of the despoliation of youthful virtue in the story of “a young French girl of fifteen who was sacrificed by her grandmother to a man of sixty, of the most disagreeable appearance and forbidding manners.” Throughout the novel, white women’s bodies are often dangerously emplaced. Clara becomes General Rochambeau’s object of desire, and his aggressive sexual attachment to her places her in such a precarious position with her husband that he subsequently “locked [her] up in a small room adjoining her chamber,” raving and swearing like a “jealous… Turk,” that “she should not leave her room.”50 Throughout the novel, Clara’s movements are at times curtailed and at times enforced; she is immobilized in a system that refuses to provide her with the care she needs, and she, like many other women Mary describes in the novel, is blocked at every attempt she makes to map out her own desires. Nevertheless, while Clara’s domestic traumas underscore white women’s general lack of freedom and autonomy, none of Haiti’s inhabitants are in a more precarious position than black women. Even though some women of color were situated in positions of dominance, where they were able to exploit (at least temporarily) male desire and exert control over various paramours situated among the military personnel on the island, many women of color were forced into submissive postures, where their beauty often incited spasms of jealousy from their white mistresses. Mary relates the story of a young slave girl whose only fault seems to have been that she was too beautiful. The girl’s mistress, believing “she saw some symptoms of tendresse in the eyes of the husband,” had the young girl’s head cut off and served to her husband on a platter.

62  Fugitivity and Displaced Bodies The husband, “shocked beyond expression, left the house and sailed immediately for France, in order never to behold such a monster.”51 This scene, according to Helen Hunt, likens sexual desire with “the specter of cannibalism,” characterizing sex as an “act of destruction and possession.”52 True, these violent depictions of exploitative sexual interactions underscore the symbolic consuming and violent threat of cannibalism in Haiti, but more significantly, this scene highlights the way in which white privilege literally and figuratively consumes black bodies. Despite several fundamental differences between Secret History and “Theresa,” both narratives similarly reveal the concept of bare life through the figure of the black female slave, who inhabits the most vulnerable place within the unmediated sovereignty of French rule in Saint Domingue. Giorgio Agamben draws the concept of bare life from homo sacer, “an enigmatic Roman legal figure,” who is banned from society and whose life may be taken without punishment, yet who cannot be ritually sacrificed. Anthony Downey points out that as a “paradigm of modern subjectivity, homo sacer is a form of subjectivity that is lived precariously under the rule of sovereignty and its power over the life and death of its subjects,” and who is ultimately reduced to bare life by “sovereign decree and deprived of basic rights.”53 Claire Bracken argues that “[o]utside the political and legal system, bare life is a form of being that is outside of political representation and value, stripped of rights and living on the margins.”54 In both Secret History and “Theresa,” black female slaves embody this conceptualization of bare life, as their existence has been “reduced to bare life through humiliation and degradation, the making of a living life unbearable and close to an experience of death.”55 Indeed, within the variety of races living and dying in Haiti during the Revolution, there is a cultural landscape of austerity in which black women’s sexual bodies are pathologized. Mary writes that black and mixed-raced women are “hated,” yet they somehow manage to gain empowerment through their sexuality. “Many of them are beautiful,” she asserts, and those “destined from their birth to a life of pleasure” (sexually pleasuring men, that is) “are taught to heighten the power of their charms by all the aids of art, and express every look and gesture in all the refinements of voluptuousness.” There is, according to Mary, no infamy attached to their destiny as courtesans, menagerie, and fille de joie, yet, like homo sacer, they must live “outside” the bounds of normal society. And it is within this “abode of [presumed] pleasure and luxurious ease [that] vices have reigned at which humanity must shudder.”56 Madame Paulina is all too aware of the sexual depravities that await her daughters, particularly as they no longer have male protectors. They are subject to the sexual vices of any male who wishes to violate them; thus, her “greatest solicitude was for the safety of her two daughters,” Amanda and Theresa, who in the “morning of life, were expanding, like the foilages [sic] of the rose into elegance and beauty.”

Fugitivity and Displaced Bodies  63 Reading “Theresa—A Haytien Tale” against Sansay’s semi-­ autobiographical Secret History illuminates the intersectional, sociocultural place from which the narrators of each story expose analogous ­historical events and provides important insights that bear on the reception and interpretation of each story and the way in which interpersonal and place attachment bonds are pathologized as a consequence of both gendered and racialized vulnerabilities. In compiling her Secret History Sansay drew on a contemporary form of writing that linked patriotism and revolutionary activity together with descriptions of interpersonal and place attachments and perceptions of freedom and independence. While Sansay offers a comparative appraisal of class distinction among various groups of women living in Saint Domingue, her social place as the wife of a dispossessing planter inherently delimits her perspective. “Theresa,” on the other hand, written several years after Haiti’s legal reclamation of place, emerges in a symbolic way, as a creative expression for repossessing place that recognizes the history of dispossession and the prior insecure place attachments slaves experienced. The story of “Theresa” operates as a textual act that re-establishes owning/possessing for ­people of color. ~~~ As the United States moved further into the nineteenth century, writers continued to recognize that racism and the cost of slavery, in terms of social, economic, and emotional damage, often discouraged African American’s attempts to claim—or reclaim—their interpersonal and place attachment bonds. Antebellum literary works, such as Harriet ­Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, William Wells Brown’s Clotel, Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and other works, helped dramatize the traumatic interpersonal and place attachment pathologies associated with slavery, yet gendered and racialized interpersonal and place attachment pathologies persisted. In his Narrative, Frederick Douglass recounts the slave owner’s “common custom” of separating infant slaves from their mothers, who are “hired out on some farm a considerable distance off,” far from her child. “For what this separation is done,” Douglass states, “I do not know, unless it be to hinder the development of the child’s affection toward its mother, and to blunt and destroy the natural affection of the mother for the child.”57 While the barbarity of this ‘common custom’ ostensibly ended after the Civil War, the damaging intergenerational effects of slavery on African-American attachment needs is profound. As one of the best known literary works of the early national period to focus on racialized and gendered inequities, Sansay’s Secret History helps explain how the emotionality of place works to shape individuals and the physical and emotional places they inhabit.

64  Fugitivity and Displaced Bodies

Notes 1 Charles Burdett, “Appendix. Letter from Leonora to Aaron Burr,” in Margaret Moncrieffe; The First Love of Aaron Burr (New York: Derby and Jackson, 1860), 428–437. 2 Charles Victoire Emmanuel Leclerc, who was married to Napoléon Bonaparte’s sister Pauline, died of yellow fever in 1802 while serving as general of the French army as part of an expedition sent to Saint Domingue to reestablish slavery. 3 Leonora Sansay, Secret History; or, the Horrors of St. Domingo, edited by Michael C. Drexler (Broadview, 2007), 89. 4 David Geggus, ed., The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History (Hackett, 2014), 39. 5 Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 3. 6 John Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (Random House, 2012), 255. 7 Mary Beth Norton, et al. A People and a Nation: A History of the United States, 8th edition, Volume I (Cengage, 2010), 198. 8 Kenneth R. Aslakson, Making Race in the Courtroom: The Legal Construction of Three Races in Early New Orleans (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 129. 9 Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), 57. 10 Aslakson, Making Race in the Courtroom, 131, 132. 11 Ibid., 145. 12 Butler and Athanasiou, Dispossession, 2. 13 David Patrick Geggus and Norman Fiering, eds. The World of the Haitian Revolution (Indiana University Press, 2009), viii. 14 Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 1. 15 Qtd. in Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 116. 16 Geggus and Fiering, The World of the Haitian Revolution, 115. 17 Drexler, “Introduction,” 11. 18 Michael J. Drexler, “The Displacement of the American Novel: Imagining Aaron Burr and Haiti in Leonora Sansay’s Secret History,” Common-Place 9 (April 2009), www.common-place-archives.org/vol-09/no-03/drexler/. 19 Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 166. 20 Joseph Hillis Miller, Speech Acts in Literature (Stanford, Stanford ­University Press, 2001), 215. 21 Giorgio Agamben, “II.3, The Sacrament of Language,” in The Omnibus Homo Sacer, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017), 326. 22 Matthew Livingston Davis (Aaron Burr), Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Vol. II (New York: Harper), 326 23 Miller, Speech Acts in Literature, 15. 24 Michael C. Drexler, “Introduction,” Secret History; or, the Horrors of St. Domingue (Broadview, 2007), 27. 25 Davis, Memoirs of Aaron Burr, 326. 26 Louis Sansay is listed as a merchant residing in New York City’s Bowery from 1796–1798. 27 Qtd. in Michael J. Drexler, “Introduction,” 30. 28 Laura (1809), Zelica, the Creole (1821), and The Scarlet Handkerchief (1823) have all been attributed to Sansay.

Fugitivity and Displaced Bodies  65 29 Sansay, Secret History, 61. 30 Laurent Dubois and John D. Garrigus, Slave Revolution in the Caribbean (Bedford, 2016), 11. 31 Sansay, Secret History, 61. 32 Mindy Fullilove, “‘The Frayed Knot,’” Place Attachment (Routledge, 2014), 142. 33 Cathy Caruth, “Introduction,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, edited by Cathy Caruth (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 4. 3 4 Joanne Tomkins, “The ‘Place’ and Practice of Sit-Specific Theater and Performance,” in Performing Site-Specific Theater: Politics, Place, Practice, edited by Anna Birch and Joanne Tomkins (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 1. 35 Melissa Adams-Campbell, “Romantic Revolutions: Love and Violence in Leonora Sansay’s Secret History, or The Horrors of St. Domingo,” Studies in American Fiction 39(2) (Fall 2012): 125. 36 Adams-Campbell, “Romantic Revolutions,” 134. 37 “Theresa—A Haytien Tale” can be found on the online journal Common-Place common-place.org as part of their “Just Teach One” series. Just Teach One: Early African American Print no. 1, Edited and introduced by Eric Gardner and Nicole Aljoe TEI-encoded by Sarah Stanley, http://jtoaa.common-place. org/welcome-to-just-teach-one-african-american/theresa-a-haytien-tale/. 38 See Jillmarie Murphy, “The Humming Bird; or, Herald of Taste (1798): Periodical Culture and Female Editorship in the Early American Republic,” American Periodicals (26) (2016): 44–69. 39 Frances Smith Foster. “How Do You Solve a Problem like Theresa,” African American Review 40(4) (1 December 2006): 632, 636, 637. 40 Louise Chawla, “Childhood Place Attachment,” in Place Attachment, edited by Irwin Altman and Setha M. Low (New York: Plenum, 1992), 66. 41 Lynne C. Manzo, “Exploring the Shadow Side: Place Attachment in the Context of Stigma, Displacement, and Social Housing,” in Place Attachment: Advances in Theory, Methods, and Applications, edited by Lynne C. Altman and Patrick Devine-Wright (Routledge, 2014), 178. 42 Mathew Thomson, Lost Freedom: The Landscape of the Child and the ­British Post-War Settlement (Oxford University Press, 2013), 227. 43 Judith Kay Nelson, “Crying Is a Two-Person Behaviour: A Relational Perspective Based on Attachment Theory,” Attachment: New Directions in Psychotherapy and Relational Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac, 2007), 286, 287. 4 4 Sansay, Secret History, 79. 45 John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss: Sadness and Depression, 3 vols. (New York: Basic, 1980), 3:333. 46 Judith Kay Nelson, “Separation, Loss, and Grief in Adults: An Attachment Perspective,” in Adult Attachment in Clinical Social Work: Practice, Research, and Policy, edited by Susanne Bennett and Judith Kay Nelson (Springer, 2010), 80. 47 Sansay, Secret History, 79. 48 Leila Scannell and Robert Gifford, “Comparing the Theories of Interpersonal and Place Attachment,” in Place Attachment: Theories, Methods, and Applications, edited by Lynne C. Manzo and Patrick Devine-Wright (Routledge, 2014), 25. 49 Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, 3:7. 50 Sansay, Secret History, 73, 63, 95, 97, 86. 51 Ibid., 70.

66  Fugitivity and Displaced Bodies 52 Helen Hunt, “‘Fascinate, Intoxicate, Transport’: Uncovering Women’s Erotic Dominance in Leonora Sansay’s Secret History,” Legacy 33 (2016): 41. 53 Anthony Downey, “Zones of Indistinction: Giorgio Agamben’s ‘Bare Life’ and the Politics of Aesthetics,” Third Text 23 (2009): 112. 54 Claire Bracken, Irish Feminist Futures (Routledge, 2015), 157. 55 Bracken, Irish Feminist Futures, 157. 56 Sansay, Secret History, 95, 70. 57 Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Cambridge, (Harvard University Press, 2009), 16.

Bibliography Adams-Campbell, Melissa. “Romantic Revolutions: Love and Violence in Leonora Sansay’s Secret History, or The Horrors of St. Domingo,” Studies in American Fiction 39, no. 2 (Fall 2012): 125. Agamben, Giorgio. “II.3, The Sacrament of Language: An Archeology of the Oath,” in The Omnibus Homo Sacer. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017: 295–362. Aslakson, Kenneth R. Making Race in the Courtroom: The Legal Construction of Three Races in Early New Orleans. New York: New York University Press, 2014. Bowlby, John. Attachment and Loss: Sadness and Depression, 3 vols. New York: Basic, 1980. Bracken, Claire. Irish Feminist Futures. London: Routledge, 2015. Burdett, Charles. “Appendix. Letter from Leonora to Aaron Burr,” in Margaret Moncrieffe; The First Love of Aaron Burr. New York: Derby and Jackson, 1860: 428–437. Butler, Judith and Athena Athanasiou. Dispossession: The Performative in the Political. Cambridge: Polity, 2014. Caruth, Cathy. “Introduction,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, edited by Cathy Caruth. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995: 3–12. Chawla, Louise. “Childhood Place Attachment,” in Place Attachment, edited by Irwin Altman and Setha M. Low. New York: Plenum, 1992: 63–86. Davis, Matthew Livingston (Aaron Burr). Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Vol. II. New York: Harper, 1837. Dayan, Joan. Haiti, History, and the Gods. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Downey, Anthony. “Zones of Indistinction: Giorgio Agamben’s ‘Bare Life’ and the Politics of Aesthetics.” London: Routledge. Third Text 23 (2009): 109–125. Drexler, Michael J. “Introduction,” in Secret History; or, the Horrors of St. Domingo, edited by Michael J. Drexler. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2007: 10–37. ———. “The Displacement of the American Novel: Imagining Aaron Burr and Haiti in Leonora Sansay’s Secret History,” Common-Place 9 (April 2009). ­Accessed December 29, 2016. www.common-place-archives.org/vol-09/no-03/drexler/. Dubois, Laurent. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Fugitivity and Displaced Bodies  67 Dubois, Laurent and John D. Garrigus, Slave Revolution in the Caribbean. ­Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016. Foster, Frances Smith. “How Do You Solve a Problem like Theresa,” African American Review 40, no. 4 (1 December 2006): 632–640. Fullilove, Mindy. “‘The Frayed Knot,’” Place Attachment: Advances in Theory, Methods, and Applications, edited by Lynne C. Manzo and Patrick DevineWright. New York: Routledge, 2014, 142. Geggus, David Patrick, ed. The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History. Cambridge, MA: Hackett, 2014. Geggus, David Patrick and Norman Fiering, eds., The World of the Haitian Revolution. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. Hunt, Helen. “‘Fascinate, Intoxicate, Transport’: Uncovering Women’s Erotic Dominance in Leonora Sansay’s Secret History,” Legacy 33 (2016): 41. Meacham, John. Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power. New York: Random House, 2012. Miller, Joseph Hillis. Speech Acts in Literature. Stanford, CA: Stanford ­University Press, 2001. Mary Beth Norton, et al. A People and a Nation: A History of the United States, 8th edition, Volume I. Boston: Cengage, 2010. Manzo, Lynne C. “Exploring the Shadow Side: Place Attachment in the ­C ontext of Stigma, Displacement, and Social Housing,” in Place ­A ttachment: Advances in Theory, Methods, and Applications, edited by Lynne C. Manzo and Patrick Devine-Wright. New York: Routledge, 2014: 178–190. Murphy, Jillmarie. “The Humming; or, Herald of Taste (1798): Periodical Culture and Female Editorship in the Early American Republic,” in American Periodicals (26) (2016): 44–69. ———. Monstrous Kinships: Realism and Attachment Theory in the Nineteenthand Twentieth-Century Novel. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011. Nelson, Judith Kay. “Crying Is a Two-Person Behaviour: A Relational Perspective Based on Attachment Theory,” in Attachment: New Directions in Psychotherapy and Relational Psychoanalysis, edited by The Studio Publishing Services, Ltd. London: Karnac, 2007: 280–293. ———. “Separation, Loss, and Grief in Adults: An Attachment Perspective,” in Adult Attachment in Clinical Social Work: Practice, Research, and Policy, edited by Susanne Bennett and Judith Kay Nelson. New York: Springer, 2010: 79–96. Sansay, Leonora. Secret History; or, the Horrors of St. Domingo, edited by Michael C. Drexler. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2007. Scannell, Leila and Robert Gifford. “Comparing the Theories of Interpersonal and Place Attachment,” in Place Attachment: Theories, Methods, and Applications, edited by Lynne C. Manzo and Patrick Devine-Wright. New York: Routledge, 2014: 23–36. “Theresa—A Haytien Tale.” Just Teach One: Early African American Print no. 1, Edited and introduced by Eric Gardner and Nicole Aljoe TEI-­encoded by Sarah Stanley, in Common-Place. Accessed January 3, 2017. http://jtoaa.common-place. org/welcome-to-just-teach-one-african-american/theresa-a-haytien-tale/. Thomson, Mathew. Lost Freedom: The Landscape of the Child and the British Post-War Settlement. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Tomkins, Joanne. The ‘Place’ and Practice of Sit-Specific Theater and Performance,” in Performing Site Specific Theater: Politics, Place, Practice, edited by Anna Birch and Joanne Tomkins. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave ­Macmillan, 2012.

3 George Lippard’s Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall and the Transformational Place of Mid-Nineteenth-Century Urban Fiction Introduction The first two chapters in this study highlight the consequences of the seventeenth century’s unparalleled scientific discoveries and forceful ­interrogation of religious authority, both of which prompted a cataclysmic disruption of the cultural fabric of Western thought. The A ­ merican, Haitian, and French Revolutions resulted in part from the radical ­sociocultural changes brought about by these scientific and religious revolutions, which annihilated much of the ancient world’s established belief systems and grew out of pluralistic modes of thought that stimulated an awareness of basic human rights. German philosopher Hegel situated this new configuration of the world, this “enlightenment,” as it came to be known, around human intellect, arguing: Never since the sun had stood in the firmament and the planets revolved around him had it been perceived that man’s existence centers in his head, that is, in thought… This was a glorious mental dawn. All thinking beings shared in this epoch… a spiritual enthusiasm thrilled through the world, as if the reconciliation between the Divine and Secular was now first accomplished.1 Although the Enlightenment’s philosophical surge in cosmopolitan thinking emphasized humanity’s shared potentialities and propagated the notion that “thinking” human beings were placed at the epicenter of the universe, these ideologies and many of the thinkers who were promoting them often ignored lower-class citizens, women, and people of color. In the United States, slaves remained symptomatically dependent on others for survival, which, Judith Butler argues, “delineates a physical vulnerability” that generates a level of violence and dispossession “from which we cannot slip away.”2 Although some key Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century, such as Adam Smith and Samuel ­Johnson, issued a philosophical challenge to slavery—Smith by claiming

George Lippard’s Quaker City  69 that “Freedom and opulence contribute to the misery of slaves,”3 and ­Johnson by contentiously confronting the hypocrisy of America’s quest for freedom from British rule by asking, “how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”4 —others, such as David Hume and Immanuel Kant, were espousing African inferiority.5 However, while slavery was a horribly brutal and violent institution, the viciousness characteristic of slavery was part of a continuum of violence within the hierarchical structure of the eighteenth-century circum-­Atlantic world. This spectrum of violence generated a systemic vulnerability that also left other non-sovereign subjects, such as women, children, and lower-class citizens, at risk. With respect to gender, intellectual debates in late eighteenth-century Europe shifted from Latin to French and from the academy to various clubs, salons, and coffeehouses, which exposed a modicum of well-­ educated European women to philosophical and scientific viewpoints that enabled them to transform and thus improve their own intellectual lives. However, while some women, and men, too, were insisting on an increase in educational opportunities for women, there were critics, such as British clergyman and poet Richard Polwhele, who aggressively argued against female intellectual advancement and educational improvements in his 1798 polemical poem, “The Unsex’d Females.” ­Concurrently, though, in the United States the idea of a widely educated American public was considered a vital and necessary conduit to ensuring a stable and successful nation. In the “Preface” to his 1789 sentimental novel The Power of Sympathy: or, The Triumph of Nature, William Hill Brown remarks that in the pages that follow, “the Advantages of FEMALE EDUCATION [are] set forth and recommended.” U.S. civic leaders, too, often recognized the fundamental importance of disseminating knowledge to both males and females, which lead Judith Sargent Murray to declare in 1798 that “a new era in female history” was on the horizon. Murray’s high expectations, however, were short-lived. By 1800 most educated women believed they “had only a modicum more control” over their destiny than their “uneducated grandmother[s] had had in 1750,” and as gender restrictions intensified during the nineteenth century’s rise of the ‘cult of domesticity,’ most women found they “could not, realistically, aspire to leave the feminine sphere altogether.”6 Alongside racial and gender inequities, lower-class citizens in the United States, particularly recent immigrants arriving in port cities along the eastern seaboard, were targeted as parasitic freeloaders who drained public charities. And while the “idea” of an educated Republic remained strong, poor parents still could not afford to send their children to school. Thus, as Siobhan Moroney notes, the “division between theory and practice remained well into the mid-nineteenth century,”7 until public education finally began to receive more financial consideration toward the end of the century. Nevertheless, throughout the

70  George Lippard’s Quaker City nineteenth century, the divisions between the urban poor and the nation’s middle- and upper-class citizens persisted. Poor Irish Catholics frequently suffered the harshest effects of the period’s rampant xenophobia and were often the victims of some of the harshest deportation laws of the period. Several laws were enacted to remove many of these individuals from the United States, despite how long they had lived in the country or what form of interpersonal or place attachments they had established. During the 1890s social reformer Jacob Riis published How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (1890), followed by Children of the Poor (1892). Both of these studies underscore the squalid living conditions of, rampant crime in, and lack of opportunity for urban tenement dwellers in New York City’s lower east side. This section of the country was by no means the only urban center that dealt with widespread poverty and crime, as poor people living in cities all along the east coast experienced similar privations. In particular, Riis blamed the “half that was on top,” those who “cared little for the struggles, and less for the fate of those who were underneath, so long as it was able to hold them there and keep its own seat.”8 Having spent several years observing New York’s underprivileged masses, Riis pinpoints place attachment disruptions as major contributors to the dismal living conditions of New York’s poor, arguing that most of the city’s crime was perpetuated by individuals whose “homes had ceased to be sufficiently separate, decent and desirable to afford what are regarded as ordinary wholesome influences of home and family.”9 Within this environment, women, children, and people of color were the most vulnerable. In fact, Riis devotes an entire chapter in How the Other Half Lives, “The Color Line in New York,” to highlighting the living conditions of African Americans who suffered under the “despotism that deliberately assigns to the defenceless [sic] Black the lowest level [dwelling space] for the purpose of robbing him.” This type of “slavery,” Riis argues, is “different only in degree from the other kind that held him as a chattel, to be sold or bartered at the will of his master.”10 The “unfortunate women” of the tenement district “whom the world scorns as outcasts,”11 along with their children, were also exposed to excessively harsh living conditions. Riis relates story after story of the “sad and toil-worn lives” of poor women, who turned to prostitution, sold their children, and were often “afflicted with suicidal mania” to such a degree that they could not “be trusted at large for a moment with the river in sight.”12 Throughout the nineteenth century, a key question then for individuals positioned outside the sphere of white, male privilege was how and where they might legitimately place their own intellectual talents and human equivalence. Understandably, for those nineteenth-century individuals who were subjected to the power and authority of others, the purported “enlightened” achievements of the previous century seemed somewhat specious, insufficient, and incomplete. The social injustices

George Lippard’s Quaker City  71 that persisted after the American Revolution, alongside the swift progress of the Industrial Revolution, inspired writers, social activists, and intellectuals throughout the first half of the nineteenth century to challenge the period’s philosophic rhetoric. Nevertheless, by the end of the nineteenth century, despite the fact that in the United States slavery had been abolished, the first wave of feminism had commenced, and there was a rising and more secure middle class, inequality persisted, and the social advancements that the Enlightenment had long since promised humanity remained illusive. Consequently, late nineteenth-century literary figures, philosophers, and intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic began to deconstruct modern concepts and political utopias. In Ecce Homo, for instance, Friedrich Nietzsche argues: In proportion as an ideal world has been falsely assumed, reality has been robbed of its value, its meaning, and its truthfulness… ­Hitherto the lie of the ideal has been the curse of reality; by means of it the very source of mankind’s instincts has become mendacious and false; so much so that those values have come to be worshipped which are the exact opposite of the ones which would ensure man’s prosperity, his future, and his great right to a future.13 As a political ideology, democracy, according to Nietzsche, signified the very idealistic lie that he argued in Beyond Good and Evil is a “decadent form of political organization” that reduces human beings to “mediocrity” and “debases [their] value.”14 As the first two chapters in this study suggest, Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn and Leonora Sansay’s Secret History attempt to dismantle the artificial moral and sociopolitical utopianisms of the early Republic and expose the fallacies of modernism’s “lie of the ideal.” Although both novels underscore the trauma of displacement and dispossession, the inequities of slavery, and the suffering associated with racialized and gendered violence, as the final two chapters in this study demonstrate, the social fabric of American urban culture continued to be plagued by a “curse of reality” that extended well beyond the early Republic. Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and Frank Norris’s McTeague (1899) foreground the traumatic interpersonal and place attachment disruptions many mid-nineteenth-century immigrants experienced once they arrived in the United States and the adverse effects of those disruptions on future generations. Both novels highlight the brutalities characteristic of lower-class urban spaces and the inexorable morass of violence, poverty, and dispossession associated with late nineteenth-century urban tenement life. Paul Laurence D ­ unbar’s The Sport of the Gods (1901) also exposes modernity’s failures by paying particular attention to the variety of insecure attachments freed slaves and their children developed to their physical surroundings. Dunbar

72  George Lippard’s Quaker City skillfully assembles the central characters’ misfortunes, insecurities, and moral failings around former slaves’ historical attachments to and forced disengagements from people and places—family, friends, homes, neighborhoods, and community—and the way in which those disrupted attachments intrude on their descendants’ lives. Though Brown and Sansay wrote approximately a century earlier than Crane, Norris, and Dunbar, all five writers reveal how “reality has been robbed of its value, its meaning, and its truthfulness.” This and several other key elements unite the literature of the early Republic with the realist and naturalist fiction of the late nineteenth and early ­t wentieth centuries. In particular, Brown, Sansay, Crane, Norris, and Dunbar communicate through a communal awareness of the alienating forces of modernity’s harshest realities and the moral failures arising from destructive attachments to corrupt and unreliable people and places. Although the subjectivity characteristic of the Romantic period is evident in the complexity of Brown’s first-person, framed narrative and Sansay’s semi-autobiographical account of the Haitian Revolution, both novels concentrate on social issues with a graphic directness that is rarely undertaken by authors writing during the first half of the nineteenth century. Though some mid-century works of fiction—Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall, Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Lydia Maria Child’s “The Quadroons,” to name a few—articulate a forceful awareness of the inequities inherent in slavery, class distinction, and gender bias, few Romantic writers were willing to portray candidly the vile depravities of lower-class urban life or detail with graphic directness the racialized and gendered atrocities characteristic of slavery, poverty, and class conflict. There is, however, one mid-nineteenth-century novel that readily exposes these atrocities and the darkest and most disturbing aspects of mid-century urbanism and, therefore, serves to medialize all of the novels under discussion in this study. George Lippard’s Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall (1845), like Brown’s and Sansay’s novels before him and Crane’s, ­Norris’s, and Dunbar’s after him, exposes the hypocrisy of enslavement and female subjugation, the savage side of urban culture, and the failures of a society entrenched in capitalist and elitist oppression. ~~~

The Place of Mid-Century Fiction and the Failures of Urban Modernity in George Lippard’s Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall (1845) None of George Lippard’s novels were as sensationalized or generated as much controversy as Quaker City, with its savage grotesqueries, satirical anti-elitism, and flagrant eroticism. The Athenæum characterized

George Lippard’s Quaker City  73 Quaker City as a novel that “professedly deals with ‘atrocities too horrible for belief,’ and rakes all the filth it can from the common sewers of society to stimulate the morbid appetite of jaded curiosity.”15 John S. DuSolle, the editor of the Philadelphia Spirit of the Times and ­Lippard’s former employer, accused Lippard of writing “‘a disgusting mass of filth’ and with trying to blackmail prominent Philadelphians”16 —an ironic accusation, considering Lippard worked as a crime reporter for the Spirit, where his news stories regularly assumed a sardonically caustic tone that introduced readers to “the beatings, thefts, and prostitution that plagued their city at night.”17 Lippard, a brazen advocate for the underprivileged, struck back at his critics, proclaiming that “literature which does not work practically for the advancement of social reform, or which is too good or dignified to picture the wrongs of the great mass of humanity, it just good for nothing at all.”18 He described himself as “frank and outspoken,” claiming that, having been “born with the masses,” he could “never forget his duty to his sisters and his brothers.”19 Lippard believed his duty was not to praise or worship those in power; rather, he sought to expose their deceptions, affectations, and social depravities and in the process sympathetically unveil the traumas associated with the gendered and racialized violence lodged within Philadelphia’s working-class neighborhoods. In his biographical introduction to Lippard’s Washington and His Generals (1847), Charles Chauncey Burr provides a motive for why ­Lippard chose to write Quaker City: The novelist’s task, with this Quaker City, was not to show what it ought to be, but rather what it is. He came not to lie—to praise a skulking servility, and insane worship of wealth, to Christianize our wine-buts, and call universal libertinism by the genteeler name of gallantry; but rather with a thunderous no against all quackeries, pretensions, and sins in high places. 20 In this assessment, Lippard’s novel may be read as a prophetic enterprise, one that serves as a conduit to the ideas and impulses of later nineteenth-century critical realist and naturalist fiction writers, who, unlike many of their Romantic predecessors, recognized that their task as writers was to present the world as it is rather than what they and their readers may have wanted it to be. By the end of the nineteenth century, many transatlantic writers began to concentrate on the harsh realities of urban poverty that Lippard had effectually unpacked fifty years earlier. At the height of the realist movement in the United States, William Dean Howells argued, “Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material,” noting that the “ugly delights as well as the beautiful.” Howells anticipated readers would come to view realist fiction writers as truthful conveyors of

74  George Lippard’s Quaker City “human nature,” which he, like Lippard before him, believed was not only their “privilege,” but also their “high duty, to interpret.”21 In 1894, Hamlin Garland remarked that the realist is in fact an optimist who perceives “life in terms of what it might be” and who, instead of presenting faulty ideals, aspires to be “perfectly truthful” and thus “aims to hasten the age of beauty and peace by delineating the ugliness and warfare of the present.”22 In “The Art of Fiction,” Henry James maintained that Catching the very note and trick, the strange irregular rhythm of life, that is the attempt whose strenuous force keeps Fiction upon her feet. In proportion as in what she offers us we see life without rearrangement do we feel that we are touching the truth. 23 The theory of attachment resonates in realist fiction because both are marked by a similar desire to uncover the universal verities present in human-to-human relationships, which is found in an individual’s internal conflicts and the subconscious desire to ignore the traumatic origins of those conflicts. Howells noted, “no author is an authority except in those moments when he held his ear close to Nature’s lips and caught her very accent.”24 Realist fiction is thus firmly established in the a­ uthor’s narrative ability to perceive and interpret human experiences as authentically as possible. Lippard’s Quaker City, therefore, provides a dramatic and important prelude to the realist and naturalist fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. London’s New Monthly Magazine characterized Quaker City as “one of the most remarkable that has emanated from the new world.”25 ­Lippard’s most important critic, David S. Reynolds, points out that Quaker City “gave impetus to a whole school of popular fiction about the ‘mysteries and miseries’ of American cities.”26 Michael Winship notes that after the publication of Quaker City, “dozens of similar works followed over the following decades to explore and sensationalize the underworlds of the many new urban centers.”27 The mid-century proliferation of this style of writing undoubtedly prepared the ground for later realist and naturalist works of fiction that highlighted turn of the century poor and working-class urban culture; thus, Quaker City acts as a channel leading toward later nineteenth-century literature. However, the novel is also an intermediary work of fiction that draws on the literary concepts and viewpoints of the early American Republic. Although the novel anticipates the realist turn in fiction and its emphasis on urban ambiguities, gendered and racial oppression, and the psychological effects of poverty and disease, it is also retrospective, for both Brown’s Arthur Mervyn and Sansay’s Secret History likewise illustrate the heinous verities of their age by graphically exposing the fallacies of war and the fragile place women, people of color, and the economically disadvantaged occupied during the early Republic.

George Lippard’s Quaker City  75 Nineteenth-century historian Henry Simpson notes that Quaker City presents the “real life of a great city,” with all “its virtues, its vices, its false religion, and its heartless neglect of the downtrodden children of God.”28 In this novel, as well as in many of his other works, Lippard presents truth with an explicit directness that both shocked and titillated his readers. Lippard’s focus on “real life” in Quaker City underscores the novel’s prescient qualities and establishes Quaker City as a compelling link between the novels of the early American Republic discussed in the first half of this study and the naturalist novels examined in the two remaining chapters. In several ways Quaker City mirrors the transformational elements of the early Republic while reaching toward the transitional features of realist and naturalist fiction, and thus it serves as a mid-century marker from which to consider the earlier fiction and toward which to imagine the future. Quaker City thus functions as a narratological heterodyne that draws from Lippard’s recent literary past, while also influencing a new generation of American fiction writers.

Parallel Places: George Lippard and Charles Brockden Brown In 1845 Lippard sent The New York Herald a one-volume issue of Quaker City, inscribed “to the Memory of Charles Brockden Brown.” Although Lippard’s focus on class distinction and the brutality of urban poverty in Quaker City gestures toward realist and naturalist fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as a transitional work of fiction, it also draws on the modes of earlier writing styles. For instance, similar to Brown’s narrative structure in Arthur Mervyn, in Quaker City Lippard combines the conventions of the gothic novel with Philadelphia’s social and economic history. Both novels extend similar challenges to Philadelphia’s political, religious, and cultural leaders and reveal similar examples of urban duplicity. Moreover, both writers sought to expose the nefarious and covert brutalities of Philadelphia’s urban elite and the clandestine motivations of human action, while simultaneously dissecting the depths of human depravity and the lower regions of Philadelphia’s working-class neighborhoods. Lippard characterized Brown’s novels as extraordinary creations of the kind, lifting a man beyond himself, anatomizing his very soul, laying bare the secret springs of human action, with as much power and truthfulness as though the author were some invisible spirit, who looked calmly from his superior existence upon the loves and hates of poor mortality. 29 With Quaker City, Lippard chose to fictionalize a society he regarded as lurid and terrifying, and thus, as Reynolds contends, he succeeded

76  George Lippard’s Quaker City in creating a “nightmare world” that was always “threatening to destroy ordinary perceptions of objective surroundings.”30 Likewise, by setting Arthur Mervyn during the height of the worst yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia history, Brown successfully fashions a similarly nightmarish world in which disease is emblematic of societal corruption. While Lippard candidly exploits the sensational in Quaker City, where the major players—Mary Arlington, Long-haired Bess, Gus Lorrimer, ­Byrnewood Arlington, Devil-Bug, and Mother Nancy—are surreal and/ or grotesque caricatures of real people, in Arthur Mervyn, Brown compels the main character to confront grotesquery as a way to find his own truth in a diseased society, where surreal events repeatedly challenge his perceptions of reality. Although Lippard was “pilloried” by many of his contemporaries, who were horrified by his uncensored attacks on “every type of ‘respectable’ Philadelphian,” he increasingly rose in favor among those who saw him as a “champion of the poor and a foe of the hypocritical elite.”31 Lippard’s candor and unrestrained passion in Quaker City are, like Brown’s in Arthur Mervyn, palpable illustrations of his defense of the oppressed. The essay “The Heart-Broken,” which is Lippard’s tribute to Charles Brockden Brown, suggests Lippard felt more than professional admiration for Brown. Writing of Brown’s final resting place in a “Quaker graveyard,”32 whose “green mounds extend from the door of the ­meeting-house to the walls,” Lippard declares that Brown’s grave holds a “sad and peculiar interest” for him. Beneath that “clump of sod,” he writes, lies a “strong Heart, throbbing with impulses that were breathed into it by Almighty God… and a skull that once flashed with divine fire from the eyes, and worked immortal thoughts within its brain.” For Lippard, Brown was a “Great Soul, worthy to stand in solemn dignity among the mightiest names of earth.” Describing Brown in a way that could just as readily be a description of himself, Lippard writes of Brown having a “supernatural analysis of motive and character, a superhuman POWER in Genius.”33 Throughout their lives, both Brown and Lippard tethered their humanitarian impulses to their social and intellectual pursuits. In the late 1790s, Brown joined The Friendly Club, a group comprised of young professionals who sought intellectual companionship with likeminded others. Members of The Friendly Club included women, many who were friends or relatives of male members. The group’s focus on rational ideals and egalitarian models of companionship undoubtedly influenced Brown’s surge of writing during the late 1790s, which included not only Arthur Mervyn, a novel Lippard described as containing a “touching pathos or thrilling power” that “immeasurably excels the works of De Foe or Boccaccio,” but also the novel Wieland; or The Transformation (1798), which Lippard thought of as “a tremendous book, awful in its delineations of a stern and unrelenting Fanaticism,” in which the female

George Lippard’s Quaker City  77 narrator’s rational intellect is juxtaposed with her brother’s progressive insanity; and Ormond; or The Secret Witness (1799), a novel in which Brown explores cross-dressing, same-sex companionship, and the trauma of rape. Ormond is, Lippard writes, “terrible in its analysis of a man, who invests vice with the warmth of glowing sophistries, and reduces virtue to an enigma—beautiful in its description of female character.”34 In the late 1840s Lippard founded his own group—the Brotherhood of the Union, a new kind of labor organization intended to displace Philadelphia’s corrupt capitalist system, and which, in the spirit similar to that of The Friendly Club, was open to anyone, regardless of profession, race, sex, or creed. Brown was brought up in Philadelphia’s Quaker community, a society whose “history of dissenting relations to mainstream Protestant and ­A nglo-American culture”35 no doubt contributed to many of his ­egalitarian beliefs. At the time, Philadelphia was the “largest, wealthiest, most culturally diverse city in North America.”36 Lippard, however, was not born in Philadelphia but in Chester County, Pennsylvania, a rural farming community located approximately 40 miles west of Philadelphia. Interestingly, this is also the same rural county where Brown’s father Elijah and the character Arthur Mervyn were born and raised. Similar to Mervyn’s early personal history, Lippard, emerged out of what Reynolds describes as a background of “private pain and social turmoil.”37 Though Lippard’s father, an occasional teacher, is dissimilar in many ways to Mervyn’s father, Sawney, an uneducated Scotch-Irish immigrant farmer, both fathers make inauspicious decisions with regard to their property. Daniel Lippard sells his fertile ninety-two acre farm shortly after George is born and is subsequently injured in a carriage accident, which forces the Lippard family to move to Lippard’s German-speaking grandfather’s farm in Germantown, Pennsylvania. Lippard is also excluded from receiving any part of his father’s estate, worth approximately $2,000 at the time of his death. In Brown’s novel, Sawney’s injudicious marriage to Betty Lawrence, the family milk-maid and market woman, compels Mervyn to leave his family’s farm and move to Philadelphia. By the time Sawney dies, there is nothing left for his son. In his earliest boyhood, Lippard is “thrown upon his own resources— cheated by pious villains—buffeted by poverty.” Burr describes Lippard as having been a “sickly intense kind of boy, like poor Dante, perpetually haunted by an idea of his own mortality.”38 Similarly, when Mervyn is exiled from his father’s farm and travels to Philadelphia, he too is not only bereft of family, friends, social position, and money, but he also encounters treachery and deception at every turn. When Mervyn narrates his life story to Dr. Stevens, he states that his “constitution has always been frail,” and because all of his brothers and sisters “died successively as they attained the age of nineteen or twenty,” he believed he could “reasonably look for the same premature fate.”39 Despite a

78  George Lippard’s Quaker City preoccupation with his own misfortunes and sense of impermanence, Lippard, like Mervyn, opts to renegotiate his place in the world and determines to spend his life championing society’s most vulnerable people, recognizing that his duty was not to surrender to misfortune; rather, both Lippard and the fictional Mervyn recognize an inherent capacity for growth that develops out of surviving adversity. Burr writes that Lippard was “born with that same restless, heaving, fiery heart; the wild, earnest, truthful sincerity withal, that has marked Genius in all ages.”40 Mervyn, too, has an “ardent zeal and unwearied diligence”; his ­“purposes were honest and steadfast,” and his “soul brooded over the world of ideas and glowed with exultation at the grandeur and beauty of its own creations.”41 Although Lippard experienced feelings of abandonment, dispossession, and isolation throughout his life, his “soul at length kindle[d] up under the cold winds that blow upon it, into flames that flash evermore in the face of the world.”42

The Place of Seduction and Betrayal in the Nineteenth Century During the early American Republic, Brown’s and Sansay’s novels, along with other novels of the period, such as Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry (1792) and Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive (1797), incorporated descriptions of American landscapes as a way to distinguish American from European literature. Many of the period’s seduction novels also included descriptions of distinctly ­A merican settings, where gendered performativity constructed an imagined social place as a way to impose control over women’s bodies. Frequently addressed to young female readers, the seduction novel politicized the female body and highlighted women’s lack of sovereignty in the new nation. Premarital sexual activity, which was deemed detrimental to the efficacy of the fledgling nation, was vilified in favor of the heteronormative “safe” construct of marriage. For instance, William Hill Brown dedicates his novel The Power of Sympathy: or, The Triumph of Nature (1789), “TO THE YOUNG LADIES, of United Columbia.” These ­volumes, Hill Brown writes, are “Intended to represent the specious Causes, AND TO Expose the fatal Consequences, of SEDUCTION; To inspire the ­F EMALE MIND With a Principle of SELF-COMPLACENCY, AND TO Promote the ECONOMY OF HUMAN LIFE.” As is true with dedications for other seduction novels of the period, Hill Brown’s appeal is morally instructive, yet the “young ladies” addressed are also tasked with avoiding the consequences of seduction, which, ­according to Hill Brown here, can be quite lethal. In The Power of Sympathy, Harriot, the object of desire, avoids seduction; however, her mother unfortunately had not, and the consequences of her seduction and betrayal produce intergenerational consequences that prove fatal to both mother and daughter. Harriot’s

George Lippard’s Quaker City  79 would-be seducer, Harrington, through the help of his friend Worthy, quickly realizes his love for Harriot and the folly of seduction; however, through an ironic—and rather contrived—twist of fate, Harrington is discovered to be Harriot’s half-brother, the son of the very man who seduced and then abandoned Harriot’s mother. When confronted with the taboo of incest, Harriot commits suicide. Hill Brown’s novel is loosely drawn from a contemporaneous scandal involving Perez Morton, a Revolutionary War patriot and powerful ­Boston lawyer, and his sister-in-law, Fanny Althorpe, who gave birth to Morton’s daughter sometime around 1787 or 1788. Morton’s seduction of his wife’s sister was viewed as an act both adulterous and incestuous; thus, to avoid the shame and disgrace of abandonment, Fanny commits suicide shortly after giving birth.43 The emphasis on the authentic nature of Hill Brown’s plot, which he informs readers is “Founded in Truth,” was a necessary component of the period’s moral indoctrination of its citizenry. Other seduction novels also make a claim of truth, such as Susannah Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1791), which Rowson states is “Founded in Truth”—it wasn’t; and Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette (1797), which Foster states is “Founded on Fact”—it was. Despite the period’s inclination toward authenticity, these and other works of sentimental fiction simply could not sustain a coherent analysis of American culture. That said, the need to focus plot sequence on facts does create an interesting link to the realist turn in fiction at the end of the nineteenth century. In Charlotte Temple and The Coquette, Charlotte and Eliza Wharton are both held accountable for their moral downfalls; however, the burden of guilt primarily falls on the seducers in each novel—John ­Montraville and Major Sanford. The premature death of both protagonists and the regret each feels for their transgressive actions generates ambivalence in both stories. As Cathy N. Davidson points out, the unresolved tensions within the seduction motif signify the “glaring gap between the public morality officially espoused” during the early Republic, and the  “private behavior of the characters who voice or supposedly validate that morality.”44 These hypocritical gaps in public and private morality are similarly borne out in Quaker City a few decades later. Despite these ambiguities, female consent remains vital to the seduction plot, for without consent, the sex act is rape, rather than seduction, and the moral directive of the novel, such as that found in Hill Brown’s dedication, is rendered meaningless. Although Charlotte Temple vacillates between following her own rational and moral intellect and her love/lust for ­Montraville, when she is confronted with the decision to get into the carriage that will escort her and her seducer away from England and toward the New World, she conveniently faints, and when she awakens, she realizes that Montraville has in fact made her decision for her when he takes her away from her secure base. Her “crime” is not that she consented to or even desired the seduction, per se, for the sex act itself becomes

80  George Lippard’s Quaker City almost irrelevant in the greater moral purpose of the novel. Charlotte’s main offence is that in yielding to her lustful desires, she must leave the protective bubble found in friends and family. Instead of following the lessons her parents instilled in her during childhood, Charlotte chooses instead to disobey them and ultimately her own moral compass. ­Charlotte’s corruption begins once she decides to follow the advice of her profligate French teacher, the more experienced Mademoiselle La Rue, whose selfish manipulation of Charlotte’s inexperience confuses Charlotte’s rational intellect. Once she agrees to a “final” clandestine meeting with Montraville and his brother soldier, Belcour, Charlotte’s ultimate destruction is sealed. Her mistaken belief that Montraville will in fact marry her removes Charlotte even further from the protection of those who may be able to offer her assistance. Her realization of the part she played in her downfall, coupled with the guilt she feels over having disappointed her parents, keeps her from seeking their help. Her age— she is only fifteen when she meets Montraville—and her unfortunate death shortly after giving birth to her daughter, Lucy, provoke intense sympathy from readers. Indeed, the novel remained immensely successful well into the nineteenth century. The death of Eliza Wharton in Foster’s novel suggests even more ambiguity than does Charlotte’s death. To begin with, Eliza is actually based on a real-life individual, Elizabeth Whitman, a Connecticut socialite, whose seduction, pregnancy, and untimely death after giving birth to a stillborn child, were well-known to readers. In Foster’s fictionalized account of Whitman’s story, the character Eliza actively seeks the attention of several suitors and flagrantly disregards the advice of those who were ostensibly looking out for her best interests. The ambiguity of Eliza’s “crime” lies in her indifference to society’s expectations that she will choose a viable life partner. The story begins when Eliza’s fiancé dies, the Rev. Mr. Haly, an older “man of worth” her parents chose for her, and she suddenly finds herself freed from a lifelong commitment to a man she did not want to marry. Though she expresses sorrow over Haly’s death, she also feels a sense of relief that she has been unfettered from her obligation. This reprieve raises questions for her about autonomy and whether or not she should marry someone before she is ready to do so; instead, she decides to enjoy the romantic attentions of other suitors. Claire C. Pettengill argues that one aspect of the novel that would have been deeply resonant to the young women who were its primary readers [is] the crucial role played by the tightly knit circle of women which supports, encourages, protects and provides for Eliza, even as it scolds and criticizes her.45 The women in her life shape Eliza’s thoughts and actions, as they encourage her to accept the hand of the apt but lackluster suitor, the

George Lippard’s Quaker City  81 Rev. Boyer. Instead, she chooses to take her time, enjoying the attentions of the dashing but profligate Col. Sanford. When she finally decides to make a commitment, she discovers she is too late, for Boyer is the one who rejects her in favor of a woman he deems more “worthy of him.”46 Eliza then engages in a sexual relationship with Sanford and becomes pregnant. Her subsequent death during childbirth, in a place where she has no friends, seems a fitting conclusion to one woman’s misguided choice to ignore the judicious admonitions of her friends, yet her actions also raise questions about female agency and whether a woman has a right to make her own marital decisions. While seduction and premarital sex are often depicted as transgressive acts that the moral forces of a fledgling nation sought to eradicate, characters in both Arthur Mervyn and Secret History challenge many of the period’s moralistic codes. In Arthur Mervyn the titular hero interacts with several females throughout the novel who are seduced and betrayed by corrupt and powerful others, or who are under threat of seduction; however, rather than seduction serving as a primary plot device in Arthur Mervyn, female sexual corruption and the degree of sympathy the main character displays toward seduced women help underscore Mervyn’s own enlightenment and moral awareness. Moreover, while one of the primary purposes of the seduction plot is to locate recognized standards of morality in the early Republic, in Arthur Mervyn, Brown seeks to expose the fallacy of moral certitude, and, through characters such as Eliza Hadwin and Achsa Fielding, encourages female enlightenment and autonomy. Two of the seduction subplots in Brown’s novel involve Thomas Welbeck, a thief and a forger who invites Mervyn into his home presumably to serve as his copyist, and closely follow the typical seduction motif. Welbeck seduces and impregnates Clemenza Lodi, appropriates her family’s money, and then deposits her in a local brothel, where she gives birth to a baby who dies shortly thereafter. The seduction and untimely death of one of Mervyn’s own sisters also provides historical background for Mervyn’s sympathies for Clemenza. Welbeck is also responsible for seducing the married sister of Watson, a friend who had brought Welbeck into his family. When Watson returns for revenge, Welbeck murders him and enlists Mervyn’s assistance in burying his body. In Secret History; or the Horrors of St. Domingo Leonora Sansay also incorporates seduction into her plot. As a performative stance in which Sansay draws upon her own experiences living in Saint Domingue during the Haitian Revolution, the novel features several seduction plot techniques as a way to transform gender identity boundaries and hegemonic social conventions. Clara is similar in some ways to Eliza ­W harton—an overt coquette, Clara enjoys the attention her beauty affords her. Although Sansay portrays the French inhabitants of Haiti as sexually promiscuous, decadent, and often morally corrupt, readers of

82  George Lippard’s Quaker City the novel would no doubt find the married, American Clara’s coquettish behavior simultaneously transgressive and provocative. When ­G eneral ­Rochambeau attempts to seduce Clara, she rebuffs his advances, yet, when her husband learns of Rochambeau’s attempted seduction, he not only confronts Rochambeau but also imprisons his wife. Clara’s coquetry does not, however, lead to her death, as was the case for most of the seduced women in the earlier fiction. Instead, she escapes from her husband, and in her sister Mary’s final letter, readers learn that Clara has been reunited with her sister in Kingston, Jamaica, that Clara’s husband has sailed to France, and, at the novel’s conclusion, Mary and Clara are about to leave Jamaica and return to Philadelphia. Though Mary describes her sister as “that truant girl… a coquette,”47 Clara does not suffer the same fate as characters like Eliza Wharton. In fact, Mary unmistakably promotes female agency when she claims, “How terrible is the fate of a woman thus dependent on a man who has lost all sense of justice, reason, or humanity.”48 In the novel’s conclusion readers learn that, instead of suffering a horrible death, Clara will be provided with the assistance of a “friend and a protector” when she returns to ­Philadelphia, where she will have the opportunity to “still be happy.”49 In the preface to the 1849 edition of Quaker City, Lippard explains that seduction, or rather the threat of seduction to which underprivileged young women were too often exposed, is one of the primary forces in his decision to write the novel. He writes, I was the only Protector of an Orphan Sister. I was fearful that I might be taken away by death, leaving her alone in the world. I knew too well that law of society which makes a virtue of the dishonor of a poor girl, while it justly holds the seduction of a rich man’s child as an infamous crime. These thoughts impressed me deeply.50 Yet, in contrast to the emotional responses readers may have felt toward the fates of Harriot, Charlotte, and Eliza, Lippard satirizes Mary  ­A rlington’s seduction and presents this daughter of a wealthy ­Philadelphia businessman as both an exasperating fool and a liar. Unlike Charlotte Temple, who spent her remaining days miserable and repentant for having disobeyed her parents, or Eliza Wharton who accepted the consequences of her actions and died alone in a strange place, Mary serves as a parodic inversion of the standard seduction motif primarily because she is the daughter of a rich man, a “respectable merchant” with a “fine venerable countenance, wrinkled by care and time.” By all appearances Mary tallies with the conventional description of a sentimental heroine—she is “very beautiful,” her lips are “full red and ripe, her round chin varied by a bewitching dimple, and her eyes [are] large, blue and eloquent,” with lashes that are “long and trembling.” She sports “glossy ringlets of… luxuriant brown” hair and looks like “a breathing

George Lippard’s Quaker City  83 picture of youth, girlhood and innocence painted by the finger of God.” However, despite Mary’s classic loveliness, there is little sympathy afforded this daughter of a wealthy retired businessman. Instead, Lippard subverts the standard seduction plot and renders Mary pathetic, silly, spoiled, and self-involved. She is willingly seduced and lured away from the ­protection of her parents, deceived into a sham marriage, and is only saved from the curse of Monk Hall because of the unlikely, e­ leventh-hour reclamation of Long-haired Bess, one of the inhabitants of Monk Hall, who had herself been seduced years before and has since been vindictively luring unsuspecting young women to their moral demise. Rather than generating a sympathetic response over Mary’s plight, readers are instead exasperated by her actions and her foolish, undying love for her “Lorraine!”—long after his deception has been exposed—as well as by the melodramatic trappings of sentimental fiction, which Lippard parodies to perfection. Unlike the seduced women in the earlier seduction novels who recognize their mistakes, Mary never acquires—never needs to acquire—an awareness of her own poor decisions. The character of Long-haired Bess in Quaker City signifies a noteworthy rearrangement in the seduction plot. Like Mademoiselle La Rue in Charlotte Temple, Bess functions as a plot device, directing Mary toward her moral downfall. La Rue, however, not only lures Charlotte toward ruin, but she also deserts her after they arrive in America and, when Charlotte is at her most desperate, La Rue entirely renounces her. Readers are provided part of La Rue’s backstory, learning that in her youth La Rue had “elop[ed] from a convent with a young officer,” and then, after the officer abandoned her, she lived with “several different men in open defiance of all moral and religious duties.”51 Feigning “penitence,” La Rue convinces a boarding school mistress to hire her as a teacher, where she will continue her profligate vocations. As a plot device, the character of La Rue provides a well-defined distinction to Charlotte, who, though she too elopes with an officer, remains agonizingly repentant throughout the novel. The character of Longhaired Bess is also seduced and betrayed in her youth, and, like La Rue, instead of seeking atonement, she chooses instead to serve as a “confidante of… amiable young lad[ies],” luring them into the same trap into which she was herself ensnared. Yet the details of Bess’s history are rendered more complex in Quaker City and thus they provoke more sympathy from readers than the scant details readers are provided of La Rue’s past. When Mother Nancy, the “old hag” of Monk Hall, calls Bess by her birth name, “Emily,” Bess shrieks and calls out to her former self, “Emily, oh Emily,” and pleads with an imaginary other to “Roll back the years of my life, blot out the foul record of my sins, let me, oh God—you are all powerful and can do it—let me be a child again.”

84  George Lippard’s Quaker City Here, Bess starts the journey toward absolution, as she begins to push herself away from the forces of historical and societal circumstances and verbalizes the trauma of seduction, even for those who seem beyond redemption. The façade of sentimentality is ingeniously set in the character of Mother Nancy, one of the more malevolent inhabitants of Monk Hall, whom many “betrayed maidens” can curse “with their ruin, with their shame, [and] with their unwept death.” Mother Nancy assumes the appearance of a “quiet old body, whose only delight was to scatter blessings around her, give alms to the poor, and bestow unlimited amount of tracts among the vicious,” but in reality she is the obverse of what she appears to be. Mother Nancy cruelly reminds Bess that Mary is “‘Just like you Bessie!’”52 Yet despite Bess’s insistence that she feels “happy” to have dragged another innocent young woman “into the same foul pit,” where she herself is “doomed to lie and rot,” she eventually chooses to defect from the forces of Monk Hall and in a final act of redemption navigates Mary and another young woman out of Monk Hall and toward safety. Thus, the pairing of young innocence with mature corruption is skillfully inverted in Quaker City. Lippard ambiguously situates the character of Long-haired Bess, who, like the character of Betty Lawrence in Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, is not simply a foil to the traditional sentimental heroine. For, like Betty, who chooses agency over passivity, prostitution over marriage, and living in shame over dying in poverty and dependence, Bess takes action. Though Lippard is hardly condoning Bess’s decision to lure other young women toward their ruin, when Mother Nancy asks Bess if she regrets having ensnared Mary, Lippard provides Bess’s character with one of the few genuinely sympathetic speeches in the novel: “Regret?” cried Bess with a flashing eye—“Why should I regret? Have I not as good a right to the comforts of a home, to the smile of a father, the love of a mother, as she? Have I not been robbed of all these? Of all that is most sacred to woman? Is this innocent Mary, a whit better than I was when the devil in human shape first dragged me from my home?”53 Indeed, it is Bess who risks her life leading Mary back to the relative safety of her paternal dwelling, to her mother and father, and to her brother. Bess, however, has no safe place to which she may return and no one to champion her but herself. And so, by interceding on Mary’s behalf, Bess effectively advocates for herself, accepts responsibility for her role as Lorrimer’s “accomplice,” and, ultimately, “with her eye flashing and her hand upraised,… looked like an inspired Prophetess.” Bess is in fact the only truly redemptive character in Quaker City, as she gazes resolutely at Lorrimer and “‘fling[s] the wages of [her] crime,

George Lippard’s Quaker City  85 at yon Perjurer’s feet!’” Bess’s elevated stature is further established in her juxtaposition not only to Lorrimer, who had “darkened [Mary’s] soul by a hideous crime!” but also the entire Arlington family. Although Byrnewood declares with “suppressed emotion” that his father “has not a hope, that does not hang on his daughter’s life,” Mr. Arlington’s hypocrisy is revealed once he suspects the truth of his daughter’s “shame.” Thus, with his “blue eye… full of wild delight,” he exclaims that his daughter’s “death” would be “‘Better… than dishonor!’” And while Byrnewood further argues that Mrs. Arlington had “not a thought but for her [daughter’s] peace and joy,” and that Mary’s seducer must “meet the reward of his crime,” she, like her husband, who “smothered the hate” he felt for Lorrimer, is all too willing to hand her daughter over in marriage to her seducer, the very “wronger” of her child, to save her family from “public shame.” Despite Byrnewood’s declarations that he will defend his sister’s honor, he in fact has his own lurid past that includes seducing, impregnating, and disowning the servant girl, Annie. However, Byrnewood’s overriding hypocrisy is that he, albeit unwittingly, played a decisive role in his “sister’s wrong” when he ironically wagered Lorrimer that the girl he sought to seduce (Mary) was not “respectable… not connected with one of the first families in the city, and more than all has never been any better than a common lady of the sidewalk.”54 After Byrnewood murders Lorrimer, he is absolved of any crime, as the court’s cry of “Not guilty!” at his murder trial signifies a continuation of societal injustice, for had Byrnewood been poor and vulnerable, he surely would have been found guilty. Mary, too, remains ignorant and foolish, and while the crime against Bess’s maidenhood leads her to play a role in luring other young women to shame, her concluding selfless act demonstrates a degree of integrity that Mary seems incapable of ever attaining. In 1894, Hamlin Garland remarked that a realist is in fact an optimist who perceives “life in terms of what it might be” and who, instead of presenting faulty ideals, aspires to be “perfectly truthful.”55 Long-haired Bess’s atonement at the end of the novel not only signifies “life in terms of what it might be,” but it also makes the news of her death in the final pages of the novel even more tragic. While Byrnewood is absolved of murder and goes on to marry and have a child of his own, Bess dies an “unknown female,” has “no friends to claim her corse [sic],” and is “buried in the graveyard of the county poorhouse.”56 As Garland argues, those writers who seek truth are attempting to “hasten the age of beauty and peace by delineating the ugliness and warfare of the present.”57 In the fallen world of Philadelphia, Long-haired Bess is the only character to achieve redemptive status, and her actions in leading Mary out of Monk Hall and back to her family represent a modicum of optimism in the novel. Bess thus provides a glimpse of hope and humanity in an otherwise brutal and sadistic world.

86  George Lippard’s Quaker City Although Lippard may not have been able to escape completely some of these idealistic influences of Romanticism, his novel also demonstrates a defined shift toward realism, providing an effective bridge between the moral epistemologies of the early national period and the inescapable traumas many urban poor and working-class citizens still encountered at the end of the century. Through parodic representations of sentimentalism, romanticized concepts of female dependency, and polarized perceptions of male and female sexuality, Lippard unapologetically unpacks the urban violence that is subsequently underscored by naturalist fiction writers at the turn of the nineteenth century. That said, although Quaker City reveals some noteworthy parallels to Crane’s Maggie, Norris’s ­McTeague, and Dunbar’s Sport of the Gods, not one of these later works includes a truly redeemed character, like Long-haired Bess. Instead, the characters in each work appear incapable of redemption, and thus they each eventually lean wearily into the futility of hope. The duplicity of Mary Arlington’s parents, which is systemically obfuscated behind their wealth and stature, is juxtaposed to the straightforward inhumanity of Maggie Johnson’s parents, who offer no pretense of protection, only violence and the brutality of poverty and alcoholism. While Maggie does not die penitent in the throes of childbirth, or nameless yet repentant, like Long-haired Bess, her death suggests something significant about the rampant hopelessness of the urban poor at the turn of the nineteenth century. Unlike Bess who dies nameless, Maggie has a name, but she is forever cursed by her surroundings. Her place in the world does not permit her to demonstrate enough courage to leave her surroundings. In traditional sentimental fiction the protagonist makes a moral stand, fights back against injustice, or dies while taking responsibility for her own actions. But Maggie simply “die[s] away to silence,” where even her death in the oily, black river occurs against a backdrop of “joyous” sounds that come “faintly.” By all appearances, Byrnewood and Jimmie Johnson, Maggie’s brother, each defend their sister’s honor, yet both are also guilty of seducing other young women and are haunted by their guilt at the very moment they are pursuing their sisters’ seducers. When Byrnewood sees Annie’s lifeless body and realizes it is the “form of Annie, the Poor Man’s daughter, the Seduced, the Mother,” he cries out, “‘I am haunted by her corse [sic].’”58 Lorrimer in fact derides Byrnewood at one point, exclaiming, “‘I say, Byrnie my boy…. Devilish odd, ain’t it? That little affair of yours, with Annie? Wonder if she has any brother?’”59 Jimmie, too, is briefly distracted by his conscience when “two women in different parts of the city” simultaneously pursue him with “wailings about marriage and support and infants.” Later he wonders vaguely, “if some of the women of his acquaintance had brothers.”60 Additionally, although Byrnewood and Jimmie both claim to be seeking retribution for crimes against their sisters, in reality, their vengeance is coupled with a vague sense that an

George Lippard’s Quaker City  87 injustice had been done to them; hence, the crime against their own honor becomes the primary motivating force for vengeance. Byrnewood, for instance, takes on the visage of a “madman,” only after “the shame of his sister,” is embarrassingly “paraded in the columns”61 of the Daily Black Mail, and when Jimmie vaguely considers the possibility that the women he had wronged could have brothers, too, it is just “for an instant,” before he cries out indignantly: “‘But he was me frien’! I brought ‘im here! Dat’s deh hell of it!’” Apparently the hell is not so much a sister’s shame but the private effects of their public dishonor on their brothers. If, as Reynolds argues, Lippard’s novel “runs with blood and reeks of murder and madness,” Norris’s McTeague takes that blood, murder, and madness and refines it, not with the throng of “freakish characters” that readers find in Quaker City, but with considerably more terrifying characters. Whereas Devil-Bug’s grotesqueries, F. A. T. Pyne’s incestuous monstrosities, and Mother Nancy’s deadly domestic charades are coupled with hair-raising events, blood, coffins, and torture chambers that can be read as sensationalized, shadowy narrative strands, the events and characterizations postulated in McTeague suggest a domestic familiarity that constructs an array of chillingly credible potentialities for readers. Indeed, Trina’s first and final physical interactions with McTeague are steeped in domestic violence. Although McTeague and Trina begin life as ordinary people and are part of the rising middle class of Polk Street, there is early evidence of McTeague’s violent tendencies and Trina’s pecuniary greed. In fact, McTeague’s first physical encounter with Trina is not a seduction; rather, it is an act saturated in lustful ferocity, as he contemplates violating her body while she lies unconscious in his dental chair. His final physical contact with Trina is to punch his fist through her face and leave her dying in a pool of her own blood. Devil-Bug may be as terrifying as a sideshow freak, but McTeague’s ordinariness provides a sense of immediacy that is at once more real to readers and thus more terrifying. While the graphic description of Trina’s murder is horrifying, the brutally sexualized description of Hattie Sterling’s murder in Dunbar’s Sport of the Gods appears even more cruel and sinister because of its erotic overtones: His fingers had closed over her throat just where the gown had left it temptingly bare. They gave it the caress of death. She struggled. They held her. Her eyes prayed to his. But his were the fire of hell. She fell back upon her pillow in silence. He had not uttered a word. He held her. Finally he flung her from him like a rag, and sank into a chair.62 Despite the fact that Joe Hamilton is African American, this description of sexualized violence against a black female character can be read as an

88  George Lippard’s Quaker City explicit allusion to the sexual possession through violent rape to which many slave women fell victim. Joe’s actions, which are drawn from the powerlessness he felt as a black male living in a place that is “cruel and cold and unfeeling,” can also be read as an allusion to the way urban poverty inspires a complete loss of humanity, even between members of the same racial group. The progression of racialized violence becomes further evident in the contrast between Joe Hamilton and Devil-Bug’s ‘slaves’ in Quaker City. While the black characters in Quaker City, exhibit a degree of humanity when they use their brute strength to prevent F. A. T. Pyne from raping Mabel, Joe’s loss of humanity is accentuated in his violent, sexualized assault against a woman of his own race. Despite the disinterested candor characteristic of naturalist fiction, it is difficult not to feel a degree of sympathy for characters like Maggie Johnson, Trina McTeague, and Hattie Sterling. Maggie, like many young women, dreams of dream-gardens where she walks with her lover. Trina, despite her rapacious greed, is a tiny figure, helpless next to the brute strength of her barbaric husband. And Hattie, hardened by the city’s pathology of place, becomes an object of pity as her lifeless form is cruelly and sadistically cast aside. However, Lippard’s disgust over the moral elite’s disregard for the persistent destabilization of female virtue and the plight of urban poor and working-class citizens is evident in the lack of empathy he creates for Mary. Lippard’s mockery of sentimental fiction in Quaker City and Crane, Norris, and Dunbar’s objective descriptions of the inescapable malignancies of urban poverty are blatant reminders of the degree to which the underprivileged, and poor women in particular, were sexually, socially, financially, and communally compromised during the nineteenth century. These authors, as well as the earlier writers discussed in this study, explore sex and the female body as capitalist commodities because the only commodity many poor, uneducated women had during the nineteenth century was their body.

The Place of Racial and Ethnic Inequalities By integrating racial and ethnic inequities into the framework of his novel, Lippard reflects his dissatisfaction with the widening gap found between Philadelphia’s impoverished black and ethnic citizens and the city’s white, upper-class inhabitants. However, anti-Semitic stereotypes seep into the pages of Quaker City and undoubtedly reflect the open hostilities directed toward Jews during the nineteenth century. Though Lippard did not share the violent, anti-Jewish sentiments of some of Philadelphia’s elites, his characterization of Jews in Quaker City suggests he was swept up to some degree by the period’s anti-ethnic/immigrant attitudes. In one scene in Quaker City, murder and moral corruption are set against a conspiracy to embezzle $200,000 through a series of forged letters. The forger, Gabriel Van Gelt is unflatteringly described

George Lippard’s Quaker City  89 as a “hump back” from Charleston who speaks in dialect with a distinctly “Jewish twang.”63 Van Gelt robs and murders the widow Smolby, and when Luke Harvey, the novel’s nominal hero, captures him, Harvey sneers, “‘You can turn State’s Evidence; it will suit you, being a Jew.’”64 The character Zerkow in McTeague also exposes the widespread demonization and ostracization of Jewish citizens throughout the United States. Indeed, as Louis Herap maintains, Norris’s portrayal of Zerkow is “one of the most anti-Semitic portrayals in American fiction.”65 Although Leonard Dinnerstein argues that during the 1890s “Californians seemed more tolerant of Jews than were compatriots in the east,” and in particular that “Jews in San Francisco felt comfortable with their position” in the city, he also points out that whenever Jews were engaged in “negative or criminal activity[,] newspapers always identified the culprit by the individual’s ethnic or religious background.”66 Alongside this pervasive anti-Semitism, black bodies were routinely commodified throughout the nineteenth century. Philadelphia’s black citizens, as Samuel Otter points out, also faced “political backlash, violence, decline, and resistance.”67 In 1830, there were approximately 14,000 black inhabitants in Philadelphia, and by the end of the decade, that number had increased to 18,000. According to Gary B. Nash, “a growing number of impoverished blacks lived in densely packed alleys and courtyards scattered throughout the city.”68 The surge in Philadelphia’s white population was even more dramatic during this period, rising from 164,000 in 1830 to 204,000 in 1840, which did not improve living conditions for poor and displaced black inhabitants, who were in constant struggle for employment opportunities with the city’s poor and working-class ethnic groups. In fact, as Nash points out, the “period from the end of the War of 1812 to the mid-1830s witnessed rising impoverishment and the decline of opportunity for free blacks in all northern cities.”69 Similar to the racial ambiguities Brown invokes in Arthur Mervyn, Lippard endows black and other marginalized characters in the novel with “retributive, even socially redemptive qualities.”70 Devil-Bug’s black servants endure their humiliating subservience with a solemnity that is reminiscent of the African-American characters in Brown’s novel who routinely perform medical care for Philadelphia’s yellow fever victims while wealthy, white inhabitants abscond from the city. Lippard’s characterization of Devil-Bug in Quaker City also creates an interesting link to the scurrilous images of ethnic otherness found in Crane’s Maggie and Norris’s McTeague. Described as a “deplorable moral monstrosity,” Devil-Bug’s brutality is the primary force driving the vulgarity and violence in Quaker City. His language is disorienting and reflects a cacophony of dialects, tones, and inflections that combine crude urban slang with paternalism and an indistinguishable ethnic vernacular. In Crane’s Maggie, Devil-Bug’s savagery is resurrected most noticeably in Maggie Johnson’s perpetually drunk Irish mother, who

90  George Lippard’s Quaker City is a terrifying scourge upon her family. Mrs. Johnson’s cirrhotic yellow face and crimson neck signify an ethnic monstrousness, as she curses and physically assaults her children, engages in mortal combat with her husband, and, with “straggled hair,” a “look of insanity,” and a “kick of exasperation,”71 lurches out of the saloon, violently drunk. In the Irish saloon where Pete is employed, Jimmie and Pete fight like “warriors in the blood and heat of a battle,” yet they are no match for the cruelty and brutality Mrs. Johnson displays. Her “lurid face and tossing hair,” “cursing trebles,” and “tossing fists,” strike terror in her daughter. Unable to see Maggie “as a pearl dropped unstained into Rum Alley from heaven,” Mrs. Johnson is “terrific in [her] denunciation of the girl’s wickedness.”72 While Devil-Bug proudly concedes his wicked nature, Mary Johnson is unable to accept responsibility for her offenses and thus imposes them on her daughter. ~~~ Ethno-racial intolerance and female subjugation are a substantial and ignoble part of the fabric that makes up America’s cultural history. While contemporary readers of Quaker City may find Lippard’s passionate portrayal of various social injustices obsolete, as the remaining chapters in this study demonstrate, inequality and social and economic disparity continued to prevail in the United States. In fact, each of the novels discussed in this study emphasize the deplorable living conditions of poor black and ethnic minorities throughout the nineteenth century and demonstrate that gendered, racial, and ethnic degradation existed within tightly bound places that the dominant sociopolitical arena of middle- and upper-class white culture often ignored. Lippard’s Quaker City, along with the other novels highlighted in this study, uncovers the multiple histories of nineteenth-century urban life in the United States and the lived conditions of the ethnic poor, blacks, and women. By placing various disenfranchised groups in proximity to the broad spectrum of people who inhabit the United States, all of these novels seek to explain the place of nineteenth-century urban transformations and the disparate connections that link American citizens together.

Notes 1 George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover, 1956), 446. 2 Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham U ­ niversity Press, 2007). 3 Adam Smith, Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue, and Arms [delivered at the University of Glasgow by Adam Smith, reported by a student in 1763] (Oxford: Clarendon, 1896), 99. 4 Peter Martin, Samuel Johnson: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard University Press, 2008), 447.

George Lippard’s Quaker City  91 5 See Eugene F. Miller, ed., David Hume, Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, rev. ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics, 1987), 629–630. A footnote appears in Hume’s “Of National Characters,” in which he states: I am apt to suspect the negroes, and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. See also Jon M. Mikkelsen, ed., Kant and the Concept of Race: Late Eighteenth Century Writings (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2013). 6 Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 295. 7 Siobhan Maroney, “Education,” in Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment, edited by Mark G. Spencer (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 317. 8 Jacob August Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (New York: Scribner’s, 1890), 1. 9 Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 2. 10 Ibid., 149. 11 Ibid., 172. 12 Ibid., 259. 13 Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, translated by Anthony M. Lodovici (New York: Macmillan, 1911), 2. Nietzsche wrote Ecce Homo in 1888, but it was not published until 1908. 14 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (New Haven, CT: Yale U ­ niversity Press, 2004), 203. 15 “Review,” in The Athenæum: Journal of Literature, Science, and the Fine Arts (London, October 18, 1845), 1014. 16 Qtd. in David S. Reynolds, “Introduction,” in The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), xiv. 17 Carl Ostrowski, “Inside the Temple of Ravoni: George Lippard’s Anti-­ Exposé,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 55(1) (2009), 2. 18 Quaker City Weekly (10th February 1849). 19 Ibid. (14th April 1849). 20 Charles Chauncey Burr, “Introductory Essay,” in Washington and His Generals: Or, Legends of the Revolution, edited by George Lippard (Philadelphia, PA: G. B. Zieber, 1847), v. 21 William Dean Howells, Criticism and Fiction (New York: Harper, 1893), 4, 8. 22 Hamlin Garland, “Literary Prophecy,” in Crumbling Idols (Chicago: Stone and Kimball, 1894), 52. 23 Henry James, The Art of Fiction (Boston, MA: Cupples, Upham and Company, 1885), 74. 24 Howells, Criticism and Fiction, 14. 25 [Review], New Monthly Magazine 74 (1845): 238. 26 Reynolds, “Introduction,” xiv. 27 Michael C. Winship, “In Search of Monk Hall: A Publishing History of George Lippard’s Quaker City,” American Literature 70 (June 2015): 136. 28 Henry Simpson, The Lives of Eminent Philadelphians, Now Deceased (Philadelphia, PA: William Brotherhead, 1859), 660. 29 George Lippard, “The Heartbroken,” in The Nineteenth-Century: A Quarterly Miscellany, Volume I, edited by Charles Chauncey Burr (Philadelphia, PA: G. B. Zieber, 1848), 22.

92  George Lippard’s Quaker City 30 Reynolds, “Introduction,” xxi. 31 Ibid., xvi. 32 Brown was buried at the Friends Burial Ground, at Arch and Fourth Streets, in Philadelphia. Various construction projects occurred on this site during the first half of the nineteenth century, and the site was eventually levelled, which made it impossible to locate Brown’s final resting place. 33 Lippard, “The Heartbroken,” 22. 34 Ibid., 27. 35 Barnard and Shapiro, “Introduction,” x. 36 Ibid., x. 37 Reynolds, “Introduction,” ix. 38 Burr, “Introduction,” iv. 39 Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn (Hackett, 2006), 14. 40 Burr, “Introduction,” v. 41 Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 292. 42 Burr, “Introduction,” v. 43 Fanny Althorpe’s suicide note is currently housed at the Massachusetts Historical Society. For more information on the scandal and links to the prominent individuals involved, see www.newenglandhistoricalsociety. com/1788-scandal-fanny-apthorp-never-dies/. 4 4 Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 87. 45 Claire C. Pettengill, “Sisterhood in a Separate Sphere: Female Friendship in Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette and The Boarding School,” Early American Literature 3 (January 1992): 186. 46 Hannah Webster Foster, The Coquette, (Penguin, 1996), 189. 47 Leonora Sansay, Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo, edited by Michael Drexler (Toronto, ON: Broadview, 2008), 152–153. 48 Sansay, Secret History, 115. 49 Ibid., 154. 50 Lippard, Quaker City, 1 51 Susannah Rowson, Charlotte Temple (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1905), 48. 52 Lippard, Quaker City, 78. 53 Ibid., 80. 54 Ibid., 15. 55 Garland, “Literary Prophecy,” 52. 56 Lippard, Quaker City, 572. 57 Garland, “Literary Prophecy,” 52. 58 Lippard, Quaker City, 451. 59 Ibid., 100. 60 Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, edited by Kevin J. Hayes (­Boston, MA: Bedford, 1999), 76. 61 Lippard, Quaker City, 362. 62 Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Sport of the Gods (Miami, FL: Mnemosyne, 1969), 117. 63 Lippard, Quaker City, 34. 64 Ibid., 413. 65 Louis Herap, The Image of the Jew in American Literature: From Early Republic to Mass Immigration (Syracuse University Press, 2002), 391. 66 Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America (Oxford University Press, 1994), 235. 67 Samuel Otter, Philadelphia Stories: America’s Literature of Race and Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2010), 1.

George Lippard’s Quaker City  93 68 Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840 (Harvard University Press, 1988), 248. 69 Nash, Forging Freedom, 246. 70 Reynolds, “Introduction,” xxxviii. 71 Crane, Maggie, 63. 72 Ibid., 75.

Bibliography Barnard, Philip and Stephen Shapiro. “Introduction,” in Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793, edited by Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2008: ix–xliv. Brown, Charles Brockden. Arthur Mervyn. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2006. Burr, Charles Chauncey. “Introductory Essay,” in Washington and His Generals: Or, Legends of the Revolution, edited by George Lippard. Philadelphia, PA: G. B. Zieber, 1847: i–xxvii. Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. Crane, Stephen. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, edited by Kevin J. Hayes. Boston, MA: Bedford, 1999. Davidson, Cathy N. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in ­A merica. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Dinnerstein, Leonard. Antisemitism in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Dunbar, Paul Laurence. The Sport of the Gods. Miami, FL: Mnemosyne, 1969. Foster, Hannah Webster. The Coquette. New York: Penguin, 1996. Garland, Hamlin. “Literary Prophecy,” in Crumbling Idols. Chicago, IL: Stone and Kimball, 1894. Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich. The Philosophy of History. New York: ­Dover, 1956. Herap, Louis. The Image of the Jew in American Literature: From Early Republic to Mass Immigration. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2002. Howells, William Dean. Criticism and Fiction. New York: Harper, 1893. James, Henry. The Art of Fiction. Boston, MA: Cupples, Upham and Company, 1885. Lippard, George. “The Heartbroken,” in The Nineteenth-Century: A Quarterly Miscellany, Volume I, edited by Charles Chauncey Burr. Philadelphia, PA: G. B. Zieber, 1848: 19–27. ———. The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall, edited by David S. Reynolds. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. Maroney, Siobhan “Education,” in Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment, edited by Mark G. Spencer. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015: 317. Martin, Peter. Samuel Johnson: A Biography. Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard University Press, 2008. Mikkelsen, Jon M. ed. Kant and the Concept of Race: Late Eighteenth Century Writings. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2013. Miller, Eugene F. ed. David Hume, Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, rev. ed. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics, 1987.

94  George Lippard’s Quaker City Nash, Gary B. Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. ———. Ecce Homo, translated by Anthony M. Lodovici. New York: ­Macmillan, 1911. Norton, Mary Beth. Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996. Ostrowski, Carl. “Inside the Temple of Ravoni: George Lippard’s Anti-Exposé,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 55, no. 1 (2009): 1–26. Otter, Samuel. Philadelphia Stories: America’s Literature of Race and Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pettengill, Claire C. “Sisterhood in a Separate Sphere: Female Friendship in Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette and The Boarding School,” Early American Literature 3 (January 1992): 185–203. Quaker City Weekly (10th February 1849 and 14th April 1849). [Review, ] in The Athenæum: Journal of Literature, Science, and the Fine Arts. London, (October 18, 1845), 1014. [Review, ] in New Monthly Magazine 74 (1845): 238. Reynolds, David S. “Introduction,” in The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. Riis, Jacob August. How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York. New York: Scribner’s, 1890. Rowson, Susannah. Charlotte Temple. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1905. Sansay, Sansay. Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo, edited by ­M ichael Drexler. Toronto, ON: Broadview, 2008. Simpson, Henry. The Lives of Eminent Philadelphians, Now Deceased. Philadelphia, PA: William Brotherhead, 1859. Smith, Adam. Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue, and Arms [delivered at the University of Glasgow by Adam Smith, reported by a student in 1763]. ­Oxford: Clarendon, 1896. Winship, Michael C. “In Search of Monk Hall: A Publishing History of George Lippard’s Quaker City,” American Literature 70 (June 2015): 132–149.

4 Atavistic Attachments, Anti-Landscapes, and the Precarity of Place in Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Frank Norris’s McTeague In the preface to his 1867 book, The Irish in America, Irish politician and writer, John Francis Maguire, explains that the “conflicting and contradictory accounts” detailing the “calamities” Irish immigrants experienced after arriving to the United States, “stimulated” him to such a degree that he was motivated to “ascertain by personal observation” what the “thousands” of Irish “constantly emigrating… from my very door,” were “doing in America.”1 Anyone crossing the Atlantic and landing in any American city, Maguire declared, could see “at a glance… the marked difference between the position of the Irish race in the old country and in the new,”2 for the “pernicious tendency of the Irish peasant” in America was to “place himself in a position dangerous to his morals, if not fatal to his independence.”3 Of particular concern to Maguire were the squalid, overcrowded urban tenement houses in which many Irish immigrants settled after they arrived in America. Throughout the nineteenth century, the longstanding, antiquated societal structures of Europe began to collapse and weaken, leaving ­millions of people homeless, disoriented, and helpless. Of major import was the devastation of Ireland’s Great Famine (1845–1852), which initiated a mid-nineteenth-century Irish diaspora, during which more than one ­million Irish citizens immigrated to other countries. They came to America, Maguire asserts, because “they had no option… hunger and want were at their heels, and flight was their only chance of safety.”4 The Irish peasantry had worked almost exclusively on “the cultivation of the soil” and thus had, according to Maguire, always exhibited a strong and “passionate attachment to Ireland’s countryside.”5 However, Maguire was troubled because, rather than relocating to rural farming communities where they would be “certain to secure for themselves and their families, not merely a home, but comfort and independence,”6 many Irish immigrants were instead settling in larger American towns and urban areas, particularly New York City, where the “evil of overcrowding is magnified to a prodigious extent.”7 Maguire found this phenomenon tragic, first, because the Great Famine had compelled so many Irish peasants to sever what he considered important place attachments

96  Atavistic Attachments, Anti-Landscapes to their homeland, and second, because immigrants to the United States were opting to commence their new lives in places where they were “languish[ing] in the stifling heat of… a tenement house.”8 Irish immigrants are among one of the largest groups of Europeans who travelled to the United States during the nineteenth century, and Maguire is correct that after arriving in America, many immigrants chose to remain in New York City or other urban centers along the United States’ eastern seaboard. However, between 1881 and 1900, the close to nine million immigrants who came to the United States represented a more heterogeneous demographic than the previous generation. Irish, German, and Italian immigrants continued to settle in the United States; however, during the last decade of the nineteenth century, there was an increase in refugees from a number of eastern European ­countries—­Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, and Russia, among others— who arrived in the United States in search of employment or to escape poverty or political unrest. Throughout the century, most immigrants settled in New York and other eastern cities, yet a smaller but no less significant port of entry for immigrants during the last two decades of the ­nineteenth century was San Francisco, where many, like those on the east coast, lived in ethnic enclaves within which they attempted to replicate the customs, traditions, and various interpersonal and place attachments they brought with them from their homelands. Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and Frank Norris’s McTeague (1899) underscore the traumatic interpersonal and place attachment disruptions many nineteenth-century immigrants experienced once they settled in the United States and particularly the adverse effects of those disruptions on the children and grandchildren of these immigrants. Maggie is set in New York City’s Irish tenement slums, where inhabitants reside in “careening building[s]” that “quivered and creaked from the weight of humanity stamping about in its bowels.” From these buildings, a “dozen gruesome doorways” gave up “loads of babies to the street and the gutter,” while in “the street infants played or fought with other infants or sat stupidly in the way of vehicles.” The women are “formidable,” as they “scream in frantic quarrels,” while various “Withered persons, in curious postures of submission to something, sat smoking pipes in obscure corners.”9 The scene is one of reiterative chaos, violence, and rampant ignorance. In contrast, McTeague opens on the West coast, in San Francisco’s vibrant Polk Street, an “‘accommodation street’ of small shops in the residence quarter of the town.”10 Instead of lethargic infants and angry children who are abandoned to the perilous street and revolting gutter that readers find in Maggie, at “four o’clock the school children… swarmed the sidewalks” of Polk Street on their way home from school. Scattered about Polk Street are busy “laborers,” “newsboys,” “plumbers’ apprentices,” “girls of the ribbon ­counters,” “dressmakers,” and “small doctors.” There are “little families” and

Atavistic Attachments, Anti-Landscapes  97 “various inhabitants” who stroll “idly from shop window to shop window, taking the air after the day’s work.” “Groups of girls collected on the corners, talking and laughing” with each other, as they remarked on “the young men that passed them.”11 In the evening, instead of the “dismal wailings of babies… varied hoarse shoutings in the street[,] and the rattling of wheels”12 that are characteristic of ‘place’ in Maggie, Polk Street is instead filled with “theater goers—men in high hats and young girls in furred opera cloaks,” surrounded by “a multitude of lights.”13 At eleven o’clock, “Polk Street drop[s] back into solitude [and] all seem[s] very still.”14 If the opening scenes in Maggie highlight the brutalities of place associated with late nineteenth-century urban tenement life, the initial description of Polk Street appears to underscore the fresh, multi-faceted flurry of turn of the century modernity and the rising tide of the working and middle classes. Nevertheless, like any proper naturalist work of fiction, this active hum of contemporaneity is short-lived, and what emerges for the principal characters in McTeague is a rapid downward spiral into the same whirling vortex of violence, poverty, and dispossession that readers find in Maggie.

Critical Receptions William Dean Howells referred to Maggie as “New York Low Life in Fiction”15 primarily because the story exposes the multiple place attachment pathologies of New York City’s tenement district.16 Although Crane was not the only American author of the period who attempted to recreate the realities of urban slum life,17 most contemporary reviewers of the novella found Crane’s relentless portrayal of the violence of place unrealistic, disturbing, and excessive. Many reviewers argued that Crane’s depiction of slum life was practically unreadable, providing scenes that were far too repugnant and lacking in sympathy for a contemporary readership. Edward Bright felt Crane could be likened to “an artist who knows how to draw but cannot paint.”18 An anonymous reviewer for the New York Tribune argued that Crane had “no charm of style, no touch of humor, no hint of imagination,”19 and another anonymous reviewer for The Nation declared that Crane’s characters are “mainly human beings of the order which makes us regret the power of literature to portray them.”20 On the other hand, several contemporary reviewers of Maggie celebrated Crane for his candid and convincing depiction of New York City’s tenement district. In the June 1893 edition of the Arena, Hamlin Garland described Maggie as “a work of astonishingly good style [and] the most truthful and unhackneyed study of the slums” that he had ever read.” Crane had provided, Garland argued, as accurate a portrayal of “the dialect of the slums” as he had “never before seen it written—crisp, direct, terse.”21 A review in the New York Press claimed that Crane

98  Atavistic Attachments, Anti-Landscapes had courage—“or is it bravado?”—to put the book in print and that he deserved praise for painting life as it is and not making it “clandestinely attractive.”22 The Port Jervis Union declared that Crane “is the master of a vigorous style and uses the English language with precision, force and fluency” and judged the “literary merits” of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets as “considerable.”23 Indeed, Frank Norris said of Crane that he is “of course, out of the ordinary… The charm of his style lies chiefly in his habit and aptitude for making phrases.” Nevertheless, Norris added, Good though the story is and told in Mr. Crane’s catching style, the impression left with the reader is one of hurry; the downfall of ­Maggie, the motif of the tale, strikes one as handled in a manner almost too flippant for the seriousness of the subject. 24 Perhaps these sentiments are what prompted Norris to compensate for Maggie’s real or imagined deficiencies when he published McTeague six years later. According to Ernest Marchand, the “realism of McTeague laid bare a section of American life where the fiction writer had scarcely ever thought to probe, and in a spirit and manner altogether new—the spirit and manner of the anatomist.”25 Though Crane’s Maggie—along with a few earlier writers’ “sporadic and isolated attempts”—was written in the same genre as McTeague, according to Marchand, it did not receive the same degree of attention that critics paid to Norris’s novel, nor did it, as Norris notes in his review of Maggie, provide a thorough investigation of determinism and the impersonal forces of environment on the characters. Indeed, as Marchand notes, the “keen-nosed watchdogs of literature sensed immediately that here was something new and disturbing in native writing, and promptly set up their growl.”26 And growl they did. Nancy Huston Banks, for instance, lamented in her 1899 review of McTeague that the passing of morbid realism has never been quite so complete as the healthy-minded hoped it would be, when it was swept out of sight five or six years ago by the sudden on-rush of works of ideality and romance, which arose like a fresh, sweet wind to clear the literary atmosphere. It was in this “resistless new movement toward light and hope and peace,” argues Banks, that the so-called “black books,” which celebrated the “painful and the unclean,” were cast aside; unfortunately for Banks, McTeague signaled a return to the literary dark side. Though written with “brilliancy and power,” the novel, argues Banks, is a “despairing utterance… of the pain of the world,” replete with “hopeless conditions of mental, moral and physical disease… and enough bitter wit to deepen the unlifting gloom.”27 In contrast to Banks’s pessimistic appraisal,

Atavistic Attachments, Anti-Landscapes  99 John Barry, in his review of McTeague in The Literary World (18 March 1899), extolled the novel for its “shrewd humor,” “dramatic force,” and “profound insight into character,” all of which made it “worthy to rank among the few great novels produced in this country.” Despite such high praise, though, The Literary World editors, who had not had a chance to read Barry’s review before it went to press, felt so compelled to diverge from his assessment that they printed a dissenting review in the next issue (1 April 1899). While the editors agreed with Barry’s general assessment of the novel, calling it “exceptionally strong and powerful” and Norris an “undeniably… powerful writer,” they also argued that “the highest art is not merely a question of execution”; thus, McTeague was not, in the editors’ estimation, a great novel, “for the spirit that animates is false to the highest standards.” They end their review erroneously predicting that the “world will not be proud of [the novel] in that distant tomorrow which irrevocably sets the true value on books of today.” Similar miscalculations were also made about Maggie’s future success. Some who knew Crane personally wrote in various reminiscences their own and others’ reactions to Maggie. Corwin Knapp Linson, one of the artists with whom Crane lived in New York City during the 1890s, said of the novella that Crane’s “vigorous English and deep human sympathy fairly took [him] by storm,” yet he recalled with pity the “yellow stacks of unsold books” in Crane’s rooms. 28 Crane, however, appeared to maintain a degree of prescience and humor about the literary value of Maggie, as indicated in the following recollection: Art critic Henry McBride, upon finding his own copy of a first edition of Maggie rescued from a fire in his studio, received laughter from Crane when relating his story. “‘Who knows,’” remarked Crane, “‘maybe in the years to come that may be considered the most valuable item to have been rescued from your fire.’”29 Though both Maggie and McTeague eventually became well-regarded representations of late-nineteenth century American fiction, it took the general reading public time to adjust to the realistic depictions of interpersonal and place attachment pathologies illustrated in both Maggie and McTeague to assert their worth.

Anti-Landscapes and Ethnic Places Maggie is one of Crane’s earliest attempts to explore how place can generate familial violence, sexual and gender debasement, and alcoholism. In his book, Maguire cites reports by doctors working as inspectors for the New York Metropolitan Board of Health in various Sanitary Districts throughout the city, which seem to spring right from the pages of Maggie. The tenement buildings are “the most prolific cause of disease,”30 laments Maguire; “every place [is] crowded with occupants,”31 and the buildings are filled with “low, damp, dark, and unventilated bedrooms.”32 Even the early and seemingly insignificant death of Tommie,

100  Atavistic Attachments, Anti-Landscapes the Johnsons’ youngest child, is reflected in Maguire’s observation that “the rate of mortality in children under five years of age in New York is greater than in any city.”33 Alongside the trauma associated with place, the Johnson children also face the unpredictability of alcoholism and parental brutality, creating ineffective attachments to both people and places, which leave them susceptible to addictive impulses as a way to navigate within their environment and counterbalance their deficiencies. Maguire relates the “abundant opportunities”34 for alcohol and its destructive consequences awaiting the tenement population: A man gradually loses ambition and hope; concern for the welfare of his family, by slow degrees, loses its hold upon him… [L]assitude and depression of spirits and constant ennui get such control over him that no power or efforts of the will can shake them off. With this… is set up an instinctive yearning for something which will give a temporary respite to the dragging weariness of life. 35 However, as we see in Maggie, adult men are not the only victims of this excessive craving to repress, even momentarily, the pathologies of place. Hence, Maguire reports that real children, like the fictionalized Jimmie Johnson, in this region of pain and turmoil would often “acquire the appetite of their parents for alcoholic stimulant.” Indeed, use of this “unhappy vice” prevailed among “members of both sexes, youth and old age,” who regularly vied with each other “as to their capabilities of drinking, enriching the proprietors” of various “low groggeries,” and sadly “spending their last penny in gratifying their morbidly-debased ­appetite, rather than purchasing the necessaries of life for their families.”36 Similar to Maguire’s account, nineteenth-century journalist George G. Foster also sought to describe the horror of place within New York’s Irish tenement district: Turning eastwardly from the Tombs into a street that would strike even the practised [sic] eyes and hardened olfactories of a veteran New-Yorker as particularly foul and loathsome, a few steps brings us to the great central ulcer of wretchedness—a very rotting Skeleton of Civilization, whence emanates an inexhaustible pestilence that spreads its poisonous influence through every vein and artery of the whole social system and supplies every heart-throb of metropolitan life with a pulse of despair.37 Both Foster’s and Maguire’s descriptions of New York’s Irish tenements provide compelling, first-hand parallels to Crane’s images of the

Atavistic Attachments, Anti-Landscapes  101 Johnson’s neighborhood and the tenement building in which they reside, but they also effectively portray the place in which the principle characters in McTeague eventually end up. Despite the fact that McTeague is also of Irish descent, he is initially able to navigate somewhat successfully within the boundaries of Polk Street. It appears that he, along with the Sieppes, represent an upward tick for certain immigrant groups, like the Irish and Germans, many of whom, at the turn of the century, were somewhat more established and certainly more assimilated than characters such as Maria Macapa, “the Mexican woman who took care of the lodgers’ rooms” in the McTeague’s building, or Zerkow, the “redheaded Polish Jew,”38 who lives and works in a dirty junk shop in the alley behind McTeague’s flat. McTeague is undoubtedly more successful than the Irish-American tenement dwellers in Maggie, yet from the moment readers are introduced to him, they become conscious of a feeling of discomfort, a sense that this burly dentist, with the oversized fingers, has another, darker version gurgling just below the surface, one of which he seems unaware. As Christopher Dowd points out, McTeague’s “initial success” is but a “temporary illusion” because the “stereotypical Irish monster”39 eventually springs to the surface. Indeed, readers are forewarned that the “vices and sins of [McTeague’s] father and of his father’s father, to the third and fourth and five hundredth generation, tainted him. The evil of an entire race flowed through his veins.”40 It is ­McTeague’s Irish heritage, argues Dowd, that “predestines” him for “failure.” In much the same way that Maggie Johnson’s pathetic attempts to rise above “the dirt of Rum Alley” fail, both her and ­McTeague’s “foul blood guarantees that, no matter how hard [either] work to climb the social ladder, [they] will wind up at the bottom.”41 The same may be said of Trina’s cousin, Marcus, as Joseph R. McElrath and Jesse S. Crissler point out: “vaudevillian comic performances are assigned to McTeague and the almost-as-cloddish Marcus Schouler in a novel in which, for approximately half its length, its narrator invites the reader to guffaw along with him.”42 These foolish absurdities, however, are supplanted with a ghastly savagery that leaves readers horrified. Although the characters in McTeague are initially emplaced atop a stronger foundation than any of the characters in Maggie, Norris foreshadows their tragic demise fairly early in the story, thus reinforcing the sense that these characters will fail. Although McTeague and his wife Trina begin their marriage on Polk Street in “the best fixed rooms in the whole flat,”43 —neat little rooms that housed their several possessions, ornaments, and photographs—­ after McTeague loses his dental practice, both he and Trina “sink rapidly lower and lower,” eventually settling in a “back room in [a] wretched house with… grisly memories.” It is through the room’s “one window,” that Trina and Mac look out “into the grimy maze of back yards and broken sheds [toward] what they now knew was their home.”44

102  Atavistic Attachments, Anti-Landscapes The Irish-American McTeague, true to Foster’s and Maguire’s descriptions, becomes an infection that consumes everyone with whom he comes into contact. Consumed by the ravages of alcohol, which awakened in the typically “slow” McTeague “an ape-like agility,” he hurls the final deathblow at his wife, “all at once into the middle of her face with the suddenness of a relaxed spring.”45 As Christopher Dowd points out, “Norris borrows the rhetoric of medical pathology to show that the Irishman’s true danger to San Francisco was viral in nature.”46 As Norris describes him, McTeague is not only a “monstrous threat to civilization,”47 but also, because he is polluted with an ethnic contagion, he is cast as a regressive danger that threatens the very notion of modernity. As the novel progresses, McTeague’s wife also degenerates alongside her husband. Even before McTeague’s concluding act of violence against Trina, the “combined effects of hard work, avarice, poor food, and her husband’s brutalities,” render the once “pretty” Trina, “coarse, stunted, and dumpy.”48 Similar to Mrs. Johnson in Maggie, with her “straggled hair” falling in “knotted masses about her shoulders,” her “crimson features” “wet with perspiration,” and face that wears the “look of insanity,”49 Trina McTeague’s formerly “swarthy tiara, the coiffure of a queen,” is a “half combed,” “haphazard,” “unkempt, tangled mass, a veritable rat’s nest.”50 Her husband beats her and then deserts her, leaving her “alone, a solitary, abandoned woman, lost in the lowest eddies of the great city’s tide—the tide that always ebbs.”51 Both novels’ demoralization of women highlights what I refer to as the gendered degradation of place within turn of the century ethnic, urban culture, demonstrating the degree to which women, in particular, are devalued in both public and private spheres. Indeed, the domestic violence that occurs in the ­McTeague home creates a rupture in the nineteenth-century sociocultural arrangement that emphasized “home,” not only as a woman’s sphere, but also the place in which a woman could potentially find security and a degree of agency. Gendered violence becomes so prevalent in Trina’s domestic life that inevitably a “great fear seized upon her,” whence, “she associated the house with a scene of violent death,”52 a premonition that comes to fruition a few short pages later when her husband savagely assaults her and leaves her dying in a pool of her own blood. In Maggie, when Maggie comes upon Jimmie and Mr. Johnson at the beginning of the story, she begins to cry when she notices that Jimmie has been fighting because she knows “‘it puts mudder out… an it’s like we’ll all get a poundin.’”53 Contemptuous of her emotional (feminine) response, which he considers a sign of weakness, Jimmie responds to Maggie’s tears by striking her, and even as she “slowly retreated her brother advanced,”54 striking her yet again. Mr. Johnson’s reaction to Jimmie’s public assault on his sister is to tell him, “‘Stop that, Jim, d’yeh hear? Leave yer sister alone on the street. It’s like I can never beat any sense into yer damned wooden head.’”55 Rather than disciplining his

Atavistic Attachments, Anti-Landscapes  103 son for abusing his sister, Mr. Johnson tells him to leave her alone “on the street.” Within the caustic moral place the Johnsons inhabit, as far as Mr. Johnson is concerned, Jimmie is free to abuse Maggie behind the closed door of the family’s apartment; the only limitation Mr. Johnson places on his son’s predisposition to violence is that he is not allowed to beat up his sister in front of other people. 56 Clearly Mr. Johnson is following a distorted code of honor, but Mr. Johnson, Jimmie, Maggie, and the other residents of the tenement district have been indoctrinated to accept this distorted morality and thus have normalized familial and gendered violence. Mrs. Johnson, on the other hand, clearly rules her home; however, both poverty and alcoholism render her vulnerable and defenseless outside of her home. Whereas Mr. Johnson dies, Mary Johnson is left to live out her days in perpetual misery. She “gradually aris[es] to that degree of fame that she could bandy words with her acquaintances among the police justices,” and she is on a first-name basis with court officials, for her “grey head wagged in many a court.”57 She ages before her time; her “flaming face and rolling eyes were a sort of familiar sight on the island”; instead of enjoying the benefits of a full life, she “measure[s] time by means of sprees,” and she always appears “swollen and disheveled.”58 As Chapter IX opens, Mrs. Johnson, in the midst of one of her drunken binges, is taunted by a group of urchins who wait for her outside a saloon. “Expectancy gleamed from their eyes” as they waited for her, crimsoned-faced and “wet with perspiration,” to appear on the scene as she leaves the saloon “with a crash.”59 She lurches and then curses as the “outrageous cluster of little boys… [laugh] delightedly and [scamper] off a short distance, calling out over their shoulders to her.”60 They mock and jeer at her as she howls and shakes her fists furiously, and finally she flounders “about in the lower hall of the tenement house” where she stumbles up the stairs.61 Taken in isolation, this scene appears pathetic and cruel, but it also demonstrates the gendered degradation of place and degree of violence to which women were subjected outside of the domestic sphere. Reading Crane’s and Norris’s depictions of setting, characters, and situations against contemporaneous studies of the nineteenth-century Irish immigrant population are certainly disturbing. One reads with horror about McTeague’s physical violence toward his wife’s rapacious greed, Mr. and Mrs. Johnson’s lack of parenting skills, and the results of their failure to offer healthy attachment bonding to their children. The pathogenic responses found in poverty-stricken environments, such as those described in Maggie and McTeague, are burdened by virulent, deviant patterns of social behavior that create stress, anxiety, and intense feelings of insecurity. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and McTeague thus present compelling portraits of place attachment’s most devastating consequences for individuals who are trapped within a diseased

104  Atavistic Attachments, Anti-Landscapes and unforgiving environment. Characters in both works are emplaced within carefully defined settings in order to highlight the deleterious effects of various inherited characteristics upon their behavior, stressing the importance of heredity and environment in determining the ultimately demoralizing options available to all of the characters. Nowhere in either story do we see a self-defining hero or heroine able to transcend the setting’s destructive familial, social, or environmental conditions, acknowledge the travesty of justice that society has imposed on him or her, and escape the limitations exerted on all by the poverty endemic in urbanism’s unforgiving, underprivileged neighborhoods. Instead, characters are shaped and then destroyed by their history, environment, and an overwhelming lack of options.

The Precarity of Place All of the primary characters in Maggie and McTeague inhabit a Precarity of Place. They persist in their environment, but there is no predictability or security in their lives, which compromises their material and psychological well-being, as well as the level of place security they experience in their environment. According to Judith Butler, Precarity designates that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death. Such populations are at heightened risk of disease, poverty, starvation, and of exposure to violence without protection.62 Because poverty and dispossession create vulnerability and a systemic lack of security, Precarity of Place suggests the potential for exploitation, violence, and abuse and implies that underprivileged subjects lack certain opportunities and benefits because of their association with a particular place of residence. As writers of naturalist fiction, Crane and Norris employ the unpredictabilities and insecurities characteristic of certain places—Rum Alley and Polk Street—to underscore the instability lower-class citizens, ethno-racial others, and women experienced at the end of the nineteenth century. In Maggie, Jimmie Johnson’s neighborhood helps shape his self-­identity and provides him with an illusion of stability. Hence, he attempts to shift the anxieties inherent in Precarity of Place through a violent effort to seize space. The novella begins with Jimmie’s brutal, self-righteous struggle to control his ‘turf,’ as he battles the “howling urchins from Devil’s Row” for “the honor of Rum Alley.”63 Rum Alley is, for Jimmie, not just a place, but also something he believes he owns and must protect. While Rum Alley and Devil’s Row shape Jimmie’s and the other young combatant’s communal identities and sense of selfhood, as the following

Atavistic Attachments, Anti-Landscapes  105 scene underscores, these places also demonstrate nineteenth-century tenement dweller’s internalized ethnicism—the ethnically charged violence that individuals within the same cultural group direct toward each other. Jimmie is described in the novella’s opening scene as a “very little boy” with an “infantile countenance,” a description that heightens the savagery of the vicious activities in which he and the other “Tattered gamins” are engaged. As the little boys make “furious assault[s]” at each other, running “to and fro, dodging, hurling stones and swearing barbaric trebles,” Jimmie’s “wan features wore a look of a tiny, insane demon.”64 Jimmie and the other children seem incapable of recognizing their shared Irish heritage, as he, with a “violent roar,” boasts: “‘dese micks [Irish] can’t make me run.’” It is apparent that, for these miniature assassins of Rum Alley and Devil’s Row, the desire to protect their own decrepit section of the slums negates their mutually shared, Irish origins, which in turn inhibits them from partaking in a communal attachment to place. Instead, they attempt to carve out a small, decrepit section of space for which they are each willing to fight to the death. The quivering and creaking building in which the Johnson family reside reveals the systemic violence of Precarity of Place. It is described as a “dark region”65 in which Mrs. Johnson, with her “massive shoulders heaved in anger,”66 awaits her family’s arrival at the beginning of the story. When she sees her son’s bruised and battered body, instead of comforting him, she throws “herself upon Jimmie” and, “[g]rasping the urchin by the neck and shoulder [and shaking] him until he rattled,”67 drags him to an “unholy sink” in order to “scrub his lacerated face.”68 The entire family is fearful of this monstrous mother who, with her “huge arms,” “immense hands,” “chieftain-like stride,” and the “rough yellow of her face and neck,”69 stirs “up the room until her children were bobbing about like bubbles.”70 Butler argues, the “apprehension of the Precarity of others, their exposure to violence, their socially induced transience and dispensability—is, by implication, an apprehension of the Precarity of any and all living beings.”71 Similar to the cathartic response of an audience viewing a tragedy, readers of Maggie are absorbed in the universal terror Mrs. Johnson invokes. When Maggie accidentally breaks a plate after “totter[ing] on her small legs beneath burdens of dishes,” her mother angrily stares at her child “with sudden hatred.”72 Likened to “a small pursued tigress,”73 Maggie is constantly fearful, and while Jimmie is “afraid of neither the devil nor the leader of society,”74 he is categorically terrified of his mother who arouses outright horror within him. As a child bending over his mother’s comatose figure as she lies upon the bare floor, Jimmie is “fearful lest she should open her eyes, and the dread within him [is] so strong, that he [can] not forbear to stare, but [hangs] as if fascinated over the woman’s grim face.”75 The physical scars that Jimmie and Maggie receive at Mrs. Johnson’s hands will eventually disappear; however, the emotional wounds she has inflicted

106  Atavistic Attachments, Anti-Landscapes upon them will fester for the remainder of their lives and eventually be revealed in their deformed psyches as they mature into adulthood. The strength of the affective bonds individuals develop toward their place of residence often determines their strength of attachment to place—or, what some place attachment theorists refer to as “neighborhood attachment.” According to Hernan Casakin and Shimshon Neikrug, attachment to one’s neighborhood is a “social-psychological process that captures people’s emotional bonds to physical and social environments.”76 Constructive neighborhood attachments are cultivated by positive day-to-day encounters with neighbors who often share ethnic backgrounds and have similar socioeconomic status, which heightens the optimistic impressions one develops toward a place of residence. John D. Kasarda and Morris Janowitz view local communities as “a complex system of friendship and kinship networks and formal and informal associational ties rooted in family life and ongoing socialization processes.”77 However, the effectiveness of a community is also dependent on the “defects and disarticulations” revealed in the variety of social problems at play within any given community. Precarity is characterized in Maggie through a variety of different factors that engender feelings of insecurity, unpredictability, and volatility. As Lindsay N. Boggess and John R. Hipp explain, “racial/ethnic composition, poverty, and residential instability”—all of which are present in Maggie—“influence the local crime rate by disrupting residential networks that are protective factors against crime.”78 This dynamic is evidenced in Maggie, when the impassive and apathetic adults observe the vicious battle among the children in the novella’s opening and do nothing to stop it. First, there is the “curious woman” who is described leaning from her window to observe the fight. Then, various “laborers, unloading a scow at a dock at the river, pause for a moment and regard the fight.” Next, an engineer in a “passive tugboat” watches “lazily” as he hangs upon the boat’s railing. And, finally, “a worm of yellow convicts” slithers from the “shadow of a grey ominous building” and crawls “slowly along the river’s bank” with a decidedly malevolent premonition of where many of the little boys, who “seemed to leer gloatingly at the blood” bubbling over Jimmie’s chin, are eventually going to end up.79 All of the tenement dwellers reside in a place of existential precariousness, which impedes their ability to develop emotional bonds to their neighborhood or to protect each other from the violence and instability of poverty inherent in the area in which they live. While Precarity of Place can create volatility and insecurity for individuals who reside within a particular community, positive neighborhood attachments have the potential to act as a deterrent to crime because residents feel as though they have a stake in maintaining the beneficial elements of their neighborhood, which in turn generates a communal identity that encourages individuals to protect their place of residence.

Atavistic Attachments, Anti-Landscapes  107 As Ralph B. Taylor notes, “higher status neighborhoods” often provide residents with a “higher use value,”80 which leads to stronger place attachments. In Maggie, however, Precarity of Place desensitizes the adults living in the Irish tenement district, who are hardened to the violence they see, as not one of them attempts to end the fight or even protect the children in their neighborhood. Within lower-class, ethnic neighborhoods and across urban communities, “[d]eterioration, and other problems resulting in differential enforcement or distribution patterns” argues Taylor, “may lower neighborhood use value for residents.”81 After migrating from Ireland to over-crowded tenements in U.S. urban centers, Ireland’s poor and dispossessed immigrants experienced place attachment disruptions that generated numerous, intergenerational complications, which added to their feelings of insecurity, instability, and unpredictability. Desensitized to the violence that surrounds them, the adults in Maggie bequeath their apathy to the next generation, who, in turn, maul one another like “true assassins.”82 In contrast to Maggie’s inaugural scenes, Norris opens McTeague with what appears to be a somewhat improved socioeconomic setting. Precarity of Place does not seem to be as much of a concern in San Francisco’s “little world of Polk Street,” which houses an eclectic assortment of “shop girls… plumber’s apprentices… small tradespeople, and their like.”83 McTeague, the hulking, awkward dentist, and his “delicate,” “refined,” and “prettily made”84 wife Trina begin their lives together on Polk Street “with no apprehensions as to their finances.” They were assured of a “tidy little income” from his dental practice as well as the interest from five thousand dollars Trina had recently won from a lottery ticket. This winning ticket, or more so the money that comes with it, is the activating circumstance that most directly leads both Trina and McTeague toward their ruination. Trina’s lottery winnings provoke anger and jealousy in her cousin, Marcus, a young man both her family and McTeague had assumed “would win [Trina] in the end.” However, having previously had no more than a passing interest in his cousin, Marcus magnanimously “hands over” Trina to McTeague, only to discover after it was too late that she had won such a large sum of money. Marcus’s resentment propels him toward a vindictive desire to destroy McTeague and make it impossible for him “to practise [sic] his profession any longer.”85 Moreover, despite the fact that Trina still has her lottery winnings, which she had invested with her Uncle Otto, she irrationally refuses to spend any of this money when Mac loses his dental practice, and subsequently the McTeagues lose their possessions and their home, and, finally, they plunge into Precarity of Place and are engulfed in complete physical and moral degeneration. Although they commenced life elevated above the Precarity in which the characters in Maggie live, McTeague and Trina eventually subsist amongst the very individuals they had previously considered beneath them. Maria and

108  Atavistic Attachments, Anti-Landscapes Zerkow are symptomatic of the novel’s vilified ethnic others, and thus are precariously emplaced in Zerkow’s “filthy den in the alley just back of the [McTeague’s] flat.”86 By immediately locating Maria and Zerkow in an alley behind the McTeagues, Norris effectively foreshadows the vicious quagmire into which McTeague and Trina descend. Before too long, the McTeagues are compelled to join the ranks of Polk Street’s precariat class. Unlike the characters in Maggie, the residents of Polk Street do not belong to “the ‘tough’ element, who had no appearances to keep up.”87 However, the narrator slowly begins to plait the scene with images of instability and a vague uncertainty. The “social position” of Polk Street residents was not “clearly defined”; consequently, residents are uncertain “how far they could go and yet preserve their ‘respectability.’”88 Those who work and reside on Polk Street believe there are rules to be followed; they just don’t seem to know what those rules are. They are never quite “sure of themselves” or their social “place,”89 and though they “rubbed elbows” with a higher-class neighborhood “one block above” them, Polk Street residents understood there were “certain limits” they could not violate. Hence, they were “absurdly formal,” out of fear they would be “taken for ‘toughs.’”90 Polk Streeters inhabit a murky Precarity, vacillating between two social tiers, never quite ascertaining where they belong in the social schema. If cruelty is the status quo in Maggie, uncertainty rules the residents of Polk Street, where “[n]o people have a keener eye for the amenities than those whose social position is not assured.”91 It is within this nebulously defined place that the “hopelessly stupid” McTeague “opened up his ‘Dental Parlors.’” Emerging from his own hazy but violent past as the son of a “hard-working shift-boss of the mine” who became an “irresponsible animal, a beast, a brute, crazy with alcohol” every other Sunday, and a mother who was an “overworked drudge,”92 McTeague settles into a simplistic life as a local dentist, spending his free time indulging in “his only pleasures—to eat, to smoke, and to play upon his concertina.”93 The few possessions he acquires seem initially to satisfy him—“a steel engraving of the court of Lorenzo de’ Medici, which he had bought because there were a great many figures in it for the money… a rifle manufacture’s advertisement calendar which he never used… a small marble-top table… a stone pug dog sitting before the little stove, and a thermometer.”94 McTeague felt his life was a “success, that he could hope for nothing better.” Bill Brown argues, “[b]oth character and urban context depend on iterative narration, which can render character indistinguishable from context.” In an exaggerated configuration of both body and thought, McTeague reiterates the vague uncertainties afflicting the other residents of Polk Street. His “mind was as his body, heavy, slow to act, sluggish.” At this early stage of the novel, there appears

Atavistic Attachments, Anti-Landscapes  109 to be “nothing vicious” about him. He is simply “strong, stupid, docile, obedient.”95 However, his brute strength, “enormous bones[,] and corded muscles” are palpable signifiers of his impending atavistic spiral. When the “animal in the man stirred and woke; the evil instincts that were so close to the surface leaped to life, shouting and clamoring,” struggling with “another better McTeague.”96 But in the “final protest,”97 he yields to the “hideous, monstrous not to be resisted… simultaneous arousing of the other man.”98 It is not merely ignorance or an inherent malicious cruelty that causes him to lose his livelihood but an actual defect in his intellectual abilities and a bumbling discomfort in his own corporeality that prevents him from seeking out healthy alternatives for employment. McTeague’s mental deficiencies and beast-like physicality thus serve to generate Precarity of Place for him and, by association, Trina. McTeague, in many ways, personifies the physical and conceptual framework of Polk Street. In much the same way McTeague suppresses a hidden brutality that lurks beneath his public facade, Polk Street embodies a veiled callousness of place—the dirty alleys, filthy dens, and unkempt hovels that are hidden behind Polk Street’s respectable flats. Because Polk Street is portrayed as an indistinct, indeterminate place, residents appear perpetually ignorant of how to perform their lives. As Neil Campbell points out, “One cannot think of the West as rural or urban space without visualizing the powerful checkerboard symmetries of the meshlike grid as it arrests and orders space.”99 The repetitive design of intersecting streets, typical of not only San Francisco, but also other urban Western communities, generates a cyclic disorder that is replicated in the thoughts and actions of characters who, as Brown argues, “struggle to achieve quantitatively,” a sense of identity “through repeated action.”100 By surrendering to his carnal desires when he assaults the unconscious Trina at the beginning of the novel, McTeague submits to the “fury” of his inner “young bull in the heat of high summer,” and, though afterward he feels “disturbed” and believes the “animal was downed,” it is only “for this time.”101 McTeague will not only repeat his brutal attacks on Trina, but these attacks will become more sinister with each repetitive action. In McTeague, Brown contends, Norris “poses both an epistemological understanding of how habit constitutes the material world for the perceiving subject, and a psychological understanding of how it constitutes the self.”102 The familiarity of iterative performance, in which various things can be quantified, momentarily anchors the characters living on Polk Street to a place of dubious security. Thus, activities such as ­McTeague’s Sunday “habit” to leave his pitcher at Joe Frenna’s saloon on his way to dinner; his replaying of the same “six lugubrious airs”103 on his concertina; Maria’s monotonous retelling of the “hundred pieces” of “vanished, half-mythical gold plate”104; and Trina’s frenzied “counting”

110  Atavistic Attachments, Anti-Landscapes and “recounting” of her “twenty twenty-dollar gold pieces,”105 provide temporary grounding for these and other characters’ muddled identities. However, the characters’ unquantifiable actions—McTeague’s perpetual confusion; his obsession with acquiring a giant gilt tooth for his dental shop; Zerkow’s chronic, debilitating fascination with Maria’s illusive gold plate; Marcus Schouler’s greed-inspired jealousy and blind fury as he pursues McTeague across the desert—are vague reiterations of the indeterminateness of Polk Street and the Precarity of Place evidenced throughout the novel. Even though the narrator of McTeague argues that those who live in a “‘tough’ element” do not need to keep up appearances, the truth of the matter is that every element of every social class engages in performative behaviors as a way to confirm both personal and communal identities. For instance, in Maggie, while the inhabitants of Rum Alley and Devil’s Row live a systemically more violent and precarious existence than those on Polk Street, they do in fact recognize and perform territorial rules in an attempt to subvert Precarity of Place. All of the characters in Maggie follow clearly defined, albeit tragically imprudent, social expectations, the boundaries of which they traverse only when they deliberately choose to flout the rules in retaliation for real or imagined slights. For instance, Jimmie, angry at his father for dragging him home from a fight in which he fancies himself “some vague soldier” in training, or “a man of blood with a sort of sublime license,” raises his voice “in defiance” when his father tells him to stop his attacks on his sister, primarily because he knows it will annoy and embarrass his father. Later in the story, when the drunken, “lurching figure” of Mr. Johnson appears “in front of the gruesome doorway” of their tenement building, he demands that Jimmie give him the pail of beer Jimmie bought for the “ol’ woman” who lives a floor below them. Jimmie reminds him that “it ‘ud be dirt teh swipe it.” However, replicating his son’s earlier act of defiance, Mr. Johnson ignores Jimmie and promptly “wrenched the pail from the urchin.”106 The Precarity created by Mr. Johnson’s poverty and alcoholism inspires him to repeatedly inflict violence on his son, yet he expects that Jimmie will not himself be violent, simply because he tells him not to be. Sadly, Mr. Johnson’s Precarity of Place only triggers his son’s reiteration of his father’s violence. By emplacing their characters within decidedly destabilized settings, Crane and Norris underscore naturalism’s attention to the effects of environment. Precarity of Place provides a unique lens through which to examine the adverse consequences of place, while still recognizing the trauma of heredity, ethnicity, and gender on each of the characters. While Precarity itself is not indicative of a lack of material objects, within the context of Crane’s and Norris’s fictional settings, dispossession and deprivation urge the characters within these tales to either remain within or turn toward the violence of place.

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Placing and Displacing Things: Objects, Emotions, and Self-identity Justice is contention. Through contention all things come to be.107 (Heraclitus of Ephesus) Most people desire and value material objects, and in most Western cultures, much emphasis is placed on acquiring objects. While the objects themselves do not create problems, the value individuals place on things may have adverse consequences, particularly for those who do not have the economic means to obtain those objects or who are themselves viewed as objects. Indeed, the ‘desire’ to own something and the ‘value’ that is placed on acquiring objects are themselves intangible ‘things’ that produce other intangible things—greed, envy, arrogance, violence, deceit, and insecurity, to name a few. In their respective works, Crane and Norris emphasize the way in which materiality and the lack of material objects adversely affect the marginalized, displaced, and dispossessed characters in Maggie and McTeague. In the 1823 edition of The American First Class Book; or Exercises in Reading and Recitation, Lesson 209 informs student-readers that, whether in the scenery of nature, amid the works and inventions of men, amid the affections of home, or in the intercourse of general society, the material forms which surround us are secretly but incessantly influencing our character and dispositions.108 According to this early nineteenth-century dictum, matter invades every aspect of human existence. It is inescapable and unassailable, and so are its furtive and sometimes indescribable influences. Humanity is matter amid matter, and from matter derives non-matter. The material world communicates through what it is as well as what it means. Hence, material objects covertly shape the immaterial—how we think and what we feel, our affect and essence. As Hegel suggests in Phenomenology of Spirit (1977), there is no fundamental separation between humanity and materiality, as everything we are emanates from our perception of self that is a symbiotic reflection of the mirror image out of which we create form. As such, ontological speculations of materiality are frequently embedded in a dualistic ideology. Material forms are often bifurcated into an either/or paradigm— natural/built, inside/outside, rural/urban, male/female, possession/ dispossession, and so on—and enter into what Giorgio Agamben calls “a zone of irreducible indistinction.”109 Because material objects, or the lack thereof, continually shape character, temperament, mood, and perception, this irreducible indistinction inevitably progresses into infinite, affective multiplicities. Because the psychosocial concept of place can

112  Atavistic Attachments, Anti-Landscapes be either tangible or abstract, the foundations of dialectical materialism inevitably produce a conflation of interpersonal attachments, subjectivities, perceptions, feelings, and memories—all of which are received and processed through limitless, indefinable reactions. As Lawrence Buell notes, nineteenth-century Americans experienced a “new fashioned-­ delight in the materiality of… things.” This phenomenon, Buell argues, engendered a “symbiosis of object-responsiveness,”110 abstract emotions that matter generates—or, what Bill Brown refers to as the “sensation of thingness.”111 What lies beyond the physical is an intangible effect, a confluence of, or dissent between, our unique perceptions of things and a subjective awareness of what those things mean and how they impact us. Thus, materiality’s furtive but incessant influence, as Lesson 209 reminds us, is situated between our rational intellect and our affective sensibilities. Elisabeth Morris112 discusses this phenomenon in her 1917 essay, “The Tyranny of Things,” which opens with an exchange between two fifteen-year-old girls who have just met. After staring at each other for a few moments, one finally says, “‘Which do you like best, people or things?’” to which the other girl responds, “‘Things’”; and so, Morris writes, “They were friends at once.” In recognizing their mutual interest in and preference for things over people, the two girls promptly achieve a synergistic attachment toward each other because of their shared inclination to value things more than they value, respect, cherish, admire, or appreciate each other. Like most of us who “go through a phase when we like things best,” these two girls, at this stage of their development, have chosen to redirect their libidinous desires toward the possession of the non-human. Many people, however, Morris laments, “never pass out of this phase,” and so they fill their houses with “an undigested mass of things.” Sigmund Freud, who by the end of his life had amassed his own fairly large and eclectic assortment of art objects from around the globe, attempted to explain his own penchant for collecting things as a desire second only to his nicotine addiction. Although he never fully integrated his thoughts on the significance of accumulating objects, Freud did hypothesize that the “core of paranoia is the detachment of the libido from objects.” Paranoia occurs when one is unable to shift the self-love of childhood toward another object of desire. When the transferal of desire is incomplete or desire is untethered, excess libido can lead to fear, distrust, and obsession. However, according to Freud, a “reverse course” can be taken “by the collector” when he “directs his surplus libido onto an inanimate object,” which may help him redirect his residual sex drive toward a “love of things”113; and so he remains relatively sane. In the paradoxical drive to resolve drive, excess libido thus becomes attached to objects of excess, which leads to possession, ownership, and control of things. Owning things then becomes a positive and necessary part of

Atavistic Attachments, Anti-Landscapes  113 one’s psychological development. The teenagers in Morris’s essay have successfully transferred their childhood self-love outward toward a love of inanimate things, and ‘presumably’ they will eventually share their desires with or redirect them toward another person with whom they will develop a sexual and/or romantic relationship. In The Principles of Psychology (1890), William James contends that individuals are defined by and define themselves through the possession of things, “the sum total of all that he CAN call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account.”114 The act of possessing things, according to James, helps define the self, but it also, as Jean Baudrillard argues, redirects one “back to the world.”115 In other words, because possession denotes ownership, one finds enjoyment through the sharing of possessions with others or from the power one acquires over others through ownership, particularly owning things that others desire. (This could create a situation in which the aforementioned fifteen-year-olds part ways.) The possession of things, then, engenders an affective response not only in the individual who ­possesses things but also in the person who has been dispossessed of material objects or deprived of ownership altogether. As James contends, if one’s possessions “wax and prosper,” the possessor feels “triumphant” and, it can be logically assumed, the dispossessed will feel a degree of envy or resentment. However, if one’s possessions “dwindle and die away,” the possessor “feels cast down,” or powerless, yet “not necessarily in the same degree for each thing, but in much the same way for all.”116 Because possession equates to power, it redirects the subject outward as it simultaneously reflects the power of ownership back toward oneself. The loss of possessions thus dramatically alters how individuals distinguish their own and others’ place in the world in relation to others. Things perform an important place attachment function in both ­M aggie and McTeague. In each story, the dearth of and/or loss of objects inaugurates a violent quest for characters in both stories to possess or reclaim things, triggering a variety of detrimental interpersonal and place attachment responses. In the early 1950s, David McClelland suggested that the “perception of power and control determines whether or not something is perceived as part of the self.” External objects are “related to the self to the extent that they are perceived as controlled by the self.”117 Hence, objects are regarded as parts of the self when one is able to exert a degree of dominance over an object, which in turn enables one to construct a perception of selfhood, or one’s place in the world. In Maggie there is a paucity of objects. Things, beyond those that are necessary for survival, are difficult and often impossible to acquire. Because the characters in Crane’s story have been historically

114  Atavistic Attachments, Anti-Landscapes dispossessed of power, self-respect, and dignity, they respond to deprivation via a fierce quest to possess not just inanimate objects—clothing, alcohol, and territory, for instance—but also through violent attempts to objectify, possess, and control other human beings. The characters’ self-identities have been shaped by deprivation. In McTeague, however, characters are not necessarily born into deprivation; rather, they are divested of material possessions, which leads to similar efforts to control their environment. While the initial setting of McTeague appears to be different from the persistent deprivation in Maggie, in truth, the loss of possessions initiates perhaps an even more brutal, pathological response for characters in McTeague than for those in Maggie. Though never entirely stable, Trina and McTeague are shocked into a precarious place when McTeague loses his livelihood, an event that essentially challenges their self-identity; thus, the slow dwindling of objects comes to signify the deteriorating self for each character. Both Maggie and McTeague highlight the way in which things—owning, desiring, pursing, and losing things—create interpersonal and place attachment disruptions that ultimately intensify the primary characters’ personal and moral failings. Despite their indigence, to one degree or another, all of the principle characters in Maggie seek to possess things, yet most of what they own is symptomatic of their abject poverty. Mr. Johnson’s meager possessions amount to a dinner pail and a cheap, apple-wood pipe, which the narrator sardonically describes as his “emblem of serenity.”118 These paltry items are indicative of his precarious place in the novel; in fact, he dies before readers can even care about him. On the other hand, Mrs. Johnson, with all her hypocritical cruelty intact, survives. Aside from the “unholy sink” in her squalid apartment, dirty dishpans, ­“burdens of dishes,” and ever-present “yellow-brown bottle”119 of ­alcohol, Mrs. Johnson strives to control her children, particularly ­Maggie, whom she regularly damns. Because of the Precarity inherent in her environment, Mrs. ­Johnson— with alcohol operating as her primary agent of denial—is unable to fully integrate the real world into her life, and c­ onsequently remains a fragmented entity. Within the framework of her intrapsychic realm, Mrs. Johnson has failed to separate her own identity from her ­daughter’s,  and consequently views Maggie as a reflection of her own life. Though Maggie attempts to move beyond the limitations of her environment and create an identity that is independent from her mother, there is no constructive mediation to support her move forward. In choosing Pete as a romantic and sexual partner, Maggie is essentially replicating the disastrous choice her mother made in selecting Mr. Johnson. In truth, by the time “Maggie observed Pete,”120 the things that she had been given—a lack of attachment, encouragement, and support— have already framed her young life. Despite the degradation of her environment (or perhaps because of it), Maggie inhabits an imaginary world. Her “thoughts were often searching for far-away lands where, as God

Atavistic Attachments, Anti-Landscapes  115 says, the little hills sing together in the morning. Under the trees of her dream-gardens there had always walked a lover.”121 It is not too difficult to believe that in her youth Maggie’s mother had imagined similar scenes and yearned for a lover akin to the likes of Maggie’s ideal. But if she had them, somewhere along the way Mary Johnson’s “dream-gardens” were destroyed by an unhealthy attachment to place where, shaken by the despair of her own personal losses, she could not tolerate her daughter’s beauty and innocence and thus sought to destroy Maggie as she herself felt destroyed. There is no potentiality for Maggie. Why dream for impossibilities? Maggie’s desires become intertwined with her mother’s fate; therefore, no matter what she does, she will forever remain subject to the limitations of her environment and the abusive foundation of her existence. If Mrs. Johnson’s rage at the fact that Maggie is attempting to find happiness with Pete is the result of a moment of clarity in which she sees her own history about to be repeated by her daughter, then Crane has drawn a far more complex character in Mary Johnson than critics have thus far observed.122 While, with devastating consequences, Mrs. Johnson seeks to possess other people by holding them emotionally hostage, the things Jimmie seeks to possess are territory (Devil’s Row), and space (the “turmoil and tumble of the down-town streets,” where he “menaced mankind”). ­Jimmie appears unwilling to move beyond the intellectual and emotional mind-set of a child as he grows into “a young man of leather.”123 For a long time, his occupation “was to stand on street-corners and watch the world go by.”124 He grew “so sharp that he believed in nothing,”125 yet his inability to see beyond his narrow existence hearkens grimly back to his childish stance “upon a heap of gravel for the honor of Rum Alley.”126 In truth, his identity has been constructed atop the crushed stone of the tenement district. Rather than aspiring to a better life, “[h]e maintained a belligerent attitude toward all well-dressed men. To him fine raiment was allied to weakness, and all good coats covered faint hearts.”127 Rather than gaining security through ownership of material objects, Jimmie’s conviction of self is derived through intimidating others he believed were physically and emotionally weaker than him. Consequently, “his sneer grew so that it turned its glare on all things.” As Jimmie grows into adulthood, he takes on the vague position of head of the family. As incumbent of that office, he stumbled up-stairs late at night, as his father had done before him. He reeled about the room, swearing at his relations, or went to sleep on the floor.128 In spite of the fact that as a child Jimmie “shiver[ed] in dread of… his parents,”129 he steps impetuously into their place and becomes exactly like them. From the time he “was a little boy[,] he began to be

116  Atavistic Attachments, Anti-Landscapes arrested,”130 he drank to excess, and he engaged in “quite a number of miscellaneous fights, and in some general barroom rows that had become known to the police.”131 The only thing that Jimmie respects is a fire engine, which is “enshrined in his heart as an appalling thing that he loved with a distant, dog-like devotion.”132 The “clang” of the fire engine’s bells pierces ­Jimmie’s “breast like a noise of remembered war,” as he continually reifies the foundational violence of his chaotic home life and traumatic childhood. Lauren Berlant describes this repetitive re-conjuring of traumatic experiences as “living trauma as whiplash,” yet, the truth is that Jimmie is not actually living; instead of prevailing in a “ ­ merging hyperconsciousness,” Jimmie lingers in a hyperobliviousness. He is stuck, “treading water” and “drifting among symptoms.”133 In reality, the trauma never stopped long enough for Jimmie to become conscious of his own meanness; thus, he subsists in the inalterable trauma of tenement life. Nothing changes for Jimmie, and so no-thing changes. The two characters in McTeague whose lives most resemble Jimmie’s, Maria Macapa and Zerkow, also exist in a state of hyperobliviousness. In McTeague, Maria Macapa’s elusive but “famous service of gold plate” becomes an object of desire for Zerkow, who repeatedly urges her to relate the story of the “plate [her] father owned in Central America.”134 As Berlant argues, “All attachments are optimistic”135; thus Zerkow’s attachment to Maria’s gold is maintained in her continual retelling of its existence and his optimistic hope that he will one day attain it. Zerkow had come to believe in this story infallibly. He was immovably persuaded that at one time Maria or Maria’s people had possessed these hundred golden dishes. In his perverted mind the hallucination had developed still further. Not only had that service of gold plate once existed, but it existed now, entire, intact; not a single burnished golden piece of it was missing… Some day, if only he was persistent, he would hit upon the right combination of questions, the right suggestions that would disentangle Maria’s confused recollections… This service of plate had come to be Zerkow’s mania.136 Zerkow is hyperoblivious to the implausibility of the gold plate. The cruel promise of satisfaction keeps him attached, and his optimism continually redirects him toward the object of his desire. But Maria and Zerkow’s baffling marriage and the birth and death of their “wretched, sickly child, with not even strength enough nor wits enough to cry,” had “peculiar consequences”137 for Maria, who afterward “did not remember”138 anything about the gold. Actually, Maria herself becomes hyperoblivious to her own telling of its existence. And here is where Zerkow’s optimism takes a turn toward cruelty. Regardless of whether or not the gold plate was actually a thing, Maria’s persistent retelling

Atavistic Attachments, Anti-Landscapes  117 of its existence sustained Zerkow’s optimism, wherein he leaned “toward promises contained within the present moment of the encounter with [his] object” of desire.139 Once Maria is no longer able to mollify his optimism, though, Zerkow cruelly and violently redirects his disappointment toward her. Maria’s inability to supply him with her “tale of treasure” leaves Zerkow with nothing but the cruelty of despair. From the narrator’s anti-Semitic perspective, Zerkow is “lashed and harassed by a pitiless greed” to find Maria’s gold plate. There does not appear to be much beyond his rapacious optimism of one day attaining this treasure. Just the story itself “ravished him with delight.”140 ­Zerkow’s desire is directly connected to the “owning” of the thing, not in using the thing to improve his living conditions or social circumstances. In Maggie, however, Crane reveals a direct correlation between materiality and social mobility. As Maggie “marveled” at Pete, she tried to “calculate the altitude of the pinnacle from which he must have looked down upon her.”141 The moment Maggie “observed Pete,” her budding sexual awareness provokes within her an awkward embarrassment of her and her family’s lack of material possessions. Because she was not taught how to protect herself, Maggie feels “instant admiration for a man who openly defied” the “hardships and insults” that inhabited her perception of the world.142 From Maggie’s pathologized sense of social mobility and materiality, Pete signifies potentiality. He appears to provide an optimistic promise that he will help her defy her environment’s odds and actually acquire things beyond the “dark, dust-stained walls, and the scant and crude furniture of her home,” the broken and battered clock, the “almost vanished flowers in the carpet-pattern,” and the “dingy curtain,” all of which become “an abomination” to her. But Maggie’s admiration and eventual trust of Pete are based on her own cruelly optimistic belief that an individual’s essential character somehow transcends that person’s actions in life, and her faulty belief about character establishes the conditions under which she misguidedly assumes that love will function as a means of liberation. As Jimmie makes clear to Maggie early in the novella, within the tenement district the Johnson’s inhabit, young women have only two choices: they’ve “edder got to go to hell or go to work!”143 In one particularly disheartening description, George G. F ­ oster illuminates the “dark abodes” of the prostitute, where the “bloated mistress of the house,” stands ready to “administer drugged brandy” to customers, while “half a dozen disgusting wretches who ought to be women, are lounging upon the benches in immodest attitudes.” In his journalistic inspection of urban life, Foster finds a “still meaner and more squalid building” in the rear of this building, and within it “a heap of rags” that suddenly “stirs in the corner.” Upon closer examination, “there appears a female face, ghastly with suffering, the eyes glassy as if set in death.” Even while we “gaze,” he says, the “jaw falls, and, with a gurgling imprecation, the spirit of the prostitute

118  Atavistic Attachments, Anti-Landscapes seeks its Maker. What a death-bed!”144 Within the urban tenement district, women, argues Foster, are particularly vulnerable to “innumerable cases of heartbrokenness, desolation, and crime.”145 Initially, for Maggie, because she has adapted her senses “for building possible and beautiful worlds from within impossible ones,”146 she envisions Pete as the guide who will escort her away from poverty and prostitution and toward wealth, prosperity, and respectability. He  is someone she believes will lead her far from the unhappy prospects before her and toward a better life. Unfortunately, he too fails her in the same way every other person in her life has failed her. In fact, Pete is a younger but equivalent duplication of her piteous father, and ­Maggie’s erroneous perception of him defies the reader’s impression that he amounts to nothing more than a conceited, egotistical brute. She is searching for someone she will be able to trust, but because of her chaotic home life and the everyday duplicity of life in the larger environment in which she is emplaced, Maggie never develops the proficiency required to succeed in her quest for a better life, and so she will never find what she so desperately desires. Maggie’s plight in the novella represents Crane’s most fully developed treatment of the disastrous intersections of youthful idealism, parental abandonment, alcoholism, child abuse, and the slum environment. Maggie, in denial of the effects of her rearing and so unable to escape the degradation toward which her parents’ alcoholism and abuse lead her, is predisposed to choose a relationship with a man who parallels the home life from which she desperately wishes to escape. Both Maggie and McTeague include descriptions of characters who lack things, lose things, and desire things, as well as those who seek to possess human beings as things and those who look to others to provide them with things. Yet the language each author employs in an attempt to describe things is itself unsatisfactory and insufficient. ­Giorgio Agamben argues that a “thing itself… has its essential place in language,” even if the language used to describe it is too inadequate. Though the “thing itself” ostensibly transcends language, the thing is possible “only in language and by virtue of language: precisely the thing of language.”147 In McTeague, the words used to describe ­Owgooste’s “dreadful accident” in the theater—“a veritable catastrophe, deplorable, lamentable”—are, as the narrator suggests, indeterminate, as they fail to define this “thing beyond words!”148 It is an act too “real,” and thus it remains pre-symbolic, a place where words fail. Indeed, this thing— public urination—becomes a foul abjection, what Julia Kristeva defines as “a border that has encroached upon everything”; hence, it becomes a vulgar, intangible, indefinable thing that exists outside the borders of language. Owgooste’s foul excretion becomes ­azotemic excess that portends the surfeit vulgarity that awaits the principle characters—­Trina’s rapacious, sexualized adoration of her gold coins and McTeague’s

Atavistic Attachments, Anti-Landscapes  119 atavistic, sexualized brutality, from the first premarital assault on ­Trina’s unconscious body as she lay in his dental chair, to the biting of her tiny fingers during sex. Moving beyond words, however, becomes significant for McTeague, for whom words are a perpetual burden. He stumbles repeatedly with every attempt at verbal expression. Indeed, McTeague appears wedged between the Imaginary and Symbolic Order, where he seems incapable of comprehending the rules of society or fully engaging in a community of others. Because he perpetually struggles with language, McTeague cannot completely enter the Symbolic Order, and thus it is only a matter of time before his atavistic desires arise. After he murders Trina, words indeed become meaningless for him in the desert’s “measureless leagues of white-hot alkali stretched away toward the horizon,”149 where “spatial monotony has come to replace temporal monotony.”150 The silent desert, the ultimate Precarity of Place where the novel concludes, is an ironic negation of the clatter of Polk Street. For, although McTeague has broken free of the need for words and the monotonous and bewildering clarification of self, as he stands “upon the hot white ground” gazing out toward the “vast, interminable” stretch of the “measureless leagues of Death Valley,” he finds himself hopelessly “locked” to Marcus Schouler’s dead body. Marcus’s corpse becomes a wordless thing to which McTeague is irrevocably attached. Thus, himself wordless, McTeague “remained stupidly looking around him, now at the distant horizon, now at the ground, now at the half-dead canary chittering feebly in its little gilt prison.”151 The canary, chained within its cage, will die beside the man cruelly chained to a cadaver in the desert. Maggie Johnson also struggles with words throughout her life. When readers are first introduced to her character, her brother beats her up for speaking. When she seeks to comfort him after his parent’s drunken fight, she approaches Jimmie with “a small voice” and “whispered”152 her concern. When she observes Pete, she doesn’t speak but “thought he must be a very elegant and graceful bartender.” She “watched him furtively” and “leaned back in the shadow,” while her “eyes dwelt wonderingly and rather wistfully upon Pete’s face.” At four different times throughout the novel, Pete uses the expression, “‘Say, Mag,’” yet he dominates every conversation of which he is a part and refuses to let her “say” much of anything. Indeed, the day after Pete leaves her in the bar and takes off with the “woman of brilliance and audacity,”153 ­M aggie seeks him out only to have her words interrupted with a “violent gesture of impatience,” “profound irritation,” and a final, “‘Oh, go teh hell.’”154 As she struggles to respond, she is “ ­ bewildered and could not find speech.”155 When she returns home, a place where she should be able to find comfort and security, she instead listens wordlessly to her mother shouting insults at her, as Mrs. ­Johnson’s voice “rang through the building.” The only words Maggie speaks are directed toward her

120  Atavistic Attachments, Anti-Landscapes brother, “‘Jimmie—’” to which he responds, “‘Well, now, yer a hell of a t’ing, ain’ yeh?’” And a hell of thing it is for Maggie, who, with no one else to whom she may turn, leaves her home. As she aimlessly wanders the streets, she notices a minister with a “beaming, chubby face” that was the “picture of benevolence and kindheartedness,” and as she silently approaches him, he too turns from her with a “convulsive ­ cTeague, movement,” and a “vigorous side-step.”156 Maggie, like M is irrevocably silenced, but instead of being consumed by the silent panorama of Death Valley—finally, a space vast enough to consume ­McTeague’s hulking mass—Maggie’s pathetic essence “faintly… died away to silence” in the “deathly black hue” of the “oily” river. Akin to the sardonic, feeble chirrup of McTeague’s caged canary, what remains after Maggie has “died away to a silence”157 is Mrs. Johnson’s pitiful and much too tardy “chittering”: “‘Oh, yes, I’ll forgive her! I’ll forgive her!’”158 The pseudonymous characters in Maggie and McTeague demonstrate to full effect the maxim of the Greek scholar Herakleitos: “Without opposition, all things cease to exist.”159 Both Maggie’s and McTeague’s lives were awash with opposition, hostility, and resistance, yet once their lives were void of just about every thing, when there was no-thing left to dispute, combat, or challenge, they both ceased to exist. ~~~ Elisabeth Morris concludes her essay, “The Tyranny of Things,” with the following summation: I have not [the old monks’] courage, and I win no such freedom. I allow myself to be overwhelmed by the invading host of things, making fitful resistance, but without any real steadiness of purpose. Yet never do I wholly give up the struggle, and in my heart I cherish an ideal. Things—objects, words, people, ideas, voices, and feelings—can be oppressive and overwhelming. Things can quell our resistance, deny our purpose, and repress our struggles. Indeed, possession and freedom make strange bedfellows. Actually, the title of Morris’s essay invokes the very tyranny Americans struggled against more than a century earlier. After shaking off the shackles of oppression, why would Americans choose to be overwhelmed by things that invade so much of our space and destroy our independence? Could it be that, where humanity is concerned, when one prison door closes, another opens? Is it simply a part of human nature to resist freedom? If in fact humanity fears absolute freedom, the characters in Crane’s and Norris’s fictional works are indicative of an extreme form of dependence.

Atavistic Attachments, Anti-Landscapes  121

Notes 1 John Francis Maguire, The Irish in America (London: Longmans, Green, 1868), vii. 2 Maguire, The Irish in America, 1. 3 Ibid., 216–217. 4 Ibid., 4. 5 Ibid., 214. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., 216. 8 Ibid. 9 Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, edited by Kevin J. Hayes (Boston, MA: Bedford, 1999), 39. 10 Frank Norris, McTeague, edited by Donald Pizer (New York: Norton, 1997), 6. 11 Ibid., 9. 12 Crane, Maggie, 43. 13 Frank Norris, McTeague, 9. 14 Ibid. 15 William Dean Howells, “New York Low Life in Fiction,” New York World (26 July 1896): 18. 16 See Jillmarie Murphy, Monstrous Kinships: Realism and Attachment Theory in the Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth Century Novel (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011), 105–106, for these and other contemporary reviews of Maggie. 17 See, for instance, James William Sullivan’s Tenement Tales of New York (New York: Henry Holt, 1895). 18 Edward Bright, “A Melodrama of the Streets,” The Illustrated American 20 (11 July 1896): 94. 19 Anonymous, [Review of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets], New York Tribune (31 May 1896): 26. 20 Anonymous, [Review of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets], The Nation 63 (2 July 1896): 15. 21 Hamlin Garland, “An Ambitious French Novel and a Modest American Story,” The Arena 8 (June 1893): xi. 22 Anonymous, “The Author-Artist will Soon Issue a Book—Stephen Crane’s Maggie,” New York Press (15 April 1894): 2. 23 Anonymous, [Review of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets], Port Jervis Union (13 March 1893): 3. 24 Frank Norris, “Stephen Crane’s Stories of Life in the Slums: Maggie and George’s Mother,” The Wave 15 (4 July 1896): 13. 25 Marchand, Frank Norris, A Study (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1942), 50. 26 Ibid., 201. 27 Nancy Huston Banks, “Two Recent Revivals in Realism,” The Bookman (June 1899): 356. 28 qtd. in Sorrentino, Stephen Crane Remembered (Tuscaloosa, AL: U ­ niversity of Alabama Press, 2006), 103. 29 Sorrentino, Stephen Crane Remembered, 161. 30 Rev. John Francis Maguire, The Irish in America, 220. 31 Maguire, The Irish in America, 223. 32 Ibid., 227. 33 Ibid., 229. 34 Ibid., 230.

122  Atavistic Attachments, Anti-Landscapes 35 Ibid., 229. 36 Ibid. 37 George G. Foster, New York in Slices (New York: Garrett & Co., 1852), 22. 38 Norris, McTeague, 18. 39 Christopher Dowd, The Construction of the Irish Identity in American Literature (New York: Routledge, 2011), 95. 40 Norris, McTeague, 22. 41 Christopher Dowd, The Construction of the Irish Identity in American Literature, 95. 42 Joseph R. McElrath and Jesse S. Crissler, Frank Norris: A Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 240. 43 Norris, McTeague, 142. 44 Ibid., 184. 45 Ibid., 205. 46 Dowd, The Construction of the Irish Identity in American Literature, 108. 47 Ibid. 48 Norris, McTeague, 184. 49 Crane, Maggie, 63. 50 Norris, McTeague, 184. 51 Ibid., 193. 52 Ibid., 189. 53 Ibid., 40. 54 Ibid., 40. 55 Ibid., 40. 56 See Murphy, Monstrous Kinships, 119. 57 Crane, Maggie, 50. 58 Ibid., 50. 59 Ibid., 62. 60 Ibid., 63. 61 Ibid., 63. 62 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2016), 76. 63 Crane, Maggie, 36. 64 Ibid., 36–37. 65 Ibid., 39. 66 Ibid., 40. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid., 41. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid., 42. 71 Butler, Frames of War, 34. 72 Crane, Maggie, 42. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid., 47. 75 Ibid., 45. 76 Hernan Casakin and Shimshon Neikrug, “Place Identity in the Neighborhood as Perceived by the Elder Residents: Relations with Attachment, Dependence and Place Quality,” in The Role of Place Identity in Perception, Understanding, and Design of Built Environments, edited by Hernan Casakin and Fátima Bernardo (Potomac, MD: Bentham e-Books, 2012), 109.

Atavistic Attachments, Anti-Landscapes  123 77 John D. Kasarda and Morris Janowitz, “Community Attachment in Mass Society,” American Sociological Review 39 (1974): 329. 78 Lindsay N. Boggess and John R. Hipp, “Violent Crime, Residential Instability and Mobility: Does the Relationship Differ in Minority Neighborhoods?” Journal of Quantitative Criminology 26 (September 2010): 351. 79 Crane, Maggie, 37. 80 Ralph B. Taylor, “Neighborhood Responses to Disorder and Local Attachments: The Systemic Model of Attachment, Social Disorganization, and Neighborhood Use Value,” Sociological Forum 11 (1996): 45. 81 Taylor, “Neighborhood Responses,” 45. 82 Crane, Maggie, 36. 83 Norris, McTeague, 54. 84 Ibid., 31. 85 Ibid., 145. 86 Ibid., 23. 87 Ibid., 55. 88 Ibid., 54. 89 Ibid., 55. 90 Ibid., 54. 91 Ibid., 55. 92 Ibid., 5. 93 Ibid. 94 Ibid., 6–7. 95 Ibid., 6. 96 Ibid., 21. 97 Ibid., 22. 98 Ibid., 21. 99 Neil Campbell, The Rhyzomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transnational, Global, Media Age (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 9. 100 Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 53. 101 Norris, McTeague, 22. 102 Brown, A Sense of Things, 54. 103 Norris, McTeague, 5. 104 Ibid., 39. 105 Ibid., 195. 106 Crane, Maggie, 44. 107 Herakleitos and Diogenes, translated from the Greek by Guy Davenport (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2011), 15. 108 478. 109 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 9. 110 Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 98–99. 111 Brown, A Sense of Things, 17. 112 Elisabeth Morris, “The Tyranny of Things” 1917, Quotidiana, edited by Patrick Madden, 8 October 2008, accessed 30 August 2017, http://essays. quotidiana.org/morris/tyranny_of_things/. 113 Peter Gay, “Introduction: Freud for the Marble Tablet,” in Berggasse 19: Sigmund Freud’s Home and Offices, Vienna 1938: The Photographs

124  Atavistic Attachments, Anti-Landscapes

114 115

116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 34 1 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 48 1 149 150 151 152 153 154 155

of Edmund Engelman, edited by Edmund Engelman (New York: Basic, 1976), 33. William James, Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), 291. Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting,” translated by Roger ­C ardinal, in The Cultures of Collecting, edited by John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 7. James, Principles of Psychology, 291. David McClellan, Personality (New York: William Sloane Associates, 1951), 539. Crane, Maggie, 39. Ibid., 41–42. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 50. See Murphy, Monstrous Kinships, 124. Crane, Maggie, 46. Ibid., 47. Ibid. Ibid., 36. Ibid., 47. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 45. Ibid., 49. Ibid. Ibid. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 81. Norris, McTeague, 29. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 23. Norris, McTeague, 135. Ibid., 134–135. Ibid., 136. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 24. Norris, McTeague, 30. Crane, Maggie, 53. Ibid. Ibid., 49. Foster, New York in Slices, 24. Ibid., 53. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 147. Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy ­(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 31. Norris, McTeague, 63. Ibid., 236. Brown, A Sense of Things, 58–59. Norris, McTeague, 242. Crane, Maggie, 45. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 86. Ibid.

Atavistic Attachments, Anti-Landscapes  125 56 1 157 158 159

Ibid., 86–87. Ibid., 89. Ibid., 94. Herakleitos and Diogenes, 15.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. ———. Potentialities: Collected essays in Philosophy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Anonymous, “The Author-Artist will Soon Issue a Book—Stephen Crane’s Maggie,” New York Press (15 April 1894): 2. Anonymous, [Review of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets], The Nation 63 (2 July 1896): 15. Anonymous, [Review of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets], New York Tribune (31 May 1896): 26. Anonymous, [Review of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets], Port Jervis Union (13 March 1893): 3. Banks, Nancy Huston. “Two Recent Revivals in Realism,” The Bookman (June 1899): 356. Baudrillard, Jean. “The System of Collecting,” translated by Roger Cardinal, in The Cultures of Collecting, edited by John Elsner and Roger Cardinal. ­Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994: 7–24 Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Boggess, Lindsay N., and John R. Hipp, “Violent Crime, Residential Instability and Mobility: Does the Relationship Differ in Minority Neighborhoods?” Journal of Quantitative Criminology 26 (September 2010): 351–370. Bright, Edward. “A Melodrama of the Streets,” The Illustrated American 20 (11 July 1896): 94. Brown, Bill. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature ­Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard ­University Press, 1995. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2016. Campbell, Neil. The Rhyzomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transnational, Global, Media Age. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. Casakin, Hernan, and Shimshon Neikrug, “Place Identity in the Neighborhood as Perceived by the Elder Residents: Relations with Attachment, Dependence and Place Quality,” in The Role of Place Identity in Perception, Understanding, and Design of Built Environments, edited by Hernan Casakin and Fátima Bernardo. Potomac, MD: Bentham e-Books, 2012. Crane, Stephen. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, edited by Kevin J. Hayes. Boston, MA: Bedford, 1999. Dowd, Christopher. The Construction of the Irish Identity in American Literature. New York: Routledge, 2011.

126  Atavistic Attachments, Anti-Landscapes Foster, George G. New York in Slices. New York: Garrett & Co., 1852. Garland, Hamlin. “An Ambitious French Novel and a Modest American Story,” The Arena 8 (June 1893): xi–xii. Gay, Peter. “Introduction: Freud for the Marble Tablet,” in Berggasse 19: Sigmund Freud’s Home and Offices, Vienna 1938: The Photographs f Edmund Engelman, edited by Edmund Engelman. New York: Basic, 1976: 13–54. Herakleitos (Heraclitus), Herakleitos and Diogenes, translated from the Greek by Guy Davenport. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2011. Howells, William Dean. “New York Low Life in Fiction,” New York World (26 July 1896): 18. James, William. Principles of Psychology. New York: Henry Holt, 1890. Kasarda, John D., and Morris Janowitz, “Community Attachment in Mass ­Society,” American Sociological Review 39 (1974): 328–339. Maguire, John Francis. The Irish in America. London: Longmans, Green, 1868. Marchand, Ernest. Frank Norris, A Study. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1942. McClellan, David. Personality. New York: William Sloane Associates, 1951. McElrath, Joseph R. and Jesse S. Crissler, Frank Norris: A Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Morris, Elisabeth. “The Tyranny of Things.” 1917. In Quotidiana, edited by Patrick Madden, 8 October 2008. Accessed 30 August 2017, http://essays. quotidiana.org/morris/tyranny_of_things/. Murphy, Jillmarie. Monstrous Kinships: Realism and Attachment Theory in the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Novel. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2011. Norris, Norris. McTeague, edited by Donald Pizer. New York: Norton, 1997. ———. “Stephen Crane’s Stories of Life in the Slums: Maggie and George’s Mother,” The Wave 15 (4 July 1896): 13. Sorrentino, Paul. Stephen Crane Remembered. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2006. Sullivan, James William. Tenement Tales of New York. New York: Henry Holt, 1895. Taylor, Ralph B. “Neighborhood Responses to Disorder and Local Attachments: The Systemic Model of Attachment, Social Disorganization, and Neighborhood Use Value,” Sociological Forum 11 (1996): 41–74.

5 African-American Place Attachments and the Chains of Modernity in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Sport of the Gods Tis an old deserted homestead On the outskirts of the town, Where the roof is all moss-covered, And the walls are tumbling down; But around that little cottage Do my brightest mem’ries cling, For ‘twas there I spent the moments Of my youth,—life’s happy spring. — Dunbar, “The Old Homestead,” ll. 1–8 The October 1901 edition of The Southern Workman extols Paul ­Laurence Dunbar’s creative talents in his fourth novel, The Sport of the Gods (1901), stating that Dunbar includes “some bits of sarcasm that would not have been unworthy of Dickens, and shows on the whole a promise for the future of which no young novel writer need be ashamed.”1 That said, The Sport of the Gods was destined to be not only Dunbar’s most successful novel but also his last and his only novel to focus almost exclusively on African-American characters. Often read as a text that reveals the cultural exigencies of African-American freedom, the political, cultural, and social identity of which was still forming during Dunbar’s life, The Sport of the Gods follows the downfall of the Hamilton family. The parents, Berry and Fannie, are among “the many slaves who upon their accession to freedom had not left the South, but had wandered from place to place in their own beloved section, waiting, working, and struggling to rise with its rehabilitated fortunes.” For their children, Joe and Kitty, the “two doting parents” created an environment that was “pleasant and carefully guarded.” As the novel opens, Berry and Fannie, servant and housekeeper, respectively, to Maurice Oakley and his wife, are living with their children in “the little servant’s cottage in the yard,” blissfully unaware of any imminent misfortune. However, as a decidedly naturalist work of fiction, the story, and thus the ­Hamiltons’ “stream of years” flowing for a time “pleasantly and peacefully,” appear destined to take a turn for the worst when Berry heads out

128  African-American Place Attachments one morning “cheerily to his work,” without any “shadow of impending disaster depress[ing] his spirits.”2 Although Berry and Fannie are loyal to a fault, when Maurice O ­ akley’s younger brother Frank implies that Berry has stolen five hundred ­dollars from him, Maurice is quick to place blame on “honest, sensible” Berry, the “pink of good servants” and abruptly states, “‘Nothing angers me so much as being deceived by the man I have helped and trusted.’” Ironically, “the man” who has deceived him is Oakley’s own brother, Frank, who carelessly gambled away the money intended for his trip abroad. After Oakley and his wife agree that “Hamilton must be made an example of,” Berry is arrested, “unbefriended” by the town’s blacks and whites, and the remaining Hamiltons are forced out of their home and southern community amid the din of “envious and sneering comments” that rages about them. As the narrator observes, since the “strong influence of slavery” was still ingrained in the minds and imaginations of the black members of the community, “with one accord they turned away from one of their own kind upon whom had been set the ban of the white people’s displeasure.” Berry is sentenced to hard labor for an undisclosed period of time, while Fannie and her children are obliged to migrate to New York City, where they confront an unfamiliar and unsympathetic environment. 3 The novel’s exposure of an urban landscape has been treated as the thematic foundation for many theoretical readings of Dunbar’s narrative, in which the moral complexities that underpin freedom and equality are undermined by the Hamiltons’ expulsion from, and subsequent return to, the South. Marlon B. Ross contends that the liberal environment of New York City “only increases the seductiveness of moral/­ sexual license without effecting any concomitant political, economic, or social reform,”4 and Shirley Moody-Turner argues that Dunbar was in fact “deeply critical of the ‘decayed and rotten morals’ oozing through the streets of New York’s Tenderloin district” and thus was “unwilling to advance an idealized picture of the North as a twentieth-century promised land.” Hence, the Hamiltons’ resettlement in New York effectively “dislocates” them from their “Southern locale” and situates them as “geographically and imaginatively out of bounds.”5 Bridget Harris Tsemo believes the Hamiltons’ return to the South at the end of the novel should be read as their having faced “insurmountable adversity with dignity and strength,”6 yet in truth Dunbar offers none of the black characters a practical mode of resistance to the highly charged racist fears of the period. Robert M. Dowling argues these views further by pointing out that Dunbar presents the city itself as a fiction, “an illusion within an illusion that will render southerners helpless in the face of rampant immorality.”7 Dowling views Joe Hamilton as a “guileless country boy who evolves from well-meaning son and brother in the South to gambling addict, violent drunk, and murderer” once he is exposed to New York’s

African-American Place Attachments  129 Tenderloin District.8 However, I argue that one of the most compelling features of the novel relies on more than the historical implications of urban landscapes, racial bigotry, black on black discrimination, or the obvious attention that naturalist writers paid to the destructive forces of urban life as seen in other novels of the period, including Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1896), Frank Norris’ McTeague (1899), Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), and Herman Melville’s much earlier novel Pierre, or the Ambiguities (1852). Instead, Dunbar carefully constructs the Hamiltons’ drama around A ­ frican-American attachment to and forced disengagement from place in order to demonstrate how the Reconstruction South and the urban North of the Great Migration turn the innate human need for attachment into a form of pathology. Attachment theory conceptualizes the proclivity humans have to create deep-rooted affectional bonds with others. The basic principles of attachment theory address familial relationships, particularly the primary bonding that develops between parents and children; however, since ­environment often plays a dominant role in naturalist fiction, it makes sense to broaden the application of attachment theory to include land as a type of familial surrogate, by considering the variety of secure and insecure attachments individuals develop to their physical surroundings. Early attachment theorists valued the breakthroughs provided by direct observation of behavior in natural settings above the analysis of internalized psychic struggles that played out among the id, ego, and superego. Likewise, when considering a novel’s inherent aesthetic and communal value, Dunbar and other nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novelists emphasized the obligation writers had to study humanity and environment directly.9 Indeed, Jonathan Daigle locates the genesis of The Sport of the Gods at a time shortly after Dunbar’s visit to the Tenderloin District in Manhattan, stating that in writing the novel, “Dunbar began to work toward a new black naturalism that would analyze the interlocking relationships among racism, life chances in the South and North, and black self-fashioning.”10 Furthermore, despite the fact that he grew up in Dayton, Ohio, Dunbar’s knowledge of the South was rather ­extensive. Not only was his knowledge garnered indirectly through stories his mother Matilda recounted of her own experiences as a house slave in Kentucky, but also through the African-American community of Dayton, where, as William M. Ramsey points out, Dunbar would have absorbed considerable knowledge of the South, “­perhaps some of it flavored with nostalgia of the elderly for more youthful times.” Although his familiarity with southern culture is somewhat tangential, Dunbar nevertheless recognized and employed in his writing the rural South’s, as well as the urban North’s, literary potential, which, as R ­ amsey maintains, “lay greatly in its evocative local color appeal.”11 Mindy Thompson Fullilove argues that the “role of place in our lives remains hidden” making it difficult “to convey the hurt that is involved

130  African-American Place Attachments in injuries to place attachment,” particularly when individuals are faced with dislocation. It is ironic, Fullilove argues, that “the experience of upheaval… also weakens communities and places them in a much worse position to succeed in their efforts to ameliorate a public or private plan.”12 Attachment theory helps explain the way in which involuntary loss of and separation from both caring relationships and one’s homeland can create emotional stress and personality disorders, including fear, rage, despair, and emotional indifference, all of which are experienced in varying degrees by the characters that make up the Hamilton family. As such, employing the psychosocial paradigm of attachment broadens the implications of Dunbar’s staging of African-American familial experiences in southern and northern communities and the spatial allure embodied in both environments, as well as the pathology of the Hamilton family’s attachment to place and the familial disruptions many African-American families experienced during the nadir of race relations in the United States. That said, Faye Z. Belgrave and Kevin W. Allison argue, while it is important to recognize that the traditional psychoanalytic model of attachment theory can be applied to African-American familial experiences, most twentieth-century attachment assessments were, in fact, “developed for and seem… to work well with middle-class white ­A mericans.”13 However, even though in its primary application attachment is a relativistic theory based on Euro-American values and ideals and adheres to a psychological agenda that largely addresses complexities within that dominant culture, this does not signify that the theory is inapplicable to African-American familial experience. In fact, one of Dunbar’s strategies is to demonstrate that black characters have the same attachments to family, friends, and romantic relationships as whites, and they strive toward the same middle-class values toward which many of his white readers strive. The primary distinction between black and white at­ rederick tachment concerns lies in what Michelle Mohr Carney and F P. ­Buttell maintain is African-American culture’s “extensive history of social and political rejection,” which ultimately creates attachment issues for blacks who, “as a collective group, have never enjoyed the feeling of availability of and responsiveness from dominant society or the American government.”14 As Fullilove points out, “the process of repeated upheaval has been reprised for African American communities, driving much of their history in the Americas.”15 Within any culture, individuals are shaped by cognitive factors that affect how they interact with their social and cultural surroundings; therefore, ­attachment issues—­insecurity, ambivalence, anxiety, or disorganized behavior— are, in effect, magnified for African Americans as a result of a consistent historical lack of trust in their surroundings and their expectation of rejection on a sociopolitical level.

African-American Place Attachments  131

Southern Redemption: Same Land—New Slavery “Oh, Mother South, hast thou forgotten thy ways, Forgot the glory of thine ancient days, Forgot the honor that once made thee great, And stooped to this unhallowed estate?” (Dunbar, “To the South—On its New Slavery”) Arjun Appadurai argues that “Displacement and exile, migration and terror create powerful attachments to ideas of homeland that seem more deeply territorial than ever.”16 Research on and clinical observations of attachment behavior have shown that dependency increases with insecure attachments that are associated with trauma and neglect.17 Historically, African Americans commenced their habitation in North America after experiencing what attachment theorists consider the most traumatic event in a person’s life: loss. John Bowlby’s understanding of loss is a compassionate and humane reading of what he defines as “one of the most intensely painful experiences any human being can suffer.”18 However, although it is also empathic, for attachment theory recognizes the grief felt by the individual encountering loss as well as the powerlessness and pain felt by onlookers, many white slave owners did not feel compassion or sympathy for slaves who were routinely taken from their families and homeland and sent into involuntary servitude or who experienced having their children, parents, siblings, spouses, and friends taken from them and sold as property. Even the celebrated ­eighteenth-century ­A frican-American poet Phillis Wheatley, who by most accounts was treated like a member of the (white) Wheatley family,19 was still a slave and thus endured the psychological and emotional trauma of being a person wholly owned by others. Since slaves were often taken from (or suffered the constant threat of being taken from) their biological families, some household slaves who were treated with any level of kindness developed an attachment to the very individuals who were directly or indirectly responsible for their displacement and familial losses. Indeed, the enslaved Wheatley experiences an intense familial attachment bond to her mistress Susannah Wheatley, as evidenced in a letter she wrote to John Thornton, in which she expresses the great loss she sustained on the death of Susannah, her “best friend,” stating that she feels “like One forsaken by her parent in a desolate wilderness, for such the world appears to me, wandring thus without my friendly guide.”20 The pathology of this attachment is, in truth, born out by the fact that Susannah’s widower, John Wheatley, did not provide for ­Phillis in his will, and after his death and the death of the Wheatley ­children, Phillis was left destitute and spent her remaining years in poverty. Wheatley’s attachment to Susannah is comparable to the affinity

132  African-American Place Attachments Berry Hamilton feels toward Maurice Oakley. Although Berry is ostensibly free when the novel begins, his attachment to Oakley is laden with dependency, and because Oakley’s protection is inconsistent and unpredictable, when his caretaking ceases, Berry is “astonished” and becomes “distressed,” turns “ashen” and seems “not to understand it at all.”21 Moreover, for the entire Hamilton family, Berry’s arrest includes not only the loss of Oakley’s supposed protection but also of their home and the geographical determinism of place. During the 1970s developmental psychologist Mary Salter Ainsworth established an observational study called “The Strange Situation,” which expanded on and complemented Bowlby’s earlier work. Several distinguishing characteristics of attachment were realized from this study, ­beginning with “secure attachment” in which an individual feels valued, understood, and accepted by primary caregivers. The securely attached individual will develop a sense of self-respect and self-esteem that helps guide his or her behaviors and feelings in a way that is self-­affirming. The Hamiltons believe the Oakley’s, who, in effect, serve as the Hamiltons’ central caregivers, value them, but they discover too late that they are ­neither respected nor understood by the Oakleys. When an individual is exposed to inconsistent or unpredictable caretaking, “insecure” attachment may arise causing one to develop less self-confidence and thus display ambivalent characteristics. Ambivalent attachment occurs when individuals realize they cannot depend on their caregivers to meet their needs. For instance, when Fannie insists that Berry “ain’t no thief,” she believes that she need only “go to Mis’ Oakley” for help, but Mrs. Oakley’s refusal to help her forces Fannie to confront the truth about how little she and her family are valued by the Oakleys. Even after Oakley demands that Fannie be sent away, she cries out “stoutly,” “‘I won’t go… You sha’n’t drive me away f’om him,’” but her valiant claims are dismissed as readily as if she were still a slave, and she is “lifted up and carried… away in a sort of dumb stupor that was half a swoon.”22 These types of dynamics, according to Lennox K. Thomas, “represent the maladaptive behaviours” of individuals who are attempting to “survive the pernicious effects of slavery” that are often “transmitted from one generation to another.”23 Given that contentment often encourages cultural stasis, Dunbar problematizes the complacency felt by former slaves like Berry and ­Fannie who were willing to continue an ostensible master-slave relationship, even though that relationship depended on others possessing power and control over their fate. Throughout their years as the Oakleys’ employees, Berry and Fannie Hamilton cultivate an affectional bond with the Oakleys who provide them with a livelihood that enables them to live above the means enjoyed by most other African Americans in their immediate community and offer them a home in which to raise their ­children and “spoil… [them] much as white fathers and mothers are wont to do.”24 Nevertheless, the security the Oakleys bestow on the Hamiltons

African-American Place Attachments  133 is reminiscent of the master-slave relationship from which all four individuals have only recently emerged, and, as such, the “protection” they afford is weak and diffuse at best. Slavery, as Dunbar’s contemporary, W.E.B. Du Bois, demonstrates in The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899), “supported a communistic paternalism centering in the Big House which was the real centre of the family life.”25 Because he portrays Berry ­Hamilton as patient, diligent, conscientious, and remaining with Maurice Oakley “[t]hrough thick and thin,”26 Dunbar elevates Berry’s character far above that of the sniping, cold, and calculating Oakley, yet he simultaneously illustrates the disastrous effects of black Americans’ dependency on southern white generosity and imitation of the white race. Paternalism was often invoked during the antebellum period as a way to justify ownership of human property, and after the Civil War “as an attitude of condescension.”27 The hierarchical order of the “Old South” fostered images of “gentility and family sympathy, pastoral beauty, ­elegance, and ease… which belied the reality of southern s­ lavery.”28 Ironically, although the South’s post-Reconstruction revision was typically described in paternalistic language, Dunbar employs maternal metaphors to illustrate the elder Hamilton’s idealized South of their own recent past, which seems to offer “mother’s hands” that have “nursed” their “infancy.”29 Their little cottage near the Oakley’s “great house” becomes more than just a place to subsist; it affords them an appealing, protected space in which to flourish and elevates them to a position of apparent superiority within their local African-American community. The setting’s idyllic landscape simultaneously reflects the Hamiltons’ attachment to the South and also the obsequious submission of the slave. The Virginia creeper that “bent and fell in graceful curves” over the front of their cottage is not only emblematic of the ligature that Berry and Fannie have to their “bower of peace” and the land on which they were raised, but its bowing also signifies a tragic fall of sorts after Berry’s arrest. The ­Virginia creeper, also known as the American ivy woodbine, is comprised of ­bluish-black berry-like fruits and tendrils with adhesive tips that enable it to cling to various objects in order to flourish. The Hamiltons cling to their home, their dependence on Maurice Oakley’s seeming beneficence, and ostensibly thrive in the security they feel, yet the Oakleys do not, in fact, provide a stable environment onto which the Hamiltons can adhere. The security the Oakleys offer is transient and conditional and replicates the fleeting comfort of “insistent morning glories”30 that cling to the door of the Hamiltons’ cottage but close as the day progresses, much like Berry and Fannie’s own hopes for their future and their children’s success close far too quickly. Dale Edwyna Smith argues that many former slaves reported “both cruelty and affection from slaveowners,” which speaks to the “complexity of paternalism as slaveholding strategy.”31 Although all the Hamiltons believe they are secure in their environment, they are defenseless against the tenacious reality of the South’s persistent past.

134  African-American Place Attachments

The Rainbow’s End: African Americans and Place Attachment They have sought it in battle, And e’en where the rattle Of dice with man’s blasphemy blends; But howe’er persuasive, It still proves evasive, This place where the rainbow ends. (Dunbar, “The Place Where the Rainbow Ends,” ll. 13–18) The psychosocial construct of place attachment is defined as a multidimensional concept comprised of community attitudes, racial and ethnic identity, length of residence, home ownership, and/or local stressors, all of which can work in tandem either to enhance or diminish one’s attachment to a particular site. The sociocultural questions of race that permeate The Sport of the Gods and Dunbar’s dialect poetry destabilize the already narrow boundaries that traditionally exist between race and environment. When considering the significance of the putative inverse of place—displacement—the complexities and difficulties of this experience could not have been more magnified for former slaves when they, as Du Bois observes, “rush[ed] from the hovels of the country or the cottages of country towns, suddenly into the new, strange life of a great city to mingle with 25,000 of their race already there.”32 Thus, as they move from a southern rural landscape to a northern urban environment, ­Fannie, Joe, and Kitty Hamilton’s downward spiral into moral degradation and their traumatic experience of the dissolution of family and home reprise the insecure attachment experiences that were imposed on slaves. Because humans’ attachment to place saturates our daily existence, our emotionality about places are retold in our creative expressions. Place attachment provides a fresh approach to analyzing Sport of the Gods and, more broadly, to studying attachment concerns in the ­A frican-American community by broadening the historical implications of slavery, the Diaspora created as a result of emancipation, and the failures of Reconstruction and Redemption. Bowlby emphasizes that the most important clinical feature of attachment behavior is the “intensity of the emotion that accompanies it.” If attachment is healthy, says Bowlby, one experiences “joy and a sense of security”; however, when attachment bonds are threatened or broken, there can be feelings of “jealousy, anxiety… anger… grief, and depression,”33 all of which are felt by the Hamiltons to one degree or another once their attachment bonds are destroyed. Furthermore, in spite of their freedom from slavery, the elder ­Hamilton’s attachment to the South, their community, their little cottage, and the

African-American Place Attachments  135 Oakley family is unstable and unpredictable. The ­Hamilton children are born into this historical disequilibrium, and as a result they lack a secure base from which to respond when their father and home are taken from them. Although there were “times when [Joe and Kitty] had complained and wanted a home off by themselves” away from the Oakleys, their small servant’s cottage was the only home they knew. However, they had not only “toddled as babies and played as children and been happy and care-free” in this “little cottage in Oakley’s yard,” but they also drew “unpleasant comparisons between their mode of life and the old plantation quarters system,”34 thus juxtaposing their sense of comfort in and attachment to their cottage home with the historical trauma experienced by their ancestors. As Nancy Caro Hollander points out, “[e]xile is perhaps the human experience in adulthood that most closely recapitulates the infant’s experience of attachment, separation and loss.”35 After ­Berry’s imprisonment, when the family learns that they must be “out of the cottage by the next afternoon,” Kitty cries out “in affright”: “‘But where are we goin’?… There’s no place to go to. We haven’t got a house. Where’ll we go?’” The next morning, before Fannie and her children leave to move to New York City, she “walk[ed] about her little garden, followed by her children,” then “she wiped her eyes and led the way to the side gate.” While Joe is outwardly “eager and excited” to leave for New York and refuses to “look back upon the place which he hated,” he nevertheless dreams of returning one day, “holding his head high” and seeking retaliation, “sneer for sneer and jibe for jibe” on those who rejected him. By contrast, Fannie and Kitty reveal a more open attachment to their hometown, “let[ting] their eyes linger upon [it] until the last house, the last chimney, and the last spire faded from their sight.” Such a forcible uprooting, according to Hollander, “is experienced as a profound rupture that threatens the psyche.”36 Consequently, Berry’s imprisonment generates more harm for Fannie and her children than simply the loss of husband, father, and protector. The abrupt sacrifice of their home, community, and the very land on which they throve and with which they developed an attachment bond creates an exigency that requires immediate action. Joe, in particular, is more concerned with the loss of his position in the community than he appears to be over the loss of his father. Yet his ostensible disengagement from his original habitation should be regarded as a defense mechanism for his exaggerated youthful pride, a conflicting impulse associated with disorganized attachment, a form of what Bowlby defines as “defensive exclusion.”37 Dunbar syncretizes a black poetic diction with black folk language to communicate the significance of separation anxiety in the black family. While characters like Joe Hamilton obfuscate their fear of separation behind grandiose language and boasts, Berry and Fannie’s genuine understanding of the potential for separation causes them to overcompensate

136  African-American Place Attachments for their children’s blackness as a way to shelter them from unpleasant realities. Joanne M. Braxton remarks that in the body of his dialect poems Dunbar demonstrates that the black family not only endured, but also “survive[d] enslavement [,] and that black fathers bonded with their children and attempted to shield them from painful encounters.”38 In “Puttin’ the Baby Away,” for example, the speaker of the poem laments painfully the loss of his “little lonesome baby black, / Dis one, dis las’ po’ he’pless one / Whose little race was too soon run” (ll. 6–8), and emphasizes the relationship between familial and home attachment. Although “De house was po’, [and] de clothes was rough, /… daih was meat an’ meal enough” (ll. 21–22), but, more important, “… daih was room fu’ little Jim” (l. 23). The father questions why “De Lawd u’d had de time to see / Dis chile an’ tek him ‘way f’om me” (ll. 31–32) and “… f’om his mammy’s nest” only to “lef’ dis achin’ in my breas’” (ll. 35–36). Braxton points out that in the poem “Little Brown Baby,” Dunbar “refutes the popular myth that slave fathers did not love their children.”39 After lightheartedly teasing the “Little brown baby wif spa’klin’ eyes” (l. 1), the narrator-father calls to “dis boy,” “pappy’s pa’dner an’ playmate an’ joy” (ll. 26–27) to “hug me up close” (l. 25), wishing his son “could allus know ease an’ cleah skies; /… [and] stay jes’ a chile on my breas’—” (ll. 29–30). The Hamiltons reveal a comparable yearning to create similar healthy attachment bonds with their children; however, more than simply wishing that their children will have “cleah skies,” they also attempt to shield their children from agonizing experiences. Unfortunately, they are unable to escape the regional prejudice that ultimately drives their children toward self-destruction. As the child of former slaves himself, Dunbar understood the aspirations many former slaves had for their children. His mother, Matilda Murphy, was a vivacious personality who taught herself how to read and write and enjoyed telling stories. According to Jean Wagner, Matilda “wanted Paul to profit by the education that had been denied his parents,” and thus created “a kind of special universe” around her son, protecting him from “those outside who might threaten him because of his color.”40 The same may be said of the approach to parenting taken by Berry and Fannie who, rather than teach their children to cope with the internalized and intergenerationally transmitted effects of a prolonged history of slavery, attempt to shelter Joe and Kitty from the harsh ­realities that surround them. Although both children “went to work early” after “receiving what schooling the town could afford,” they were coddled by their parents and encouraged “to have quality [i.e. white] mannahs an’ to waih quality clothes.”41 While similarities in race, ethnicity, ­fi nancial security, and religion often create stability and promote attachment by “bonding [residents] to one another and their neighborhood,”42 the Hamiltons effectively distance themselves and their children from other members of the black community by highlighting their

African-American Place Attachments  137 dissimilarity from them, investing in what Daigle perceives as the “‘New Negro’ identity that confers no value on the race.”43 According to Ralph B. Taylor, attachment to place occurs when there is a “recognized positive connection between an individual or group and their locale,” yet the white power structure of the South is able to recruit both white and black members of the Hamiltons’ community to ostracize an innocent man and his family. Consequently, the Hamiltons’ favorable association with the South is destroyed when Berry is arrested. Attachment to place profits from and contributes to mutual identity, kinship, and cooperation and creates a “feeling that other residents are similar in important ways, and share similar values;” however, because Joe and Kitty are taught to share few values with members of their own race, they feel no affinity for or affiliation with the black residents in their immediate community. Taylor found that a neighborhood’s “use value” arises because residents find within their communities “social support” and “some degree of safety,” and because the neighborhood itself “represents a symbol contributing to personal and social identity.”44 In The Sport of the Gods, however, the Hamilton children’s identities are formed by the belief that they are superior to those members of their community who are, in fact, most like them. Unlike the experience of her mother and slave women of an earlier generation, Kitty was “spoil[ed]… out of all reason.” Having the “prettiest clothes of any of her race in the town,” she is the “delight of her mother’s life,” and her mother’s pride in her is “aided and abetted by Mrs. Oakley, who also took a lively interest in the girl.” Foreshadowing her cupidity for the glitter and glamour of the stage after her arrival in New York City, Kitty’s main interest during the Oakley family’s farewell dinner for Frank Oakley at the beginning of the novel is to “station herself where she could view the finery.” Joe shares Kitty’s “cheerful disposition,” but he also has absorbed white aristocratic ideals, “and rather too early in life bid fair to be a dandy.” In his “days of prosperity,” Joe had even refused to shave “a black chin or put shears to what he termed ‘naps,’ and he was proud of it,” yet, after being fired from the white barber shop where he had worked, he was compelled to seek employment in “one of the coloured shops.” Instead of fulfilling his expectation that “he had but to ask for a place and he would gladly be accepted,” the black proprietors throughout the town taunt him for all of the “foolish little vaunting things” he had said against them. Both Kitty and Joe are set up for failure by their parents whose fear for their children’s future, drawn out of their own past experience, pathologizes racial and community attachment; ultimately, the crisis in their family is amplified by the ­Hamiltons’ inability to provide genuine stability and security for their children because they themselves lack any real influence over their own lives. Taught to strive toward whiteness, Joe and Kitty will never be accepted as white, and because they have been taught to set themselves

138  African-American Place Attachments above the black community, after Berry’s arrest and imprisonment, they, along with their mother, are shunned by other blacks in their community. As a consequence, in addition to having to cope with the loss of their father, the Hamilton children lose their home and suffer embarrassment before, and rejection from, members of their own race who, “even at the first telling,” did not doubt “the story of [Berry’s] guilt.” Even Berry’s fraternal lodge, “The Tribe of Benjamin,” is “personally grieved” after auditing his treasury books and finding them in order. With his friends afraid to support him, his enemies go on the attack. “The man was down, it was time to strike.”45

The City’s Heat Could the city be more gay? Burn your bridges! Come away! (Dunbar, “At Loafing-Holt,” ll. 37–38) Bowlby briefly considers humans’ instinctive attraction to their natural habitat as well as humans’ versatility and adaptability outside of their natural surroundings. Although most animal species continue to live in an environment that is comparable to the one in which they evolved and in which they were adapted to operate, humans have extended their environments far beyond their natural habitats. While the natural habitats of most animal species offer them modest variety and alter gradually, “the range of habitats in which man lives and breeds is… enormous.” ­A lthough animals of other species engage in forms of environmental modification—nest-making, dam-building, b ­ urrowing— such alterations are part of an animal’s instinctive behavior and result in homeostasis. Human beings, on the other hand, typically do not make modifications based on instinctual responses; instead, according to Bowlby, each of the environmental modifications they make is “the product of some cultural tradition, learned afresh and sometimes laboriously by members of each new generation.”46 As Maria Vittoria Giuliani points out, the affective bonds individuals develop with certain places can have a powerful, positive effect on shaping identity; however, the loss of attachment to place can also have “negative, sometimes even disastrous consequences.”47 Du Bois’s Philadelphia Negro addresses the way in which former slaves developed neighborhood attachment and coped with the negative consequences associated with displacement, as they began to migrate to northern urban communities and found themselves in neighborhoods quite different from those in which they had lived in the South. ­Consequently, they navigated around strange, because unfamiliar, surroundings. The landscape they now inhabited was quite different from the one they had formerly known and, in many ways, prized; the shape

African-American Place Attachments  139 of buildings seemed unfamiliar, while homes and varieties of entertainment available to them struck them as peculiar; and the climate was unlike anything most Southern blacks had ever experienced. As Bowlby points out, the adjustments one makes to “suit a new environment and… a new outcome…. can easily lead to confusion.”48 The Hamiltons’ initial reaction when they arrive in New York is one of “bewilder[ment]”; they feel “shy” and “helpless,” as they experience the “first pangs of strangeness.” Fannie is perhaps the most disoriented when they first arrive, as the “very bigness” of the city “frightened her and made her feel alone.” Here, a clear distinction is made between habitations that threaten—the city, for example, where “there could not be so many people together without a deal of wickedness”49 —and those that protect—such as the little cottage in the South that seems to provide comfort for the ­Hamiltons. The irony of this distinction, however, lies in the fact that, although recent studies on attachment and environment have shown that rural environments often foster social alliances, whereas more complex urban environments tend to encourage rivalry, 50 neither place, in reality, provides protection or comfort for the Hamilton family. The fact that from approximately the mid-1880s through the end of the nineteenth century, “young Negroes ha[d] been pouring into… cit[ies] at the rate of a thousand a year” raises several questions, which relate to the very same place attachment concerns introduced in The Sport of the Gods. Examining the conditions under which urban-dwelling ­A frican Americans lived at the turn of the century, Du Bois identifies three ­specific causes for what he termed “Negro problems” arising “from the peculiar history and condition of the American Negro.” The first two causes, “Slavery and emancipation with their attendant phenomena of ignorance, lack of discipline, and moral weakness,” and “immigration with its increased competition and moral influence,” are eclipsed by the complexities of the third predicament in which the former slave and his offspring who migrate to northern cities find themselves, “namely, the environment… —the world of custom and thought in which he must live and work, the physical surrounding of house and home and ward, the moral encouragements and discouragements which he encounters.”51 Dowling points out that during the 1890s the Tenderloin was known for its “racial tolerance and professional opportunities”;52 however, the Hamiltons, like many southern blacks seeking employment in northern cities, are ill-equipped to scrutinize adequately their new surroundings and thus are too easily driven toward situations that undermine their moral values to the point of dissolution. Rather than juxtaposing a racially enlightened North to a regressive South, Dunbar underscores the potential moral frailties of black urban culture. According to Ramsey, the North and South essentially “subvert each other’s regional ideology.”53 Once the Hamiltons have left the South and are being “whirled away toward the unknown” of northern urban life, Dunbar uses the

140  African-American Place Attachments conventions of naturalism and sentimental fiction to present one of the first fictional descriptions of the effects of city life on African Americans. For instance, he delivers a deliberate shock to readers when he abruptly cuts from the cottages, open spaces, and gardens of the rural south developed at the end of Chapter VI to the opening of Chapter VII, where New York City’s buildings that “hunger” and its “lights” and “busy street[s]” that engender in the observer “a feeling of loneliness, almost of grief,” inaugurate the education of the “ignorant.” As Hollander points out, “[a]ttachment theorists have emphasized that psychological safety and stability depend on the adult’s capacity to seek and sustain close reliable ties with other individuals.”54 Familiar environments, even those with negative associations, are often preferred over unfamiliar environments because of the likelihood of maintaining close relationships with others. 55 The move from a seemingly close-knit rural community to a lonely urban setting accentuates the unfamiliar features of the city, that “strange social environment,” according to Du Bois, which has an “immense effect” on the “thought and life… work and crime… [and] wealth and pauperism”56 of every newly arrived southern black, including the Hamiltons. Dunbar’s depiction of New York City’s Tenderloin District is especially interesting as it echoes Crane’s and Norris’s characterization of the effects of city life on ethnic and, potentially, racial attachment practices in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and McTeague, respectively. Just as Crane uses low-life urban fiction to illuminate the downfall of the Irish-American Johnson family and Norris highlights late-nineteenth century Jewish and Mexican immigrants to California, in The Sport of the Gods Dunbar furnishes middle-class white readers with a glimpse into the lower depths of turn of the century black urban culture and society as well as insight into the forbidden and repressed region of the civilized African-American psyche. Here, Dunbar seems to be appropriating William Dean Howells’s critique of Maggie, which, according to Howells, reveals Crane’s “distorted perspective” of reality and the “hopeless environments” shaped by a “cyclone of violence and volcano of vulgarity.”57 As Lawrence R. Rodgers explains, “[t]he North, and by implication, the category of urban naturalism, while less constrained by the limitations of race than the South of plantation fiction, exerts its force over black characters in equally potent ways.”58 Although the city is “cruel and cold and unfeeling,” readers are told that the “fool” who “stay[s] on,” namely the Hamilton children, will be quickly intoxicated until “the very streets are his chums and certain buildings and corners his best friends.”59 As Hollander argues, “[a]ttachment, loss and mourning in adults as well as in children are deeply affected by a persecutory environment and become salient issues in all phases of the experience of the exile.”60 Consequently, exile creates Precarity of Place and an unpredictable indecisiveness and an expectation of future loss that leads to a

African-American Place Attachments  141 poignant awareness of the precarious nature of materiality. Yi-Fu Tuan describes ‘topophilia’ as the emotional connections—attachments—­ individuals feel to place because an individual’s “belongings are an extension of his [or her] personality.” Because people invest parts of their emotional selves in their homes and neighborhoods, to be “forcibly evicted from one’s home and neighborhood is to be stripped of a sheathing, which in its familiarity protects the human being from the bewilderments of the outside world.”61 The persecution of the Hamiltons by both blacks and whites in the novel magnifies and pathologizes the loss of attachment to and grief felt by the loss of their father and their home and plays a significant factor in the Hamiltons’ attraction to the materiality they find in New York City. Dunbar demonstrates the extent to which the materiality of the city affects the Hamiltons as they erroneously view their surroundings when they first arrive in New York. Mr. Thomas, the first “coloured face” the Hamiltons see “among the porters who were handling the baggage,” is “exceedingly polite,” yet he “look[s] hard at Kitty” and will, in fact, play a role in both Joe and Kitty’s eventual downfall. Likewise, the Hamiltons are amazed by the “apparent” splendor of Mrs. Jones’s boarding house, for they are unable to comprehend that what they perceive as a “fine place” is really a cheap and substandard dwelling, replete with “hard, gaudily upholstered installment-plan furniture.” Over the course of two days, the family is quickly transported from their southern cottage to an urban boarding house, and then into “the mystery and glamour that envelops the home of the drama,” when Mr. Thomas introduces them to the “weird… alternate spaces of light and shade” in the theater house. Taking in their surroundings, Kitty, “[w]ithout any feeling of its ugliness,” is fascinated and believes that the stage is “a house of wonders,” while Joe “suddenly rais[es] himself in his own estimation” and “instantly beg[ins] to swell.” As Joe gazes at the “swaggering, sporty young negroes,” he reprises his father’s miscalculations about success, as he gleefully ruminates on that future moment when he will become one of them. With an air of condescension, however, the narrator muses that “[o]ne might find it in him to feel sorry for this small-souled, warped being, for he was so evidently the jest of Fate, if it were not that he was so blissfully, so conceitedly, unconscious of his own nastiness.”62 Like Crane’s Jimmie Johnson and Pete and Norris’s McTeague, Joe ­H amilton becomes “the mean and selfish lover, a dandy tough, with… gross ideals and ambitions.”63 He is “wild with enthusiasm and… a desire to be a part of all that the metropolis meant.” Gazing with envy at the young men who pass him in their “spruce clothes,” Joe dreams of the day that will validate his sense of personal superiority, the day when “some greenhorn from the South should stand at a window and look out envying him, as he passed, red-cravated, patent-leathered, intent

142  African-American Place Attachments on some goal.” Yet unlike the characters in Crane’s novella who are born and raised in New York’s Bowery district, Joe is not demoralized by the callous vulgarity of “the great city” alone, for readers are reminded that he began his journey northward “with false ideals as to what was fine and manly.”64 Although she initially had “a certain self-respect which made her value herself and her own traditions higher than her brother did his,” in time Kitty becomes “secretive and sly” and drinks in the “quick poison of the unreal life about her.” Just as Dunbar used two distinct voices in his poetry to create a continuing dialectic between black and white voices, here he uses black dialect and colloquial English to emphasize the emotional distance between the two generations of the Hamilton family. When Kitty “flew home with joyous heart” to tell her mother, “‘Miss Hattie thinks I’ll do to go on the stage. Ain’t it grand?’” Fannie’s southern black dialect sounds the distance between her and her daughter: “‘I do’ know as it’ll be so gran’. F’om what I see of dem stage people dey don’t seem to ‘mount to much.’” Kitty is drawn to the artificial and deceptive spectacle of the stage almost as effortlessly as Joe is drawn in by the false voices of the city. Hattie Sterling’s seemingly nonchalant warning to Kitty the first time the two women meet, “‘We don’t last long in this life: it soon wears us out, and when we’re worn out and sung out, danced out and played out, the manager has no further use for us,’” makes no impression on the girl who is grateful for Hattie’s offer to make that “fool” of a theater manager “do something” for her. When, in an attempt “to see just what effect her plea would have on her daughter,” Fannie tells Kitty that Tom Gibson has asked her to marry him, Kitty easily relinquishes her mother to a man who has not only lied by telling her “‘dat a pen’tentiary sentence is de same as a divo’ce,’” but who will also physically abuse her. Kitty’s hardness is sealed in her words of comfort to her mother: “‘I don’t reckon we’ll ever see pa again an’ you got to do something. You got to live for yourself now.’”65 While she may believe that her own future is full of promise, Kitty will fail—of that Dunbar makes certain. As Rodgers contends, when she rejects the humble songs of her past for the “coon ditties” of the stage, “Kitty is transformed from a stock southern plantation figure into the novel’s minstrel re-enactment of the same emblem… [leaving] one racist code of behavior to become engulfed in another.”66 The scene in which Kitty auditions for the managing star of ‘Martin’s Blackbirds’ is in fact a thinly veiled introduction to the unique agonies that await young women who are lured toward the superficial luster of the stage. The description of the manager and the language and mannerisms he uses as he interacts with the women performers does not bode well for Kitty. He arrives to the theater late, “hurried, fierce, and important… walk[ing] among the chorus like an angry king among his vassals.” He epitomizes “self-­ sufficient, brutal conceit,” as he simultaneously insults and objectifies the women in the chorus:

African-American Place Attachments  143 “Look here, Taylor, if I didn’t know you, I’d take you for a truck.” “And to think that I’ve got to do something with these things in two weeks.” “Don’t be afraid to move. Step like a chicken on a hot griddle.” “Oh, quit, quit, and go rest yourselves, you ancient pieces of hickory.” At this point, though, Kitty still retains some of the “independence which she had known from babyhood” and believes she will “talk back to him” should he try to insult her; nevertheless, when he finally demands that Kitty audition for him, she “rose and went toward him trembling.” Her physical beauty and vocal talent ultimately win her a place in the show, but before long both attributes will be consumed by her lifestyle, as she realizes within a few short years that “her voice was not as good as it used to be, and her beauty had to be aided by cosmetics.”67 While the city will eventually consume Kitty, it entirely masticates Joe to a groveling mess. His downfall is quick and hard, as the narrator reminds readers that, for both brother and sister, “It had taken barely five years to accomplish an entire metamorphosis of their characters. In Joe’s case [however] even a shorter time was needed.” He has no center, no fundamental core that will save him, and “his pride, which stands to some men for conscience, had no definite aim or direction.” Unable to take responsibility for “his foulness and degradation,” he blames ­Hattie Sterling for his downfall, stating just before he murders her, “‘you made me what I am.’” After Hattie’s murder, Joe “was as one whose soul is dead,” and even his friends dismiss him as “one more who had got into the whirlpool, enjoyed the sensation for a moment, and then swept ­dizzily down.” In a state of frozen grief, Joe experiences what Bowlby defines as “disordered mourning,” a devaluation of everything that once mattered to him. Only his mother grieves for him, yet the only thing Joe notices “or seem[s] to have any affection for” is Hattie’s little pet dog. The narrator describes Joe’s dénouement with no small sense of irony, informing readers that Joe would “sit for hours with the little animal in his lap, caressing it dumbly. There was a mute sorrow in the eyes of both man and dog, and they seemed to take comfort in each other’s presence.”68 The story of Joe and Kitty Hamilton ends with an “earnest hour sermonized” by the saloon dwellers who contemplate the “pernicious influence of the city on untrained negroes.” At this point in the narrative, the pathology of place attachment resonates in the question satirically asked by the sermonizers: Oh, is there no way to keep these people from rushing away from the small villages and country districts of the South up to the cities, where they cannot battle with the terrible force of a strange and

144  African-American Place Attachments unusual environment… [and] prove to them that woolen-shirted, brown-jeaned simplicity is infinitely better than broad-clothed degradation? Though these down and out saloon preachers “dare[d]” to want to “say that the South has its faults… but that even what they suffered from these was better than what awaited them in the great alleys of New York,”69 the next chapter shifts the setting back to the South where readers are quickly reminded of the inaccuracy of these sentiments and the insidious racism the Hamiltons and other African Americans living in the South habitually faced. At the conclusion of Sister Carrie (1900), Dunbar’s contemporary Theodore Dreiser sentences Carrie Meeber to a fate similar to that which Dunbar condemns the Hamiltons at the conclusion of The Sport of the Gods. After having permitted Carrie to achieve the fame and fortune for which she yearned, Dreiser confirms her fate when he intones: “In your rocking-chair, by your window dreaming, shall you long, alone. In  your rocking-chair, by your window, shall you dream such happiness as you may never feel.”70 Dunbar, like Dreiser, does not provide a satisfying conclusion to his novel, as none of his characters have any of their dreams fulfilled. Joe and Kitty end their days ravaged by the “subtle, insidious wine of New York,” and after Berry’s release from prison, he and Fannie return to the South only to spend the remainder of their lives unhappy and “powerless against some Will infinitely stronger than their own.” The elder Hamiltons are left at the novel’s closing to ask the question Dunbar raises in “To the South”: “What, was it all for naught, those awful years”? (l. 57). Berry and Fannie sit together in their little cottage, a dwelling forever changed and now somewhat foreign to them, with “clasped hands listening to the shrieks” of ­Maurice Oakley, “the madman across the yard,”71 who cannot face his mistakes and thus continues his self-indulgent abuse of the innocent couple whose lives he has ruined.

Coda Throughout the history of the United States, when it comes to race, the ‘days of yore’ have often seemed more present than past. The contemporaneity of antiquated ideas and the outmoded perceptions of value based on gender, class, or the color of one’s skin signify an archaic ­framework onto which modernity has been constructed in this country. The A ­ merican Revolution was only the first in a series of struggles to assemble and maintain our democratic ideals and decipher what it means to be a United States’ citizen. The cyclic struggle for ethno-racial, gender, and class equality has been reforged many times during multiple

African-American Place Attachments  145 conflicts, wars, and social protests that have attempted to rectify the inconsistencies that exist between the inalienable rights set forth in the constitution and the repeated practices of denying those rights to particular citizens of the country. In 1866, senator Lyman Trumbull introduced the Civil Rights Act into the senate. Officially titled “An Act to Protect all Persons in the United States in their Civil Rights, and furnish the Means of their vindication,” the bill, as summarized by congressman James F. Wilson, was intended to provide for “the equality of citizens of the United States in the enjoyment of ‘civil rights and immunities.’”72 Despite the devastating consequences of the Civil War and the dissolution of legal slavery in the United States, then-president Andrew Johnson vetoed the bill, an act that emboldened racist, white politicians and lawmakers in southern states to enact the Black Codes, a set of laws intended to impede legal rights and freedoms to citizens of African descent and thus make it even more difficult for recently freed slaves to navigate successfully in communities throughout the South. In an essay he wrote for The Atlantic in December of 1866, Frederick Douglass admonished Johnson and exhorted politicians to confront the explicit bigotry and racism implied in Johnson’s refusal to enforce civil rights. Douglass argued in part: Slavery, like all other great systems of wrong, founded in the depths of human selfishness, and existing for ages, has not neglected its own conservation. It has steadily exerted an influence upon all around it favorable to its own continuance. And to-day it is so strong that it could exist, not only without law, but even against law. Custom, manners, morals, religion, are all on its side everywhere in the South; and when you add the ignorance and servility of the ex-slave to the intelligence and accustomed authority of the master, you have the conditions, not out of which slavery will again grow, but under which it is impossible for the Federal government to wholly destroy it, unless the Federal government be armed with despotic power, to blot out State authority, and to station a Federal officer at every cross-road.73 Here, Douglass pinpoints the extensive psychological burden of slavery that permeates the consciousness of both former slaves and former masters and the internalized racial biases that sanction exploitation. Berry Hamilton’s sovereignty clearly conflicted with Maurice Oakley’s (and other former slave master’s) expectations that Berry would (and should) remain servile. The systemic conflict between ex-slaves and ex-slave owners is thus brought to bear in the Hamilton family’s struggle for justice and the Oakleys’ inability to recognize the Hamiltons’ value and

146  African-American Place Attachments importance as human beings. This universal breach against humanity is tragically replicated in Berry’s progeny, even after they leave the racist ideologies of the South and head to New York City. Although Joe and Kitty believe they have found independence when they arrive in New York, they instead succumb to a reconstituted servility that eventually destroys both of them. Douglass goes on to refer to Johnson as a “treacherous President” who “stood in the way” of ensuring genuine independence for freed slaves, reasoning that “it can be easily seen how reluctant good men might be to admit an apostasy which involved so much of baseness and ingratitude.” It was “natural,” he contends, that Congress “should seek to save ­[ Johnson] by bending to him even when he leaned to the side of error.” Nevertheless, Douglass urges members of Congress to “go on without his aid, and even against his machinations.”74 Several members of Congress did indeed demonstrate the moral courage to resist Johnson’s duplicity and moral failures, and on 5th March 1868, the United States’ Senate gathered for a trial against President Johnson. Impeachment proceedings for Johnson enumerate in part his ­egregious role in legitimizing and prolonging the racist ideologies of the South. During Johnson’s impeachment trial, Illinois Senator Richard Yates argued, in part: To lighten the burden and partially protect and defend the endangered rights of the freedmen, Congress passed a Freedmen’s Bureau bill; the President arrested it by a veto. Congress passed another Freedmen’s Bureau bill; the President endeavored to defeat it by another veto, and when it passed into law he strove to embarrass and thwart its operations. To protect the freedmen he had wickedly abandoned to the control of their enemies and the nation’s enemies, Congress passed a civil-rights bill; the President attempted to arrest it by a veto; and failing in that, he has utterly neglected to enforce it.75 That the United States congress would act to impeach a president who so clearly stood on the wrong side of justice should have, by any reasonable estimate, ensured the extension of rights to all citizens of the United States. Unfortunately, racism continued its foul reign. Almost thirty years later, in an 1894 interview Alabama senator, confederate Civil War general, and Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, John Tyler Morgan, speculated that a majority of the negro population of the Southern states have come to the conclusion that there is no future for the race in this country, and are sincerely anxious to emigrate to Africa, which is the natural home of the Black man.

African-American Place Attachments  147 With respect to employment needs, Morgan argued that the South could “get along without negro labor,” and if the “preferences of the poorer classes of the white population were consulted it would be found that they would be mighty glad to get rid of the negro competition.”76 Well into the twentieth century, Southern white supremacists continued to insist that “the South was under siege,” and that even “three decades after emancipation[,] African Americans had proven themselves incapable of advancement, unworthy of the ballot, and indifferent to laws, thrift, and education.”77 White racist southerners, like Morgan, have never accepted Douglass’s faith that the Constitution of the United States, knows no distinction between citizens on account of color. Neither does it know any difference between a citizen of a State and a citizen of the United States. Citizenship evidently includes all the rights of citizens, whether State or national. If the Constitution knows none, it is clearly no part of the duty of a Republican Congress now to institute one.78 How tremendous would it be if this study concluded with a ‘high five’ to the United States for finally eliminating hatred? Regrettably, feelings of white privilege, emboldened by a defective notion of natural superiority and a shameful fear over loss of status, are kept alive over 150  years after the conclusion of the Civil War. In her November 2016 essay for the New Yorker, “Making America White Again,” writer Toni ­Morrison discusses the “horror of lost status” that is driving some white Americans (mostly men, but a few women, too) to continue to “abandon their humanity” and make the days of racism and white supremacy more present than past. As a nation built in large part on the backs of African slaves, many of whom were forced from their own countries and brought to a place whose pledge of loyalty claims “liberty and justice for all,” the United States continues to “hold whiteness as the unifying force.” Immigrants of color, too, have always known that “if they want to become real, authentic Americans they must reduce their fealty to their native country and regard it as secondary, subordinate, in order to emphasize their whiteness.” Yet white purity, along with “white ­people’s conviction of their natural superiority,” is rapidly dwindling in the United States. This loss of status has propagated a “display of cowardice,” where grown men “tuck their heads under cone-shaped hats,” denying themselves the “dignity of face-to-face confrontation,” while they aim “their guns [at] the unarmed, the innocent, the scared,”79 and even on those who are peacefully protesting, unarmed, and running away. The single-word question on the mind of every American citizen should be “Still?” While some antiquated ideologies are best kept in their historical place, other voices from the past reveal the genuine values on which the United States was founded and the forward thinking principles that serve

148  African-American Place Attachments ­ incoln to unite all citizens of the country. Perhaps President Abraham L said it best in his second Inaugural Address, as the country stood on the threshold of Civil War: We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be by the better angels of our nature. 80 Despite the horror of bigotry and hatred that continues to plague the United States, Lincoln’s words provide hope that the nation will continue to strive toward the ideals of democracy, ensuring equality for all its citizens and welcoming those immigrants and exiles who seek the promise of egalitarianism, freedom, and liberty that frames the basic laws and fundamental humanity of this nation.

Notes 1 Review of The Sport of the Gods, by Paul Laurence Dunbar. The Southern Workman 30 (1901): 557. 2 Paul Laurence. Dunbar, The Sport of the Gods (Miami, FL: Mnemosyne, 1969), 2–6, 35. 3 Dunbar, Sport, 48, 31, 32, 49–50. 4 Marlon B. Ross, Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 145. 5 Shirley Moody-Turner, “Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Critique of the folk Ideal,” in Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013), 121. 6 Bridget Harris Tsemo, “The Politics of Self-Identity in Paul Laurence ­Dunbar’s Sport of the Gods,” Southern Literary Journal (March 2009): 24. 7 Robert M. Dowling, Slumming in New York: From the Waterfront to Mythic Harlem (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 84. 8 Dowling, Slumming, 83. 9 See Jillmarie Murphy, Monstrous Kinships: Realism and Attachment Theory in the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Novel (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011), (1–36), for a discussion of the way in which attachment theory was informed by the tenets of realist and naturalist fiction. 10 Jonathan Daigle, “Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Marshall Circle: Racial Representation from Blackface to Black Naturalism,” African American Review 43 (Winter 2009): 642. 11 William M. Ramsey, “Dunbar’s Dixie,” Southern Literary Journal 32 (Fall 1999): 32–33. 12 Mindy Thompson Fullilove, “‘The Frayed Knot,’” Place Attachment: Advances in Theory, Methods, and Applications (Routledge 2014), 148. 13 Faye Z. Belgrave and Kevin W. Allison, African-American Psychology: From Africa to America (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006), 134. 14 Michelle Mohr Carney and Frederick P. Buttell, “Attachment Theory,” in Comprehensive Handbook of Social Work and Social Welfare: Human Behavior in the Social Environment, edited by Bruce A. Thyer, 4 vols. ­(Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2008), 2: 220.

African-American Place Attachments  149 15 Fullilove, “‘The Frayed Knot,’” 142. 16 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 176–177. 17 See John Bowlby, A Secure Base (3) and Ainsworth, Barach, Birtchnell, and Sroufe for further discussions of attachment and dependency. 18 John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, 3 vols. (New York: Basic, 1980), 3:7. 19 See, for example, W. H. Jackson, who appears sympathetic to Wheatley’s being “kidnapped and sold” to a captain of a slave ship on its way to Boston and the “shameful condition” under which “she awaited the coming of a purchaser” (118–119). He, like other critics of the period, reminds readers that the Wheatleys, particularly Susannah, “loved her as one of [their] own children” (120). 20 Phillis Wheatley, The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley, edited by John C. Shields (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 183. 21 Dunbar, Sport of the Gods, 41, 43. 22 Ibid., 44, 47. 23 Lennox K. Thomas, “Attachments in African Caribbean Families,” in Attachment Theory in Adult Mental Health: A Guide to Clinical Practice, edited by Adam N. Danquah and Katherine Berry (Routledge, 2014), 180. 24 Dunbar, Sport of the Gods, 6. 25 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (Philadelphia, PA: University of Philadelphia Press, 1899), 71. 26 Dunbar, Sport, 2. 27 Dale Edwyna Smith, “Paternalism,” Slavery in the United States: A Social, Political, and Historical Encyclopedia Vol. I, edited by Junius P. Rodriguez (ABC-CLIO, 2007), 409. 28 Smith, “Paternalism,” 409. 29 Dunbar, “To the South,” l. 17 30 Dunbar, Sport, 2, 4. 31 Smith, “Paternalism,” 410. 32 Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, 45. 33 John Bowlby, A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development (New York: Basic, 1988), 4. 34 Dunbar, Sport, 65–66. 35 Nancy Caro Hollander, “Exile: Paradoxes of Loss and Creativity,” in Psychodynamic Perspectives on Abuse: The Cost of Fear, edited by Una ­McCluskey and Carol-Ann Hooper (London: Jessica Kingsley, 2000), 84. 36 Dunbar, Sport, 76, 78–80, 87. 37 Kay attributes disorganized attachment style to an individual whose parent “is likely to have experienced a major loss, trauma, or significant psychopathology” (277), such as Berry’s arrest and subsequent imprisonment. See also John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss: (3:44–74). 38 Joanne Braxton, “Introduction,” The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, edited by Joanne M. Braxton (Charlottesville: University Press Virginia, 1993), xxviii. 39 Braxton, “Introduction,” xxviii. 40 Jean Wagner, Black Poets of the United States: From Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes (New York: Illini Books, 1975), 74. 41 Dunbar, Sport, 4, 5. 42 Ralph B. Taylor, “Neighborhood Responses to Disorder and Local Attachments: The Systemic Model of Attachment, Social Disorganization, and Neighborhood Use Value,” Sociological Forum (1996): 43. 43 Jonathan Daigle, “Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Marshall Circle: Racial Representation from Blackface to Black Naturalism,” African American Review 43 (Winter 2009): 644. 44 Taylor, “Neighborhood Responses to Disorder and Local Attachments,” 42, 45.

150  African-American Place Attachments 45 Dunbar, Sport, 4, 5, 7, 66, 67, 49, 51. 46 John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, 3 vols. (New York: Basic, 1980), 1:59–160. 47 Maria Vittoria. Giuliani, “Theory of Attachment and Place Attachment,” in Psychological Theories for Environmental Issues, edited by Mirilias Bonnes, Terrence Lee, and Marino Bonaiuto (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 138. 48 John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, 1:52. 49 Dunbar, Sport, 81–82, 86. 50 See José B. Ashford and Craig Winston. Human Behavior in the Social Environment: A Multidimensional Perspective (Belmont, CA: Cengage, 2010), 392. 51 Dubois, Philadelphia Negro, 286, 283, 284. 52 Dowling, Slumming, 80. 53 Ramsey, “Dunbar’s Dixie,” 40. 54 Dunbar, Sport, 80, 81–82, 86. 55 See also Hamilton (162–163). 56 Dubois, Philadelphia Negro, 284. 57 William Dean Howells, “An Appreciation” (1896), in Bloom’s Classical Critical Views: Stephen Crane, edited by Joyce Caldwell Smith (New York: Infobase, 2009), 107. 58 Lawrence R. Rodgers, “Paul Laurence Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods: The Doubly Conscious World of Plantation Fiction, Migration, and Ascent,” in American Literary Realism, 1870–1910 24 (Spring 1992): 54. 59 Dunbar, Sport, 82–83. 60 Hollander, “Exile: Paradoxes of Loss and Creativity,” 86. 61 Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perceptions, Attitudes, and Values (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974/1990), 99. 62 Dunbar, Sport, 84, 99, 100. 63 Howells, “An Appreciation,” 107. 64 Dunbar, Sport, 83, 87–88, 100. 65 Ibid., 89, 130, 166, 163, 164, 168, 169. 66 Rodgers, “Paul Laurence Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods,” 53. 67 Dunbar, Sport, 171–174, 217. 68 Ibid., 198–199, 208, 210–212. 69 Ibid., Sport, 212–213. 70 Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2004), 478. 71 Dunbar, Sport, 82, 255. 72 Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking: Cases and Materials, edited by Paul Brest, et al. (New York: Aspen, 2006), 350. 73 Frederick Douglass, “Reconstruction,” Atlantic Monthly 18 (December 1866): 761. 74 Ibid., 762. 75 History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, “Chapter VIII. Organization Of The Court Argument Of Counsel.” Accessed June 7, 2017. http:// avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/john_chap_08.asp. 76 Reported in “Negro Emigration and Deportation,” Public Opinion 18 (11 April 1895): 370. 77 K. Stephen Prince, Stories of the South: Race and Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 211. 78 Douglass, “Reconstruction,” 762. 79 Toni Morrison, “Making America White Again,” New Yorker (21 ­November 2016): 37. 80 Stephen Berry, House of Abraham: Lincoln and the Todds, A Family Divided by War (New York: Houghton, 2007), 60.

African-American Place Attachments  151

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152  African-American Place Attachments History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, “Chapter VIII. Organization Of The Court Argument Of Counsel.” Accessed June 7, 2017. http://avalon. law.yale.edu/19th_century/john_chap_08.asp. Hollander, Nancy Caro. “Exile: Paradoxes of Loss and Creativity,” in Psychodynamic Perspectives on Abuse: The Cost of Fear, edited by Una McCluskey and Carol-Ann Hooper. London: Jessica Kingsley, 2000: 81–99. Howells, William Dean. “An Appreciation” (1896), in Bloom’s Classical Critical Views: Stephen Crane, edited by Joyce Caldwell Smith. New York: Infobase, 2009: 106–108. Jackson, W. H. Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Denver, CO: W.H. Lawrence, 1887. Kay, Jerald. “Attachment and Its Disorders,” in Clinical Child Psychology, edited by William M. Klykylo and Jerald Kay. Oxford: Wiley and Sons, 2012: 274–288. Moody-Turner, Shirley. Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013: 101–126. Morrison, Toni. “Making America White Again,” New Yorker (21 November 2016): 37–38. Murphy, Jillmarie. “Introduction,” in Monstrous Kinships: Realism and Attachment Theory in the Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Novel. Newark: University Delaware Press, 2011: 1–36. Prince, K. Stephen. Stories of the South: Race and Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865 1915. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking: Cases and Materials, edited by Paul Brest, et al. New York: Aspen, 2006. Ramsey, William M. “Dunbar’s Dixie,” Southern Literary Journal 32 (Fall 1999): 30–45. Reported in “Negro Emigration and Deportation,” Public Opinion 18 (11 April 1895): 370. Rodgers, Lawrence R. “Paul Laurence Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods: The Doubly Conscious World of Plantation Fiction, Migration, and Ascent,” American Literary Realism, 1870–1910 24 (Spring 1992): 42–57. Ross, Marlon B. Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era. New York: New York University Press, 2004. Smith, Dale Edwyna. “Paternalism,” in Slavery in the United States: A Social Political, and Historical Encyclopedia, Vol. I, edited by Junius P. Rodriguez. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2007: 409–410. Sroufe, L. Alan, Elizabeth A. Carlson, and Shmuel Shulman. “Individuals in Relationship: Development from Infancy through Adolescence,” in Studying Lives through Time: Approaches to Personality and Development, edited by D.C. Funder, R. Parke, C. Tomlinson-Keesey, and K. Widaman. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1993: 315–342. Taylor, Ralph B. “Neighborhood Responses to Disorder and Local Attachments: The Systemic Model of Attachment, Social Disorganization, and Neighborhood Use Value,” Sociological Forum (1996): 41–75. Thomas, Lennox K. “Attachments in African Caribbean Families,” in Attachment Theory in Adult Mental Health: A Guide to Clinical Practice, edited

African-American Place Attachments  153 by Adam N. Danquah and Katherine Berry. New York: Routledge, 2014: 169–183. Tsemo, Bridget Harris. “The Politics of Self-Identity in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Sport of the Gods,” Southern Literary Journal 51.2 (March 2009): 21–37. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perceptions, Attitudes, and Values. New York: Columbia University Press, 1974/1990. Wagner, Jean. Black Poets of the United States: From Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes. New York: Illini Books, 1975. Wheatley, Phillis. The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley, edited by John C. Shields. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Index

abandonment 17, 78–79, 118 abolitionists 33, 49 Agamben, Giorgio 50, 62, 11, 118 agrarian(ism) 6, 8, 10, 11, 21 African-American 34, 56, 63, 89, 127, 129, 130, 131, 133, 134, 140 Afrocentric 11, 54, 55 Ainsworth, Mary Salter 132 alcoholism 13, 86, 99, 100, 103, 110, 118 Allen, Richard (Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, during the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia) 34 American landscapes 6–7, 10, 40, 78 American Revolution 2, 7, 17, 46, 47, 49, 71 antecedent phase 19 anti-Semitism 88–89 atavism 13, 109, 119 attachment: affective 1, 8, 14, 22; anxieties 2; bodily 35; bonds 3, 5, 6, 19, 23, 24, 35, 58, 60, 63, 103, 131, 134–136; destructive 21–22, 72; disruptions in 3–4, 23–28, 40, 56, 70–71, 96, 107, 114, 130; familial (filial) 1, 3, 40, 57–58, 131; fear of 32; fragmented 24; humanto-human, human-to-place 2–8, 13–14, 26, 35; ineffectual 13; insecure 12, 57, 71, 129–134; interpersonal 2–5, 11, 58–59, 112; needs 2, 5, 63; neighborhood see neighborhood attachment; place see place attachment; pathology 13, 35, 40, 129–131, 143; secure 12, 23, 129, 132; theory 3, 5, 12, 54, 57–58, 129–131 autonomy 13, 22, 30–31, 36, 40, 50, 54, 58, 61, 80–81

bare life 62 Black Codes 145 body (bodies): black 35, 62, 89; commodification of 58; as object 32, 37, 11; racialized 34 Bonaparte, Napoleon 45, 64n 2 Bowlby, John 3, 57–59, 131–143 Brackenridge, Hugh Henry (Modern Chivalry) 6–7 brothel 26, 29, 31, 32, 81 Brotherhood of the Union 77 Brown, Charles Brockden: Arthur Mervyn 16–44, 52, 71, 74–76, 81, 84, 89; Wieland; or The Transformation 76; Ormond; or the Secret Witness 77 Brown, William Hill (The Power of Sympathy) 69, 78 burial practices 37–38 Burr, Aaron 45, 49–52, 59 Burr, Charles Chauncey 73, 77, 78 Butler, Judith: Dispossession, with Athanasiou 18, 20, 48; Frames of War 68, 104, 105 cannibalism 62 Carey, Mathew (A Short Account of the Malignant Fever) 34 Caribbean slave trade 34, 47 Christophe, Henri 60 circum-Atlantic 24, 46, 47, 49, 69 circumstance of potentiality 21 city see urban Civil Rights Act (1866) 145 corpse 36–38, 119 Crane, Stephen (Maggie: A Girl of the Streets) 10, 12, 13, 71, 86, 88–90, 95–126, 129, 140 Creole 55, 61

156 Index deactivation 60 de-attachment 32 desubjectification 50 disenfranchised 18, 34, 90 displacement (displaced) 4, 11, 17, 19, 23–24, 32–36, 46, 48, 50, 53, 56, 71, 77, 89, 111, 131, 134, 138 dispossession 2, 9, 11, 14, 17, 19, 35–36, 40, 46, 48–50, 53–54, 63, 68, 71, 78, 97, 104, 110, 111 Douglass, Frederick 63, 145–147 Du Bois, W.E.B. 133–134, 138–140 Dunbar, Paul Laurence (Sport of the Gods) 10, 12, 13, 71, 86, 87, 127–153 early American Republic 2, 6, 24, 74, 75, 78 early national 2, 6, 8, 9, 26, 33, 63, 86 egalitarianism 13, 46, 148 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 10 emotional geography of place 23 enlightened 8, 11, 13, 21, 22, 24, 36, 39, 46, 70, 139 Enlightenment 22, 40, 68, 71, 81 environment 4, 12, 18, 22, 30, 34, 39, 59, 70, 98, 100, 103–104, 106, 110, 114, 115, 117, 119, 127–130, 133, 134, 138–140 equality 27, 48, 49, 58, 128, 144, 145 ethnic: general 2, 7, 17, 47, 48, 88–90, 96, 102, 106–108, 110, 140; identity 4, 8, 58, 134; multi-14; trauma 13 expropriated 14, 20, 35 exile 13, 16–19, 22, 24, 25, 32, 33, 60, 77, 131, 140, 148

gendered degradation of place 102 Godey’s Lady’s Book 12 Haitian Revolution 2, 9–11, 24, 33, 34, 46–49, 53, 72, 81 hegemonic 9, 33, 54, 81 heredity 104, 110 heteronormative 78 homo sacer 62 Hume, David 69, 91f 5 hyperactivation 59 hyperobliviousness 116 immigrant 8, 12, 17, 34, 69, 71, 77, 88, 95, 96, 101, 103, 107, 140, 147, 148 indeterminism 23, 24, 109–110, 118 inequality 47, 71, 90 internalized ethnicism 105 intersectional 55, 63 Johnson, Samuel 68 Jones, Absalom (Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, during the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia) 34 Kant, Immanuel 69 Kristeva, Julia 36–37 LeClerc, Charles Victoire Emmanuel 60 Lincoln, Abraham 148 Lippard, George: Quaker City; or, the Monks of Monk Hall 10, 11, 12, 68–94; Washington and His Generals; “The Heart-Broken” 76 Louverture, Toussaint 51

fashion 29–31 Foster, Hannah Webster (The Coquette) 79–82 freedom 2, 6, 8, 23, 30, 31, 36, 39, 40, 48, 54, 57, 58, 61, 63, 69, 120, 127, 128, 134, 145, 148 Freedom’s Journal 55–56 French Revolution 8, 46, 47, 48, 68 Freud, Sigmund 3, 112 Friendly Club, The 76–77 futurity 6, 8, 21, 32, 40

male gaze 53 materiality (materialism) (materialist) 1, 5, 6, 12, 12, 18, 23, 25, 27–32, 35, 36, 104, 109–117, 141 matria familias 17 menagerie 48 migration 18, 23, 129, 131 mixed-race 33, 34, 46, 47, 49, 54, 55, 62 modernity 2, 6–13, 40, 49, 71, 72, 97, 102, 144

gendered: geographies 24–33; inequities 32; power 55; violence 46, 58, 71, 102, 103

naming 49–51 Napoleon see Bonaparte, Napoleon narratological heterodyne 75

Index  157 national identity 2, 6, 8, 9, 14 naturalism 11–13, 110, 129, 140 negrophobic 46 neighborhood attachment 106–107, 138 Norris, Frank (McTeague) 10–13, 71, 86–89, 95–126, 129, 140, 141 optimism 21–22, 85, 116–117 other (otherness) 2, 6–8, 10, 11, 13, 14, 20–22, 24, 30, 33, 40, 45, 48, 89, 104 paternalism (paternal) (paternalistic) 6, 10, 17–19, 21, 22, 89, 133 pater familias 17 patria potestas 17 people of color 2, 7–9, 11, 24, 33–34, 45, 47, 48, 53, 56, 58, 63, 68, 70, 74 performativity (performative) 6, 18, 27, 37, 49–54, 78, 81, 110 Pine Barrens (New Jersey) 28 place: disruptions 33, 59; entrenchment 23; identity 4, 13, 26; materiality of 5, 18, 23; rootedness 23, 35 place attachment 2, 4–13, 18–26, 28, 35, 40, 46, 50–63, 70, 71, 95–99, 103, 106, 107, 113, 114, 130, 134, 139, 143 potentiality 21, 24, 32, 50, 59, 68, 87, 115, 117 poverty 22, 26, 70, 71–74, 75, 77, 84, 86, 88, 96, 97, 103, 104, 106, 110, 114, 118, 131 Precarity 104–108, 110, 114 Precarity of Place 12, 104–110, 119, 140 privilege: general 29, 48; elite 7; male 22, 33, 34, 70; gendered 54–56; white 62, 147 prostitution (prostitute) 25, 30, 31, 70, 73, 84, 117–118 race 101, 130, 133, 134, 136–138, 140, 144, 146 racialized: general 9, 24, 34, 54, 55; violence 46, 55, 56–58, 71–73 reclamation of place 63 Reconstruction (Southern) 12, 129, 133, 134 refugees 1, 2, 8, 10, 11, 33, 34, 46–49, 96 renegotiation of place 19, 47

Rowson, Susannah (Charlotte Temple) 79, 80–83 rural 2, 8, 10, 11, 16, 18–24, 27–30, 40, 77, 95, 109, 111, 129, 134, 139, 140 Saint Domingue 9, 11, 33, 46–54, 62–63, 81 Sansay, Leonora (Secret History; or the Horrors of St. Domingo) 9, 11, 12, 45–67, 71, 74, 81 seduction: general 9, 20, 22, 78–88; motif 26, 79, 81, 82; novel 32, 37, 78, 79, 83; plot 9, 79, 81, 83 self-identity 19, 51, 104, 111–114 sentimental general 27, 39, 53, 55, 82, 84; sentimentalism 12, 84, 86; novel 69, 79, 83, 86, 88, 140 sentimental parody 11, 82–86 sex worker see prostitution slavery 7, 33, 36, 46–49, 55, 63, 68–72, 82 social class 2, 6–8, 11–13, 24, 26–27, 30, 34, 46, 49, 53–56, 63, 68–75, 86–90, 97, 104, 107, 108, 110, 130, 140, 144, 147 Tenderloin District 10, 128, 129, 139, 140 tenement 13, 70, 71, 95–118 Tenney, Tabitha Gilman (Female Quixotism) 6–7 “Theresa—A Haytien Tale” 11, 55–63 topophilia 141 transition phase 19 transmogrification 36 Tyler, Royall (The Algerine Captive) 7 United States 2, 7–14, 24, 26, 33, 34, 36, 49, 54–56, 63, 68–71, 73, 89, 90, 95, 96, 130, 144–148 uprooting phase 19 urban (city): general 8, 10, 13, 19, 20, 30, 70–75, 86, 88–90, 95, 102, 108, 111, 119, 129, 139–141; fiction 11, 12, 40, 140; landscape 2, 8, 9, 13, 128, 129; modernity 6, 11, 12, 72; places 10–13, 16, 18, 19, 21, 30, 47, 70, 71, 74, 96, 97, 107, 109, 118, 134, 138–140 Wheatley, Phillis 131–132 yellow fever 16, 21, 22, 26, 34–36, 52, 76, 89