Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism 9780804770972

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AESTHETIC MATERIALISM

Aesthetic Material]m electricity and american romanticism

Paul Gilmore

stanford university press Stanford, California 2009

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2009 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University All rights reserved Parts of Chapter 3 were originally published in ATQ, Volume 16, No. 4, December 2002. Reprinted by permission of The University of Rhode Island. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gilmore, Paul. Aesthetic materialism : electricity and American romanticism / Paul Gilmore. p.  cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8047-6123-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1.  American literature—19th century—History and criticism.  2.  Authors, American—19th century—Aesthetics.  3.  Electricity in literature.  4.  Telegraph in literature.  5.  Romanticism—United States.  I.  Title. ps217.a35g55      2009 810.9'003—dc22 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Typeset at Stanford University Press in 10/13 Galliard

2008031223

For Charlotte and Rowan

I have perceived that to be with those I like is enough, To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough, To be surrounded by beautiful curious breathing laughing flesh is enough. To pass among them . . to touch any one . . . . to rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment . . . . what is this then? I do not ask any more delight . . . . I swim in it as in a sea. —Walt Whitman, “I Sing the Body Electric”

Acknowledgments

This book completes a long process that began as I finished my dissertation at the University of Chicago. Along the way, bits and pieces of the final project appeared in “The Telegraph in Black and White,” ELH 69 (2002) and “Romantic Electricity, or The Materiality of Aesthetics,” American Literature 76 (2004). A significantly shorter and different version of Chapter 3 was originally published as “Aesthetic Power: Electric Words and the Example of Frederick Douglass,” in ATQ, Volume 16, No. 4, December 2002. Reprinted by permission of The University of Rhode Island. The project developed most quickly and fully during the 2001–2002 academic year, thanks to a Barbara Thom Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Their extensive holdings and the collaborative environment the library fostered helped to direct and give final shape to this project. My thanks go to Roy Ritchie, W. M. Keck Foundation Director of Research, and the entire staff of the library for their help and support. In the years since then, during my time at California State University, Long Beach, I have been fortunate to have additional time for research through course reductions supported by awards from the Scholarly and Creative Activity Committee. My chair, Eileen Klink, and my students and my colleagues, especially Tim Caron and George Hart, have made Long Beach a great place to teach, to learn, and to grow. I have been equally fortunate to have participated in the Southern California Americanist Group (SCAG) since I came to the Los Angeles area. Founded by Michael Szalay, and carried on under the leadership of Jennifer Fleissner and Cathy Jurca, the group has continued to provide a wonderful framework for discussion and interaction, fellowship and goodwill. During the last few

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Acknowledgments

years my work has grown by coordinating this group with Greg Jackson, Eric Hayot, and Sharon Oster. I’ve learned an incredible amount from all participants, especially the most regular regulars, Mark McGurl, Elisa Tamarkin, Mark Goble, and Sianne Ngai. As this project neared completion, SCAG and the Huntington Library further enabled me to hone my thinking by giving Greg Jackson and me the chance to organize a conference on “Historical Formalism, or Aesthetics in American Literary History.” Again, I’d like to thank Roy Ritchie and the staff at the Huntington, especially Carolyn Powell and Susi Krasnoo, for all their help and support. The scholars who participated, through their papers, their questions and comments, and their conversation, helped me to conceive the broader context for this work: Nancy Bentley, Bill Brown, Russ Castronovo, James Dawes, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Wai Chee Dimock, Rob Kaufman, Dana Nelson, Sam Otter, Nancy Ruttenburg, and Eric Sundquist. I couldn’t have asked for a better collaborator than Greg Jackson. His friendship, good humor, and knowledge about just about everything have provided a real boost to this project for a number of years. I can always count on him to supply the right balance of critique and support. At Stanford University Press, Emily-Jane Cohen has been a patient, supportive, and careful editor in guiding this work towards its completion. The comments of the readers—Russ Castronovo, David Nye, and Laura Rigal—pushed me to refine my arguments in very different and constructive ways. Earlier in the process, Wai Chee Dimock, Marc Redfield, and Laura Otis graciously agreed to read sections of the book, providing some key guidance, questions, and suggestions. I’ve dedicated this book to my two daughters, Charlotte and Rowan. Their joy for life, their complexity, their curiosity, their ability to grow and learn have energized, inspired, and, at times, fruitfully frustrated my work on this project. Their presence in my life constantly reorients me, providing me with needed perspective. Finally, I met Reid Cottingham only a few months after I first presented on some of these materials at the MLA convention. As much as this project has changed since I first began, I have changed even more, due to her love, care, and devotion. My shift in thinking about these materials mirrors a greater transformation in my own life. I can’t imagine this book or my life without her.

Contents

Introduction: The Word “Aesthetic”  1

1. Idealist Aesthetics and the Republican Telegraph  19



2. Aesthetic Electricity  64



3. Frederick Douglass’s Electric Words: Aesthetic Politics and the Limits of Identification  111



4. Mad Filaments: Walt Whitman’s Aesthetic Body Telegraphic   143

Conclusion: Aesthetic Electricity Caged  177 Notes  191 Works Cited  219

Index  237

AESTHETIC MATERIALISM

Introduction: The Word “Aesthetic” Of all the scientific terms in common use, perhaps no one conveys to the mind a more vague and indeterminable sense than this, at the same time that the user is always conscious of a meaning and appropriateness; so that he is in the position of one who endeavors to convey his sense of the real presence of an idea, which still he cannot himself fully grasp and account for.

—Elizabeth Peabody, “The Word ‘Aesthetic’ ” (1849)1

Thus, Elizabeth Peabody opens Aesthetic Papers, one of the first American volumes to use the word in its title. Most famous for publishing Henry David Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government” (“Civil Disobedience”), Aesthetic Papers emphasizes the very problem of defining its chief term, a word everyone understands and uses, according to Peabody, with his own sense of “appropriateness.” This problem remains central to the debates over aesthetics and, in particular, the ideologies and politics of aesthetics, in the wake of the “linguistic,” “historical,” and “cultural” turns in literary criticism. Peabody’s description of the problem points to the difficulty of defining a kind of experience that, seemingly by definition, is beyond definition, that is a “real presence” but merely “an idea.” In addition to this constitutive difficulty, the problem of defining aesthetics has at least two related dimensions: distinguishing different historically specific ideas about aesthetics and differentiating the various topics sometimes grouped under the term, including aesthetic objects, aesthetic judgments (or values), aesthetic theory, aesthetic experience (or effects), aesthetic attitude (or function), and aesthetic practice.2 Over the last few decades, dominant academic literary criticism has analyzed, demystified, and dismissed aesthetics largely by de-historicizing and



Introduction

de-materializing aesthetic experience. This ironic turn has taken place, in large part, through the ahistorical equation of New Critical formalism with aesthetics in toto and through the reduction of aesthetics to a history of its modern theoretical considerations, beginning with Alexander Baumgarten’s naming of a new philosophical discipline in 1735, continuing through Immanuel Kant’s third Critique, Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, G. W. F. Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics, the treatises of the various British and American romantics, and finally ending with twentiethcentury New Criticism. Such criticism has dismantled the New Criticism’s idea of a transhistoric aesthetic object, the ideal of the art-object as a transcendent, self-sufficient unity detached from the social world, by revealing the sociopolitical interestedness of aesthetic judgments supposedly based on objective formal properties. These critiques are not so much wrong—attempts to define the objective characteristics of artworks that universally evoke a certain kind of experience seem doomed merely to valorize a classspecific critical practice reinforcing the sociopolitical status quo—as they are limited in historical and thematic scope. Recent materialist/political critiques of aesthetics have tended, paradoxically, to eschew the material experience that aesthetic theories attempt to make sense of and, instead, have focused on the theories themselves. In place of an attention to the sensuous experience and material existence that might give rise to notions of the aesthetic, they provide a critique of aesthetics as ideology and an unveiling of the deep power structures lying behind such ideology. They have confused, to use Robert Kaufman’s formulation, aesthetics with aestheticization.3 Where the return to aesthetics in literary criticism in the last decade has been described as a kind of new formalism, a revival of formalism, or a recovery of the formalism implicit to much new historicism and cultural studies, it is important to distinguish formal approaches from aesthetics in avoiding a reduction of aesthetics to aestheticization.4 Thus, even as a new aesthetics addresses questions of literary form, we need to recognize form as merely one element in the intersection of audience, world, and text that might yield or help to articulate aesthetic experience. Historically, in fact, “aesthetics” in the United States did not refer to an explicitly apolitical sphere, the apotheosis of literary form, or a specific artistic canon of great works. Nineteenth-century critics often assailed transcendentalist aesthetics for neglecting these very areas. Only sparingly used in American publications of the 1820s and the 1830s to refer broadly to the study of the arts, “aesthetics,” by the 1840s, began to be used more frequently to evoke the dangers of an approach to both art and life connected with roman-



Introduction

 

ticism and German idealism.5 Critics worried that, with its focus on the individual, subjective judgment rather than on the critic’s or artist’s role as cultural arbiter, aesthetics abandoned the moral and political project of literature. The American Whig Review, for example, devoted its 1846 review of Margaret Fuller’s volume of essays Papers on Literature and Art to describing this “new kind of criticism—aesthetic criticism.” In summation, the review dismissed Fuller’s essays and their aesthetic critical method by noting that “There is nothing in them of the practical; nothing is said of counter-point, or chiaro-oscuro, subject or composition, style or choice of words.” Rather than accounting for the mechanical workings of art and guiding the tastes of the uninstructed, Fuller—with the “transcendental school” that “embrac[ed] the new aesthetic method of criticism”—simply “affects to discover and reproduce the veritable spirit of an author or literature.”6 The problem with aesthetics, from this point of view, was that it did not offer universally valid, objective judgments but rather indulged in a subjective (or, at best, an intersubjective) attempt at accessing the experience of another. Despite the recent tendency to “conflate the New Critical version of aesthetic value with the issue of aesthetics in general,” a move Winfried Fluck aptly describes as “ahistorical,” New Critics distinguished their “objective criticism of works of art” from aesthetics.7 Most notably, in their famous account of the Affective Fallacy (1946), W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley contend that “It may well be that the contemplation of this object, or pattern of emotive knowledge, which is the poem, is the ground for some ultimate emotional state which may be termed the aesthetic (some empathy, some synaesthesis, some objectified feeling of pleasure). It may well be. The belief is attractive; it may exalt our view of poetry. But it is of no concern of criticism, no part of criteria.”8 According to Wimsatt and Beardsley, criticism must concern itself with non-aesthetic phenomena, with the supposedly objective structures of literature, the formal features that transcend any specific reading or any particular historical moment. In rejecting it as a basis for criticism, Wimsatt and Beardsley’s imprecise definition of aesthetic experience—“some ultimate emotional state . . . some empathy, some synaesthesia, some objectified feeling of pleasure”— echoes that offered by thinkers from Alexander Baumgarten forward. In particular, in suggesting the aesthetic’s personal and sensuous yet objective nature, their definition parallels Peabody’s claims for the importance of the aesthetic.9 In her introduction to Aesthetic Papers, she extends the term’s “vague and indeterminable sense” beyond a dictionary definition

 



Introduction

 

 

 

of the “‘philosophy of poetry and the fine arts’”: “The ‘aesthetic element,’ then, is in our view neither a theory of the beautiful, nor a philosophy of art, but a component and indivisible part in all human creations which are not mere works of necessity; in other words, which are based on idea, as distinguished from appetite.” Aesthetic considerations are linked by their “reference to the central fact of the constant relation of the individual to the universal, and of their equally constant separation” (1–2). Aesthetics thus refers to “the unpersonal,” to an individual experience “which sinks and subordinates the observer to the object,—which, by putting my personality aside, enables me to see the object in pure uncolored light” (3). Peabody’s definition at first seems to refute the subjective nature of aesthetic experience. Most famously, Kant insists that the judgment of taste is “indifferent to the existence of the object,” that an aesthetic judgment “designates nothing whatsoever in the object, but here the subject feels himself, [namely] how he is affected by the presentation” of the object.10 But the subjective nature of the experience takes on a distinctly transcendent aura for it appears not to derive from the individual’s particular interests, desires, or needs. As Kant puts it, although based in subjective experience, a person’s liking of something he designates as beautiful appears as if it were universal because he “is conscious that he himself [feels so] without any interest. . . . because he cannot discover, underlying this liking, any private conditions, on which only he might be dependent” (54 §6). In this context, Peabody’s contention that the aesthetic “sinks and subordinates the observer to the object,—which, by putting my personality aside, enables me to see the object in pure uncolored light” reflects rather than contradicts Kant’s definition. Because one’s personality—individual interests, particular needs or desires—seems not to play a role in aesthetic judgment, the object, purely in itself, seems to cause our reactions, despite the fact that they are subjective. As Robert Kaufman has argued, for Kant the aesthetic judgment does not lead to universally applicable values, but rather individuals experiencing the beautiful feel as though the object conjuring such feelings must be beautiful for all because they see no personal, self-interested causes for their pleasure. The feeling of universal acceptance is not one declared to be true, but rather a recording of what the subject feels must be true, although it cannot be: “We can see, at this point, that nothing is postulated in a judgment of taste except such a universal voice about a liking unmediated by concepts. . . . all that is postulated is the possibility of a judgment that is aesthetic and yet can be considered valid for everyone. The judgment of taste  





Introduction

itself does not postulate everyone’s agreement” (Kant 60 §8). Kant does not claim that the reaction or judgment is or should be universal but only that the observer, the participant in the experience, feels as if the judgment must be universal. The aesthetic experience, in this way, “must involve a claim to subjective universality” (Kant 54 § 6). This book builds on this understanding of aesthetics as primarily experiential in insisting on the distinction between aesthetic experience and normative aesthetic judgments. I take it as axiomatic that something distinguishable as aesthetic experience is potentially accessible to any sentient human and that no objective standard can or should exist for defining what objects or phenomena constitute such an experience. Rather than delineating how specific formal features meshed with sociohistorical conditions to produce such experiences for specific groups of readers, I focus on how a variety of romantic writers delineated aesthetic experience in the terms I have begun to sketch out—as sensuous and individualizing, yet seemingly universal; as the product of specific, yet indeterminate material conditions that would not necessarily give rise to a similar experience in others. In particular, I will argue that a distinct strain of romantic thinking helps to bracket aesthetic experience as distinctly pre-political, as occupying a moment determined by sociohistorical conditions yet yielding no definite political effect in and of itself.

Electricity and the Matter of Materiality

 

 

Suffusing the works of British and American romantic poets and thinkers, metaphors of electricity frequently came to figure this kind of subjective universality, a kind of embodied transcendence, from the late eighteenth century through the middle of the nineteenth century. Alluding to either an intense, nearly physical emotion, a shocking sense of sympathy, or an ecstatic feeling of transcendence, electricity served a variety of writers as a vehicle for imagining aesthetic experience in scientific, sociopolitical, and spiritual terms. While Whitman’s body electric is perhaps the best-known example of poetic electricity, the idea that an “electric spirit and mysterious principle . . . distinguish[es] the off-spring of genius from that of talent and industry” appeared frequently in American literary criticism and popular discourse by the mid-nineteenth century.11 To cite some of the more famous examples, Ralph Waldo Emerson speaks of the poet drawing on “a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the con-



Introduction

 

 

 

ductor of the whole river of electricity”; Margaret Fuller repeatedly refers to “the especial genius of woman” as “electrical in movement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency,” equating the lyrical and the electric; and Edgar Allan Poe describes those “moods of the keenest appetency, when the film from the mental vision departs” as occurring when “the intellect, electrified, surpasses . . . its every-day condition.”12 What Whitman’s figure of this poetic electricity captures best, and what this study will foreground, is the bodily physicality and sociohistorical materiality of this electric experience. Metaphors of aesthetic electricity, I argue, were outgrowths of residual and emergent literary, popular, and scientific understandings of electricity, and these sources for aesthetic electricity point to the attempt of many to imagine aesthetics as a sensuous experience of the individual body embedded in specific social situations that somehow led to the momentary suspension of the individual in a sense of a larger whole. Electricity was simultaneously and variously conceived of as a material fluid, as a spiritual medium, as a disembodied force, and these various conceptions supported considerations about the relationship between physical vitality and electricity, as it came to be seen as identical to or analogous with both the nervous fluid and life itself. In the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, such ideas and scientific and technological investigations into electricity gave rise to its metaphoric and symbolic use to represent the human potential to harness the natural world and to free humanity from the chains of the past. With the invention and widespread diffusion of the telegraph in the middle-third of the nineteenth century, electricity became more fully linked both to language and communication and to the socioeconomic changes of industrialization transforming western Europe and the United States. In these various ways, electricity was seen to link the world together—technologically, commercially, spiritually, linguistically, physically. A review of a book on electrical medicine expressed this broadly held sentiment in 1861: “pervading all matter, existing in all mineral, vegetable, and animal bodies, not only acting in the combinations of the elements and molecules, but also serving as a means for their separation from each other[,] this imponderable fluid or power, whatever it may be . . . is one of the most active agencies known to man.”13 In aesthetic discourse, electricity could serve to describe aesthetic experience as linking individuals to the universe and to a universal humanity while also emphasizing both its power and its potential to disconnect them from the world and from the larger community. To understand how these figures of electricity operated, then, we need to exam 





Introduction

ine their discursive use alongside the material and scientific developments and economic structures from which they emerged. The book review on electrical medicine emphasizes one of the central reasons for electricity’s prominence in thinking through and describing aesthetic experience. While other figures for the operation of the imagination or the mind more broadly or for aesthetic experience circulated throughout this era in Anglo-American literature—the Aeolian harp, the lamp (or light in general), machinery (including springs, trains, etc.), to name a few— electricity proves a particularly important figure for this study because of the ways it seemed to bridge the spiritual and the material, the natural and the technological. Because electricity troubled Newtonian understandings of the objective world, it spurred questions about the very nature of the material world. Even through the middle of the nineteenth century, electricity remained for most people and some scientists a mysterious substance or power. It seemed to be imponderable—lacking in weight and mass and everything else that would seem to distinguish matter—yet it also seemed to pervade all matter. It was famously destructive, yet seemed akin to some vital life force. It was capable of being used by humans in their most advanced technological marvels, yet its exact properties continued to elude their full understanding. Metaphors of electrical effect and affect were more than just metaphors. Figures of electricity were not simply used to conjure some analogous relationship between aesthetic experience and electrical phenomena. Rather, aesthetic experience itself was often imagined to be, in fact, electrical itself, as the product of nervous impulses viewed as electrical, or the result of words or thoughts conveyed through electrical technology or through a spiritual medium itself envisioned as electric. Equally important, electricity served, in the eighteenth century, as an analogue to the flow of commerce, thus naturalizing an emergent capitalist world. With the invention of the telegraph and its use in the growth and development of global markets, the figure of electricity increasingly represented sophisticated market methods and mechanisms. This conflation of the figural and the literal (or the material) parallels the imprecise nature of aesthetic experience, its quality of having a universal or shared quality and its intense specificity. In what follows, I emphasize how electrical figures and allusions refer to, ground themselves in, and metaphorize the various material and ideological conditions giving rise to the modern discourse of aesthetics—the democratic revolutions, rational science and technology, market developments, global systems, and atomization of individuals that define modernity.



Introduction

 

Above all, Aesthetic Materialism focuses on electricity to explore how writers such as Percy Shelley, Emerson, and Whitman imagined aesthetics as both material and transcendent. To speak of aesthetics as material contradicts the predominant critique of recent decades, that aesthetics is not simply an ideology, but the epitome of ideology. According to most recent critiques, aesthetics consistently, if not necessarily, ends up in formalist or idealist abstraction. Or, perhaps more accurately, the most prominent recent critiques of the aesthetic, most notably those of Paul de Man and Terry Eagleton, do not so much dismiss it for its immateriality as they fault aesthetic theory for not living up to its potential or for abandoning its originary materialism. De Man reads Kant and all of modern aesthetic theory as attempting to discover “the articulation that would guarantee the architectonic unity of the [philosophical] system,” the articulation of some sort of organic structure or experience capable of unifying the varieties of human experience, humanity itself, and human existence with the natural world. Yet Kant’s architectonic figures reveal “the material disarticulation not only of nature but of the body,” leaving us “with a materialism that Kant’s posterity has not yet begun to face up to.” In this way, “the critique of the aesthetic ends up, in Kant, in a formal materialism that runs counter to all values and characteristics associated with aesthetic experience, including the aesthetic experience of the beautiful and the sublime as described by Kant and Hegel themselves.”14 A pure, materialist aesthetics for de Man would foreground the “disarticulation” experienced through the encounter with language, in particular literary language, and thus the radical formalism of this aesthetics marks a continuation of a kind of critical semiology, which “more than any other mode of inquiry, including economics . . . is a powerful and indispensable tool in the unmasking of ideological aberrations, as well as a determining factor in accounting for their occurrence.”15 As Eagleton has argued, de Man’s materialist aesthetics finally abandons the ground of modern philosophical aesthetics—the sensuous, perceiving body—thus dismissing the aesthetic’s promise of “a creative development of the sensuous, creaturely aspects of human existence” in favor of a type of critical reflection on language and the self ’s articulation through language.16 From a Marxist perspective, Eagleton reads the aesthetic, as developed in Britain and Germany in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, as actually providing “the first stirrings of a primitive materialism” (13) as it “mediates between the generalities of reason and the particulars of sense” (15), the individual’s specific experience and universal truths accessed through reason. Yet, despite distinguishing himself from the “drastically undialectical thought of a vulgar Marxist or ‘post-Marxist’ trend  





Introduction

 

 

 

 

 

 

r­

of thought” that would condemn “the aesthetic [as] simply ‘bourgeois ideology’” (8), Eagleton repeatedly concludes that the attempt to build on the specificity of the individual’s embodied experience to create a larger, coherent social collectivity becomes a model of consensual discipline, a model for integrating the particular into a hegemonic whole that tends to abandon its grounding in the socially enmeshed historical body for some transhistoric, idealist conception of “pure form” (196). Where de Man ignores the bodiliness of aesthetic experience in favor of a process of critical reflection spurred by the engagement with literary language, Eagleton, despite his insistence on the individual body’s centrality to the aesthetic, fails to address the particular conditions under which an aesthetic experience takes place, instead offering a thorough if perhaps reductive account of the sociohistorical forces unde lying the articulation of various aesthetic theories. As Isobel Armstrong argues, in the end “Nothing less than the impossibility of the category of the aesthetic is [Eagleton’s] theme.”17 From de Man’s and Eagleton’s opposing positions, aesthetics similarly ends up reifying its material basis in language or the sociohistorical body. The same theoretical problem, however, haunts materialism. As Raymond Williams frames it, “material investigation, grounded in the rejection of categorical hypotheses of an unverifiable kind . . . finds itself pulled nevertheless towards closed generalizing systems: finds itself materialism or a materialism. There is thus a tendency for any materialism . . . to suppose that it is a system like others, of a presumptive explanatory kind . . . at the level not of procedures but of its own past ‘findings’ or ‘laws.’”18 If, as de Man and Eagleton assess it, aesthetics tends towards aestheticization or aestheticism, defining materialism presents nearly as many problems as defining aesthetics and is, as Williams suggests, nearly as prone to ideological abstraction.19 I want to suggest that one of the problems with various materialist critiques of aesthetics is that they tend to ground themselves in the laws of their own version of materiality, in a reduction of the determining factors to a series of findings drawn on the investigation of one structure, process, or element above all others. As Louis Althusser asserted in arguing that ideology has a material existence, “‘matter is discussed in many senses,’ or rather that it exists in different modalities, all rooted in the last instance in ‘physical’ matter.”20 Aesthetic experience, I will insist, is not founded in simply one kind of materiality, but rather takes place in the interstices of different materialities. I argue that a re-orientation of aesthetics has to address four interrelated kinds of materiality, while refusing any one kind of materiality a determining or preeminent role: de Man’s materiality of the signifier, the material na-



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Introduction

ture of language itself; Eagleton’s Marxist historical materialism concerned with the limitations imposed by the social world of economics and politics; the materiality of the perceiving subject, the body through which an aesthetic experience occurs; and, finally, the represented object in response to which—and the object-world within which—that experience takes place. Instead of granting final determining power to one form of materiality, this study emphasizes their interrelationship, the feedback loops running among them and the gaps between them. Thus, the individual body is the site of aesthetic experience, but that experience occurs due to the stimulus produced by some object or a representation of an object whose history is grounded in the broader sociohistorical situation. That sociohistorical situation similarly structures the senses that apperceive the object, while the representation of the object itself is only accessed through the material structures of the medium itself—for literary studies, language—which, once again, are to a large extent the product of the historical situation. Thoroughly historicizing these various materialities fosters a recognition of their relative autonomy. Because the aesthetic challenges our notions of materiality, even as it constitutes itself in materiality, I call my project “aesthetic materialism” rather than “materialist aesthetics,” a terminology contingent on our preconceived idea of what materiality is. “Aesthetic materialism,” then, ascribes determining agency to material reality, even as it compels us to reconceive that very materiality. Just as I focus on aesthetics in terms of experience, as the product of certain processes, so, in echoing Raymond Williams, I want similarly to build a materialism based on a procedure of examining the various forces and objects underlying any sense of materiality. It follows that any account of the aesthetic needs to address both the broader sociohistorical grounds of aesthetic experience and the more specific material events registered on individual bodies. It must attend to the larger sociohistorical forces at work in creating and fostering aesthetic experience while not ignoring the distinctly somatic nature of that experience. Electricity, for many of the writers I study, allowed them to imagine aesthetic experience in exactly those terms.

Aesthetic Experience and the Polarities of Romantic Electricity Because aesthetic experience occupies the space between individual experience and social reality, the space created by the intersection of the various materialities evoked by electricity, it is both subjective and universal. The subjective nature of this universality provides both the utopian impulse



Introduction

in aesthetic politics and aesthetic ideology’s coercive power. Aesthetic Materialism attempts to navigate between these poles by maintaining its focus on this very experience of subjective universality. In the aesthetic experience, the self seems to recede, as individuals give themselves over to the object (or, more properly, the perception of the object), and thus are left feeling as though anyone would have the same reaction. In that moment, it is inconceivable that anyone would not recognize the beauty, the sublimity, the humor, the ugliness of the thing perceived. The perceiving subject, in other words, recognizes no basis for this judgment in his or her particular interests, investments, desires. As such, this experience seems to place the individual outside civil society, the modern arena “of uncoerced human association and also the set of relational networks—formed for the sake of family, faith, interest, and ideology—that fill this space.”21 While an aesthetic experience might occur only because of one’s place within society— one’s social background, age, education, location, or privilege in relation to particular institutions—it does not directly or immediately involve the self in the negotiations, struggles, and identifications attendant in the working of civil society. Individuals may feel moved by a Picasso painting or Eliot’s “The Waste Land” only as a result of the training and education they have received due to their class position, their own individual histories crisscrossed by relations of power involving gender, nationality, and sexuality. Others may be touched by a renaissance Pietà or be moved by the beauty of a Thomas Kinkade painting due to a similar confluence of different overdetermined reasons. Yet that does not mean that the individual’s aesthetic experience of those objects necessarily feeds back into or undermines the social structures and ideologies giving rise to those particular encounters. In its intense focus on the sensuous perception of the object itself, the aesthetic momentarily interrupts both the dominant sense of the self as interested and autonomous and an instrumentalized orientation towards the world. In this way, aesthetics leads to “putting into question the individual’s ‘ordinary’ relation to all spheres of existence, and of reconstituting them as sites of aesthetic incompletion,” “the ceaseless problematization of and withdrawal from all normative judgment itself.”22 The most compelling attempts at revitalizing aesthetics have understood aesthetics in these terms, but have tended to move, too quickly, it seems to me, towards reading aesthetics as constituting a progressive politics focused on indeterminacy.23 Even in its recognition of the contingency of experience and identity, of the ambivalence of representation, the aesthetic experience’s political effects—or even its tendencies—remain indeterminate. That is not to say that aesthetic experience remains permanently outside

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Introduction

the political. Instead, as “subjective universality” indicates, aesthetic experience always posits a reference to other people. In the aesthetic moment, the individual feels at one with some universal humanity who must have the same reaction. Yet the subjective nature of the event reiterates the observer’s detachment both from the object—as a result of language’s mediation, the nervous system, and individual experience—and from any imagined universal community. These elements come together in the almost involuntary need to share this response—“Isn’t that beautiful? Isn’t that horrifying?” The question is simultaneously rhetorical—of course it’s beautiful—and is in need of confirmation because the experience’s universality is already in doubt. If the first moment of the aesthetic experience seems, in its apparent disinterestedness, to lie completely outside of both society and politics, the immediacy of the second moment indicates that such an experience inexorably moves towards the recognition of a larger community and the recognition that others might not share the reaction. It is through these second-level reflections or responses that aesthetics leads to the political.24 While this experience can possibly lead to a celebration of difference, a skepticism towards any universalizing or normalizing claims, it is equally or more likely that it will feed into a reactionary response wherein the experience is taken to define what is truly human or what links a particular group together. To cordon off aesthetic experiences that lead to specific, exclusionary identifications—nationalistic, racist, class-bound—or that lead to an easy sort of universal humanism is to return, in different form, to a norm for judging such experience. Not to recognize those uses of or responses to aesthetic experience as possible, if not predominant, is to engage in a naïve celebration of aesthetics forgetful of the work of the past decades that has outlined the ways aesthetic experience is frequently made to be complicit with narrowly defined interests. It is essential, then, to bracket this first moment of sociopolitical indeterminacy in examining aesthetic experience. In reconsidering contemporary ideas and claims about aesthetics, this book focuses on writers who attempted to hold onto the first ambiguous moment of aesthetic experience, to hold in abeyance both the move towards the political and the subsequent defining and delimiting of the ineffability of the experience. Electricity, for these writers, suggested the fleeting, instantaneous, and elusive qualities of such aesthetic encounters. Yet electricity only works to figure aesthetic experience in these ways due to its sociohistorical location, due, that is, to the scientific and popular understandings of electricity during a period stretching, roughly, from the late eighteenth century



Introduction

to the middle of the nineteenth. My argument runs in two directions to convey both the possible uses of electricity for figuring aesthetic experience and the historical transitions that enabled and limited those uses. From an historical perspective, I move from the mid-eighteenth century, tracing the relationship between the transatlantic investigation of electricity and the development of romantic aesthetics, through the invention of the telegraph and the utopian visions it fostered, to the end of the nineteenth century and the telegraph’s thorough embeddedness in monopoly capitalism. Throughout this period, electric phenomena were frequently used to describe or were seen as particular manifestations of the various materialities I locate at the center of aesthetic experience: the volatility and power of language, the shocking confusion of individual boundaries ensuing from the contact—especially sexual contact—of human bodies, and the networks of social, political, and economic power underlying individual experience. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, those connotations largely derived from analogies of electricity with commerce, from considerations of electricity as spiritual, and from speculations about the electrical nature of the body. These disparate ideas contributed to the development of electrical science and technology, and with the invention and development of the telegraph, electricity became an even more potent figure for social and political connection, the power of language, and the link between the spiritual and the physical. By the end of the century, however, the thorough corporatization of telegraphy, the diffusion of other electrical technology, and the demystification of electricity largely sapped the power of electricity to suggest the transformative power of imagination or the shocking effect of aesthetic experience. The first two chapters of this book outline two trajectories for understanding aesthetic experience as electrical. In both cases I move from the late-eighteenth century through the middle of the nineteenth and from a transatlantic context to a more specifically American one, examining texts addressing literary aesthetics as well as works on electricity, telegraphy, and their relationship to the human body, society, and language. Recognizing the international context of discussions about aesthetics and electricity reveals fresh connections among the authors, movements, and ideologies I examine. In particular, re-examining American romanticism through the different varieties of British and European romanticism augments our understanding of the complex relationship between transcendentalism and materialism in the works of writers such as Fuller, Melville, and Emerson. In the first chapter, I explore the friendship between Samuel T. Coleridge

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and Samuel F. B. Morse to reconstruct the transatlantic uses of electricity as a figure for imagining the politically conservative ends of art in modern society. The chapter moves on to examine the two dominant modes of understanding the telegraph that emerged in the 1840s and 1850s, arguing that they bridge the idealism of Coleridge and the technological utopianism of Morse. On the one hand, spiritualists grasped the telegraph as a material instrument revealing the immaterial interconnectedness of all humanity, all life, all creation. On the other hand, techno-utopianists envisioned the telegraph, along with the railroad and the steamship, accomplishing the material, commercial unification of the world, a world union that would be run by the intellectually and spiritually gifted races of Europe. I end this chapter by examining James W. Taylor’s The Useful and the Beautiful (1844), an otherwise unnoteworthy pamphlet that exemplifies how these various lines of thinking—Coleridge’s romantic idealism, Morse’s republicanism, American techno-utopianism, and spiritualism—could come together. What is finally at work in this disparate group is an attempt to delimit the material indeterminacy of aesthetic experience by conjoining it to a specific ideology. As such, this chapter describes a tendency to codify the step from the initial aesthetic experience to its social moment by using electricity, its laws, and its technological uses to universalize the terms, the conditions, and effects, of such experience. Recent critiques of aesthetics have emphasized such universalizing, ideological claims, but in doing so they have tended to read this response as constituting aesthetics, not as simply one possible response to aesthetic experience. By more thoroughly historicizing and materializing this movement, by suggesting the basis of this particular response to the problematic of the aesthetic in the economic, scientific, and political developments of the age, the first chapter allows us to discern the other possible readings of aesthetic experience that comprise the remainder of the book. The second chapter thus runs counter to the first by describing an interconnected, but distinctly different, line of thought that emphasizes the disruptive, unpredictable nature of aesthetic and electric connection. Unlike Coleridge who retreated from his more materialist and radical youth into a conservative idealism, Percy Shelley built on hypotheses about the mind and nervous system as electric to imagine electricity as a more indeterminate, generative, natural force capable of spurring radical sociopolitical change, a force he equated with the potential of poetry itself. For many, the invention of the telegraph suggested the potential elimination of exactly that kind of physiological, cultural, and linguistic unpredictabil-

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Introduction

ity and opacity. Telegraphic networks played an essential role in the consolidation of capital and political power. Yet they enabled the imagining of new sorts of social connections and emblematized a type of interconnectedness—used in theorizing the permeability of the body itself and its intersection with the world through the nervous system—that challenged dominant notions of the discrete self. This chapter outlines two reactions to this challenge, one represented by Nathaniel Hawthorne, where the destabilizing potential of electrical technology and connection are rejected for their possible violation of the intrinsic self, the other figured in elements of Thoreau’s works, where, despite his anti-technological tendencies, electricity comes to mirror the ability of art to shock individuals into a recognition of their ever-shifting, fluid relationship to the world. More profoundly, in Pierre, Herman Melville repeatedly emphasizes the instability of the knowledge, connections, and insights allowed by a kind of aesthetic electricity, hinting at the futility of ideological attempts—from the left and the right— to delineate the precise limits and effects of a material aesthetic experience. In this way, these various writers—Shelley and Thoreau as well as Hawthorne and Melville—come together to indicate how the views elaborated in the first chapter attempted to paper over the fluid, dynamic nature of aesthetic experience. As such, they gesture to the ways that aesthetic experience disrupts any attempt to be limited in its political or social effects. In the final two chapters, I build on the first two chapters to explore the particular uses of electricity to figure aesthetic experience and its indeterminate political implications in antebellum America. While Frederick Douglass’s antebellum autobiographies, journalism, and fiction aimed specifically at ending slavery, he draws on an aesthetic understanding of electricity to problematize the universalizing discourses of human rights that his antislavery politics depended on. In his novella, “The Heroic Slave,” and his two antebellum autobiographies, Douglass uses electrical imagery both to suggest the slave’s embodied possession of a universal desire for freedom and a universal appreciation for beauty and to indicate the distance between the slave’s experience and that of the white readers. Contrasting Douglass’s denial of white readers’ complete understanding of the slave experience with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s use of electricity in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, this chapter links his use of electricity to Emerson’s transcendentalist view of electricity as emblematizing the relationships between the self and the world and between art and politics. The fourth chapter builds on this foundation to produce a close-reading of “I Sing the Body Electric.” Drawing on techno logical, spiritualist, and aesthetic understandings of electricity, Whitman

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Introduction

refuses any easy relationship between body and identity, insisting, instead, on the transient experience of connection, identification, and omprehension. In particular, the slave auction scenes and the final catalogue of the poem elaborate Whitman’s intensely corporeal understanding of aesthetic experience as electric and as potentially transformative of the perspectives and assumptions that underlie, but do not constitute, political commitment and action. Whitman’s postbellum poetry presents the most thorough late-centur attempt at grounding aesthetic experience in electrical thought. In the conclusion, I turn to probably the most famous telegraphic work in American literary history, Henry James’s In the Cage, to complete my historical analysis of the range of aesthetic electricity. While the novella foregrounds the linguistic and social gaps that telegraphy is supposed to overcome but in reality exposes, it never suggests the potential of art or technology, of language or electricity, to close those gaps in meaningful ways. James’s text imagines the telegraph as reinforcing the “iron cage” of the capitalist ethos rather than truly enabling a way of reimagining the self and its relationships to the world and society. Pointing to developments in the consolidation of the telegraphy industry in the United States and Europe and to the growing knowledge about and domestication of electricity as well as to James’s formalism, I argue that James’s novella reflects the exhaustion of electricity as a material emblem for aesthetic experience by the end of the nineteenth century. Yet, despite reflecting significant cultural, social, and economic changes in the Anglo-American world, James’s example does not represent the foreclosure of aesthetic experience as potentially leading to a more energized form of social engagement. While electricity would largely, but not completely, retreat as a vehicle for thinking about aesthetic experience, alternative concrete figures—based in the changing material realities and our perceptions of them—would continue to offer the possibility of constructing aesthetic experience in the terms I have described. My narrative moves, then, from the use of aesthetic electricity to render art an instrument for the use of social engineering to electricity and telegraphy to figure the gap between art and the social world. As I travel from didacticism to aestheticism, I emphasize a third way of understanding aesthetic experience through electricity, an understanding that recognizes the entrenchment of aesthetics within the social, material world but insists on the uncertainty of the effects produced by the intersection of the economic, the physiological, and the linguistic. That experience both challenges the sociopolitical status quo by fostering the recognition of a common human-

y­

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Introduction

ity and the limits of that commonality and remains politically uncommitted due to its erasure of the interests, identities, and rights at the core of modern politics. Critical practice in the past decades has demonstrated the all-too-powerful ways that aesthetics has historically been used to reinforce social, economic, and political distinctions by placing particular groups outside of the universal humanity aesthetic claims involve. By recovering the attempts of a variety of writers to figure aesthetic experience as material through electrical science, technology, and imagery, Aesthetic Materialism acknowledges the force of the political uses of aesthetics while emphasizing the difference between aesthetic experience proper and its mobilization for political ends. Moving beyond notions of the aesthetic as form—as canonized (and thereby fossilized) thought and practice, as secular sacralization—to consider aesthetic experience as recorded and inculcated by certain literary practices within specific historical situations would constitute the next step in, rather than a retreat from, cultural and historical approaches to the literary sphere.

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chapter one

Idealist Aesthetics and the Republican Telegraph

In 1829, Thomas Carlyle famously denounced the nineteenth century as the “Mechanical Age,” offering what has often been taken as the quintessential romantic view of science and technology. According to Carlyle, in the physical as well as the spiritual realms, “We war with rude Nature; and, by our resistless engines, come off always victorious, and loaded with spoils.” Through this process, “nothing follows its spontaneous course, nothing is left to be accomplished by natural methods. Everything has its cunningly devised implements, its pre-established apparatus; it is not done by hand, but by machinery.” In this way, “Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand.”1 Carlyle indicts a merely materialistic science and technology and an economic materialism for endangering the heart, the soul, and art, for offering only a particularizing knowledge of the physical world and not access to the deeper, unifying truths of the universe. Yet this distinctively romantic view of art as potentially enabling insights into the complex field unifying self, nature, and God grew, in large part, out of the scientific and technological developments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As a number of literary and cultural historians over the past decades have demonstrated, romantic writers frequently drew on scientific insights into the natural world and evoked the imaginative, world-changing possibilities of technology. Similarly, historians of science have shown how a number of leading scientists were deeply influenced by romantic ideas concerning the unified nature of the universe and its forms of matter and force and the romantic emphasis on the importance of perspective. In the same way, romanticism was not simply a reactionary response to the market forces

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unleashing a new ethos of self-interested individualism and the philistine accumulation of wealth. Instead, the romantic ambivalence about new technologies and the economic forces that promoted them was, in fact, the product of the contradictions inherent to the emergence of industrial capitalism. In developing my argument that a specific strain of romantic aesthetics drew on electrical science and technology to figure aesthetic experience as both material and transcendent, I first need to set up this background by returning to the eighteenth century and earlier, examining important electrical experimenters and theorists such as Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, and Joseph Priestley, in the context of the emergence of romanticism in the Anglo-American world. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s figurative uses of electricity in his early poetry tellingly hints at these connections. In the 1790s, Coleridge became friends with Sir Humphry Davy, the leading English electric scientist of the age, and was deeply engaged with both the mechanical associationist thought of David Hartley and Priestley and the radical politics of Priestley and William Godwin. Soon, however, Coleridge’s worldview would change dramatically. Where in his early career, Coleridge embraced revolutionary politics and explored a materialist understanding of the world and human consciousness, his later works consistently define truth as reflecting the ideal, mirroring relationship between consciousness and immutable natural laws. In the process, Coleridge rejected revolutionary social and political changes and refigured electricity less as a natural force than as an emblem of eternal universal laws. In the midst of this conservative turn, Coleridge met a young American painter, Samuel F. B. Morse, who was studying in London. Morse, of course, would go on to become most famous not for his art but for his invention of the electro-magnetic telegraph. Coleridge’s romantic ideology may seem antithetical to the development of new technologies focused on transforming the physical and social world. Yet this chapter traces what I take to be important parallels between Coleridge’s later interconnected ideas about electricity, the mind, and cultural politics and Morse’s thinking about the telegraph. Like Coleridge, Morse based his politics in the commonwealth tradition of republicanism, and I contend that a confluence of romantic thought and late Federalist republican ideology gave rise to Morse’s view of electrical science as a tool paralleling the task he saw for art, the fostering and diffusing of a rational model of behavior and social structure. This model of electric art and technology attempted to harness the electrical force to suture the nation and the world together through the



Idealist Aesthetics and the Republican Telegraph

universalization (and de-materialization) of language, thought, and feeling even as it sought to assure the continued dominance of a Euro-American intellectual elite. In drawing these connections between Morse and Coleridge, I locate their theories within the broader socioeconomic and philosophical changes re-shaping the Atlantic world into a market-driven capitalist realm. It is important to emphasize the transatlantic nature of these transformations, for the ability of commodities, conceptions, and people to cross national borders and move across great distances instantiated the very fluidity of the material and spiritual worlds that electricity was taken to epitomize. Turning to figures such as Franklin and Edmund Burke, I demonstrate the ways that theories about electricity both were influenced by the increased flow of persons and products back-and-forth across the Atlantic and reflected concerns about the disruptive political and social effects of that fluidity. Building on this discussion, I move forward to the mid-nineteenth century to examine how Coleridge’s and Morse’s conceptions about art and electricity prefigured the two dominant reactions to the telegraph in the United States. On the one hand, spiritualist accounts of the telegraph imagined the new technology, through its apparent dispersal of universal reason and a common language, as mirroring a spiritual telegraph permeating the universe and enabling the union of all souls. As in Coleridge’s idealist account of electricity, the telegraph for spiritualists simply emblematized a universal law of relations. While Coleridge’s romantic electricity illustrated an eternal law of structure and opposition that should be replicated in a traditional hierarchical society, spiritualists’ more sentimentalized telegraph revealed a vast egalitarian spiritual union. In both cases, however, the individual experiences of historical forces, social stratification, and lived bodily (sensuous, aesthetic) existence were sublimated in favor of the universal truth they suggested—either the universal law governing all relations or the reduction of human life and differences to a spiritual equality. Techno-utopian celebrations, on the other hand, emphasized the telegraph’s ability to transform the social world through its conquest of nature. While frequently embracing democratic and capitalist ideologies that troubled Morse, this line of thought, nonetheless, reiterated the kind of cultural hierarchy at the center of Morse’s politics by imagining the telegraph as enabling the peaceful Euro-American conquest and transformation of the rest of the world. In concluding, I bring these different strands together by examining James W. Taylor’s The Useful and the Beautiful. Taylor’s little-known pamphlet illustrates how a utilitarian view of electricity

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and electrical technology could be linked to electrical imagery to describe the power of art. As such, I argue, it helps us to see how Coleridge and Morse reflect a similarly anaesthetic and idealist view of cultural production and reception that runs through one tradition of aesthetic thought in the nineteenth century from Friedrich Schiller to Matthew Arnold. This mode of aesthetic thought, as with Morse’s technological imaginings and his racist politics as well as Coleridge’s romantic idealism, expresses a fear of the very basis of aesthetic thought, the sensuous body and its chaotic, potentially indeterminate reception of the world. Anaesthetic technological and romantic attempts to define electricity come together as part of a broader attempt to stabilize and substantiate the links among art, language, political and cultural structures, and the individual mind. Reconstructing this use of electricity then sets us up to recognize, in the chapters to come, the more radical critique of traditional and bourgeois notions of the self, the body, and their boundaries offered by a more materialist version of romantic electricity.

Electric Aether and Associationism The era of literary romanticism witnessed some of the most important breakthroughs in the scientific study of electro-magnetism, discoveries that both drew on and energized European romanticism. Luigi Galvani’s experiments in the 1790s spurred the acceptance of ideas of the animal body as electric or, at least, the notion that nervous impulses were conveyed through a medium akin to electricity, if not by electricity itself. In attempting to replicate Galvani’s experiments—and, finally, disproving his thesis about animal electricity—Allessandro Volta created the first functioning battery, the Voltaic pile. This discovery of the ability to create electricity from the chemical reactions of metals led many to begin theorizing a connection between magnetism and electricity. For German naturphilosophie, a key source for the romanticism of Coleridge and others, this connection reiterated the fact that the universe was a united, organic whole.2 Hans Christian Oersted’s discovery of electricity’s influence on magnetism was guided by such thinking, and his discovery, in turn, led to Michael Faraday’s experimental proofs of electro-magnetic induction, which made the way for the electro-magnetic telegraph as well as the dynamo. Yet even as the early decades of the nineteenth century generated scientific advances essential to modern physics and electrical technology, such developments were far from



Idealist Aesthetics and the Republican Telegraph

strictly progressive. Instead, as Iwan Morus has argued, debates raged over the exact nature of electricity, creating a “heterogeneity of electricity”: “The fluid had a variety of different uses. It could explain the movements of the planets, the structure of the earth, the development of plants, and the organization of the human brain.”3 While electricity’s power was increasingly harnessed and understood, it remained a mysterious force or substance, used to explain a variety of equally mysterious phenomena. Faraday’s findings suggested that electricity was independent of matter, so that, as Barbara Doran has argued, “By the end of the nineteenth century, the mechanical notions of ‘atoms in a void’ and ‘forces acting between material particles’ had been replaced by the notions of the electromagnetic field as a nonmaterial, continuous plenum and material atoms as discrete structural-dynamic products of the plenum.”4 Beginning with considerations of electricity in the eighteenth century as a force permeating the universe, as the life force itself, or as the nervous fluid, scientific and popular, residual and emergent, understandings of electricity challenged a Newtonian worldview of the universe, the mind, and social reality consisting of discrete particles in motion. Early-nineteenth-century thinkers could not imagine the revolution epitomized by the theory of relativity, but they readily recognized that electricity posed a vexing problem for Newtonian science, for its actions could not be easily reconciled with a mechanistic world conceived of in terms of solid atoms acting directly upon one another. In order to resolve this difficulty, Newton had posited a nearly immaterial Aether, a “Medium exceedingly more rare and subtile than the Air, and exceedingly more elastick and active” that “readily pervade[s] all Bodies” and serves as a kind of vehicle for a variety of forces and actions, including vision and gravity. Newton even suggested that this aether might be at work in the nervous system, that “Animal Motion [is] perform’d by the Vibrations of this Medium, excited in the Brain by the power of the Will, and propagated from thence through the solid, pellucid and uniform Capillamenta of the Nerves.”5 Following his lead, most electrical scientists of the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries attempted to view electricity in terms of “streams of tiny invisible particles that acted on matter by direct contact.”6 While readings of electricity as the animating force and Galvani’s theory of animal electricity were largely discounted in the early decades of the nineteenth century (only to re-emerge at mid-century), their premises about an electrical fluid or aether fostered speculations about the relationships between electricity and the nervous impulse, electricity and life, and

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electricity and other natural forces such as gravity and magnetism. Such hypotheses would continue to appear in the work of even some of the leading thinkers on electricity throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. Bridging the spiritual and physical worlds, by providing a materialist understanding of a dynamic or divinely designed universe, electricity seemed, if not identical with the source of nervous impulses or not the prime source of life itself, to supply a ready substitute for both. As a number of historians have argued, Newtonian mechanical physics provided a vital paradigm for eighteenth-century theories of the mind, political systems, and art. One development of this Newtonian model particularly important for late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Anglo-American literature and criticism was psychological associationism.7 Associationism emerged from the materialism of both Hobbes and Locke in the late seventeenth century and influenced the early thought of both Wordsworth and Coleridge. Although associationist thinkers staked out different ground on the question of how determined thought was, all associationists agreed, as James Engell summarizes, “that the mind groups together habitually, almost instantaneously, ideas or images according to certain patterns or, as they became known, ‘laws of association.’” Associationism posited that “There is not one involuntary or voluntary idea, motive, or personal feeling (‘idea of sensation’) that does not stem either from direct sense experience exciting the nerves and our ‘white medullary substance,’ or from a coalescence and mixture of nervous vibrations caused by numerous other ideas.”8 As David Hartley most fully articulated it in the first half of his Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations (1749), this meant linking Newton’s theories about physical vibrations with Locke’s ideas concerning psychological association: “The Doctrine of Vibrations may appear at first Sight to have no Connexion with that of Association; however, if these Doctrines be found in fact to contain the Laws of the Bodily and Mental Powers respectively, they must be related to each other, since the Body and Mind are.”9 As part of what has been called the first cognitive revolution, psychological associationism became an influential attempt at locating the mind as part of the body and of the physical world. For strictly deterministic materialists like Hobbes, viewing the mind as part of the physical world led to the conclusion that “motion determines all mental activity” as thought is “determined by relations established by the original sensation.”10 But as the second half of Hartley’s treatise emphasizes, most associationists attempted—as Kant would do at the end of the



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man, who, from a supreme veneration for the God of nature, takes pleasure in contemplating his works, and from a love of his fellow-creatures, as the offspring of the same all-wise and benevolent parent, with a grateful sense and perfect enjoyment of the means of happiness of which he is already possessed, seeks . . . that greater command of the powers of nature, which can only be obtained by a more extensive and more accurate knowledge of them; and which alone can enable us to avail ourselves of the numerous advantages with which we are surrounded, and contribute to make our common situation more secure and happy.13

 

 

 

 

 

 

Natural philosophy leads to the physical improvement of life, at once deriving from and fostering a true piety for the divine hand behind that physical world. It also has important political consequences, for it ennobles and empowers all of humankind: “This rapid progress of knowledge . . . extends itself not this way or that way only, but in all directions, [and] will . . . be the means, under God, of extirpating all error and prejudice, and of putting an end to all undue and usurped authority. . . . the English hierarchy (if there be any thing unsound in its constitution) has equal reason to tremble at an air-pump, or an electrical machine.”14 As historian James Delbourgo

 

 

 

 

 

century—to reincorporate ideas of free will and Christian theology with an emphasis on a mechanically determined physical world. Accounting for the intersection between a physical world and a spiritual realm—between mechanistic determinism and free choice—associationists frequently turned to electricity. Hartley, for example, cited electricity “as a Clue and Guide . . . that other reciprocal Motions or Vibrations have a great Share in the Production of Natural Phaenomena.”11 As a subtle aether permeating the universe, electricity offered a bridge between the physical and the spiritual, between the inanimate world of Newtonian physics and life itself. In fact, as Patricia Fara has noted, “one major function of electrical aethers was to account for God’s continuing involvement in the world. . . . they offered a reasonable account of how Christian dualism and electrical theory could be reconciled.”12 Despite the broad rejection of Galvani’s animal electricity and Franz Anton Mesmer’s animal magnetism, this spiritualized understanding of electricity continued to provide a powerful possibility for associationists and others concerned with maintaining a philosophical defense of Christian moral responsibility within a materialistic, scientific worldview. The political implications of this kind of spiritualized electricity and associationism emerge in the career of the most important promoter of Hartleian associationism in the late-eighteenth century, Joseph Priestley. In his preface to Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air, Priestley locates natural history within the divine and social order by praising

Idealist Aesthetics and the Republican Telegraph

has argued, electrical language was used during the late-eighteenth century to “naturalize and sacralize revolution as the artless work of higher cosmic forces.”15 While electricity suggested the possibility of a divine presence in a physical and political world governed by Newtonian mechanics, the drive to understand and control electricity simultaneously underscored the competing intentions of humanism. It emblematized humanity’s potential for semi-autonomous self-rule by demystifying not only superstitions concerning the natural world but also the ancien regime and its misuse of power.16 By the end of the eighteenth century, then, electricity simultaneously could represent both a divine force beyond humankind’s control and the human capacity to use God’s gifts to perfect himself.

Coleridge’s Electricity and Romantic Ideology In deploying electricity as a metaphor in his earlier poetry, Coleridge drew on these two meanings, connecting a scientific understanding of electricity with a political-spiritual utopianism; after his conservative turn, however, he would reject such revolutionary and material understandings and posit electricity as simply revealing a complex universal law. Electricity appears in a number of his early poems from the 1790s (see “Ode to Sara”; “To Fortune”; “Songs of the Pixies”; “Lines on an Autumnal Evening”) most often to suggest an intense emotional feeling, especially some physical (or sensuous) manifestation of emotion, of love, through a thrill, a flash of the eye. In these poems, Coleridge echoes the use of electricity from the mid-eighteenth century on as a figure of emotional connection, bodily excitement, and artistic power. Such figures were not merely metaphorical, relating the jolting intensity of emotion to the shock of electricity. They grew out of the materialist understandings of the nervous system and the mind and were anchored in understandings of electricity as a force permeating the universe, as the life force itself, and as the nervous fluid. Robert Southey introduced Coleridge to Priestley’s thought (and indirectly Hartley’s associationism) at the same time he promoted William Godwin as a theorist for their incipient pantisocracy. In Coleridge’s “Sonnet: To William Godwin” (1795), he seems to bring these different influ ences together by describing Godwin as “form’d t’ illume a sunless world forlorn, / As o’er the chill and dusky brow of Night, / In Finland’s wintry skies, the Mimic Morn / Electric pours a stream of rosy light.”17 One basis for this image comes from Priestley’s History and Present State of Electricity

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(1775) where he opines that “the Aurora Borealis is an electrical phenomenon was, I believe never disputed, from the time that lightning was proved to be one.”18 Just as the Aurora Borealis pours electric light onto the winter of Scandinavia, so Godwin’s revolutionary political thought enlightens a “forlorn” world, and makes “OPPRESSION, terror-pale, / Since, thro’ the windings of her dark machine, / Thy steady eye has shot its glances keen” (l. 5–7). Godwin’s illumination of the world takes on a divine radiance in its electrifying nature, an electricity at once physical, spiritual, and emotional. This electric figure, as Peter Kitson has noted, reappears in Coleridge’s commonswealth republicanism in his 1795 lectures The Plot Discovered.19 There, Coleridge specifically connects electricity to the free flow of information in attacking censorship: “By the operation of Lord Grenville’s Bill, the Press is made useless. Every town is insulated; the vast conductors are destroyed by which the electric fluid of truth was conveyed from man to man, and nation to nation” (1:313). Influenced by the scientific thought of Priestley and Davy, as well as the associationism of Hartley and the politics of Godwin, Coleridge’s allusions to electricity in his early poetry and political writing suggest a physical force directly acting upon and shocking the body, a force that then can represent both the potential and necessity of opposing the “machine” of tyranny. Coleridge’s electrical figures also hint at their roots in the soci economic transformations of the eighteenth-century Anglo-American Atlantic world. Priestley’s commentary on the Aurora Borealis directly drew on Benjamin Franklin’s writings on electricity. Franklin became internationally famous with the publication of his Experiments and Observations on Electricity in 1751. Detailing his argument for lightning being electrical and the use of lightning rods to protect people and structures, the book’s innovative theory of electricity posited it as “an extreme subtle fluid, penetrating other bodies, and subsisting in them,” so that the flow of electricity arises from bodies with excessive electricity (positively charged) giving off the fluid to bodies with insufficient electricity (negatively charged).20 Significantly, Franklin’s experiments rapidly became emblematic of the politically revolutionary potential of science and reason. As French finance minister Anne-RobertJacques Turgot famously put it, Franklin “snatched the lightning from the sky and the scepter from the tyrants.”21 Franklin’s humble origins, his revolutionary politics, and his ability to manipulate natural and political power bespoke the democratic capacity for humankind to participate in their own governance and to overcome the limitations of traditional beliefs about the world and society.

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Franklin’s comments on the Aurora Borealis hint at one socioeconomic correlative to this kind of thought. In a letter from 1752—cited by the OED as one of the earliest applications of “current” to electricity—Franklin wonders if “the Aurorae Boreales [sic] are Currents of this [electric] Fluid.”22 Current here derives from the same root as currency (i.e., the “current of money”), and Franklin’s own work on currency, most notably in his pamphlet A Modest Enquiry in the Nature and Necessity of a Paper-Currency (1729), illustrates this connection. Patricia Fara has suggested that Franklin’s view of electricity as a kind of fluid seeking a balanced, level dispersion may have come directly from his experience as a businessman, and she points out that, in turn, his electrical theories provided early political economists, especially the French physiocrats, with a model for their own economic theories.23 Electricity challenged the static model of order suggested by Newtonian mechanics and mechanical innovations. In any singular machine, one cog of a specific size could not be exchanged with another of a different size or with a lever or spring. Yet electricity seemed to be the same everywhere, to be a kind of universal force that pervaded all matter. As Franklin hypothesized in his letter on the Aurora Borealis, because “the Electric Fluid is always the same” and it is “found in all Matter we know of,” it might be a kind of “Universal Medium.” In this way, electricity seemed to suggest a kind of material general equivalent, a form through which, by which, all other forms could be compared and transformed. This idea of the general equivalent, from Marx, finds one of its earliest descriptions in Franklin’s A Modest Enquiry, a pamphlet whose labor theory of value Marx cited in Capital. In arguing for an increase in the supply of paper currency in Pennsylvania, Franklin describes how money, whether a commodity itself, such as gold, or not, is merely a “Medium of Exchange,” “a Measure of Values,” by which “Labour is exchanged for Labour.”24 By making the exchange of labor easier, money becomes such a useful instrument; in particular “Bills of Credit are found very convenient in Business; because a great Sum is more easily counted in Them, lighter in Carriage, concealed in less Room, and therefore safer in Travelling or Laying up” (127). Just as money, currency, provided a universal medium for the exchange of labor, electricity, through its own flow, seemed to represent a universal medium subsisting in and connecting all of the physical universe. From these comments, it seems the electric current of freedom represented by Revolution was equivalent to the financial revolution of the eighteenth century enabling the flow of goods and wealth back and forth across the Atlantic. Of course, for my purposes, one of the most important goods criss-



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crossing the Atlantic were texts of all sorts, including bills of credit, scientific treatises, and political pamphlets. These networks of exchange, as Thomas Haskell has argued, fostered the expansion of sympathy to people in far-off places, augmenting the idea of a universal humanity. In Haskell’s provocative reading of the capitalist origins of anti-slavery thought, bills of credit and other fiduciary instruments are particularly important, for their value depended on merchants, consumers, and producers having faith in (as the term indicates) people they had never seen and would probably never meet. The market forced its participants, through contractualism, to attend to their own power, in the present and the future, to affect events largely divorced from their everyday activities. One need merely consult nearly any eighteenth-century novel to recognize the negative consequences of this expansion of responsibility—the wreck of a ship on the other side of the world, the discovery of a contract from decades earlier, the failure of an economic enterprise across the ocean and their tragic consequences suggested that one’s person and interests spread out in web-like ways across the world. Yet Haskell’s point is that this interdependence also encouraged a greater sense of responsibility for addressing the inequalities and tyrannies of far-flung realms, for it indicated just how linked one’s fate was with another’s.25 One of the favorite electrical experiments of the Enlightenment and after—the nearly instantaneous passing of a current of electricity through a series of human bodies linked by their holding hands—seemed to reflect this basic, if newly economically materialized, fact. All people were connected, or, at least, potentially so, a fact confirmed by a current passing from one body to the next. Electrical science and technology, then, were fostered by the developing global market of the eighteenth century—through the dispersal of scientific knowledge and apparatus and through the material analogies it yielded for analyzing electrical phenomena. Even before the development of more commercially lucrative uses for electricity, it seemed to provide a natural defense of the unimpeded flows of commerce and ideas. This understanding of electricity as a kind of physical general equivalent linked up with the interest in sensibility, in the innate, embodied basis of taste, in imagining humankind as sharing an essential capacity to feel, not simply on an emotive or physical level, but in a realm linking the two with reason and morality. As Jacques Rancière has recently argued, this more universal distribution of the sensible, “the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience,” demarcates the emergence of the distinctly modern aesthetic regime. Because “Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to

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see and the talent to speak, around the properties of space and the possibilities of time,” this aesthetic regime, as opposed to earlier (and residual) representative and ethical regimes, “is strictly identical with the regime of democracy.” Yet, due to its subjective egalitarianism, the aesthetic regime negates “any relationship of necessity between a determined form and a determined content . . . . destroys all of the hierarchies of representation and also establishes a community of readers as a community without legitimacy, a community formed only by the random circulation of the written word.”26 Emerging from the market revolution, the birth of the aesthetic undermined any empirical grounds for making universal claims about the sensible body while positing the possibility of a truly inclusive, egalitarian universality. These connections push us to revise traditional conceptions of the relationship between the development of capitalism and bourgeois ideology and romantic aesthetics. Raymond Williams, for example, reads romanticism as most significantly providing “the opposition on general human grounds to the kind of civilization that was being inaugurated,” through its emphasis on “the embodiment in art of certain human values, capacities, energies, which the development of society towards an industrial civilization was felt to be threatening or even destroying.” Yet romanticism’s “emphasis on a general common humanity” develops not so much against “the aggressive individualism and the primarily economic relationships which the new society embodied” as alongside them.27 As Colin Campbell has demonstrated, romanticism’s focus on individual sensibility and sensation in its development of a kind of modern hedonism went hand-in-hand with the consumer revolution energizing industrial development.28 With its connections to currency, to the flow of goods throughout the Atlantic world, and its potential to represent both a universal physical medium and an equally accessible, specifically human sensibility, electricity and its symbolic uses hint at these intersecting, sometimes contradictory forces. Despite his lifelong antipathy towards the emerging market order, Coleridge’s electric figures of the 1790s grew directly out of these various connections. By the mid-1810s, however, he had abandoned his convictions about radical political change, rejecting a more materialist understanding of the world in general and electricity and thought in particular.29 In Biographia Literaria (1817), he dismisses the idea that electricity is the vital force as simply the latest manifestation of materialistic and mechanical associationist psychology. His attack on Hartleian associationism is central, in fact, to his famous conception of the esemplastic nature of the imagination. For Coleridge, the problem with associationism is that, despite attempts otherwise, it ends in a godless, meaningless, and deterministic view of the world  

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and humanity. The implications of Hartley’s thought are that “the will, and with the will all acts of thought and attention, are parts and products of this blind mechanism, instead of being distinct powers, whose function it is to controul, determine, and modify the phantasmal chaos of association” (7:1:116). Thought, Coleridge insists, is immaterial and does not consist of physical matter, whether particles “like billiard balls,” the fluids of “the humoral pathologists,” or “an electric light at once the immediate object and the ultimate organ of inward vision, which rises to the brain like an Aurora Borealist” (7:1:101). Concluding a long list of modern materialists and their various conceptions of the materiality of thought with the same image of electrical force he used positively to characterize William Godwin’s influence two decades earlier, Coleridge suggests both the continuities and changes in his conception of electricity. Electricity still potentially represents a revolutionary force, but one based not in nature but in the deceptive fictions of a materialist worldview. The political implications of this materialism are further emphasized in a passage first published in The Friend in 1809 and reproduced almost verbatim in Biographia Literaria. Tracing “The magic rod of fanaticism” (7:1:197), as it manifested itself in revolts from the German peasants of the sixteenth century to the Puritans of the seventeenth century, Coleridge contends that “The same principles dressed in the ostentatious garb of a fashionable philosophy once more rose triumphant and effected the French revolution.” Soon thereafter, “the detestable maxims and correspondent measures of the late French despotism had already bedimmed the public recollections of democratic phrensy; had drawn off to other objects the electric force of the feelings which had massed and upheld those recollections; and that a favorable concurrence of occasions was alone wanting to awaken the thunder and precipitate the lightning from the opposite quarter of the political heaven” (7:1:199). Rather than representing both love and revolution, as in his youth, electricity came to signify the dangers of a materialistic view of the world in the sociopolitical sphere. The mature Coleridge did read electricity as an important natural phenomenon but only so far as it reflected ideal, transcendent truths. In his “Essay on the Principles of Method” (1818), he notes that “In the phaenomena of magnetism, electricity, galvanism, and in chemistry generally, the mind is led instinctively, as it were, to regard the working powers as conducted, transmitted, or accumulated by the sensible bodies, and not as inherent” (4:1:462). Noting that both materialists and spiritualists have used this tendency to support their flawed conclusions, Coleridge argues that what is “common to, and involved in” all of their hypotheses is “the idea of

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two—opposite—forces, tending to rest by equilibrium. . . . These give the law, and in it the method, both of arranging phaenomena and of substantiating appearances into facts of science” (4:1:478–479). For him, the physical universe and its laws—in particular, the laws of electricity and chemistry—mirror or reflect the mind at work. The true solution to the idealist/materialist debate is to recognize an underlying dialectical structure for both thought and the physical world. Drawing on the work of German naturphilosophie, Coleridge comes to argue that electricity is not properly the vital force or the poetic force, for nothing material can be. While electricity itself may appear volatile, fluid, uncontainable, the truth it reveals is impervious to time, change, society. It simply exemplifies the ideal laws that govern reality, the reality of the mind. In this way, as Maria Tatar has described, the naturphilosophie “concept of nature as an organic whole, the identity between nature and the human mind, the notion of a tripartite rhythm in the history of human consciousness, and the principle of polarity—came to serve as the very foundations of Romantic poetry.”30 Organicist romantic aesthetics, in such a light, reveals its idealist orientation of viewing natural phenomena as indicators of sublime, transcendent truths, as the material world, whether manifested in electric science, poetry, or social structures, comes to function, primarily, as a reflection or outgrowth of an ideal, defining systems of laws. This is essentially what Jerome McGann describes as romantic ideology. With their “concepts of Romantic Nature and Imagination as touchstones of stability and order” outside the social world, McGann contends that “The idea that poetry, or even consciousness, can set one free of the ruins of history and culture is the grand illusion of every Romantic poet.”31 Rather than “reveal the contradictory forces which human beings at once generate and live through, and . . . provide the reader, both contemporary and future alike, with the basis for a sympathetic and critical assessment of those forces” (121), the British romantics, Coleridge and Wordsworth in particular, but Byron and Percy Shelley as well, responded “to the age’s severe political and social dislocations . . . [by] reach[ing] for solutions in the realm of ideas” (71). Thus, where electricity, in its poetic uses in romanticism, as represented by Coleridge at least, starts out as aesthetic and as experiential—as sensuous, as registered on the body, as shocks or a fluid moving through the sensuous body influencing and changing it, and, in turn, allowing the possibility of changing society—it ends up as simply a vehicle to a kind of anaesthetic theoretical contemplation of the ideal, a balanced and static structuring of the universe and political society.  

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Republican Electricity and Idealist Aesthetics

 

 

Terry Eagleton’s well-known account of aesthetic ideology interprets this movement away from the body as intrinsic to all aesthetic theory if not to aesthetics itself. Eagleton attempts to produce a dialectical description of aesthetic theory in the modern West, arguing that aesthetic ideology is at the “heart of the middle class’s struggle for political hegemony” even as it “provides an unusually powerful challenge and alternative to these dominant ideological forms” through its “creative turn to the sensuous body.”32 In focusing on German thinkers, Eagleton only mentions Coleridge occasionally, usually to lament or simply describe the way that the political right, from Edmund Burke onward, has largely captured aesthetic ideology in the British context, drawing on it both as a critique of the emerging bourgeois hegemony from a traditionalist emphasis on organic unity and as a defense of the new order through its supplementary capacity to provide a sensuous, moral counter-weight to an unimpeded market ethos (59–62). While this chapter analyzes the various ways an electrical understanding of aesthetic experience (and of the world, the body, society) were channeled into static worldviews for ideological ends, my central argument in the chapters that follow is that this universalizing move of aesthetic judgment is only one of several possible responses to the problematic of the aesthetic, the problem, in Kant’s phrase, of subjective universality. The universalizing tendency of aesthetics dominates recent discussions of aesthetics as ideology, with Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794– 95) often taking a central role in marking a turn away from Kant’s transcendental philosophy and towards a more distinctly political understanding of aesthetics.33 Against Kant’s aesthetic subjectivism, Schiller returns to the idea of an objective taste, only realizable when “man is a complete being, when both his fundamental drives [sensuous drive and formal drive] are fully developed.”34 It is through the aesthetic, through taste, that humanity can achieve this completion, this wholeness of being, not just on the level of the individual but on the national or social level—“Taste alone brings harmony into society, because it fosters harmony in the individual. All other forms of perception divide man, because they are founded exclusively either upon the sensuous or upon the spiritual part of his being. . . . only the aesthetic mode of communication unites society, because it relates to that which is common to all” (215). Aesthetics becomes the essential sphere for reconciling the individual with society, so that “if man is ever to solve that

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problem of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through Beauty that man makes his way to Freedom” (9). By envisioning the individual human as potentially achieving complete self-integrity, as achieving an internal wholeness and completion, and by espousing a “pure concept of human nature” grounded in the “absolute and unchanging” (71), Schiller is able to imagine a political state free of unresolvable conflict. Freedom is possible, then, because of the “absolute, unchanging, unity of [the individual’s] being” (57): “Wholeness of character must therefore be present in any people capable, and worthy, of exchanging a State of compulsion for a State of freedom” (23). For this line of thought, which runs on the left through Marx’s idea of species-being, to Ernst Bloch’s utopian function of art, to Herbert Marcuse’s aesthetic dimension, the political force of aesthetics lies in its radical vision of a non-alienated humanity.35 Schiller’s aesthetics became an essential template for nearly all utopianist, leftist aesthetics because it imagined the aesthetic realm as laying the groundwork for the production of free individuals able to work and live in complete harmony with one another.36 Despite maintaining his commitment to a more liberal politics, Schiller’s aesthetic politics parallels Coleridge’s as attempts to delimit the imagination as the basis for politics in reaction to the French Revolution. Schiller’s response to the problematic of the aesthetic was grounded, as Josef Chytry notes, “in his lifelong commitment to Commonwealthman political liberalism,” and, as Peter Kitson has argued, in the 1790s, when he began to “strike a Burkeian posture,” Coleridge drew on “the Commonwealthsman tradition to move from his radical reading of the constitution to one where the rights of property were sacrosanct.”37 Kitson’s argument that Coleridge’s political thought largely derived from commonwealthsman republicanism is important for filling in the contours of this aesthetic politics. While the historiographical debates about the rise of liberalism and its relationship to the classical commonwealth republicanism of the eighteenth century has died down, the so-called republican synthesis remains an important touchstone for understanding eighteenth-century British and American political thought. As most fully described by J. G. A. Pocock, commonwealth republican ideology combined an emphasis on the foundational nature of individual liberty with a distrust in governmental power even as it stressed the need for a disinterested civic virtue. Essential to the health of any republic was its unity and homogeneity embodied in the virtuous nature of its citizenry, a virtue grounded in economic independence based in simplicity, frugality, and industry, and in a deference to one’s betters.38 In the



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last few decades, historians have tended to read republicanism as always in dialogue with, always intermingled with, strains of Whiggish mercantilism and Lockean liberal thought, and by the 1790s, in both the United States and Great Britain, any kind of pure republicanism was all but dead due to the increasing prominence of the emerging capitalist order. Coleridge’s link to Burke can further elucidate this merging of republican and liberal thought with aesthetic ideology, allowing us to better situate Coleridge’s idealist electricity in the context of aesthetic discourse and contemporary economic, political, and philosophical developments. His later politics, as several critics have noted, begin to approach the conservative traditionalism Burke espouses in his later writings, most notably Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), with their focus on a cultural heritage bound to the church as an essential social foundation for the nation.39 Coleridge’s use of electricity to convey the destructive potential of the democratic “phrensies” of enthusiasm all but echoes Burke’s comments in his Letters on A Regicide Peace (1796–97), what Pocock describes as the “wild jeremiad of a mind at the end of its tether.”40 There, Burke asserts that “The correspondence of the monied and the mercantile world, the literary intercourse of academies; but, above all, the press of which they had in a manner, entire possession, made a kind of electrick [sic] communication every where” which “made every Government, in it’s [sic] spirit, almost democratick [sic].”41 This point follows his earlier comment in the same work that ambassadors to France are likely to “become true conductors of contagion to every country, which has had the misfortune to send them to the source of that electricity” (9:206). Electricity represents, as it does for the later Coleridge, a contagious, dangerous democratic spirit linked to the popular press and its circulation of subversive ideas. Yet, again like Coleridge, electricity can also stand for the natural order such a spirit threatens to overthrow. In Reflections, Burke lectures that the confiscation of church lands has destabilized the state: “The perennial existence of bodies corporate and their fortunes” provides “a great power for the mechanism of politic benevolence.” Destroying this power, “growing wild from the rank productive forces of the human mind[,] is almost tantamount” to attempting to destroy “the power of steam, or of electricity, or of magnetism.” Rather than destroying these energies—which have “always existed in nature” and have frequently seemed “unserviceable”—humankind, through “contemplative ability, combining with practice skill, tamed their wild nature, subdued them to use, and rendered them at once the most powerful and the most tractable agents in subservience to the great views

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and designs of men.”42 Dismantling the traditional, natural social institutions, it seems, reverses the conquest of nature and unleashes the powerful forces those institutions held in check—electricity, but also language and wealth—to do further harm. These dual uses of electricity, I want to suggest, fuse a fear of the centrifugal forces of capitalism, the fact, as Marx and Engels famously put it, that “all that is solid melts into air,” with an attempt to harness those economic forces for the use of traditional powers.43 As Pocock has described, for all of its emphasis on tradition, Reflections embraces many central tenets of political economy.44 Burke’s early writings on the beautiful and the sublime help us to see this tension at the core of a certain kind of conservative aesthetics that Coleridge’s mature thought exemplifies and points to the place of language in this attempt to delimit, while opening up, the possibilities of sensuous existence. In Burke’s account of taste in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757–1759), he builds on the sensational psychology of Locke and the moral humanism of Frances Hutcheson and others to derive the idea of a universal taste from the sensuous existence of all humans, arguing that the “standard both of reason and Taste is the same in all human creatures,” because “We do and we must suppose, that as the confirmation of their organs are nearly, or altogether the same in all men, so the manner of perceiving external objects is in all men the same, or with little difference.”45 Burke acknowledges that tastes do differ, based on “the habits, the prejudices, or the distempers of this particular man” (15). And, drawing on the Lockean heritage of mechanical association, Burke speaks of the “governing motions” of our passions and the difficulty of distinguishing between “natural effects” and our earliest “associations” (130). But he argues that despite our different experiences and the different mental associations those experiences produce, all humans retain some access to the primitive body, as “There is in all men a sufficient remembrance of the original natural causes of pleasure, to enable them to bring all things offered to their senses to that standard” (16). The sublime becomes so important for Burke because its power seems to overcome the different reactions generated by individuals’ different experiences, allowing us to access the foundations of a universal taste. For Burke, by the end of his career at least, the solution to both political and aesthetic disharmony lies in the wisdom of traditional institutions. Yet it also depends on the policing of language and its uses. In A Philosophical Enquiry, Burke describes the power of words to create a sublime experience due to their very imprecision: “The truth is, if poetry gives us a noble



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h­

assemblage of words, corresponding to many noble ideas, which are connected by circumstances of time or place, or related to each other as cause and effect, or associated in any natural way, they may be moulded together in any form, and perfectly answer their end” (171). Language’s power lies not in its representational capacity but in its ability to inflame “the contagion of our passions” through which “we catch a fire already kindled in another, which probably might never have been struck out by the object described” (175–176). While Burke contends that we find this power to a greater extent in “the languages of most unpolished people” (176), he seems to view language’s contagious, sublime fire in A Philosophical Enquiry as largely positive, as essential to its power to move and motivate. Prefiguring the language of conflagration and contagion he’ll use in his reactions to the French Revolution (in terms which were applied to electricity), Burke seems to suggest in his earlier aesthetic theory that language’s non-representational nature provides us with access to the foundational grounds of a universal human sensibility. For Burke, the sublime starts out as a guarantor against the subjectivist tendencies of associationism in his sensationalist aesthetics. Yet in turning to the indeterminacy of language and the experience of the sensuous body confronted by the sublime to locate the basis for a universal taste, Burke seems to open the door to indiscriminate aesthetic experience. As Eagleton and others have argued, Burke’s aesthetic theory is fundamentally developed to defend the emergence of a middle-class order and its commercial society, a relationship that flashes out in his electric imagery; more specifically, Tom Furniss has emphasized that Burke produces this “inflationary theory of language” at a moment of great concern about the national debt and its potential to endanger class structures.46 In linking the dangers of economic speculation to the dangers of linguistic fluidity, Reflections on the Revolution in France and Letters on a Regicide Peace reverse Burke’s earlier, largely positive account of the destabilizing effects of the commercial revolution on class hierarchies, language, and political power (and the imagery of electricity). In both cases, Burke seems to recognize the process JeanJosep Goux has described where “currency will become a metaphor for the effacement effected by conceptual speculation and also, along another line, a metaphor for the erosion of the distinction, the flattening of relief which afflicts language through its everyday use, just as the use of coins causes wear.”47 Already, in A Philosophical Enquiry, he begins to delimit the proper uses of linguistic power by discriminating between the dangerous “force” of “bombast” which puts “together [words] without any rational

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view” and the truly sublime (166). Where in the earlier work Burke relies on our ability to discern the rational use of words from irrational bombast, by the end of the century, the rise of the middle class and their increased consumption of goods of all sorts, including literature and art, a philosophical associationism grounding taste in aesthetic experience, and a financial revolution whereby everything seemed to be reduced to a price necessitated a return to tradition, a renewed emphasis on traditional institutions as fixing linguistic, symbolic, and financial meaning and thus keeping the horrors of the French Revolution from flowing across the Channel. The older Coleridge echoes many of Burke’s fears, but in the place of traditional institutions, many of which had had little efficacy in the face of the economic and social changes of the eighteenth century, Coleridge posits that the ideal truths of the aesthetic realm are to be guarded and guided by the clerisy, the guardians and regenerators of national, religious, and cultural traditions.48 Like Burke, Coleridge struggled to detach his later thought from its roots in the sensationalist psychology and mechanical materialism of associationism and associationism’s latent subjectivism. Although Coleridge claimed to have overcome psychological associationism by 1801, Jerome Christensen has described how he never fully escaped the associationist problematic or its language of mechanical effects. In his later works, Coleridge denounces a kind of mechanical reading of novels and the mechanical style of French materialists, paralleling Burke’s own critique of the power of the popular press. Yet, at the same time, he frames his critical project as aspiring “To expose the folly and the legerdemain of those who have thus abused the blessed machine of language; to support all old and venerable truths; and by them to support, to kindle, to project the spirit; to make the reason spread light over our feelings, to make our feelings, with their vital warmth, actualize our reason” (4:1:108). Christensen explicates Coleridge’s “blessed machine of language” as suggesting a kind of “utterly impersonal mechanics” consisting of “vital word[s], plumed by the eternal bounty of the invisible,” through which thought and self are disciplined.49 This machine, rather than being the invention of the mechanical tinkering of an individual, is the efflux of divinity, as the “divine purposes in the gift of language[;] are duties too sacred and important to be sacrificed to the guesses of an individual” (4:1:45). Language, at its purest, provides a kind of access, limited as it may be, to divinity itself, to the “old and venerable truths” underlying traditional society. This divine machinery helps Coleridge to counter both the determinism and potential subjectivism of associationism. As he phrases it in Bio-



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graphia Literaria, in criticizing Wordsworth’s theory of diction, “The best part of human language, properly so called, is derived from reflection on the acts of the mind itself. It is formed by a voluntary appropriation of fixed symbols to internal acts, to processes and results of imagination” (7:11:54). In distinguishing among the primary and secondary imagination and the fancy, Coleridge seems to reiterate this idea by defining the primary imagination as “the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM” (7:1:304). It is this synthesis of human perception with eternal creation in the formation of transcendent symbols that Coleridge finds unaccounted for in the mechanical nature of psychological associationism, even as he figures the most important system of symbols, language, as a kind of transcendent machine. In his famous definition of the symbol, Coleridge envisions a vital, true language based in the eternal and connecting the individual imagination to divine truth. The imagination is “that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the Reason in Images of the Sense, and organizing (as it were) the flux of the Senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the Reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths, of which they are the conductors.” It follows, then, that “a symbol . . . is characterized . . . above all by the translucence of the eternal through and in the temporal. It always partakes of the reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that unity of which it is the representative” (6:29–30). Returning to electrical (conductors) and associationist (machine) language, Coleridge’s romantic theory makes that electrical machinery not revolutionary, as Priestley and the younger Coleridge would have it, but divine, with symbolic, poetic language being the preeminent example of a electric machine conducting between the eternal and the individual. As Goux has described, the general equivalent tends, in historico-logical fashion, towards a kind of idealism, as the general equivalent’s abstraction from particulars points to value being located in some form disconnected from any specific particulars. The symbol, with its particularity grounded in universal truth, works to guarantee a universal humanity, an eternal truth, without reducing that universality to a physical level. Yet Coleridge’s continued use of electricity and associationist terms hint at the roots of this type of thought in the technological and economic changes he seeks to rescue the symbol from, suggesting his continued reliance on the destabilization of the market, the flux and flow of modernity, figured as the electric power of language, the electric current

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of commerce. The electrical machinery of the symbol returns us to the very body, its indeterminate reactions and associations—its interests and biases, its proclivities and misreadings—that Coleridge’s republican idealism attempts to escape.

Morse’s Republicanism and Idealist Associationism Born in 1791, the year after Franklin died, Samuel F. B. Morse viewed his career as an artist and an inventor in similar terms as he attempted to synthesize republican and romantic ideologies. While Morse is now known almost exclusively for the telegraph, he had earlier made his name as a painter and as a founder of the National Academy of the Arts of Design.50 In pursuing a career as a painter, he distinguished himself from his father, the leading Federalist and Congregationalist Jedediah Morse, and his father’s generation, when the cultural leaders of New England still tended to be clergy. The younger Morse, however, conceived his task as an artist in essentially the same terms his father imagined his role as minister and author. At the core of Federalist thought was an understanding of the relationship of the mind, society, and literature that built on classical republican notions. As a variety of historians have pointed out, Federalism was not simply a partisan political orientation but a “constellation of religious, moral, and economic principles,” “an understanding of society as an organic web of reconcilable interests, tended and brought into harmony by the judicious leadership of the best educated and most virtuous.”51 This view, as Lewis Simpson has argued, meant that the “literary outlook led Federalist men of letters to assert an analogy between the threat of democracy to political order and the danger of democracy to the organization and control of literature.”52 Whether the clergy proper or authors (often from the clerical ranks) or artists, the role of the cultural elite was to contain this threat. We can begin to discern the relationship of such thought to electricity and electrical imagery by returning to Franklin. While Franklin’s experiments and theories were readily conceived in revolutionary terms by Turgot, Priestley, and others, his own electrical demonstrations in the mid-eighteenth century seem to have had a more conservative turn. In a exhibition called “The Conspirators,” Franklin and his associate Ebenezer Kinnersley would electrify a frame around the picture of the King and then ask audience members to remove the King’s crown. As Franklin described it, “If now the picture be moderately electrified, and another person take



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hold of the frame with one hand, so that his fingers touch its inside gilding, and with the other hand endeavour to take off the crown, he will receive a terrible blow, and fail in the attempt. If the picture were highly charged, the consequence might perhaps be as fatal as that of high treason.”53 Writing almost three decades before the Revolution, Franklin seemed to suggest how the mysterious force of electricity could be used to enforce a model of deferral and submission to the aristocracy. Although in conflict with his later politics, this demonstration resonates with Franklin’s cultural politics. Despite publishing the first novel in British colonial America (Samuel Richardson’s Pamela in 1744) and authoring his own fictional and belletristic pieces, Franklin repeatedly speaks of both science and cultural products as the means for improving the self and the masses. In the Autobiography, for example, after limiting the role of poetry by stating that he “approv’d the amusing one’s Self with Poetry now & then, so far as to improve one’s Language, but no farther,” he describes Poor Richard’s Almanac, the site of many of his most famous sketches, as a “proper Vehicle for conveying Instruction among the common People.”54 More broadly, in his 1784 pamphlet “Information to Those Who Would Remove to America,” he explicitly attempts to dissuade “strangers possessing Talents in the Belles-Lettres, fine Arts, &c” from emigrating, not simply because there are “few rich enough” in the new United States “to pay the high Prices given in Europe, for Paintings, Statues, Architecture and the other Works of Art” but also because such items are simply “more curious than useful.”55 Works of art, above all, should be useful, and their primary use is in providing models for behavior, whether in terms of style, as the Spectator did for Franklin in learning how to write, or in terms of inculcating and fostering useful ideas and behavior, as he describes his Autobiography as doing. The didactic, diffusion model of art and culture underlying Franklin’s attitudes towards science, art, and literature as instruments for shaping the self and the populace imply, as Michael Warner has commented, “a recalcitrant social difference.”56 Hewing more closely to a neoclassical line than his individualistic, dynamic persona might suggest, Franklin’s views on art reiterated the importance of models, models indicating a hierarchical society of masters and apprentices. While leading Federalists and Jeffersonians vociferously disagreed about the proper way to achieve such a society and about the extent to which such a society could be achieved, they similarly embraced this understanding of the role of culture. Competing politicians of the early republic shared the hope that by objectively discerning God’s or Nature’s laws, and discover-

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ing the proper balance of control and discipline in the economic and social realms, they could create a smoothly running, if necessarily imperfect, republican machine of state. This model of culture, nation, and citizen, as Laura Rigal has observed, was often imagined in mechanical imagery and defended in terms of a Newtonian world model, one epitomized by Benjamin Rush’s idea of making citizens into republican machines.57 In discussing the importance of education in a democratic republic, Rush contended that a republic must “revolve upon the wills of the people, and these must be fitted to each other by means of education before they can be made to produce regularity and unison in government.”58 Thus, “if we expect them to perform their parts properly, in the great machine of the government of the state,” we must “render the mass of the people more homogeneous, and thereby fit them more easily for uniform and peaceable government” by “convert[ing] men into republican machines.”59 Implicitly embracing both a Newtonian mechanical world model and a related associationist psychology, Rush and most other early American leaders viewed literature and education as instruments, machines, acting to create one large national machine, mirroring the mechanical design of God’s universe, by rendering individuals machines themselves.60 Yet these images of republican machinery emerged not just from a Newtonian understanding of the physical universe, but also from the rapidly developing use of machinofacture in the United States and Western Europe.61 While Rush and others, most prominently Alexander Hamilton and Tench Coxe in the 1790s United States, envisioned manufacturing as providing the proper discipline for the mass of the republican citizenry, the infant manufacturing economy increasingly fostered self-interest, precisely what Federalists like Jedediah Morse feared most, the rise of the individualistic, nascent capitalistic spirit. Rather than giving voice to individual sensations and passions or providing private means to wealth and success, both the mechanical and the fine arts were supposed to be vehicles by which the educated, disinterested elite gave guidance to the democratic whole, transmitting lessons of republican virtue and preparing individuals to be citizens in a democratic republic. It followed, as the standard literary histories narrate it, that the United States was slow to embrace romanticism’s emphasis on individual imagination and subjectivity and its tendency to eschew moral didacticism. Throughout the early decades of the nineteenth century, neoclassicism remained the overwhelmingly dominant theoretical perspective on literature in the United States.62 When the New England literary establishment, most



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notably the North American Review, began in the late 1810s and early 1820s to accept romanticism, it was, as Lawrence Buell contends, “a conservative sort of Romanticism . . . which commended literature as a vehicle of moral advancement, approved the hopeful Romantic vision of human nature’s capacity for improvement, prizing reason rather than emotion as the proper means to that improvement while at the same time granting a secure place for the latter under the ambiguous heading of ‘moral sentiment.’”63 It was, in short, a de-mystified, optimistic version of Coleridgean idealism that began to take hold in the United States. This process produced a “synthesis” of neoclassicism and romanticism that foregrounded the social importance of literature and the role of intellectuals as the guardians of society’s morals while embracing the idea of the great individual genius, the notion of a greater innate sensibility to beauty, and the importance of national culture.64 Like the young editors of the North American Review and his close friend James Fenimore Cooper, Morse attempted to revitalize a kind of republican neoclassicism for the increasingly democratic and capitalist republic of the early-nineteenth century by infusing it with elements of romanticism.65 Despite his father’s dispute with the more liberal Unitarians of Boston who were behind the North American Review (his father founded a journal, The Panoplist, to oppose the Monthly Review, a journal often seen as preceding the North American Review as the voice of the Boston cultural establishment), Samuel Morse undertook a project similar to theirs in adapting his father’s conservative cultural politics to the democratizing and increasingly market-oriented United States of the 1820s and 1830s. Morse framed the problem in an early letter, when he asked “Are not the refining influences of the fine arts needed, doubly needed, in our country? Is there not a tendency in the democracy of our country to low and vulgar pleasures and pursuits?”66 From this point of view, engendering the masses with the proper taste, as understood in neoclassical terms as a faculty built on innate sensibility but demanding education and refinement (the proper associations), becomes essential to protecting the republic. In his lecture celebrating (and defending) the first anniversary of the National Academy of Design, Morse envisioned the Academy in such terms, as an institution through which “the concentrated labours of the artists of the country can be brought to bear upon the public mind.”67 This power meant that We hold a station in which we cannot be neutral. Our Academy of Arts must have some influence upon public morals: we may be of essential aid to the cause of morality, or we may be an efficient instrument in destroying it; we may help

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This quotation reveals some of the key terms for Morse’s version of a nationalist cultural program. Rather than appealing to and through the body, by “pandering for the sensualist” elements in all, art should act on and “elevate and purify the public mind,” in the service of “Truth and Virtue.” True art is not aesthetic, in this sense, for it addresses a spiritualized mind, not the body, reforming that mind by severing it from the impurities of the body and orienting it towards the “public.” It is merely an instrument, a “handmaid of Truth and Virtue,” rather than a form with its own ends. In sum, art, specifically the large-scale historical paintings Morse dreamed of creating, “would tend to elevate and refine the public feeling by turning their thoughts from sensuality and luxury to intellectual pleasures,” pleasures aligned with their republican duties as citizens and subjects.68 Morse most fully formulated his attempt to combine a neoclassical emphasis on the mechanics and morality of art with a more romantic celebration of the imagination in a series of lectures on the affinity of the arts from 1826. There, he begins to question some of the reigning neoclassical assumptions by arguing that mechanical reproduction, although essential to all forms of art, “will not produce the poetic excitement of the imagination.”69 Echoing Coleridge’s distinction between a fancy that simply combines and an imagination that actually creates, Morse distinguishes this mechanical imitation from intellectual imitation—an imitation “which perceives principles, and arranges its materials according to these principles, so as to produce a desired effect” (59). Yet Morse retains a mechanistic model of how art works, how its effects are actually registered on individuals, as he describes how “an Intellectual Machinery is brought into operation to produce that effect which the objects themselves unassisted by art could not produce” (72). Doing so, he suggests a kind of idealist associationism implicitly drawn from the thinkers connected to the Scottish Common Sense school—Lord Kames, Dugald Stewart, Archibald Alison. Those thinkers’ version of associationism, as Terence Martin describes, “stressed that the imagination calls up images in terms of all one’s associated experience,” thus “resolving the processes of literary invention in a manner that could readily be appreciated and understood, characterizing the imagination as an orderly, predictable, and hence reliable faculty” and allowing them to “emphasiz[e] neoclassical rules of criticism and standards of taste.”70 Associationism thus assured a stable physical world as provid-



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ing individuals with access to the common, unifying order of the world, while, in its dualism, maintaining the idea of an independent soul capable of freely determining the individual’s acts.71 Attempting to free art from sensuality and materialism while maintaining an underlying physical basis for assuring its moral effectiveness, Morse argues that “Every thing is bound together with a mysterious chain; no object seems so insulated as not to bear some relation to another, none so feebly related that it will not be found difficult to separate it from all others”(63). In place of a kind of mechanical materialism, he posits a kind of intellectual machinery, at once independent of and influenced by the body’s interaction with the world. Notably, his notion of things being bound together by a mysterious chain, with his use of “insulated,” echoes Byron’s line from canto 4 of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (published in 1818) where he speaks of “the things which bring / Back on the heart the weight which it would fling” as “Striking the electric chain wherewith we are darkly bound.”72 Morse’s electricity, as we will see in the next chapter, differs significantly from Byron’s, but here it begins to parallel Coleridge’s own development of associationist thought. As electricity became for German naturphilosophen and Coleridge an exemplary phenomenon of the indivisibility of mind, physical creation, and universal law, Morse’s allusions to electricity in his art lectures suggest a similar understanding at work and gesture to the relationship between technological and scientific developments and romantic theory.

Morse’s Electricity, Spiritual and Material Most histories of the invention of the telegraph have little to say about the possible role republican and romantic thought had on Morse’s ideas.73 In tracing the origins of his invention, historians usually cite his frustration with the slowness of communicating from abroad. According to Morse’s own disputed account, it was aboard the packet ship Sully returning from Europe to the United States in 1832 that, inspired by Charles Jackson’s discussion of recent electrical discoveries, he resolved that “If the presence of electricity can be made visible in any part of the circuit, I see no reason why intelligence may not be transmitted instantaneously by electricity” (Journals 2:6). But, as his defenders claimed, such an idea had “lain dormant in his brain for many years” (Journals 2:6). While in Paris working on his painting The Gallery of the Louvre in the years immediately preceding his trip aboard the Sully, he reportedly complained that “‘the mails in our country are too

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slow; this French telegraph [the semaphore] is better, and would do even better in our clear atmosphere than here, where half the time fogs obscure the skies. But this will not be fast enough—the lightning would serve us better’” (Journals 1:417–418). More than a decade and a half earlier, when he first went to Europe, he expressed a similar discontent with the fact that communication depended upon transportation—“I only wish you now had it [this letter] to relieve your minds from anxiety, . . . and I wish that in an instant I could communicate the information; but three thousand miles are not passed over in an instant and we must wait four long weeks before we can hear from each other” (Journals 1:41). From such accounts, the inspiration for the electro-magnetic telegraph lay in the desire for instantaneous communication; its revolutionary nature proceeded from the fact, as Daniel Czitrom has pointed out, that prior to its invention there was “no separation between transportation and communication.”74 The telegraph’s great potential derived from its apparent ability to separate its message from physical bodies—human, animal, material. This sort of disembodiment was essential to Morse’s project of freeing art from the taint of sensuality and granting it its proper role in fostering republican virtue. In many of his comments on the telegraph, Morse emphasized its spiritual or moral effects, echoing the neoclassical and republican tenets concerning the social responsibility of imaginative invention and the distrust of the sensuous body at work in his career as an artist.75 As Robert Rankin remembered, Morse believed that through “modern science,” “every one of God’s great forces could yet be utilized for man’s welfare.” In particular, he felt that “magnetism would do more for the advancement of human sociology than any of the material forces yet known,” and although “he would scarcely dare to compare spiritual with material forces, yet that, analogically, magnetism would do in the advancement of human welfare what the Spirit of God would do in the moral renovation of man’s nature; that it would educate and enlarge the forces of the world” (Journals 2:46–47). Just as painting will do God’s work by fostering the proper tastes as it “would tend to elevate and refine the public feeling by turning their thoughts from sensuality and luxury to intellectual pleasures,” so the telegraph would become a divine instrument analogous to the very “Spirit of God” by educating and enlarging the physical and spiritual forces of the world. Implicitly building on considerations of electricity as a nearly immaterial force akin to some divine power, Morse seemed to understand his electrical technology as furthering the spiritualization of the nation. Despite Coleridge’s anti-technological statements, the telegraph, in this  

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way, becomes, at least for Morse, exactly the kind of intellectual machinery that might serve Coleridge’s idealist project. Like Coleridge, Morse was concerned about defending the “old and venerable truths” and political and social hierarchies from the democratic impulses of the age, and, again like Coleridge, he saw art as playing a central role in maintaining social structures mirroring that divine order. In his last works, Coleridge describes the “producing and re-producing, in preserving, continuing and perfecting, the necessary sources and conditions of national civilization” (10:53) as the essential duty of the clerisy—“the learned of all denominations” and disciplines (10:34).76 Where Coleridge and his followers such as Carlyle would view technological improvements as the enemy of the work of the clerisy, as the products of a kind of mechanical philosophy employed by a revolutionary and upstart capitalism, Morse and most Americans attempted to conceive of technology as enabling the balancing of the democratic and republican elements of American society.77 For Morse, technology would become a more effective tool for an American clerisy in guiding the masses than his art could ever be. At the same time, though, despite imagining both the telegraph and art as enabling a kind of disembodied and disinterested communication, Morse’s invention and his art criticism both recognized and drew on the transformation of the cultural sphere from a hierarchized model of deference to a marketplace of competing effects and experiences. This recognition emerges, in part, from his reaction to the changing conditions for art in the early republic and is at the center of the founding of the National Academy of Design. The older American Academy of Art depended on the patronage of an elite who controlled access to their collections of old masters. The National Academy, on the other hand, was “geared not to the interests of rich patrons and collectors” but instead was “an institution by artists, for artists.”78 Most important, it was designed to foster the work of American artists through yearly exhibitions of new paintings. Despite his concerns that America was becoming too materialistic, Morse realized that creating a market for American artists was essential for the creation of a national art. In responding to a critique of the National Academy, he thus attacks “the purchasers of their works” who “claim to direct the studies and thoughts of the artist, in such a way too, as to make him feel his absolute dependence on wealth” and “depriv[e] him of his independence.”79 And, at the same time, he concludes by answering the question of “how is the artist who takes so independent a stand, to subsist?” by contending that “As he cannot be pensioned in our country, I know of no better way, than that I

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Just as the electro-magnetic telegraph he would invent would register the flow and disruption of the electric “fluid,” so the genius behind art displays itself through its flashes of power at meeting resistance. Morse, in fact, may have derived this simile directly from the lectures on electricity by James Freeman Dana that he had recently heard.80 And his remarks also seem to reflect his early experience with electricity as a student at Yale. There he had witnessed Professor Jeremiah Day reveal the mysterious electrical fluid at work by having “all of the students hold hands to form a circuit, which he electrified . . . ‘we all received the shock apparently at the same moment.’”81 A favorite of electrical technicians and scientists throughout the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, this experiment was frequently used to theorize some sort of pre-existing, physical or political connection linking different people together, a connection Galvani had famously hypothesized in terms of animal electricity. More telling, perhaps, is Morse’s use of bodily metaphors to describe this process in this passage. The reluctance of the public to support the arts is a “disease to which infant Art is subject,” a disease that the electric effect of art can help to overcome even as it evidences the very resistance of the body it hopes to affect. The body in question is underlined by Morse’s description a decade later of the new invention he was still attempting to design. Through the electro-magnetic telegraph, he foresaw that “the whole surface of the country would be channeled for those nerves which are to diffuse with the speed of thought, a knowledge of all that is occurring throughout

 

We also shall have difficulties to contend with, some peculiar to ourselves . . . they are the diseases to which infant Art is subject; they must be borne. . . . But why do I speak to you of difficulties? They are the glory of genius, without which its energy and its brilliancy would pass unnoticed away, like the electric fluid which flows unobserved along the smooth conductor, but when its course is thwarted, then, and only then, it bursts forth with its splendour, and astonishes by its power. (23)

 

proposed, viz. to purchase his works” (25). The artist, in order “to exert his genius to the best advantage, must be independent in some way” (25), both economically and artistically. He must find purchasers, but not create works to be sold, have patronage without being patronized, lead the people’s taste so as to create a market for the tastes his works create. It is in addressing this problematic that Morse turns to electrical imagery in his art criticism. In his 1827 lecture celebrating the first anniversary of the National Academy, Morse uses electricity to describe art’s brilliance and its ability to overcome obstacles:

 

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the land; making in fact one neighborhood of the whole country” (Journals 2:85). Morse’s metaphors indirectly connect art and electricity together less as material instruments for influencing and structuring individual minds and the nation as a whole than, with its notion of energetic and brilliant genius, in romantic terms of expressive power. That, in turn, is registered in a very physiological manner, through its “brilliancy,” its “burst[ing] forth,” its “splendour” in overcoming the resistance of the masses to a correct taste in art. As much as electricity seemed to provide a nearly spiritual vehicle for universal communication, its physical manifestations as visible bursts and shocks on the body itself reiterated its materiality and suggested the physical nature of art.82 Where Morse’s idealism, his notion that art will act directly on minds, despite his acknowledgements of the economic necessities structuring artistic production, serves as a way of defending against the very danger of art becoming only another commodity in the marketplace, his connection of art and electricity on a more material basis suggests his rootedness in that very economy. Where Morse largely retreats into an older notion of static communities, discrete selves, and determined meaning, his invention, finally, depends on romantic and scientific ideas paralleling capitalism’s dissolution of organic community, free-standing identities, and fixed signifiers. For Morse, like Coleridge, the solution to that transformation lay in reconnecting a cultural elite to the new economic power base in such a way as to combat the disruptive, related tendencies of the marketplace and of materialist associationism. The telegraph would allow the clerisy to do its work cleanly and effectively.

The Universal Telegraph and the Telegraphic World Body Morse’s vision of his invention fostering the creation of a Christian republic through its economic and cultural power easily fused with more spectacular accounts of the telegraph’s power. When Morse successfully applied to the U.S. Congress for funding an experimental telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore in February, 1843, his request was infamously greeted with a combination of derision, incredulity, and misapprehension. Cave Johnson, a congressman from Tennessee who would later become a promoter of Morse’s invention, insisted that “he did not wish to see the science of mesmerism neglected and overlooked. He therefore proposed that one half of the appropriation be given to Mr. Fisk, to enable him to carry on experiments, as well as Professor Morse.” When supporters

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objected that the motion was out of order, the Chair ruled that it “would require a scientific analysis to determine how far the magnetism of mesmerism was analogous to that to be employed in telegraphs.” While the Chair’s response was greeted with laughter, it pointed to the serious considerations given to the connections between spiritual communion and technological communications (Journals 2:194–195). With the development of the electro-magnetic telegraph and the increasingly abstract nature of the new insights offered by electrical science, both mesmerism and animal electricity received renewed attention in the mid-nineteenth century. The telegraph spurred such thought in part, because, as Alexander Jones put it in 1852, “It is easy to understand the steam-engine . . . but not so the workings of the telegraph machines, or the nature of the subtle fluid by the agency of which they are actuated.”83 As James W. Carey has argued, “There were other technological marvels of the mid nineteenth century; but the inscrutable nature of the telegraph made it seem more extraordinary than, and qualitatively different from, other inventions,” and thus telegraphic discourse “located vital energy in the realm of the mind, in the nonmaterial world.”84 Because the telegraph was understood as both a spiritual and physical medium, even by some scientists, it was imagined it could bring “mankind into [a] harmony of faith and life” based in spiritual interconnection.85 The completion of the first functioning transatlantic cable in 1858 (it worked for less than a month) produced an outpouring of commentary fantasizing the elimination of bodies and bodily difference. In one of the most prominent and lengthy celebrations, Charles Briggs and Augustus Maverick contended that the telegraph was a “perpetual miracle” because of “the agent employed and the end subserved”: “For what is the end to be accomplished, but the most spiritual ever possible? Not the modification or transportation of matter, but the transmission of thought. To effect this an agent is employed so subtle in its nature, that it may more properly be called a spiritual than a material force.”86 As other commentators would elaborate, by extending the dominion of a spiritual force, the telegraph “made visible” an already existent “union of all the families of man,” thus fostering the “consciousness of the oneness of mankind.”87 This understanding of the telegraph as a disembodied medium leading to moral or religious ends was appropriated by spiritualism, a religious movement originating in the late 1840s in the telegraphic centers of upstate New York. Immensely influential and popular into the twentieth century, spiritualism became most famous for its supernaturalism, in particular its séances and table-rapping. Spiritualists drew on the nearly immaterial na 

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ture of the electro-magnetic telegraph to suggest that an invisible telegraph, joining the dead and the living and all of the universe, already existed. This thought receives its most scientific elaboration in a chapter entitled “The Telegraphic System of the Universe,” from Amherst College president and respected scientist Edward Hitchcock’s The Religion of Geology (1852). Instinctively, it seems, leaping into poetic voice, Hitchcock describes how new technologies make visible the mysterious forces underlying the moral order of the universe: “Our words, our actions, and even our thoughts, make an indelible impression on the universe. . . . convert[ing] creation ‘Into a vast sounding gallery; / Into a vast picture gallery; / And into a universal telegraph.’”88 He reasons that while “It seems to us a marvellous [sic] discovery, which enables man to convey and register his thoughts at the distance of thousand of miles by the electric wires,” we should not be surprised that “by means of this same power, all our thoughts are transmitted to every part of the universe. . . . It is as if each man had his foot upon the point where ten thousand telegraphic wires meet from every part of the universe, and he were able, with each volition, to send abroad an influence along these wires, so as to reach every created being in heaven and in earth.”89 From such a perspective, Morse’s telegraph was not so much a new invention as a material manifestation of the invisible spiritual telegraph lines already connecting all of creation together. Such understandings of the telegraph fostered potentially radical feminist politics. Because of “telegraphy’s apparent ability to separate consciousness from the body. . . . [its] disembodying power,” many women influenced by the spiritualist movement, according to Jeffrey Sconce, were able to “use the idea of the spiritual telegraph to imagine social and political possibilities beyond the immediate material restrictions placed on their bodies.”90 These interpretations of the telegraph negated the body as a marker of identity and, in doing so, suggested the possibility of a kind of egalitarian political, social, and spiritual union supposedly prevented by bodily difference. For Hitchcock, this spiritualist union allows the overcoming of not sexual but racial difference.91 He turns to Charles Babbage’s description of the eventual punishment of slave traders to illustrate the telegraphic spiritual community: “The soul of the negro, whose fettered body, surviving the living charnel-house of his infected prison, was thrown into the sea to lighten the ship . . . will need, at the last great day of human accounts, no living witness of his earthly agony . . . every particle of air still floating over the unpeopled earth . . . will record the cruel mandate of the tyrant.”92 Even dismissive accounts of the “atmospheric telegraph” illustrate how the telegraph’s erasure

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of the body in creating a spiritual union troubled racialized boundaries: “Were one of these ‘Atmospheric Telegraphs’ in operation any where near Mason and Dixon’s Line, it would doubtless prove a powerful competitor with the ‘Underground Railroad’ in facilitating the flight of ‘colored gemmen’ on their way to Canada.”93 The spiritual nature of the universal telegraph, conducted through the magnetic forces found in every physical and spiritual thing, insured that humankind was already one (or soon would be), that the families of man were already unified and telegraphically in touch with one another through a spiritual “unpeopled” realm. This immaterial unification of humankind depended on abstracting individual people from their specific conditions and experiences and particular bodies to create a universal human soul, so that, in the end, what the spiritualist encounters through the spiritual telegraph is another soul, nearly identical to his or her own, so fluid, in fact, that it can simultaneously inhabit his or her body. The spiritualist telegraph imagines a type of perfect communication, so perfect, in fact, that no differences, whether temporal, geographic, linguistic, biological, or cultural, cannot be overcome as one soul speaks directly to another. James Carey and John Quirk have labeled the idea of an egalitarian, nearly disembodied if not purely spiritual commerce the “mythos of the electronic revolution.” The ideology lying behind this myth, located in the “rhetoric of the electrical sublime,” “promised” that electricity would provide “the same freedom, decentralization, ecological harmony and democratic community that had hitherto been guaranteed but left undelivered by mechanization.”94 Because it was seen as a nearly spiritual force, electricity, it was supposed, could overcome the difficulties mechanization could not. But as Carey and Quirk contend, “electricity also promised the same power, productivity and economic expansion previously guaranteed and delivered by mechanical industrialization,” and in the end, “the real beneficiaries of the rhetoric of the electrical sublime were the electric light and power companies who presided over the new technologies.”95 In the case of the telegraph in the United States, the electric sublime helped to ensure the expansion of the telegraphic network and its consolidation into the Western Union monopoly by the late 1860s. As has been widely recognized for years and has been more fully articulated by a number of historians in recent years, the telegraph, as it was developed and then monopolized in mid-nineteenth-century America, became both a key tool of and a representative model for the consolidation of capital.96 Rather than benevolently linking different peoples of the world together in harmony and equality,



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the telegraph played a central role not only in strengthening the hold of capital over workers and consumers in the United States but in fostering the colonial enterprises of the European powers.97 Yet this spiritualist understanding of telegraphy, as idealistic as it is, emerged from the material conditions—and conceptions of those material conditions—surrounding the telegraph and electrical science. As Marx famously puts it in The German Ideology, “If in all ideology men and their relations appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.”98 Hypotheses about electricity being a universal fluid actuating and flowing through all living matter, as noted earlier, both grew out of and bolstered political economists’ speculations about the flow of money, mirroring, in this way, the monetary form’s ability, in capitalist societies, to strengthen and reflect the abstractable nature of economic value. Remaining with Marx, we might see electric spiritualism as the supreme expression of the “cultus of abstract man” that he reads as “the most fitting form of religion” for a society built on the reduction of “individual private labour to the standard of homogeneous human labour.”99 Electricity, as a creative and destructive force seemingly spiritual in its etherealness, seems to mirror the very character of the human capacity to shape the world. More specifically, as I will explore at more length in the next chapter, the rapid expansion of the telegraph became a prime motor in more tightly knitting together both commercial markets and European (and American) empires. Enabling the dispersion of information at speeds unthought of before, the telegraph brought people—at least some people—and data, especially commercial data, together in a way that seemed to erase all distance, all time. As Menahem Blondheim has explored most fully, the telegraph’s most significant impact in its early years in the United States came through the birth of the Associated Press.100 News in the United States became centralized, delocalized, fostering the sense that all were experiencing the same events—those newsworthy enough to be sent over the wires—at the same time. In fact, in their accounts of the telegraph’s capacity to turn information into a commodity distributed through a centralized system, historians such as Blondheim, Carey, and Quirk echo, in more critical and materialist terms, the spiritualists’ rapture about the telegraph linking souls (or at least minds) together. Antebellum techno-utopian discourse even more closely provides an upside-down version of that offered by recent historians. Paralleling the spiritualist vision of humanity unified through a spiritual communion,

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represented in physical form by the telegraph, techno-utopian discourse imagined the telegraphic lines creating a national or universal body joining all of humanity together through economic interests and transparent communication. The telegraph freed thought from space and time—the determinants of bodily existence—but simultaneously rendered mind and thought, or spirit, physical in the form of “nerves” or wires criss-crossing and creating both the individual and the national “body.” At the outset of the Civil War, Oliver Wendell Holmes summed up this thought by noting that “the whole nation is now penetrated by the ramifications of a network of iron nerves which flash sensation and volition backward and forward to and from towns and provinces as if they were organs and limbs of a single living body.”101 After fading in the early decades of the nineteenth century, electrical understandings of the body gained renewed attention with the invention and growth of telegraphy. This connection is suggested by the example of William F. Channing, a Boston physician who published Notes on the Medical Application of Electricity in 1849 and three years later reported “On the Municipal Electric Telegraph; Especially in its Application to Fire Alarms.” As he declares in his Notes, “a revolution has now taken place in favor of [the medical use of] electricity, which, after its wide celebrity at the commencement of the present century, had fallen into disuse.”102 He hints at a conceptual source for that revolution in his discussion of the municipal electric telegraph, where he explains that “The Electric telegraph is to constitute the nervous system of organized societies. . . . its functions are analogous to the sensitive nerves of the animal system.”103 In fact, mainstream reportage of science frequently concluded that because the electric “fluid [was] so analogous to the nervous force,” it made sense “to regard the whole nervous system as an apparatus, through the medium of which, electricity, modified and restrained by certain laws, is made subservient to the purposes of existence.”104 A copiously illustrated 1862 Harper’s article titled “What are the Nerves?” exemplifies that the human nervous system was regularly conceived of as “present[ing] a very curious analogy to” the “telegraphic system.”105 If the nerves of the individual body functioned like the telegraph, it seemed the telegraph might function like the nerves in the body politic. Thus, even Southern fire-eater George Fitzhugh admitted that the telegraphic nervous system will unify the nation, “will so bind men together, that, in a great degree, one thought and one feeling shall fill all minds and pervade all bosoms.”106 In these descriptions, the telegraph united the nation or the world not just into one shared consciousness, but one shared  

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body: “[The telegraph] leaves, in our country, no elsewhere—it is all here: it makes the pulse at the extremity beat—throb for throb and in the instant—with that at the heart. . . . In short, it will make the whole land one being—a touch upon any part will—like the wires—vibrate over all.”107 In rendering the United States “ONE PEOPLE,” the telegraph, through electricity, made that people into one being, one body whose throbs and beats all would feel instantaneously and simultaneously. Implying a unified national identity—a homogeneous, self-identical citizenry—this national body corresponds with the spiritualist dream of inhabiting another’s body, as the telegraph erased social differences of all sorts, becoming a transparent medium for the intermixture of individual souls. While spiritualist interpretations of the telegraph erased the machinery of the technology to fantasize an immaterial network of communion, techno-utopian accounts described the creation of a universal body joining all the world together in similar fashion. If the spiritualist telegraph mirrors an anaesthetic fantasy of disembodied union, the techno-utopian vision of a telegraphic body suggests a version of this kind of community based, at first, in physical bodies linked together by language and technology. In the end, however, like spiritualism, these techno-utopian ideals of communion dismiss these bodies and the physical connections needed to suture them together in favor of an idealized vision of transparent selves and media.

The Northern Brain of Humanity, or A Common Language of the World Repeatedly, both spiritualist and techno-utopian commentators celebrated the telegraph for eliminating the need for translation and thereby unifying the world in one harmonious whole. If thought, as nervous impulse, were electric, then through the electricity of the telegraph, mind could interact directly with mind, through the material, nearly spiritual, electro-magnetic telegraph. With the telegraph, the idea that both thought and language were electric and, as such, were part of a network linking all of humanity took on even greater currency, as exemplified by an 1848 article on the “Influence of the Telegraph upon Literature”: “Language is but the medium of thought—which flies as rapidly and acts as instantaneously as the invisible element which flashes along the Telegraphic wire. The more closely, then, that it follows the operation of thought [in a telegraphic manner], the more perfectly does it perform its office.”108 Thought,

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like telegraphic messages, is electric, and language, at its best, mirrors that electricity, materializing and translating the “invisible element” of electric thought into a form where others can comprehend it. By rendering language as close to thought as possible, by paring language down to its bare minimum, the telegraph becomes an instrument for eliminating the noise caused by another instrument, language, thus serving to connect mind more closely with mind. Attempting to purify language of exactly that kind of noise, Morse’s original plan for a code called for a massive dictionary of words corresponding with numbers. Messages would be sent in code as numbers registered by marks, so that ^^^ ^^ would be 32, ^^^^^ would be 5, and ^^ ^^^^ would be 24. The operator’s only job would be to consult the Morse dictionary to find what words corresponded with 32, 5, and 24. While technoutopian discourse imagined that the telegraph would, as a matter of course, bind the world by fostering the development of one unified, rational language, Morse attempted to institute a mechanical, unequivocal language based on a one-to-one correspondence between numbers and words, defining words by electronic impulses and reducing the electronic language simply to whether the circuit was open or not. This plan attempted the strict coordination of word and number, implying a certain transparency to language itself. Meaning is thus located in the word itself, in its full presence as conveying a specific idea. Morse famously worked to keep operators from “reading” the telegraph acoustically—a method that would eventually become the norm and for which the sounder was invented—in order to eliminate the human body from the system as much as possible. Registered by a mechanical recorder in order to eliminate individual interpretation, Morse’s original code would convey specific one-to-one meanings in a manner quite similar to his paintings, where specific images were to kindle the imagination of viewers but only so as to give rise to specific impressions. The media itself—the code, the paint, language, the human bodies receiving the message—become transparent, allowing the direct, determinate workings of now-dematerialized associations. An article from Harper’s Monthly Magazine from 1873 elaborates these connections between the telegraph, language, and bodily networks. Drawing on the idea of the nervous system as electric, the article imagines the telegraph as “our great artificial nervous system” allowing “an electric flash of intelligence [to] spread over the country, carrying a thrill of gratification or grief ” that renders the nation (and perhaps the world) one large body.109 This body is unified through the sympathy enabled by the new technology:



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“It lifts every man who reads its messages above his own little circle, gives him in a vivid flash, as it were, a view of vast distances, and tends by an irresistible influence to make him a citizen of his country and a fellow of the race as well as a member of his local community” (359). But it is through language that this bond is made secure. Because “Language is the instrument of thought. . . . a tool for thinking, before the thinker uses it as a signal for communicating his thought,” the telegraph’s “most extended and important influence . . . upon the human mind” (359) is its peaceful creation of “a common language of the world.” Specifically, through Morse’s invention “the peculiar and local idioms of each language are to a large extent discarded” (360). By bringing languages together, eliminating unnecessary words, and acting in a way akin to Darwin’s survival of the fittest (the article’s analogy), the telegraph will allow the world to speak one language and, thus, to speak with one mind. While this vision of the telegraph imagined the world united in one harmonious whole through its wires spreading a common interest in progress and diffusing ideas and sentiments, it assumed the supremacy of Western civilization, as exemplified by its technological wonders, as a model for the rest of the world. Although the Harper’s article insists that the “idea of a common language of the world . . . is no longer a dream of the poet nor a scheme of a conqueror,” it emphasizes a competitive “assimilation” of all languages that will, of course, give “pre-eminence to the Italian alphabet” (360). Other commentators were much more forthright. A series of four articles by Pennsylvanian J. W. Moore in the Southern mouthpiece DeBow’s Review in 1853 and 1854 emphasized that telegraphic commerce would prove more capable in its conquest of the world than the sword or the Bible had. Commerce “conquers, not for the purpose of establishing demoralizing empires,” Moore states, because its “aim is peace, its end is happiness.” By “operating to facilitate commerce and international intercourse,” the telegraph will unite people together and “underlay the whole physical structure of society with a basis of peace, rendered durable by the cements of the arts and sciences.”110 Moore, in this way, echoes numerous other commentators on the peaceful prospect of technological domination. He goes on, however, to reveal starkly the racist underpinnings of such thought. After arguing that “in order to overcome the prejudices of nations, cause them to abandon their non-productive modes of life, their superstitions, their idolatries, instil into them habits of industry, and raise them to a parity in knowledge and general refinement with ourselves, we must first of all invent a means to reach their defects” (16:256), Moore delineates the five races—Caucasian,

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Mongolian, Malayan, African, and American aboriginal—and the percentages of each who have actually beheld “the lights of truth and civilization. . . . the arts of peace and the sciences” (16:258). As with most discussions of the telegraph from this era, the telegraph will unite these various peoples by establishing a universal language, or at least producing the same “collateral results”: “commercial intercourse has just assumed the sceptre of the world. Now the telegraph is invited to complete what has been so auspiciously begun—it is required to bring nations into hourly conference—to assimilate all languages to a common understanding” (16:255). Moore, however, underlines that the telegraphic dream of unifying humankind through commerce (and one language) fits within a violent, racially based imperialism of “conquest”: “[by] bring[ing] pagan countries into closer proximity with the enlightened Caucasian race. . . . the universal establishment of the telegraph. . . . will be a mortal stab to their political relations and domestic adolescence” (16:259–260). The telegraph will unite the world by violently destroying the cultures of “pagan countries,” assimilating the “non-productive” into a fitting place in a world system. In such techno-utopian fantasies, the telegraph would peacefully unify the world by rendering the whole world the same, as simulacra of Western Christianity. An anonymous poem published in The Atlantic in celebration of the first transatlantic cable further connects the religious ends of the telegraph with techno-utopian visions of Euro-American conquest creating a global body. According to the poem, the telegraph is not merely an instrument of communication, but is a divine “mystic cord” which unites the world into one “brotherhood,” “fus[ing]” all the “nations in [its] kindly heat.” This unification of the “thought,” “heart,” and “blood”—the minds and bodies—of all “continents” arises through “The vigor of the Northern brain”: “Through Orient seas, o’er Afric’s plain, / And Asian mountains borne, / The vigor of the Northern brain / Shall nerve the world outworn.” The disembodied Northern, i.e. European, brain, through electricity, will reinvigorate and become master of the physical features (and implicitly the peoples) of the Orient, Africa, and Asia.111 European (and American) technological progress will bring the world into one peaceful union of civilization through its conquest of other continents’ geographies and peoples so that “round the world, the thought of all / Is as the thought of one!” As in other commentary, this union evokes the idea of life itself as electric—“The new Prometheus steals once more / The fire that wakes the dead!”—even as the poem emphasizes the Northern brain’s taming of that most volatile  

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element in nature, lightning: “Wild terror of the sky above, / Glide tamed and dumb below!” The telegraph would unite the world into one body that would erase distinctions of all sorts, but at the same time, it separated Euro-Americans from the body by making them the disembodied “brain of humanity” guiding that unification. Thus, the conquest of electricity, one of nature’s most mysterious powers, will lead to the conquest of more “natural,” uncivilized peoples. Again and again both Northern and Southern commentators drew upon the idea of the telegraph as enslaving electricity: “the invisible, imponderable substance, force, whatever it be . . . is brought under our control, to do our errands, like any menial, nay, like a very slave.”112 As the metaphors of the telegraph “bid[ding] the terrible slave [electricity] toil in the empire of a master” emphasize, the telegraph was understood not only as furthering the “empire of man over nature,” but also as enabling the conquest of primitive peoples by Euro-American commerce.113 This emphasis on the telegraph allowing the necessary control of uncivilized masses by the educated few returns us to Coleridge’s idea of the role of the clerisy and Morse’s Federalist-republican project of diffusion as well as Morse’s anti-immigrant and pro-slavery politics. The telegraph would allow the proper men—Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, rational—to control potentially disruptive bodies through a nearly bodily fusing of Northern brain with the body of the rest of the world. In the 1830s, Morse became a leading anti-Catholic Nativist, most prominently publishing Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States and Imminent Dangers to the Free Institutions of the United States Through Foreign Immigration and in 1836 running for mayor of New York. As his latest biographer, Kenneth Silverman, has argued, Morse believed that “[u]nlike the intellectual religion of his father and ancestors . . . Catholicism addressed the imagination but not the understanding.” Catholic rite was closer to theater than true religion. Yet Morse feared that his own paintings might potentially present the same danger, as “the sensuous appeal of color and form [might] promote instead, as Catholicism did, a ‘religion of the Imagination,’” as “a love for art could sink into ‘heartlessness and frivolity.’”114 If art required the body in order to work on the mind, what would keep it from merely addressing the sensuous self? Echoing Coleridge’s concerns about the masses’ reading of novels and of French styles of misreading, Morse attempts to negotiate this danger in his lectures on the affinity of arts, given almost a decade before his anti-immigration diatribes would bring him to prominence in Nativist circles. There,

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he argues that art teaches the unity of all, but in this unity is division—“Man himself in exterior appearance stands not insulated and distinct from the animal world; witness the negro, the ouran outan, the baboon, the monkey by gradual and downward steps blending the human face divine, with the unseemly visage of the brute.” While Morse finishes by asking “Where is the line that severs the connection?”(64), with his use of insulation and connection suggesting the electrical connection uniting all of creation, the racial distinction he makes is clear, hinting at his later anti-abolitionist writings, such as his pamphlet An Argument on the Ethical Position of Slavery. Even as art teaches unity and the association of ideas connects all things, mind makes clear distinctions, distinctions related to God’s power over humans and a chain of being leading from him to the most enlightened humans and downward to brute creation. Grounded in the interaction between electrical science and technology and the socioeconomic changes of the capitalist revolution, a feedback loop whereby electrical technology was fostered by economic theories borne of the new flows of capital and products and in turn enabled the development and expansion of new markets, new commercial arrangements and practices, both spiritualist and techno-utopian accounts of the telegraph imagined the erasure of the cultural and bodily distinctions separating man from man, even as they both reiterated the centrality of a specific kind of body and distinct culture—the white Protestant body—as the model for the newly unified world.

The Useful and the Beautiful Morse’s hopes and fears of art’s potential mirror both Coleridge’s aesthetic theory and his and others’ accounts of the telegraph’s rationalizing and dematerializing possibilities. James W. Taylor’s The Useful and the Beautiful (1844) reveals the potential merging of these various lines of thought. While there is little evidence to suggest that Taylor’s comments—a published version of his commencement address at Hamilton College—ever had much effect on American thought about technology or the arts or that Taylor was familiar with Coleridge, they suggest some of the ways a certain type of conservative romanticism coincides with a spiritual humanism grounded in ethnocentric techno-utopianism. The Useful and the Beautiful specifically attempts to unite the two categories in its title even as it denounces a “souldestroying Utilitarianism.”115 A recent graduate of Hamilton who would go on to become a prominent ambassador between the United States and



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Canada in the years following the Civil War, Taylor defends religion and art from a reductive utilitarianism, asking rhetorically “By what license of language, do you deny the appellation of the Useful, to whatever shall task, animate and delight the mind of Man?” (10). He uses electricity to link the materially useful with the transcendent utility of art and religion in order to question those who “fear that by the development and ascendancy of this principle, the human mind will be degraded and materialized” (5). Instead of degrading the human mind, technology stimulates it: “How the imagination kindles with the contemplation of the physical benefits secured by Steam, that restless, but obedient slave of Man!” (6). Standing at the head of the technological developments that have rendered nature the fit material of both technology and art is the only recently developed telegraph:

 

 

Already we have controlled the demon of the cloud, Electricity, whose bolts fall harmless around our dwellings, and upon whose swift and fiery flight is now imposed the errand of the Carrier Dove. But perhaps the proudest triumph of Utility may be seen in the public relations of the world. Trade, that outcast of Roman policy, is the handmaid of modern civilization. He is a superficial observer, who regards the accumulation of wealth as its chief consequence, overlooking its higher destiny as the Mediator of Nations, the auxiliary of Peace. . . . what fetters can be forged for Human passions, half so strong and enduring as that invisible net-work, woven by a thousand keels from land’s end to land’s end? (7)

 

 

 

 

Endorsing the techno-utopian visions we’ve already seen, Taylor connects commerce and technological advances with the peaceful conquest of nature, rendering steam and electricity slaves to the influence of civilization. Unlike most techno-utopian accounts, however, Taylor goes on to identify the telegraph’s taming of electricity with an electric force essential to both beauty and religion. Taylor defines the sphere of the beautiful as “the Soul of Man—it is indifferent to our material wants . . . its ministry is to our intellectual and spiritual life—its gaze is upward, its aspirations ever yearning with passionate earnestness toward a distant and bright ideal” (7). The source of this yearning is the feeling that “there is a fitness and harmony of things . . . a language of Nature and one Common Humanity, which when listened to aright, is recognized as the voice of Universal Truth.” Beauty, then, consists of “the emotions produced by” this “pervading spirit, which unites by the electric chain of sympathy and love, Man to Earth, Earth to Heaven, and all to God” (8). Here, Taylor exemplifies the diffusion of the idea of art as providing an electric connection and further underlines the link between electrical technology and readings of electricity as a language unifying all of humanity. Such an idea is at work in much

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of the techno-utopian and spiritualist discourse surrounding the telegraph that I’ve examined, but Taylor ties it directly to the feeling or experience of beauty. Morse’s invention would, it seem, mirror the work of art itself, the creation of a feeling of beauty that unites, through “sympathy and love,” all of humanity. This union of technology and art, the useful and the beautiful, will yield a more uniform, universal understanding of beauty, as “this epoch of the Useful will prove the vestibule of a more advanced civilization—a nobler because an Universal Taste, when, instead of the refinement of a coterie, an entire people shall reach the elevation of an enlarged and enlightened culture” (10). At the center of Taylor’s attempt to unite the useful and the beautiful, then, lies a renewed call for public education. If we only “Let the plastic mind of every child be judiciously cultivated” (15), making music and the other arts “the daily food of the people as early and constant as culture can render it” (18), then “Poetry, Art, the Beautiful” will become universal (18). Combining the techno-utopian celebration of the conquest of nature and the possibility of creating social networks with a spiritualist notion of humanity being linked together in an ideal sphere, Taylor emphasizes the importance of education or culture for fostering a universal taste in the masses that will allow the harmonious functioning of the political state. Although appreciating art and beauty on their own to a much greater extent, Taylor still echoes the Revolutionary generations of Rush and Franklin by emphasizing the role art will play in creating a properly functioning—rational—citizenry. Art’s role remains to create proper associations, to train or cultivate individuals to attain their common spiritual and political potential. The job of art, and of the telegraph, is to join all of humanity together, in one spiritual and physical bond, thus enabling the mind to control the irrational body. Taylor’s quintessentially American celebration of technology and utilitarian view of art appear, at first, to oppose the rejection of the mechanical age epitomized by Carlyle and running through British thought from Coleridge to Matthew Arnold.116 Yet Arnold’s aesthetics similarly rests on the idea of human perfection leading to human commonality, bringing us back full circle to the relationship between American techno-utopianism and British romantic idealism. Arnold contends that “culture . . . places human perfection in an internal condition, in the growth and predominance of our humanity proper, as distinguished from our animality, in the ever-increasing efficaciousness and in the general harmonious expansion of those gifts of thought and feeling which make the peculiar dignity, wealth,  

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and happiness of human nature.”117 Human progress, human happiness, depends on the universal humanity most prominently, accessibly, at work in our common perception of the beautiful. This shared human nature, this common yearning towards “The idea of perfection as a general expansion of the human family[,] is at variance with our strong individualism, our hatred of all limits to the unrestrained swing of the individual’s personality, our maxim of ‘every man for himself ’” (34). Counteracting society’s “Faith in machinery” (34), culture resists the focus on individual cultivation because “men are all members of one great whole.” Hence, “the expansion of our humanity, to suit the idea of perfection which culture forms, must be a general expansion,” and “Perfection, as culture conceives it, is not possible while the individual remains isolated” (33). In the American context, most observers viewed technological advancements, especially the telegraph, as enabling exactly this kind of general expansion through its ability to overcome isolated individuals. For both Arnold and Taylor, as for Schiller, the aesthetic becomes less about the sensuous experience of the individual body, less about the subject’s apperception of the world necessarily being framed by certain constraints (as Kant argues), than about a uniform humanity that, when realized, will lead to the fullness and perfection of individuals as well as communities. Art becomes so essential, not because it reveals and mediates the gap between the rational and the sensuous but because it hints at a potential political and moral uniformity and perfection through its formal perfection and its fostering of a universal taste for that perfection. Techno-utopianism, spiritualism, and a type of aesthetic use of electricity come together, then, in their claims at discovering or fostering a common humanity, some essence that transcends all possible differences and all material barriers. As we will see, however, other thinkers working within a romantic tradition developed an alternative account of aesthetic experience as electric, one in which electricity comes to represent the very possibility of art capturing or conjuring up a kind of experience wherein the individual’s sensuous body and the common objective world are held in tension as neither the idiosyncracies and contingencies of individual life nor the possible commonalities of the human condition are denied.

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James W. Taylor’s ability to meld the useful and the beautiful together with the electric current of the telegraph reflects what many commentators have seen as a distinctly American faith in technological progress. As John Kasson and others have noted, even with the increased class stratification and environmental degradation accompanying industrialization and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century technological marvels, most Americans seemed to have found ways, as Taylor does, to imagine those changes as enabling the growth and development of a more equitable, flourishing society in balance with nature. With Morse and Franklin as the democratic American heroes, the telegraph and electricity seemed particularly designed for linking the disparate regions of the far-flung republic. One of the few notable exceptions to this chorus of approval appears in Walden (1854), where Thoreau complains that “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” The telegraph is simply another one of those “‘modern improvements’” that “are but improved means to an unimproved end.”1 As Thoreau later articulates the problem in Walden, “Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain” (92). The telegraph and railroads might link the United States through a national commerce, but individuals might never benefit from that commerce; it might, Thoreau worried, actually keep them from better living “like men.” Thoreau’s comments here seem to be part of his transcendentalist cri-



Aesthetic Electricity

tique of economic and philosophical materialism. Celebrations of new technologies like the telegraph fail to acknowledge that what truly needs reform is man’s consciousness, his view of and interaction with the world. Yet, as Leo Marx has most famously observed, Thoreau offers a far more equivocal account of new technologies.2 Thoreau’s ambivalence about the telegraph, his suspicion that it would only further nationalistic and commercial ends at the expense of the individual and his discussion of its potential for forming real communities, reveals, I will argue, a distinctly aesthetic interpretation and appropriation of Morse’s invention. Like the spiritualists, Thoreau understood reality in terms of human consciousness or spirit. Yet, unlike much spiritualism, he insisted on a dialectical relationship between the mind and the world, a relationship he understood, at times, in terms of the new technologies of the era, including the telegraph. Spiritualist explanations of electricity tended towards an idealist dream of abandoning the body altogether in allowing the complete identification of one person with another. Thoreau’s readings of the telegraph and electricity, however, move towards acknowledging the material and social forces that might allow a connection on physical and linguistic levels while consistently emphasizing the tension between (comm)union and the autonomous self. This sense of the possibility of mind connecting with mind, of individuals losing themselves in a larger whole, through subjective, bodily experience, along with the equal sense of the impossibility of complete connection, complete erasure of the self, is, as I have described in the introduction, at the core of what the term aesthetics conveyed for many antebellum American thinkers. The central contention of this book is that the telegraph and electricity provided a material model for these thinkers to imagine this sort of continuous (dis)connection and its potential social, political, and individual ramifications. No one thinker fully articulates such a vision, a telegraphic aesthetic incorporating the body, technology, and language to understand the relationship between individual sensuous experience and some humanistic, communal whole, although Whitman, as I will discuss in the last chapter, comes, perhaps, closest. In building a composite picture of this view, this chapter examines four different accounts of the intersection between electricity, the telegraph, and art. I begin by returning to British romanticism, in order to trace an alternative to the neo-platonic idealism of Coleridge. For Percy and Mary Shelley and Byron, electricity remains, as with the younger Coleridge, a material force emblematic of the potential for human connection and universal freedom based on the body. Sharing Coleridge’s interest in science and his commitment to the centrality of hu-

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man consciousness, Percy maintained a more dialectical understanding of the relationship, figured as electric, between immaterial thought and the material world. That understanding shaped both his political radicalism and his poetic theory.3 In this way, Percy Shelley’s electricity gestures to a way of reconstructing the telegraph less as the deterministic machine of techno-utopian and spiritualist accounts than an open-ended network of conflicting and indeterminate effects. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s allusions to electricity and telegraphy for figuring art’s potential parallel the techno-utopian vision of the telegraph diffusing and unifying a homogeneous national identity. But rather than suggesting art’s potential to foster the transcendence of individual identity, electricity and the telegraph exemplified for Hawthorne the danger that art might become merely a means to control other people, that it might allow the artist to infiltrate and dominate the individual’s sacred spiritual self. For Henry Parker, in his satiric science fiction story “Von Blixum’s Experiment,” techno-utopian and Spiritualist claims become farcical. Yet, in ridiculing these accounts, Parker’s story unwittingly suggests their power, revealing the telegraph’s actual transformative potential. With Shelley’s, Hawthorne’s, and Parker’s accounts of electricity and the telegraph and art in mind, I turn in the second half of the chapter to Herman Melville’s Pierre. Pierre emphasizes the limits of human knowledge and sympathy in the transformed world of market-driven, mid-century urban America. Yet it also simultaneously hints at the persistent possibility for re-imagining relationships among self, society, and the world. Although Melville’s darkness has traditionally been read in contrast to transcendentalist optimism, I suggest that this possibility and its limitations approximates Thoreau’s views. Like Hawthorne, Thoreau similarly worried over the expansive power of electric technology and electric art, yet by recurring to the ultimate incommensurability of selves while insisting on the radical permeability of the individual self—as Melville does—Thoreau built on both the material transcendence offered by techno-utopian discourse and the egalitarianism of spiritual telegraphy to outline, finally, an aesthetic model that mediates between the mechanical mind/body dualism of techno-utopian discourse and the egalitarian idealism of spiritualist accounts. By placing Thoreau within the context of Shelley, Hawthorne, and Parker, we can begin to reconstruct a more materialist transcendentalist aesthetic, one far more similar to Melville’s worldview and Shelley’s poetics than usually recognized.



Aesthetic Electricity

The Electric Chain Wherewith We Are Darkly Bound: Byron Over the last few decades, the canonization of the American renaissance in the early- and mid-twentieth century has been thoroughly dissected, as critics and historians have shown how specific cultural and political needs at different historical moments have fostered the enshrinement of particular writers as embodying a distinctly American vision. Such criticism has demonstrated, for example, how the idealist aesthetics of “classic” American literature served Cold War era critics as a way of arguing for the detachment of art from political questions by providing a moderately liberal tradition that placed its faith in the gradual progressive resolution of political disputes while emphasizing the individual’s spiritual and moral development. Although numerous critics have shown how the traditional view of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman seriously misreads their works by neglecting the historical context of the nineteenth century, the basic story of the development of American romanticism has largely remained unrevised. Over the course of the twentieth century, a standard history developed in which Wordsworth’s nature poetry and Coleridge’s neo-platonism and celebration of the imagination became the key influences on the romanticism that would appear decades later in the United States. In particular, Coleridgean idealism, for many good reasons, has often been read as central to the development of romanticism in the United States. But we should also remind ourselves of the history of privileging this model of romanticism in American literary criticism. Most prominently, F. O. Matthiessen argued that Coleridge was “the most immediate force behind American transcendentalism,” in American Renaissance (1941), but his citation of Coleridge spoke to more than an intellectual genealogy.4 Instead, Matthiessen was attempting to draw a line of thought, “the dominant strain in modern art,” beginning with Coleridge and continuing through Emerson, Hawthorne, and Poe to T. S. Eliot (10). Matthiessen’s immediately previous book was The Achievement of T. S. Eliot (1935), a book that helped to ensure Eliot’s place as the leading Anglo-American modernist, and Matthiessen’s method, in American Renaissance, draws heavily on Eliot’s criticism. Most notably for this narrative, Eliot, despite his distaste for romanticism, cites Coleridge as “perhaps the greatest of English critics,” a critical acumen he contrasts with “‘aesthetic criticism.’”5 In placing Coleridge at the head of romantic thought and as the key instigator of what was best in American romanticism, Eliot and Matthiessen helped to create a genealogy that has still not been fully challenged.

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For all of Coleridge’s influence on the transcendentalists and, less directly, on other American writers of the antebellum era, his name and works were less well-known than those of other canonical British romantics, especially Byron. In the 1820s and 1830s, in fact, Byron was most often cited (usually in negative terms) as epitomizing the tendencies of a new kind of British poetry. For example, a decade before he famously attacked the transcendentalists as a “New School in Literature and Religion” intent on “keeping our community in a perpetual stir,” Andrews Norton placed Byron at the head of a similarly new school of British poetry.6 Writers such as Scott, Edgeworth, Wordsworth, and Southey, but, according to Norton, Byron, above all, demanded “something more true, natural, and vigorous. . . . something more exciting and passionate,” but in doing so they often crossed the line of what was decorous or moral.7 While Norton’s main criticism lies in a moral realm, as he insists that “what is beautiful and grand in nature, depends so much upon the purest moral and religious associations” (339), he makes clear that Byron’s prosaic poesy is equally flawed, “the principal difference between [his poems], and prose too dull to find a reader, consists in the circumstance of their being written in stanzas” (321). Experimental poetic form, moral heterodoxy, passionate revolt against neoclassical standards all combine to make Byron both exemplary and most regrettable. More positively, Frederic Henry Hedge, whom Perry Miller denominated the theoretical leader of transcendentalism and, in turn, the Emersonian version of American romanticism, introduced Schiller to his readers of disenfranchised Unitarians and New Englanders not by comparing him to Wordsworth or Coleridge, but by stating that for “those who are not acquainted with German works of this description, Shelley’s and Byron’s poetry may serve as English samples.”8 This was not a new connection for his readers, just one with a more positive valuation than that offered in the 1820s, when in the North American Review Alexander H. Everett had similarly spoken of Schiller’s tendency to create “conception[s] wholly false and unnatural” as being “produced again, with equal effect in our own time, by lord Byron.”9 As these citations hint, the transcendentalists and their critics recognized Byron not simply as representing a new kind of poetry but also as embodying its challenge to the sociopolitical status quo. In a piece titled “Education of the People,” Orestes Brownson, perhaps the most politically radical of the early transcendentalists, argues that “the dominant sentiment of our epoch is that of social progress.” He continues by declaiming that “We see it everywhere . . . we felt it in the thrill which ran through our hearts, and  

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heard it in the loud burst of sympathy which broke from the whole civilized world, at the news of the French Revolution of July, 1830. We see it in the influence of such writers as Jeremy Bentham, Byron, and Bulwer.”10 In his 1836 pamphlet New Views of Christianity, Society, and the Church, where he argues that “We cannot then go back either to exclusive Spiritualism, or to exclusive Materialism,” we must “recognize and accept all the elements of Humanity,” Brownson contends that a spiritual element needed to counter the overwhelming materialism of the age “moulds the form in Byron, penetrates to the ground in Wordsworth, and entirely predominates in the Schlegels.”11 And in an 1838 essay in Brownson’s Boston Quarterly Review, George Bancroft would similarly cite Byron as representing the democratic spirit of the age—“the secret of Byron’s power lay in part in the harmony which existed between his muse and the democratic tendency of the age.”12 Throughout the 1830s, then, the New England intellectuals who created the philosophical milieu for the emergence of Emersonian transcendentalism alluded to Byron as the representative for a new worldview, a democratic, impassioned, yet socially engaged philosophy that would combine spiritualism and materialism. Without belaboring Byron’s prominence in the antebellum United States, I want to emphasize how examining the transatlantic currents of romanticism more carefully, particularly recognizing the continuing influence of the more materialist romantic irony of Byron and Percy Shelley, encourages a different understanding of American romanticism and New England transcendentalism, one we can begin to access more fully by examining the use of electrical imagery and thought.13 The most famous allusion to electricity in romantic literature comes, of course, in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), and her novel provocatively suggests the various forces electricity could figure. While the original edition of the novel does not specifically allude to electricity, Mary Shelley’s introduction to the 1831 edition traces the novel’s characterization of life and mind as material—and as potentially related to electricity—to conversations among herself, Percy Shelley, Byron, and John Polidori about the experiments and theories of Erasmus Darwin and others. In the mid-1810s, the possibly electric nature of life had come to the forefront with a revival of interest in mesmerism and with the Vitalism debate between John Abernethy and William Lawrence. In an attempt to counter the mechanical materialist tendencies of the medical profession, while not rejecting science’s emphasis on physical causation, Abernethy, President of London’s Royal College of Surgeons, had suggested that life itself derived from some sort of immaterial force, perhaps “analogous to

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electricity,” that enlivened the physiological structures of bodies explored by science.14 This life-force would seem to offer scientific evidence of the existence of an immortal soul. Lawrence, Abernethy’s former pupil and the Shelleys’ physician, dismissed the attempt to find some life-force separate from matter, eventually attacking Abernethy’s allusion to electricity on the grounds that electricity, too, was, in fact, material. As the debate gained publicity, Lawrence was attacked as an atheist and as unpatriotic, while Abernethy’s compromise position, though more acceptable to most orthodox believers, also came under attack.15 Most significantly, Coleridge’s rejection of electricity as the life-force or as the vehicle of thought largely grew out of his complete dismissal of Lawrence and his skepticism about the materialist elements of Abernethy’s vitalism.16 Coleridge’s idealism did not, however, provide American writers of the nineteenth century with their most frequent reference to electricity from British romanticism. As we’ve already seen in chapter one, Byron’s account in Childe Harold of “the things which bring / Back on the heart the weight which it would fling / Aside for ever” as “Striking the electric chain wherewith we are darkly bound” frequently appeared as an epigraph or in direct or indirect allusions. The passage at length, from canto 4 of Childe Harold, published in 1818, begins to suggest an alternative, less determinate type of associationist psychology figured in terms of electricity: And slight withal may be the things which bring Back on the heart the weight which it would fling Aside for ever: it may be a sound— A tone of music,—summer’s eve—or spring, A flower—the wind—the ocean—which shall wound, Striking the electric chain wherewith we are darkly bound; And how and why we know not, nor can trace Home to its cloud this lightning of the mind, But feel the shock renew’d, nor can efface The blight and blackening which it leaves behind, Which out of things familiar, undesign’d, When least we deem of such, calls up to view The spectres whom no exorcism can bind 17

The chain that darkly binds us is electric, because the shock reminding us of things we would forget, of the specters of our past, occurs so rapidly, so mysteriously, in response to some sort of stimulus that seems insignificant and disconnected from the memory it recalls. Electricity works here to suggest both the physicality of the mind and of these memories and the non-mechanical, instantaneous, and untrackable pathway thought



Aesthetic Electricity

takes. It works, in other words, both as a metaphor for the enigmatic, rapid workings of memory and as a direct allusion to the possibility that life and thought were, in fact, electrical phenomena. These lines epitomize the role electric imagery plays throughout Byron’s oeuvre as indicating a kind of unconscious, yet sensuous force, a way to account for a powerful chain of mental associations to which we do not have full access. Similarly, in Mazeppa (also 1818), Byron writes of the Involuntary sparks of thought, Which strike from out the heart o’erwrought, And form a strange intelligence, Alike mysterious and intense, Which link the burning chain that binds, Without their will, young hearts and minds; Conveying, as the electric wire, We know not how, the absorbing fire.(ll. 236–243)

Expanding on the reading of the lines from Childe Harold, we can see how, unlike the mechanical associationism Coleridge denounces, this electric associationism partakes in some transcendent (strange intelligence) element that binds humans together. This connection appears elsewhere in Childe Harold canto 4 where an electric chain of sympathy links the high and the low together: “From thy Sire’s to his humblest subject’s breast / Is linked the electric chain of that despair, / Whose shock was as an earthquake’s” (ll. 1545–1547). It is this element of electricity that Byron uses to figure poetic creation and its political potential. In Canto 3 of “The Prophecy of Dante” (1819), for example, Byron delineates how poets are “form’d of far too penetrable stuff ” (l. 168), as indicated by “the finer thoughts, the thrilling sense, / The electric blood with which their arteries run” (161–162). Thus having “the intense / Feeling of that which is, and fancy of / That which should be” (163–165), they are not meant for this world: “soon they find / Earth’s mist with their pure pinions not agree, / And die or are degraded” (170– 172). If the “rough stuff ” of the world’s hard realities penetrates the poetic mind through its electricity, its openness to the world, elsewhere electricity figures not poetic but political idealism: “the mightiest fail” because their “hearts electric—charged with fire from heaven” are made “Black with the rude collision—inly torn” by society’s failure to address what is truly important (“Monody on the Death of the Right Honourable R. B. Sheridan” (1816) 88–91). For Byron, the human imagination, as figured at times in electric terms, becomes the source of intellectual and political freedom, the medium where the mental and the physical meet, but that electricity can

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also indicate the indeterminate, at times destructive nature of the intense emotional and physical feelings to which the artist, the political revolutionary, are particularly receptive. Where Coleridge’s romantic idealism cited electricity as emblematizing the dialectical nature of universal laws, laws governing the immaterial mind and its relationship to nature, Byron describes electricity as a far more unstable, potentially destructive yet enlightening and physical force, affecting both mind and body.

Poetry is a Sword of Lightning: Percy Shelley’s Romantic Electricity Byron’s various electric allusions begin to outline a much more indeterminate, more materialist version of aesthetic electricity at work in British romanticism, a version most fully developed in Percy Shelley’s thought. Electric imagery, in fact, appears throughout Byron’s oeuvre, but it increase significantly in his later works, especially in canto 4 of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and in Don Juan, after he and Shelley had become friends. Percy Shelley’s development of a materialist understanding of electricity for exploring and describing the force of literary aesthetics, a force he links to mental processes, life, love, and technology, seems to draw on Abernethy’s supposition about the life-force being analogous to electricity and Erasmus Darwin’s conclusion that the nervous impulse was electric, while inclining towards Lawrence’s type of vital materialism.18 This synthesis of conflicting scientific views pushes him to explore an alternative materialism based in electricity, one more fluid than the mechanical associationism of Priestley, yet grounded, as we saw in chapter one, in the material—economic, scientific, linguistic—changes of the era. In two of his most important theoretical statements, “Defence of Poetry” and the preface to Prometheus Unbound, Percy describes poetry in terms of electricity. In “Defence,” he speaks of poetry as “a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.”19 He returns to this image, modifying it, in his concluding paragraph, where before stating that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” he refers to the “electric life which burns within” (7:140) poetry. Poetry, although often unacknowledged, has an invisible, yet material (political, physical, even military) power that cannot, finally, be contained by those who would try to relegate it to a particular understanding. In the “Preface,” Percy links this electricity to the poets’ mental processes, contending that

s­

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the true “spirit” of poetry lies in “the uncommunicated lightning of [the poets’] own mind” (2:173). Poetry, from this perspective, remains an impossible enterprise, even as it has intense, real effects. It is uncommunicated, yet it exceeds all controls. Here, Shelley echoes Friedrich Schlegel’s image of poetry in “On Incomprehensibility” (1800). If Coleridge’s view of electricity parallels that of naturphilosophie, contributing to his organic and transcendent understanding of language and poetry, Shelley’s development of Schlegelian irony produces, as Marc Redfield has argued, a poetry in which “poetic words do not understand what they express, or feel what they inspire,” so “that poetry opens aesthetics to the contingency of history, and the constitutive uncertainty of futurity.”20 Schlegel’s use of lightning hints at a kind of jouissance, paralleling Redfield’s de Manian–materialist understanding of language: “For a long time now there has been lightning on the horizon of poetry. . . . But soon it won’t be simply a matter of one thunderstorm, the whole sky will burn with a single flame, and then all your little lightning rods won’t help. . . . Then there will be readers who will know how to read. In the nineteenth century everyone will be able to savour the fragments.”21 Rather than invoking an idea of organic wholeness or mechanical determinacy, Schlegel uses electricity to convey both the intense, nearly physical emotion of an ecstatic, shocking encounter with poetry and its ineffable ambiguity and open-endedness. Instead of comprehending or understanding poems, readers will come to have a sensuous, appreciative connection to poetic fragments. This intense feeling, sensation, flavor is contrasted, by Schlegel and others, with Enlightenment rationalistic technique, the attempt of such thinkers as Benjamin Franklin to tame these wild impulses through instruments like the lightning rod. The lightning of poetry belies the Enlightenment dream of containing poetry, the human mind, nature itself by displaying the indeterminacy of language and history in its ability to constantly destabilize any attempt to delimit its meaning and use. As opposed to merely mechanical readings of poetics, mind, and society, Schlegel’s electric romanticism proposes a type of unstable materialism, a materialism built less on a Newtonian notion of individual atoms (including atomized individuals) in motion than in the flow of forces disrupting, impinging upon, and reconfiguring the boundaries separating atom from atom, person from person. Percy Shelley moves beyond Schlegel’s electrical poetry, as electricity comes to figure more than just the phenomenality of language. While most of his allusions to electricity, so far, appear as merely figurative, electricity’s

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ability to suggest language’s fluidity is based, for Percy, in contemporaneous understandings of the materiality of mind and life and the political implications and foundations of such understandings. As Edward Reed has recently argued, Shelley was influenced, in particular, by Darwin’s theorization that “all of animate nature was possessed of sensibility and feeling, even plants” and his attempt to discover “the material basis for this sensibility in a subtle fluid or ether in the body and nerves, basing his ideas on the influential fluid theory of electricity developed by his friend Benjamin Franklin.”22 As I described in chapter one, this understanding of electricity both drew on and helped to bolster the market and industrial revolution, the economic and political changes arising with the increasing flow of goods, money, and people back and forth across the Atlantic and around the world. In “A Refutation of Deism” (1814), Percy most explicitly hints at an understanding of electricity as an imponderable, physical force analogous to, if not identical with, thought itself. In rejecting the idea of a divine watchmaker behind the creation of animated life, Shelley, echoing Darwin, contends that speaking of matter as “inert” makes no sense, for It is infinitely active and subtle. Light, electricity and magnetism are fluids not surpassed by thought itself in tenuity and activity; like thought they are sometimes the cause and sometimes the effect of motion; and, distinct as they are from every other class of substances, with which we are acquainted, seem to possess equal claims with thought to the unmeaning distinction of immateriality. (6:50)

The phenomenon of electricity defies the distinction between matter and immaterial thought central to conventional metaphysics, as thought becomes as material as electricity and the material world becomes as “active and subtle” as thought. When he speaks of poetry as the “uncommunicated lightning of [the poet’s] own mind,” then, Shelley links poetry not only to a fundamental life force but also to the specific workings of the physical mind. As Robert Kaufman argues in placing Shelley in a line of materialist aesthetics moving from Kant to Marx and Adorno, Shelley, especially in “Defence of Poetry,” articulates his aesthetic position by opposing himself to various forms of scientific and economic calculation, a move that sets him apart from the mechanical materialism of such radical precursors as Joseph Priestley and William Godwin.23 In this way, like Coleridge, Percy attempted to move beyond the determinism of associationist psychology even as he, unlike Coleridge, maintained its materialist emphasis.24 Where Coleridge dismissed the idea of the mind being material in order to escape



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the mechanistic conclusions that seemed to follow, in the process turning to electricity as a phenomenon for illustrating ideal, noumenal laws, Shelley draws on electricity to hint at an alternative model of the mind, one, which Karl Kroeber has argued, anticipates some of the most recent attempts to theorize the materiality of consciousness.25 This model emphasizes the mind’s embodiment, its fundamentally physical nature, but reconceives that physicality as non-determinate and as potentially yielding to some sort of transcendence of the self. Percy begins to outline such a model in his preface to Prometheus Unbound. While the preface seems to embrace the idea of the great artist, out of time and out of place, by contrasting the writers who simply imitate by reflecting their age and those of genius who create “lightning,” he insists that all poets “are, in one sense, the creators, and, in another, the creations of their age”: “Every man’s mind is, in this respect, modified by all the objects of nature and art; by every word and every suggestion which he ever admitted to act upon his consciousness” (2:174). Largely the product of its environment, especially of language, the mind is not finally determined, but rather modified, by that environment. Electricity provides a model for exploring a more fluid materialism of the mind as its lightning is not merely the mechanical product of its environment, not simply generated by the stimuli it receives, but rather the explosive culmination of the creative tension between the mind and stimuli acting upon it. Just as lightning does not simply flow from the clouds, but in fact creates an electric current between the clouds and the ground, so electric thought rebounds between the inner self and the outer world. Shelley’s electric aesthetics, in this way, fosters what Alan Richardson has called “embodied universalism,” a replacement of “the ‘timeless’ universalism of the Enlightenment, which located human uniformity in reason, language, and logic, with a time-bound and biological universalism that instead grounded ‘primary’ human features in the body, in the material organization of the mind, and in the emotions.”26 By eroding the distinction between materiality and immateriality, aesthetic electricity troubles the sense of the self as a stable site of experience, opening the door to reconstituting the self and the biological, economic, political, and ideological forces—all, at times, figured as electric—constituting particular individuals and their society. Rejecting the materialist determinism of mechanical philosophy and the idealist abstractions of both Enlightenment thought and Coleridgean imagination, Percy Shelley’s idea of poetry as electric locates the aesthetic in the physical body, in the material self, as a force or experience giving rise to a recognition of a materially based universal humanism,

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an ethical perspective not to be conflated with politics but necessary for true political reform. From this reading, Shelley’s idea of the poet as an unacknowledged legislator wielding a sword of lightning takes on a new light, revealing the limitations as well as the power of poetry as a political force. Eschewing the utopianism of the late Enlightenment, Shelley electrifies the human imagination, rendering it both the medium where the mental and the physical meet and the source of intellectual and physical freedom. As such, the materiality of electric poetry lies not just in its physicality—in language being registered by the senses—but in its genesis within and action upon the social world. Poetry is material because it is literally words, which are material themselves, but it is also material in a sociohistorical sense, the product of material conditions of political and economic structures. In “Defence,” for example, Shelley indicates that it is poetry’s embeddeness in what we might now call social discourse that gives it its “electric life,” as that life is “less [the poets’] spirit than the spirit of the age” (7:140). Similarly, in the preface to Prometheus Unbound, in further developing the figure of lightning thought, Percy elaborates this relationship between mind and the world, gesturing to its political implications: “The great writers of our own age are, we have reason to suppose, the companions and forerunners of some unimagined change in our social condition, or the opinions which cement it. The cloud of mind is discharging its collected lightning, and the equilibrium between institutions and opinions is now restoring, or is about to be restored” (2:173). Echoing Schlegel’s prediction about the lightning charge of poetry, Percy at once envisions political revolution and at the same time insists that the changes to come are unpredictable, are “unimagined.” Thus, in concluding his preface to Prometheus Unbound, Percy acknowledges his “‘passion for reforming the world,’” but insists that his poetry does not contain “a reasoned system on the theory of human life. Didactic poetry is my abhorrence” (2:174). As Kaufman, from an Adornian-Marxist position, Paul Hamilton, from a Habermasian-Public Sphere approach, and Redfield, from a de Manian–deconstructive angle, have all differently argued, it is this refusal of political commitment that allows Shelley to provide an alternative understanding of aesthetic politics.27 Through acknowledging the material opacity of language itself and by gesturing to the radical indeterminacy of meaning, in drawing on materialist understandings of the mind and the basis of the self in the senses, and in recognizing the sociohistorical conditions and material means by which poetry is disseminated, Percy Shelley emerges as a theorist and practitioner of a kind of aesthetics



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imagined to engender critical thinking about one’s self and the world, a process of constantly questioning received ideas that opens the self to new experiences and new perspectives that might provide the ground for sociopolitical change but that refuses to offer a political programme.

 

Percy Shelley’s interest in electricity as signifying that the relationships among the individual mind, language, and society are unstable yet possibly productive of political change may have also derived from his hope in the revolutionary potential of electric technology. As Thomas Jefferson Hogg recalls in his remembrance of Shelley at Oxford, he contended that “The galvanic battery is a new engine; it has been used hitherto to an insignificant extent, yet has it wrought wonders already; what will not . . . a well-arranged system of hundreds of metallic plates, effect?” Linking Voltaic electricity to the balloon, Shelley concludes that such inventions “would virtually emancipate every slave, and would annihilate slavery for ever.”28 As I described in chapter one, with the invention of the telegraph, the emancipatory effects of electricity were elaborated at length as it either emblematized humankind’s ability to conquer nature (and primitive humans) and create a harmonious world or mirrored a spiritual community in which all were already one. James W. Taylor’s The Useful and the Beautiful perhaps best illustrates this point, demonstrating how figures of art as electric merged with techno-utopian and spiritualist accounts of the telegraph to produce a kind of aesthetic utopianism where all of humankind would be joined together both by the network of wires encircling the world and by the cultivation of an enlightened, universal taste. Taylor’s lecture epitomizes the view of the telegraph as an emblem of American inventiveness and American promise, yet some dissenting voices, echoing Carlyle’s critique of the mechanical age, began to suggest that this network would destroy the individual self, with its particularized history, interests, and perspectives, by subsuming the self into a larger group. Thoreau’s comments in Walden are perhaps the most famous dissent from the nearly universal acclaim for the telegraph, but more to the point here is Herman Melville’s use of electric imagery in Moby-Dick. In “The QuarterDeck,” Melville describes Ahab as attempting, by “some nameless, interior volition,” to “have shocked into them [his crew] the same fiery emotion accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own magnetic life,” going on

 

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Soap-Bubble Anti-Aesthetic

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to have Ahab refer to “mine own electric thing.”29 The aesthetic nature of Ahab’s power over the Pequod’s whalers, hinted at throughout the text and especially in this scene, recalls Melville’s positive use of electric imagery in his celebration of Hawthorne’s genius as providing a “shock of recognition [that] runs the whole circle round” the “brotherhood” of genius.30 Ahab seems to suggest the dark side of electric genius, the possibility of a charismatic, magnetic personality leading the easily swayed for his own ends. With its attention to Ahab’s ability to manipulate the sailors’ economic interests, Moby-Dick emphasizes how the capitalist revolution tended to reinforce hierarchies instead of producing radical equality. Rather than creating a universal harmony based in human commonality, aesthetic electricity will transform the masses, as the imperialist language of techno-utopian discussions of the telegraph similarly hinted, into merely a reflection of one controlling personality, parts of a body controlled by one central authority, or as Ahab megalomaniacally puts it near the end, “Ye are not other men, but my arms and my legs; and so obey me” (568). The techno-utopian vision of the world becoming one body imagined the Northern brain controlling the uncivilized bodies of Asia, Africa, and America, turning them into the arms and hands of a now-unified and harmonious global whole. Melville, in contrast, explores the possible tyranny behind this unified world-body as Ahab’s “magnetism” (518) renders the harpooners Queequeg, Tashtego, and Daggoo his unthinking limbs. Electricity, in this way, not only served to represent the potential of aesthetic connection; it also registered fears about the aesthetic’s coercive potential to subordinate individuals in a league against their own interests. Nathaniel Hawthorne more fully demarcates the moral dangers of aesthetic connection, associating it with both mesmerism and the language and technologies of electricity. In response to these dangers, he advances a model of aestheticism, of art and the artist as nearly detached from the material world. As he phrases it in “The Custom House,” the romancer and his imagination must occupy some “neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other” so that “the impalpable beauty of [his] soap-bubble” artistic creation will be protected from “the rude contact of some actual circumstance.”31 Hawthorne etherealizes art even further in his characterization of Owen Warland in “The Artist of the Beautiful.” When his beautiful butterfly is destroyed in the hands of Robert and Annie Danforth’s child, Warland stands by unperturbed because “when the artist rose high enough to achieve the Beautiful, the symbol by which



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he made it perceptible to mortal senses became of little value in his eyes, while his spirit possessed itself in the enjoyment of the Reality.”32 Even in a story where technological innovation and precision provide the vehicle for creating a beautiful object, Beauty occupies some sphere beyond the physical world, a realm accessed through a nearly spiritual transcendence of political, social, and economic concerns. Hawthorne’s rude contact with the soap-bubble recalls the rude collision with the rough stuff of the world that Byron sees as darkening the electric force of artistic and political imagination. But where Byron views the electric imagination and its rude collision with the world as potentially enabling a connection with others, Hawthorne re-envisions the rude collision of the electric force as the invasion of one person by another. At numerous times in his works, but most elaborately in The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Hawthorne draws on mesmerism to describe an artistic electric force, linked, at times, with the telegraph, which threatens to violate the innermost self. In House, Hawthorne reproduces the techno-utopian and spiritualist visions of the telegraph and its unlimited potentials for creating universal harmony, only to dismantle such dreams with allusions to the actual uses of the telegraph. After Clifford, Hawthorne’s figure for the impotent artist detached from the world, feels released from his mental prison upon finding his cousin Jaffrey dead, he drags Hebzibah along on a train ride to flee the dead body and his own past. Enraptured by “electricity;— the demon, the angel, the mighty physical power, the all-pervading intelligence!” Clifford hypothesizes “that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time. . . . the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence. . . . a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we deemed.” Echoing spiritualist interpretations of the telegraph and its potential, Clifford imagines that the new technology might do away with bodies altogether. He begins his celebration of the modern “harbingers of a better era,” in fact, by mentioning mesmerism as one of those developments which will lead to “purging away the grossness out of human life,” one of those discoveries which is making the world “ethereal and spiritual.” In this way, “An almost spiritual medium, like the electric telegraph, should be consecrated to high, deep, joyful, and holy missions,” enabling “Lovers” to “send their heart-throbs from Maine to Florida,” so that distant friends feel “an electric thrill.”33 But when his fellow-passenger insists on and warns of the uses of the telegraph for law enforcement, politics, and capitalism, Clifford comes quickly tumbling back to earth, his

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vision of electricity leading to a spiritualized aesthetic existence destroyed by the social uses of technology. Where Clifford imagines the telegraph as enabling one vast interconnected realm of private intimacy, its public uses seem to demolish his dreams entirely. In contrasting Clifford’s spiritual aestheticism with Holgrave’s model of authorship, as represented in his mesmerizing Phoebe, Hawthorne reiterates the dangers of an electric aesthetic. Hawthorne viewed mesmerism, in the words of Samuel Coale, as “morally and philosophically repugnant,” for it “could violate an individual consciousness and soul,” allowing the mesmerist to “gain power over his victim.” At the same time, however, Hawthorne repeatedly draws on mesmerism “to describe the way the artist works upon a reader’s consciousness.”34 With its focus on new technologies like daguerreotypy, railroads, and the telegraph, House’s version of this power, most prominently at work in Holgrave’s story lulling Phoebe into a trance, unites technology and commerce with the power of art to seduce, enthrall, enslave. Hepzibah’s opening of the cent-shop is three-times described as having a “galvanic” effect on her (37, 52, 216), hinting at the market’s power to artificially enliven a woman previously “dead” to society (216). Holgrave equates this “galvanic” power with what the narrator describes as “the sympathy or magnetism among human beings [which] is more subtle and universal, than we think; it exists, indeed, among different classes of organized life, and vibrates one to another” (174). Yet as energizing as that contact may be, it also enslaves Hepzibah. Whether Hawthorne fully accepted the theories of animal magnetism and spiritual electricity, he draws on their use of magnetism and electricity to suggest a material counterpart to the ethereal, aesthetic union contemplated by Clifford. That counterpart is aligned with both the energizing and subordinating effects of communication and commerce, of contact and exchange, vital to civil society. But when turned into art, this magnetism becomes a type of power wielded by the strong and talented over the weak and impressionable, especially women, as in both the story of Mathew Maule and Alice Pyncheon and the telling of their story by Holgrave to Phoebe. In this condition, the author’s audience comes to “live only in his thoughts and emotions” (211), as he achieves a kind of “empire over the human spirit” (212). As Hawthorne expressed in a famous letter to his future wife Sophia “beseech[ing]” her “to take no part in” the dangers of mesmerism and its “magnetic miracles”: “Supposing that this power arises from the transfusion of one spirit into another, it seems to me that the sacredness of the individual is violated by it; there would be an intrusion into thy holy of holies.”35 The spiritual-



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electric connection Taylor and others imagined as producing a universal taste becomes simply a tool of control and manipulation as the boundary separating individual souls becomes permeable, allowing the destruction of the most sacred part of the self. Hawthorne’s anti-aesthetic here, his characterization of aesthetic production and reception as either furthering the spiritual conquest of one by another, by allowing the enslavement of one soul to another, or remaining so detached from the actualities of day-to-day life as to have little or no effect on its audiences, prefigures two leading critiques of aesthetics in literary criticism of the past decades—aesthetic experience, aesthetic works, seduce us so that we “live only in [the author’s] thoughts and emotions” (House 211), so that we become merely the product of its ideological conjurings, or aesthetics, in accessing a realm of possibility, of freedom, flees the determining world of economics and politics, leading us to invest our energies in the empty hope of achieving harmony in an ideal sphere. On the one hand, then, the artist and his audience potentially become part of an aesthetic state, but rather than a realm of freedom for the full development of true human nature, as in Schiller’s vision, that state enshrines the domination of genius over the feminized masses. In this way, Hawthorne prefigures the critiques of what Gerald Graff has called “right new historicism” which “argues, in effect, that since every form of culture is destined to be co-opted, the very notion of an oppositional position is nonsense.”36 On the other hand, the artist and his audience through the intimacy granted by the work of art become “citizen[s] of somewhere else” (Scarlet Letter 44), a somewhere else of soap-bubble frailty, as they build “a house, of materials long in use for constructing castles in the air” (House 3). It is no surprise, then, that Hawthorne comes to exemplify Sacvan Bercovitch’s view that

 

 

None of [the American romantics] adopted the Romantic-Antinomian stand of Byron or Baudelaire against ‘the common tide.’ None of them envisioned, with Schiller, an ‘aesthetic state’ beyond and apart from national ideals. And none of them challenged the political and economic premises of capitalism. . . . The works of our classic writers show more clearly than any others I know how American radicalism could be turned into a force against any form of change that would decisively alter the norms, ideals, and structures of American culture.37

For Hawthorne, both technology and aesthetics hold out the false hope of the harmonious, nearly spiritual unification of soul with soul, a dream of an electric or mesmeric egalitarian whole. But the reality is that any such whole is only created through the diminution and enslavement of weaker souls and that art, to avoid such violence to its audience and to its subject

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matter, must remain aloof from the world, floating outside the material existence of life.

Melted Wires: “Von Blixum’s Heroic Experiment” and the Limits of Telegraphic Communion As I argued in chapter one, techno-utopian and spiritualist readings of the telegraph intersect in significant ways, specifically in their refusal to acknowledge the materiality of the various media—the wires, the code, the bodies, the language—through which the electric force was supposed to flow. Hawthorne dismantles spiritualist and techno-utopian claims for aesthetic electricity, revealing both the potentially coercive power of aesthetics—figured in electrical terms—and emphasizing the disciplinary uses of electricity and electrical technology. Yet in retreating into a kind of idealist aesthetics (or anti-aesthetics), Hawthorne does not explore, in any depth at least, the limits of, the gaps within, the circuits of influence and subordination he describes. Instead he accepts the techno-utopian and spiritualist vision of complete, unmediated connection, simply revealing the destructive results of those connections involving unequal partners. What is more surprising, perhaps, is that materialist critiques of such thinking similarly recapitulate this erasure of the indeterminacy of the media. James W. Carey, for example, in a frequently cited article on the telegraph and ideology, describes the discourse surrounding the telegraph as “An essentially religious view of communication—or one cloaked, at least, in religious metaphors— [acting] as a mediator—a progressively vanishing mediator—between middle-class aspiration and capitalist and, increasingly, imperial development.”38 This religious cloaking encouraged the development of “a form of language stripped of the local, the regional and colloquial” (310), as the telegraph “forced news, to be treated like a commodity” (311). But the telegraph, according to Carey, did more than just commodify language by stripping it down to an abstract minimum; it played a central role in the development of the commodity form as described by Marx. For Marx, commodities’ exchange-values come to have “absolutely no connexion with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom” because that value is based in “human labour in the abstract.”39 From Carey’s perspective, the telegraph further tears value from its basis in labor. With its speed, the telegraph allowed “information [to] move independently of, and faster than, physical entities,” and thus to become “a simulation of, and control



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mechanism for, what has been left behind” (314)—real objects and individuals. In this way, “the commodity was sundered from its representations” (317), allowing the development of a far-flung market system. By detaching the economic value of objects from their relationship with individuals, allowing them to move as information over vast distances in only a few moments, the telegraph fostered the hegemony of the commodity form, wherein “the sundering of a real, direct relationship between buyer and seller, separates use value from exchange value” (318). From an implicitly leftist perspective, Carey offers a compelling, often convincing account of the ideological function played by utopian discourses of electronic technology, indicating some of the ways that an instrument celebrated for its egalitarian potential and its democratizing of language and communication became a tool of economic, cultural, and social domination. A similar, more suggestive critique of visions of the telegraph creating a political and spiritual egalitarian community emerges from a more conservative perspective in Henry W. Parker’s parodic 1846 science fiction short story “Von Blixum’s Heroic Experiment.”40 Parker’s story goes further than Hawthorne in some respects by mocking not just techno-utopian thought but also materialist accounts of transcendence and the possibility of escaping the physical world in this life. At the same time, however, his satiric tone begins to hint at the telegraph’s real potential to foster the reconception of the self and the community. Published in The American Whig Review the same month as defenses of a state religion and of capital punishment and only a few months before the magazine’s dismissal of Margaret Fuller’s aesthetic criticism, the story immediately ties spiritual, medical, and technological electricity together when the narrator claims that his friend Von Blixum’s scientific achievements are “intimately connected” with “Animal Magnetism, the Water Cure, and the Electro-Magnetic Telegraph.”41 Von Blixum’s experiments, we learn, culminate in his discovering a manner of “instantaneous transportation of one’s self to any distance, by means of the Electro-Magnetic Telegraph,” a discovery that will potentially lead to “complete freedom from the chains and pains of matter; the elevation of the laboring classes, and a general relief from the present faulty construction of society” (290). This political fantasy imagines replacing actual bodies with artificial ones, as one’s soul could be transported from body to body, and ends with the idea that “one person might pass directly into another’s hollow body, thus intermingling and interchanging thought by silent, immediate felt communion” (294). Von Blixum’s invention mirrors the spiritualist claims for a universal telegraph, but while spiritualists saw such a telegraph

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as promoting human morality, the story hints that what Von Blixum truly achieves is his own dehumanization, as it satirizes the narrator’s reaction to his death from a “melted” wire that fails to connect with his artificial body: “The daring philosopher had involuntarily escaped beyond recovery; he had perished a sacrifice to science. . . . Reach me a fan, reader, lest I go off into a swoon or a sonnet!” (295). Ending the story with the possibility of going off into a sonnet and referring to Von Blixum as speaking in “a highly transcendental and often finely imaginative strain” (291), the story marks itself as a satire of transcendentalist desires of marrying aesthetic, technological, and spiritualist ideas of escaping repressive social structures, individual identity, and matter itself. Echoing Poe’s more famous “Some Words with a Mummy,” published in the same journal a year earlier, Parker’s story plays with progressive political and spiritual beliefs as it attacks materialist attempts to explain spiritual transcendence. As a young Congregationalist minister in Brooklyn, who would go on to become a regular contributor to such bastions of New England conservatism as The North American Review and The New Englander and Yale Review, Parker could be expected to offer a defense of orthodox Christian belief against materialist understandings of transcendence. A poet himself, Parker late in his life would publish The Spirit of Beauty (1888), a collection of essays “scientific and aesthetic,” in which he provided a critique of attempts to apply Darwinian thought to ethics and aesthetics.42 If in his later life, his essays would attack the materialism of Darwin, his earlier story may have been an attack on the anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844). Written by Robert Chambers, Vestiges scandalized many leading Victorian English and American thinkers with its protoevolutionary history of creation, its emphasis on deep connections between animals and humans, and its materialist explanations of life. Most telling, Chambers argued for “the absolute identity of the brain with a galvanic battery,” based on the fact that electricity could supply the place of stimulation from the nerves.43 Like many American journals, The American Whig Review had devoted several articles to explaining and denouncing Vestiges, one such article appearing in the issue immediately prior to Parker’s story. Yet, even as the journal consistently attacked materialist notions of life and thought as electric, its pages repeatedly resounded with metaphors of electricity suggestive of a materialist understanding of thought, emotion, and imagination. In a May, 1845, article on reading, for example, the author explains the power of such un-taught masters as Shakespeare by arguing that “This mysterious something, which works within us with such secret,  

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but resistless energy, like some spiritual electricity or magnetism, has been baptized into the name of Genius.”44 Parker’s story similarly registers as it denounces the possibility that technological improvements and a materialist understanding of human thought might, in fact, lead to some kind of spiritual, egalitarian union. The story, in other words, reflects the widespread feeling that the telegraph somehow challenged individual boundaries through its ability to detach words from the presence of actual bodies and gestures to the way that the telegraph, as a unifying force tying disparate parts of the country and the world together through the apparent materializing of thought, contributed to spiritualized understandings of electricity. Even as the story attempts to display spiritualist conceptions of electricity as absurdly far removed from the actual political, economic, and social uses of the telegraph, the story also suggests, through its mocking and mapping of these connections, an incipient materialism underlying such readings. Although the story dismisses Von Blixum’s dream of the telegraph revolutionizing political and economic structures through its transformation of conceptions of the individual self, its mockery intimates a real concern about the socially transformative potential of this telegraphic model of self. It is this possibility that Carey’s analysis of telegraphic rhetoric misses, and it is this possibility, prefigured by Byron’s and Shelley’s use of electricity, that undergirds the aesthetic materialist development of electricity in American romanticism. What Carey fails to acknowledge in his invocation of Marx is Marx’s faith that the tools of capitalist domination are also the tools of its undoing, that the devices that encourage the erosion of organic communities and the development of a universal medium of value are ambivalent, for they produce the ground for alternative futures. As Marx and Engels argued in 1848, through “the rapid improvement of all instruments of production” and “by the immensely facilitated means of communication,” including “steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs,” the bourgeoisie “creates a world after its own image.” But this “constant revolutionising of production” both sweeps away “[a]ll fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions,” the organic communities, cultures, and languages whose passing Carey laments, and gives rise to the means by which consciousness of common exploitation can be created—“the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. . . . [are] needed to centralise the numerous local struggles.”45 The telegraph served as an instrument for the economic domination of

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atomistic individuals as well as specific nations, races, and classes, yet its ability to broaden the reach of capital worked to suggest the permeable boundaries of the individual self and the possibility of previously unimagined communities outdistancing both capitalist exploitation and national borders. In this way, the telegraph became an instrument that both helped consolidate bourgeois ideologies of the atomistic self and belied the sense of the isolated self, as each individual within modernizing American society became more and more entrenched within networks of commerce, information, and power denying the possibility of the strictly demarcated self.

Vile Falsifying Telegraphs of Me: Melville’s ‘Pierre’ 1 By locating the failure of Von Blixum’s experiment in the material failure of the network, the melted wires, the gap created between the body and the wires through which the soul, the self, moves, Parker’s story reiterates the importance of the mind/body, soul/physical self distinction to both spiritualist and techno-utopian readings of the telegraph, while suggesting that it is in the gaps themselves that we might find an alternative understanding of the telegraph’s potential. Those gaps, I want to argue, gaps created by the very materiality of the bodies, technologies, and codes involved in any sort of communication but shaped by the specific historical forces producing any cultural event or aesthetic experience, are at the center of what I am calling aesthetic electricity. No text that I know of more fully invests those gaps with meaning (and indeterminacy) than Herman Melville’s Pierre, or The Ambiguities (1852). In fact, the only nineteenth-century text that I’ve encountered that employs electric language and imagery more than Pierre is John Neal’s Logan (1823), a bizarre gothic novel featuring multiple Byronic heroes, whose stories unveil the troubled foundation of Anglo-American claims to North America while featuring oedipal violence and incestuous desires. Pierre shares much in common with Neal’s novel, and in this and the following sections, I focus on Pierre in order to flesh out the ways that, despite the dominant faith in its reliability and speed and its ability to link the world together, the telegraph gave rise to questions about the limits of communication and sympathy. While Melville, often seen as the most Byronic of the canonical American renaissance writers, emphasizes those limitations, I return to Thoreau at the end of this chapter to outline how those limitations actually enable a re-reading of the telegraph as figuring the problematic of aesthetics, of what Kant defined as its subjective universality.

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Earlier, I described Melville’s use of electric imagery in “The QuarterDeck” to figure Ahab’s power over the sailors on board the Pequod. But that chapter in Moby-Dick not only indicates the dangers of a kind of aesthetic, charismatic electricity; it also begins to reveal the ambiguity of this electrical power. Ahab attempts to “shock into them [his crew] the same fiery emotion accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own magnetic life” (165), yet he recognizes, when his mates refuse to return his gaze, that he has not fully succeeded, commenting that “’tis well. For did ye three but once take the full-forced shock, then mine own electric thing, that had perhaps expired from out me” (166). The danger, for Ahab’s monomaniacal quest, is that in electrifying the crew he may fully discharge himself. In a complete electrical circuit, a circuit wherein Ahab’s electricity is returned to him in full by his crew, Ahab’s Leyden jar, rather than serving simply as a kind of re-chargeable battery, will be somehow depleted of its energy. These passages suggest that human contact, true connection with another, threatens to weaken Ahab’s quest to prove himself invulnerable to the world. This possibility comes to the forefront in “The Symphony,” where, for a moment, Ahab actually identifies with Starbuck and seems swayed from his course, before again turning inward (literally “avert[ing]” his “glance”) to ask “Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm?” (545). A complete electrical circuit of hatred or any other sentiment jeopardizes Ahab’s attempt to “strike through the mask” (164), to answer or erase the metaphysical questions that torture him, because it reminds him of “that mortal inter-indebtedness which will not do away with ledgers” (471–472), a problem Ahab describes as intrinsic to having a body—“I would be free as air . . . and yet I owe for the flesh in the tongue I brag with” (472). For Ahab, the solution seems to be to make the electrified crew an extension of his body, and in the final chapter, as the conclusion approaches, Ahab proclaims that his sailors are “not other men, but my arms and my legs” (568). Yet, if the primary problem lies in his interdependence upon his body, his connection to the world of pain through that body, then the crew, rather than solving his problem, exacerbates it. Electrifying the bodies of his sailors with his own hatred will extend his body, making him more vulnerable to pain, while fostering his recognition of his interdependence on the world and other men.46 In Mardi (1849), Melville evokes this image of the telegraphic/electric body in restaging the Vitalist debate. After citing one philosopher for whom life is “a certain febrile vibration of the organic parts,” Babbalanja quotes another who argues that it is God that “keeps up the perpetual

 



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telegraphic communication between my outpost toes and digits, and that domed grandee up aloft, my brain.”47 Significantly, Babbalanja’s discourse about the body’s communication serves to answer a question about the political connection holding the various tribes of Vivenza (the United States in Melville’s allegory) together. The spiritual electricity functions in the individual body as the nervous impulse and in the body politic of the United States as the force binding the North and South. By the time he was writing Pierre, Melville’s political and aesthetic vision was much darker. Pierre uses the telegraph and electricity to materialize the broader fields of ambiguities at the center of the novel. After referring to Pierre as having a “heavenly magnet” which “draws all [her] soul’s interior” to him, Isabel describes the hurt she suffered at the words and insinuations of the other farmers’ “girls.” At this point, she speaks of Pierre looking “so sadly and half-reproachedly upon” her, which leads her to contradict what she takes him to be thinking by stating that “Lone and lost though I have been, I love my kind, and charitably and intelligently pity them, who uncharitably and unintelligently do me despite.” In response, Pierre claims that his looks are “vile falsifying telegraphs of me,” for his “heart was only dark with ill-restrained up-braidings against heaven that could unrelentingly see such innocence as thine so suffer.”48 In this scene, Isabel misreads Pierre as questioning her sympathy for others who may have harmed her, when instead Pierre reveals his own lack of sympathy for those people she identifies as her kind. The telegraphic reference reveals that, despite the electrical connection Isabel and Pierre feel, they remain equally unable to fathom the depths of each other’s hearts. Melville sets up this telegraphic misreading by inundating this scene, Pierre and Isabel’s second encounter with one another, with electric imagery. Amidst “the mild heat-lightnings and ground-lightnings” (149) of a summer evening, Pierre comes to view Isabel as electric herself:

 

To Pierre’s dilated senses Isabel seemed to swim in an electric fluid, the vivid buckler of her brow seemed as a magnetic plate. Now first this night was Pierre made aware of what, in the superstitiousness of his rapt enthusiasm, he could not help believing was an extraordinary physical magnetism in Isabel. And—as it were derived from this marvelous quality thus imputed to her. . . . over all these things, and interfusing itself with the sparkling electricity in which she seemed to swim, was an ever-creeping and condensing haze of ambiguities. Often, in after-times with her, did he recall this first magnetic night, and would seem to see that she then had bound him to her by an extraordinary atmospheric spell—both physical and spiritual. (151)  

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Melville clearly draws on the discourse of spiritualism and mesmerism that Hawthorne uses in The House of the Seven Gables, but reverses Hawthorne’s gendering, as it is the mysterious Isabel who nearly “deprive[s]” Pierre of “consciousness” (150). As with Hawthorne, this spell seems to melt their two souls into one in an eroticized union, but, where with Phoebe and Holgrave Hawthorne describes the encounter as the domination of a stronger (masculine) soul over another, his penetration into the most inner reaches of her soul, Melville emphasizes the role Pierre’s imagination plays in producing the electrical sensation. Pierre’s reading of Isabel as his sister is based less on any firm data or on any confirmation her story really offers than on his own desires—erotic and otherwise—for a sister. With the repeated use of “seemed,” the “as it were,” and the allusion to Pierre’s enthusiasm, Melville refuses both Pierre and his readers any firm knowledge of Isabel’s electric self. The telegraphic nature of the false signals Isabel receives a few pages later, then, not only indicates their electric nature, but reiterates the fallibility of the earlier electric signals Pierre has received, emphasizing their codedness, their status as a kind of language in need of interpretation and liable to be misinterpreted. In this extended scene, Melville begins to hint at a very different picture of the telegraph from the one dominating antebellum American discourse and contemporary historiographical discussions. As described in chapter one, the spiritualist faith in the universal telegraph granting direct communication between disembodied souls corresponded with a techno-utopian idea of the telegraph creating a perfectly coherent, unambiguous, universal language that would enable a global commerce in ideas and goods, that would, in turn, lead to world harmony. But Melville’s figurative language suggests that rather than simply erasing differences and fostering the complete identification of interests and tastes, the telegraph and its network of bodily, technological interconnection were struck at the core by dissonance. If the telegraph potentially linked all of humanity in one network or one body, that network did not, as both utopian and dystopian accounts suggested, eliminate all noise, all miscommunication, all competing interests and interpretations. While Morse imagined a utilitarian model of language as part of a republican/Enlightenment dream of transparency and lobbied for centralized, governmental control of the telegraph so it would fulfill its didactic and unifying potential, the capitalist development of the telegraph led to a proliferation of individual, corporate, and covert versions of the code. Just

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as the failure of Morse to get the U.S. government to buy and control the telegraph so as to prevent its monopolization by commercial interests had less to do with the technology itself than with the changing forces of capitalism in mid-century United States, so the code that would emerge had as much to do with economic considerations. Most historians of technology ascribe Morse’s success to his system’s use of just one line, rather than multiple ones as most plans called for. Morse’s one wire telegraph was advantageous for it cut the largest cost in building a line—the expense of the wire itself. But this desire for cost-effectiveness came into tension with Morse’s republican-Enlightenment focus on perfect clarity, on eliminating all possible noise from the system in order to foster its didactic ends. It quickly became evident that what made the telegraph revolutionary was its speed and its ability to reduce language through truncation, puns, suggestiveness, the fact that, like with instant messaging today, thoughts, ideas, data, could be transformed into an even more minimal code. The revised Morse code, where dots and dashes correspond to letters, which then build words, proved faster for it eliminated the need for the operator to consult the authoritative dictionary as Morse had envisioned. Morse’s plan of relying on mechanical readers, print-outs of dashes and dots, in order to eliminate, as far as possible, unreliable human senses similarly fell to the wayside as operators quickly realized they could “read” messages more quickly by ear by listening to the telegraphic recorder. The telegraph, in this way, contributed to and developed out of the speeding up of life with the rapid production of commodities and the quickened movement of goods, people, and information, all trends, as noted in chapter one, already described in terms of electricity prior to the telegraph’s invention. This speed of movement depended on the abstraction of specific things into general equivalents, the reduction of commodities to exchangeable values, of people to a type of equal abstract personhood (or labor power), and of words to the combination of the opening and closing of an electric circuit. One product of this abstraction was the consolidation of economic power and knowledge. In his account of the far-ranging effects of the antebellum telegraph industry leading to the formation of the Associated Press, Menahem Blondheim has emphasized that the telegraph’s economic success depended on newspapers using the new networks as a way of trying to get and publish information, especially commercial data of a variety of sorts, before their competitors.49 The speed of the telegraph thus enabled the centralization of information (and power), helping to foster the development not just of the Western Union telegraphic monopoly but of the



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monopoly era of American capitalism in general. Yet in rendering messages, language itself, electric, the telegraph not only increased the speed by which information could be conveyed, but also revealed its fluidity and its dependence on unstable physical markers and interpretation. In the revised code, language moves from the level of words to letters or, even something prior to letters, strokes of the keys that make letters. The new code creates a new language of its own, consisting of dots and dashes, then requiring translation into alphabetic form, where the old code attempted to circumvent the need for translation by maintaining a one-to-one relation between words, meaning, and code. The speed of the telegraph depended on reconstructing language itself so as to more readily allow for substitution, condensation, and abbreviation, thus fostering the development of new codes and ciphers.50 Blondheim’s history shows how the telegraph led to the consolidation of knowledge, power, and information and their consequent dispersal through channels largely controlled by the centralized structure, but the ready use of cipher and codes spoke to covert uses of the technology. While corporations and commercial interests most frequently used cipher in order to keep valuable information secret and thus gain time on their competition, operators and consumers, from the first years of the telegraphic system, also began to use different ciphers to send private messages over the public medium. In the most famous case of manipulating the Morse code, the young Thomas Edison and a fellow operator were able to make sure that no one was able to use their line by agreeing to “shift” the code in such a way that only they could receive each other’s messages, thus creating, in essence, a private line for themselves. As Edwin Gabler’s social history of telegraph operators of the late-nineteenth century argues, this ability to manipulate, encode, and decipher different ways of utilizing the Morse code became a way for workers to form communities across vast distances and establish some work-space autonomy.51 It was not just that the code could be manipulated so that its meaning would remain opaque to those not in on the code or that it could be used by workers rather than by its owners. While the reliability of the telegraph became central to its success, stories of its unreliability, of the fact that reducing language and meaning to the opening and closing of a circuit increased rather than decreased possible ambiguities, appeared with a regular frequency. For example, as mentioned in the previous chapter, an 1873 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine article on the telegraph spoke enthusiastically about the telegraphic system becoming “our great artificial nervous system.” According to the article, “Along every wire the same pul-

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sations run,” so that “Almost instantly the knowledge of [any event] reaches the nearest ganglion . . . . spread[ing] simultaneously in every direction throughout the land.”52 Later, however, in extending this network across the Atlantic Ocean, the article reveals, even as it dismisses, all the fissures and gaps within the system. It notes the human presence—and its potential to disrupt the apparently unmediated flow of knowledge—even as it dismisses that danger:  

 

A message sent from New York [to London] has to be rewritten four times in its route—that is to say, four times it has to leave the wires and pass in at the eye or ear of an operator, through his mind and by his hand on to paper, or on to the transmitting instrument, or both. These faithful servants of the public, sitting continuously at their posts hundreds and thousands of miles apart, maintain an incessant stream of such communications with such perfect discipline and unbroken attention that the average time for the entire operation . . . is less than fourteen minutes.53  

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After detailing all the potential breaks within the system, the leaps between telegraphic sounder to operator’s ear to his or her mind, back to the hand, and to the telegraphic key, the author seems necessitated to speak of an “incessant stream” and of “unbroken attention” to counter the fragments of the system and the body he has just acknowledged. Even as the article stresses that all of this happens “at once,” “almost instantly,” it notes what, for us in the digital age, seems to be the great lag time—less than fourteen minutes—between the initial transmission and its final reception. Fictive accounts similarly underlined the technology’s possible unreliability. Ella Cheever Thayer’s heroine-telegraphist in Wired Love (1879) repeatedly engages her over-the-wire interest in puns dependent on the fluidity of language Morse’s code was meant to circumvent, and her initial encounters, over the wire, with her eventual lover reiterate the technology’s limitations due to the human body and its senses, as she simply is not able to hear and respond to his messages quickly enough. More significant, she tells her friends of a message that was supposed to read “John is dead. Be at home at three,” but instead was read as “John is deadbeat. Home at three,” a problem arising because “the sending operator did not leave space enough between the words; we leave a small space between letters, and a longer one between words.”54 The final Morse code depended on five different, ambiguous marks—the dot (or short electric impulse), the dash (or long electric impulse), the short break between individual dots and dashes, the longer break between the letters represented by a series of dots and dashes, and the even longer break between words—to create meaning. Without stretching the point too far, Thayer’s example suggests the way that the



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telegraph displayed the différance deconstruction has taught us is essential to any language’s capacity to function, a description that gives weight to Adam Frank’s ponderings about the influence of the telegraph on Charles Peirce’s semiotic.55 From a more historical perspective, the emergence of the question of legal liability for faulty messages emphasizes both the economic importance of the data being sent and the increased indeterminacy produced by the timely need for that information. As Lester Lindley has noted in his discussion of the telegraphic industry’s impact on American law, a narrative that foregrounds the technology’s tendency towards centralization and control, towards a kind of monopoly that American jurisprudence had yet to encounter, legal cases surrounding telegraphic errors were central to the development of state telegraphic law by the mid-1860s. State courts largely ruled that common law precedents referring to the carriers of goods could not be applied to telegraphic networks, due to the imprecision with finding fault and the lack of lost value in an erroneous message. Where one could discern, with some certainty and precision, where along the railroad a specific package was lost or damaged, “electrical impulses speeding through wires could be lost any number of places or ways. Uncontrollable changes in atmospheric conditions could ‘change the wires and pervert a telegraphic message,’ a Kentucky court decided.” These rulings suggest the concern generated by the telegraphic code’s and network’s occasional failings, while reinforcing both the telegraph’s transformation of commercial relations and the inadequacy of the legal, political, and cultural spheres to respond to those changes in such a way as to eliminate the noise generated by the new processes. This inability to integrate the telegraphic network fully into old frames of interpretation was directly related to its seemingly mysterious, supernatural potential. When even the Michigan Supreme Court could decide that rather than really “transmit[ting] items, or convey[ing] the identical message or words,” the telegraph simply “reproduced the same words at another place to another person,” thus positing some difference between original words and final messages, the disconnection between words and body, self and voice, language and meaning, seemed all but complete.56 What developed, then, with the system of dots and dashes referring to different letters and numbers (as well as selected diacritical marks), while regulated and normalized by international conventions, was, despite its overall reliability, open-ended to possibilities for manipulating and transforming the code as well as more prone to miscommunication, misunderstanding, and misinterpretation.

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Melville’s allusion to “falsifying telegraphs” thus begins to hint at the failure of signs of all sorts, specifically, in this scene, of facial expressions, gesturing to the telegraph as a source for recognizing this imprecision. In this way, it points to the telegraph’s ability to impact language and other sign systems in a way analogous to how Walter Benjamin described the photograph impacting the visual field. In the Artwork essay, Benjamin contends that “a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye—if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man.” Revealing the minutiae of everyday life, breaking down the visual world by capturing it for a split second, the camera “intervenes” in our normal way of viewing the world “with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, its extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions.” Doing so, the camera both “extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives” and “manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action.”57 The camera’s radical potential lies in its uncovering the world in a new way, in its revealing both the determining power of the visible physical realm and its incompleteness. Placed within the historical context of the telegraph’s development and reception, Melville’s comments on falsifying telegraphs, I want to suggest, gesture to a similar reading of the telegraph as revealing, through its reduction of language to electrical impulse, its reconfiguration and fostering of new codes, and its continuing reliance on the frailties of the human body itself, both the determinacy and incompleteness of language itself.

Tinglingness: Melville’s ‘Pierre’ 2 Through this indeterminacy, Pierre’s electricity seems to belie the uses of electricity to conceive of a kind of innate human commonality, as the novel’s overwhelming bleakness seems to speak against the kind of revolutionary potential Benjamin discerns in photography. Yet, despite its repeated undermining of any sort of sentimental or romantic transcendence or connection, Pierre hints at the possibility of commitment, understanding, and insight through the same language of electricity. In describing Pierre’s entrancement by Isabel’s electric fluidity, Melville’s narrator notes that “This spell seemed one with that Pantheistic master-spell, which eternally locks in mystery and in muteness the universal subject world, and the physical electricalness of Isabel seemed reciprocal with the heat-lightnings



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and the ground-lightnings nigh to which it had first become revealed to Pierre” (151). Melville, as before, relies on “seemed” to indicate that the very perception we are gaining access to may be merely that, a perception. But that perception, rather than appearing to grant some sort of knowledge, is instead a perception or recognition of a mystery, of a lack of understanding. In this way, the passage doubly withholds the possibility of some sort of transcendence, some sort of connection that leads not to full knowledge of the other but “locks” both participants “in [the] mystery and in [the] muteness [of] the universal subject world.” Yet, at the same time, it holds out the possibility of just such a connection, a connection grounded in both the human body—Isabel’s “physical electricalness”—and its environment. Melville repeatedly locates this ambivalence and its electrical nature in the body itself, in the problem of individuals having separate bodies, in particular locating the electric tension between knowledge and mystery, between the possibility of their being some “universal subject world” and the discrete self, in erotic encounters. In his first explicit use of electricity in the novel, Melville prefigures the eroticized scene between Pierre and Isabel in describing Pierre’s love-making of Lucy: “With Lucy’s hand in his, and feeling, softly feeling of its soft tinglingness, he seemed as one placed in linked correspondence with the summer lightnings, and by sweet shock on shock, receiving intimating foretastes of the etherealest delights of earth” (36). As later with Isabel, this moment connects—or seemingly connects—Pierre, in “linked correspondence,” to some kind of spiritualphysical realm (the summer lightnings, tingling and earthly, yet ethereal) akin to the “Pantheistic master-spell” of Isabel’s mystery. The “shock on shock” here offers Pierre a kind of knowledge, the “foretastes” of sexual delight. Yet the electrical element of Pierre’s contact with Lucy simultaneously depends on or registers the fact that it is elusive, is as ungraspable (at least to the virginal Pierre) as the lightning itself, just as later Isabel’s “physical electricity” is “interfused” with an “ever-creeping and condensing haze of ambiguities.” As Stephen Rachman has argued, the language itself here, in particular the use of “tinglingness,” gestures to Pierre’s feelings being not an independent sensation, but rather an individual instantiation of a particular kind of feeling.58 To advance Rachman’s point, the “ness” of tinglingness indicates less the reality of the sensation Pierre feels than its approximation of some sensation hinted at by that term, a term that in itself seems to suggest electrical stimuli and, synaesthetically and onomatopoeically, the materiality of language itself.59 The electric nature of this tinglingness and foretaste of sexual pleasure

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corresponds with the numerous moments Melville speaks of Pierre having “electric presentiments” of one thing or another (see, for example, 70, 105, 110, 111). Like tinglingness, foretaste and presentiment similarly connote a kind of pre-knowledge or pre-sensation, a kind of ambiguous, amorphous, yet embodied feeling of something one has yet to experience or to know fully. The chapter “The Presentiment and the Verification” suggests that the limited knowledge of presentiment is, in fact, the only knowledge possible. The presentiment in the title refers to Pierre’s intense response to hearing and seeing Isabel for the first time, but the verification, the letter from Isabel, rather than verifying anything for certain merely allows Pierre to diagnose (probably incorrectly) the presentiment he has already had. Melville returns to electricity to elucidate this indefiniteness in “Retrospective,” the chapter where his narrator most fully attempts to explain Pierre’s reaction to Isabel’s claim, again locating the ambiguity in the body itself:

 

In their precise tracings-out and subtile causations, the strongest and fieriest emotions of life defy all analytical thought. We see the cloud, and feel its bolt; but meteorology only idly essays a critical scrutiny as to how that cloud became charged, and how this bolt so stuns. . . . Why this cheek kindles with a noble enthusiasm, why that lip curls in scorn, these are things not wholly imputable to the immediate apparent cause, which is only one link in the chain, but to a long line of dependencies whose further part is lost in the mid-regions of the impalpable air. (67)  

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Echoing Byron and Shelley, the electrical imagery here suggests that electrical connections—whether sympathetic, intuitive, sexual, or mental—are unpredictable. Setting up the imagery used to describe Pierre’s feelings in visiting with Isabel, the narrator, with his meteorological analogy, indicates that the causes and effects of specific emotional reactions are physical, “a long line of dependencies,” and that their indefiniteness makes them seem nearly spiritual, “impalpable.” We see the cloud—amorphous but apparently solid—and then feel the bolt, the actual effect, but the connections between—alluding, perhaps, to Byron’s famous comment on the “electric chain”—remain obscure. Melville repeats this point later, in directly admonishing Pierre as a “rash boy” for not realizing there are “no couriers in the air” (as spiritualists would have it) to warn him and in suggesting that Pierre has simply reproduced his relationship with his mother in his appropriation of Isabel as a sister and a wife: so strange and complicate is the human soul, so much is confusedly evolved from out itself, and such vast and varied accessions come to it from abroad, and



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so impossible is it always to distinguish between these two, that the wisest man were rash, positively to assign the precise and incipient origination of his final thoughts and acts. . . . For surely no mere mortal who has at all gone down into himself will ever pretend that his slightest thought or act solely originates in his own defined identity. . . . since man’s moral texture is very porous. (176–177)

 

 

Here, the electrical origin of thought and feeling in “Retrospective” is associated with the “porous” nature of the human soul, with the fact that, rather than being the product of one’s “own defined identity,” his or her thoughts and feelings are some indeterminable mixture of stimuli—accessions from abroad—and the pre-existing self. That porousness captures both the fluid boundaries of the self and the sinuous, elusive quality of the permeable circuits of thought and feeling that lead from any specific stimulus. This porousness, the shocking effects of contact, and their origin in a variety of bodily, psychological, and social structures returns us to Walter Benjamin. Benjamin located the progressive potential of aesthetics in the quotidian experience of shock derived from the modern encounter of the self with the object-world of commodities, thus making aesthetic experience the product of specific sociohistorical objects while locating that experience squarely in an individual body and thereby emphasizing its potentially disruptive nature. In challenging a reductive idea of social totality or an understanding of cultural commodities merely as reinforcing capitalism, Benjamin offers the idea of the constellation, a concept related to the early romantic notion of the fragment, which, as we have seen, Friedrich Schlegel similarly figured as electric. For Benjamin, “ideas are not represented in themselves, but solely and exclusively in an arrangement of concrete elements in the concept: as the configuration of these elements . . . Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars.”60 Ideas and their material determinants are not bound in a direct one-to-one relationship. Rather ideas emerge from the interrelationships among concrete objects, among, from my perspective, various types of materialities. This overdetermination corresponds with Benjamin’s interrogation of the discrete, individual body. In her reconstruction of Benjamin’s prescription for a transformed aesthetics as a therapeutic practice for dealing with the shock of modernity, Susan Buck-Morss argues that Benjamin demands “of art a task far more difficult [than being propaganda]—that is, to undo the alienation of the corporeal sensorium, to restore the instinctual power of the human bodily senses for the sake of humanity’s self-preservation, and to do this, not by avoiding the new technologies, but by passing through them.”61 Benjamin (as read by Buck-Morss) insists that “the senses maintain an un-

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civilized and uncivilizable trace, a core of resistance to cultural domestication. . . . because their immediate purpose is to serve instinctual needs—for warmth, nourishment, safety, sociability—in short, they remain a part of the biological apparatus” (6). Like Melville, Benjamin views that body as porous, as the social nature of human life and both the biological and historical nature of the senses problematize any idea of a discrete individual body through their being “part of a system that passes through the person and her or his (culturally specific, historically transient) environment” (Buck-Morss 12). The body, rather than being an atomistic whole unto itself, becomes part of what Buck-Morss terms a synaesthetic system. As described in chapter one, techno-utopian visions of the telegraph uniting the world into a harmonious whole often figured that union as creating a universal or, at least, national body where the “iron nerves . . . flash sensation and volition backward and forward to and from towns and provinces as if they were organs and limbs of a single living body.”62 While many thinkers revived ideas of the human body as electric in the wake of the development of the telegraph in order to propose a rationalized, effective model of human physiology, the gaps and uncertainties within the telegraph system—as described in the previous section—reiterated the body’s own tangled circuitry and the implausibility of imagining the body itself as a model for a completely unified society. In fact, as Laura Otis has described, at mid-century, leading European scientists such as Emil DuBois-Reymond and Hermann Helmholtz theorized the human body and its nervous system as a series of telegraph wires even as they determined that electricity and the nervous impulse were not simply identical.63 These scientists soon realized that the human body’s response to stimuli was much slower than the speed of electricity. Yet rather than undermining the analogy between the telegraph and the nervous system, such temporal disjunction, which “seemed to separate living beings from the physical world around them,” further implied the similarities between the nervous system and the telegraph: “In the telegraph, as in the nervous system, what produced meaning was not the signals themselves but the receiving apparatus. . . . the principles of telegraphy revealed the way that the body processed information. In both systems, indistinguishable impulses created by different causes became meaningful only when received and interpreted.”64 Building on Buck-Morss and Benjamin, Otis argues that telegraphic operators and experimental physiologists of the mid- and late-nineteenth century came to realize that both systems were defined by their gaps, as technicians and anatomists both “suspected that knowledge constructed from coded  

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messages could never be certain, and that one could never really know what was happening at the other end of the wire.”65 What these gaps revealed was not only the centrality of interpretation, whether by the brain receiving the nervous impulses or the individual operators receiving the message, but also the openness of both systems, the fact that both the body and telegraph were, to use Melville’s term, porous. Just as physiologists were discovering that they could produce sensations that people would understand as indicating the presence of a stimulating object that was not there, thus demonstrating the way the body had to learn that certain stimuli were, most often, the effect of certain objects, telegraphic code while serving as a bridge between people indicated the uncloseable gap between sender and receiver. The analogizing of the nervous system with the telegraphic network resulted, for some at least, not in substantiating a mechanical model of the human body, of human communication, and of human society, but in problematizing any reading of the body, communication, and society dependent on simple one-to-one correspondence or determinacy. The nerves, as media for stimuli to reach the brain, and the telegraph, as the medium for conducting thought from mind to mind, refused to disappear, insistently returning to give the lie to fantasies of complete identification, of sure communication of the mind with the world, of the individual with another self. The telegraph might render the United States one body, but that body, instead of being a unified whole, consisted of fragmented organs, nerves that never fully connected, and inconsistent and unpredictable lines of communication, influence, and connection. Melville’s figurative uses of electricity to indicate both the possibility of connection and the incompleteness of that connection echo and build on these readings of telegraphy, as Pierre’s falsifying telegraphs and his electric presentiments foreshadow Benjamin’s account of modernity.

Electric Insight: Melville’s ‘Pierre’ 3 The tension between knowledge, perception, and disconnection at work through electrical imagery in Pierre’s reaction to Isabel parallels the electrical effects of texts of various sorts throughout the novel. The first ambiguous electrical connection Pierre feels for Isabel occurs, in fact, due to the alienating effect of Isabel’s letter on Pierre’s consciousness:  

 

 

 

 

 

If . . . the heavier woes . . . both purge the soul of gay-hearted errors and replenish it with a saddened truth, that holy office is . . . the magical effect of the admis-

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This electrical imagery suggests that it is the lightning of the letter, the “universality of that electral light” (88), that changes “the long-cherished image of his father . . . from a green foliaged tree into a blasted trunk” (88), that leads to “the charred landscape within” Pierre (86), and that makes Pierre recognize his mother as a narcissist (“to her mirrored image, not to me, she offers up her offerings of kisses” [90]). It is important to emphasize that the novel never seems to question the basic nature of Pierre’s insights into his parents, his recognition of their flaws, even if he may misread or misunderstand those flaws. In this way, this electric paragraph indicates that the revelation of Isabel as his sister—whether in fact true or not—has granted Pierre a new kind of insight and wisdom, one gained through pain and, perhaps, based on false grounds, but allowing him to view objects “in their substantial realities.”66 Melville’s phrasing here, in fact, seems to contrast directly with Hawthorne’s account of the space of romance in “The Custom-House,” where he speaks of “Moonlight, in a familiar room” as “a medium the most suitable for a romance-writer” because “all these details, so completely seen, are so spiritualized by the unusual light, that they seem to lose their actual substance, and become things of intellect,” as they are “now invested with a quality of strangeness and remoteness” (35). In employing the idea of the lightning’s enlightening effects, its ability to remove deceptions, Melville’s passage echoes the techno-utopian discourse surrounding the telegraph I’ve already explored. Anticipating this connection, the narrator has already hinted at a telegraphic model by describing the various “words” and “signs” through which parents reveal their moral failings to their children as a “cipher” to which Isabel’s letter provided the key (70). Like the techno-utopian telegraph, the lightning of Isabel’s letter enables the spread of knowledge, knowledge that undermines any spiritual or sentimental attachments by violently transforming the landscape (here  

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internalized) and its inhabitants. In telegraphic techno-utopianism, that violence was often imagined as civilizing the more primitive non-Western peoples who would be the victims/beneficiaries of global telegraphy. But where such discourse acknowledged the violence of technological assimilation only to suppress it in a concluding vision of universal harmony, the lightning knowledge Pierre receives leaves a permanent wound, “never to be completely healed” (65). Pierre’s “electric insight” (twice 89, 90) alienates him from the world, so that “he staggered back upon himself, and only found support in himself. Then Pierre felt that deep in him lurked a divine unidentifiableness, that owned no earthly kith or kin. Yet was this feeling entirely lonesome, and orphan-like,” leaving him “an infant Ishmael” (89). Where electricity in the scene with Isabel seems to connote the spiritualphysical connection linking them together, joining him to the entire “universal subject world,” the “divine unidentifiableness” Pierre feels from the electric insight into his parents leaves him bereft of all family, of any and all connection with any human beings. These two electric moments, then, seem to work at cross-purposes, as the electrical connection with Isabel makes Pierre feel united with the universe as a whole and yet the knowledge that connection brings leaves him completely alone. These tendencies, I want to argue, reflect the telegraph’s socioeconomic effects and help to distinguish Melville’s position from Hawthorne’s sort of aesthetic retreat. Melville takes great care to establish the socioeconomic situation giving rise to Pierre’s (and Isabel’s) feelings of belonging and alienation. The last in a long line of aristocratic Americans, Pierre, in his youth at Saddle Meadows, seems to stand outside the America where “all things irreverently seethe and boil in the vulgar caldron of an everlasting uncrystalizing Present” (8). Echoing Marx and Engels’s description in The Manifesto of the Communist Party that in capitalism “all that is solid melts into air” (after Pierre reads Isabel’s letter, in fact, “the physical world of solid objects now slidingly displaced itself from around him” [85]), Melville contrasts the aristocratic veneer of the Hudson Valley patroons with the urban center of New York where “families rise and burst like bubbles in a vat. For indeed the democratic element operates as a subtile acid among us, forever producing new things by corroding the old” (9).67 For Pierre’s mother, his marriage to Isabel constitutes “Mixing the choicest wine with filthy water from the plebeian pool, and so turning all to undistinguishable rankness” (194). Yet Melville suggests this “undistinguishable rankness” already reflects the reality of American society, a fact embodied by Isabel’s very existence—if we believe her claims about her pa-

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ternity—as well as by Charlie Millthorpe, Pierre’s childhood friend who is a product of “the political and social levelings and confoundings of all manner of human elements in America” (275). Pierre delineates an American society in constant flux, where the social, economic, and political upheavals of the age destabilize any and all individual identities. Isabel’s constant feeling of the “vacant whirlingness of the bewilderingness” (122) of her life is, in fact, a product of her flotsam life of being tossed back and forth across the Atlantic by the waves of political and economic revolution, ending in her near lack of an identity as an orphaned working-class girl, who barely discerns the difference between herself and the object-world around her. In accepting Isabel as his half-sister, Pierre recognizes that the “Revolutionary flood” (11) reveals his life in Saddle Meadows to be a lie, and thus it is Pierre’s willingness to cross those class boundaries—boundaries enforced by sexual standards—and his mother’s unwillingness that finally leads to his leaving Saddle Meadows and despairing over the “heart-vacancies of the conventional life” (90). Expanding Marx and Engels’s point about the revolutionary force of capitalism, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have described the centrifugal forces of the capitalist machine—represented in Pierre through fluid and electrical imagery—as a process of deterritorialization of human selves, bodies, and communities. This deterritorialization corresponds with the capitalist machine’s destabilization of codes, a destabilization which telegraphy illustrates and fosters: “Capitalism is in fact born of the encounter of two sorts of flows: the decoded flows of production in the form of moneycapital, and the decoded flows of labor in the form of the ‘free worker.’ Hence, unlike previous social machines, the capitalist machine is incapable of providing a code that will apply to the whole of the social field.” Drawing on the scientific thought of the twentieth century that emerged out of the electrical experimentation of Faraday and others and the electrical technology of the telegraph and the telephone, Deleuze and Guattari envision the social field and the individual body as a realm defined by the intersection of various flows and forces. In Pierre, the movement of goods and workers leads to the possible sexual liaisons haunting Pierre’s past and present. That deterritorialization also undermines any one privileged position from which Pierre can judge those flows, any one code through which he can fully read the world. At the same time, though, as Deleuze and Guattari emphasize, even as “The decoding of flows and the deterritorialization of the socius thus constitutes the most characteristic and the most important tendency of capitalism,” that movement is counteracted by “their violent and artificial



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reterritorialization,” as “Capitalism institutes or restores all sorts of residual and artificial, imaginary, or symbolic territorialities, thereby attempting, as best it can, to recode, to rechannel persons.”68 In terms of the telegraph, in the most material terms, the new technology was largely relegated to commercial ends, while, rhetorically, spiritualist and techno-utopian discourses responded to the deterritorialization of individual psyches, particular bodies, and local languages by reintegrating individuals into a universal, interconnected soul or body and by fostering ideas of both a transparent language and integral selves, ideas serving the domains of capitalism, imperialism, and normalization. These reterritorializations were never completely stable, however, never completely exorcised the potential for envisioning new arrangements of power, new understandings of identity, new conceptions of the self, and the possibility of technologies, eventually, enabling these potential relations to come to fruition. Pierre emphasizes the damage of literal and figural deterritorialization, as it is Pierre’s removal from his ancestral home, the anachronistically feudal structures there, and the libidinal flows unleashed by breaking from his mother that lead to his, Isabel’s, and Lucy’s deaths in the topsy-turvy urban environment of New York. Yet the moral center of the novel guides us to sympathize with Pierre’s Quixotic journey to becoming a “thorough-going Democrat” (13) and to view his mother and Glen Stanly, the most thorough-going aristocrats in the novel, as the chief villains. Drawing yet again on electrical imagery, Melville fleshes out this tension between a democratic erasure of boundaries and an aristocratic defense of them most fully in his famous letter to Hawthorne from May, 1851. There, he muses that one can be “earnest in behalf of political equality,” while still believing in an “aristocracy of the brain,” an idea he associates with Schiller. Melville believes he can see “how a man of superior mind can, by its intense cultivation, bring himself, as it were, into a certain spontaneous aristocracy of feeling,—exceedingly nice and fastidious,—similar to that which, in an English Howard, conveys a torpedo-fish thrill at the slightest contact with a social plebeian.” The torpedo-fish, or electric ray, was the source of much interest on the part of electrical experimenters in the late-eighteenth century, as its ability to shock those who handled it suggested how an animal might produce electricity, through a kind of natural Leyden jar, in its own body.69 The Howards epitomized English aristocracy, and Melville seems to suggest that the electric shock of recognition running through the brotherhood of genius in “Hawthorne and His Mosses” is mirrored by a shock of difference in coming in contact with those who are not part of that spontaneous

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aristocracy. Melville continues, however, by embracing the idea of a “ruthless democracy” from which Hawthorne may “feel a touch of a shrink,” for as “ludicrous” as it may seem to “declare that a thief in jail is as honorable a personage as Gen. George Washington,” the “Truth is the silliest thing under the sun.”70 Electricity represents both the feeling of commonality among the spontaneous aristocracy of genius and their shrinking from the touch of the ruthless democracy, who are, it seems, equally honorable as they. Electricity, as we’ve seen with Pierre, both connects the individual to others with whom they seem to share a particular talent, insight, or experience, and alienates him from those who either don’t or, at least, whom the perceiver doesn’t wish to imagine do. It represents, as argued in chapter one, the flow of energies, people, wealth, and information that Deleuze and Guattari term deterritorialization, and, for Melville, the shock of such processes bringing hitherto foreign bodies together and the shock of reterritorialization’s reactive attempt to dispel such dangers. It is in this light that I want to read Melville’s account of the literary marketplace in Pierre. The deterritorialization of literature, the profusion of literary forms and audiences, was, as we have seen, re-contained in the apotheosization of a universal aesthetic judgment based on a normative humanity in the theories of Schiller, Taylor, and Arnold, a move Melville seems to mirror in his “aristocracy of the brain.” Pierre’s failed career has often been read as illustrating Melville’s own commitment to an aristocracy of taste. But, returning once again to the electric language permeating Pierre and at work in his letter to Hawthorne, I think we can discern how Melville both laments the failure of such projects and lambastes their pretensions. In his early career as poet, Pierre was celebrated for his “Perfect Taste” by what the narrator sarcastically describes as the “always intelligent, and extremely discriminating public” (245). In contrast, as he prematurely attempts a mature work, Pierre realizes “that the wiser and the profounder he should grow the more and the more he lessened the chances for bread, that could he now hurl his deep book out of the window, and fall to on some shallow nothing of a novel, composable in a month at the longest, then could he reasonably hope for both appreciation and cash” (305). Here and elsewhere, Melville directly opposes popular fiction with the truth. What is wrong with fiction is that it oversimplifies, that it reduces the complexities of the world to straight-forward narratives or maps, so that Pierre, like most other youths, has been misguided by novels’ “false, inverted attempts at systematizing eternally unsystemizable elements, their audacious, intermeddling impotency, in trying to unravel, and spread out, and classify, the



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more thin than gossamer threads which make up the complex web of life” (141). Pierre’s linked desires to deliver a “neglected Truth to the world” and make his living doing so are thus doomed from the start (283). But Pierre’s failure lies not simply with the marketplace and the public’s unwillingness to face the dark truths of existence. Instead, Melville makes clear that Pierre fails in an aesthetic register due to his solipsism, due to the pride and self-reliance that are reinforced by the very aristocratic feelings that his potential genius grants him. Before describing the letter from Isabel as electrifying in the new light it shines on his mother, the narrator seems to mock Pierre for not recognizing his reaction to the letter as clichéd, by reminding him any “brisk novelist” can “so steal gushing tears from his reader’s eyes” (69–70). Writing can falsely and easily create an electric reaction in readers, yet the narrator both calls our attention to the feeble materiality of writing, the power of “one little bit of paper scratched over with a few small characters by a sharpened feather” (69) and emphasizes its incredible potency, as “The stabbed man knows the steel, prate not to him that it is only a tickling feather” (70). Writing may have the slightest of physical existences, may wring tears, signifying no real impact, from the susceptible reader with the greatest ease, yet it can also cut like steel or shock like lightning. The effects of writing, in other words, are all but indeterminate, even as those effects are determined by an individual’s history, by the “threads” that the “Weird Ones . . . wove in the years foregone” (70).71 Melville’s narrator concludes this passage by removing even his own textual authority, noting that “But not thus, altogether, was it now with Pierre, yet so like, in some points, that the above true warning may not misplacedly stand” (70). The narrator can only approximate the truth of Pierre’s life, of the effects particular stimuli, such as Isabel’s letter, might have on him. Pierre’s problem, then, is that he too readily takes his own experience to be representative, and thus, “Swayed to universality of thought by the widely explosive mental tendencies of the profound events which had lately befallen him” (283), he ends up writing a book “directly plagiarized from his own experiences” (302). In attempting to create his own novel Pierre recreates the novels the narrator has already dismissed for their attempts at “systematizing eternally unsystemizable elements.” In particular, he fails to recognize his own place within that unsystematizable world, the fact that he cannot rely on himself. His ability to make money with his fugitive pieces feeds Pierre’s pride and his Ahab-like desire to “be not only his own Alpha and Omega, but to be distinctly all the intermediate gradations,” to be able to “live on himself ” (261), through a sort of self-cannibalization. This re-

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sponse to the financial crisis in the city echoes his initial response to Isabel’s letter. At that point, Pierre proclaims that all that is left is his own self, that depending on himself he will confront Truth (65) by no longer piling up “words” and building up “libraries” but by “sit[ting] down and read[ing]” (91). Instead, though, he sits down to write, attempting to create a solipsistic economic, metaphysical, and aesthetic circuit in order to block out the fluid, electrical world that has destroyed his old life. With this retreat, the electrical figures permeating the first half of the novel largely disappear. The problem with Pierre’s electrical insights, then, is not so much that they are wrong, but that they are limited, that rather than offering him a stable knowledge of himself, the world, his mother, and Isabel, they are the product of a collision of historical factors beyond his control and beyond his capacity to understand. Rather than recognizing those limitations, however, Pierre assumes he has a unique insight into the Truth and thus strikes out to “gospelize the world anew, and show them deeper secrets than the Apocalypse!” (273). Despite Pierre’s darkness, despite its skepticism about human community and knowledge, Melville’s use of electricity in terms of shocking revelation, linguistic code, and spiritual connection combine to indicate that Pierre’s presentiments possibly do offer some access to truth about the self and others. Concluding his letter to Hawthorne, Melville articulates the limits of these insights even as returns to their power. Calling to mind Pierre’s feeling of participating in the “universal subject world,” Melville dismisses Goethe’s idea of “Live in the all” as “nonsense.” While Goethe’s saying amounts to the idea that “your separate identity is but a wretched one” and that you should “get out of yourself, spread and expand yourself, and bring to yourself the tinglings of life that are felt in the flowers and the woods, that are felt in the planets Saturn and Venus, and the Fixed Stars,” Melville wonders how someone with a “raging toothache” is expected to escape his identity. Using the same ambiguous root—tingling, both a noun and an adjective, describing a feeling that is not definable enough to be precisely located—he uses to describe Pierre’s feelings on holding Lucy’s hand, Melville seems to dismiss the fantasy of “linked correspondence” with the lightning. Yet Melville also comments that this idea is a “good” one, although filled with “flummery,” and in a postscript qualifies his dismissal, by sounding an almost Whitman-esque tone: “This ‘all’ feeling, though, there is some truth in. You must often have felt it, lying on the grass on a warm summer’s day. Your legs seem to send out shoots into the earth. Your hair feels like leaves upon your head. This is the all feeling.” Melville



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concludes by pointing out the problem: “what plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion.”72 The aesthetic connection of one with all, of feeling the tinglings of life not just in flowers but also in other human beings is not, Melville comes to say, unreal. The electric feeling of connection, the dream of commingling with another’s sensations, is not a fiction, but rather than recognizing that feeling as temporary, as fleeting, people tend to take it falsely as granting them some sort of universal, stable insight into the world or other people. Pierre’s recognition of a relationship with Isabel has a real foundation, a foundation registered in his electric feeling of connection, in their shared experience of the bewilderingness of the vulgar caldron of an everlasting uncrystalizing Present, in their negative knowledge that they “and all mankind, beneath our garbs of common-placeness, conceal enigmas that the stars themselves, and perhaps the highest seraphim can not resolve” (139).

Where Melville emphasizes the destructive effects of the instability of electric presentiment and insight, Thoreau gestures to it enabling a kind of transcendence of the self. But like Melville, Thoreau hints at a telegraphic understanding of this alienation from the discrete self. Linking Thoreau, through Melville, to Shelley and Byron, we can begin to see how these authors offer somewhat parallel accounts of how aesthetic experience emerge out of specific socially embodied circumstances but, figured as electric and epitomized by the telegraph’s own ambiguity, remains indeterminate. Thoreau outlines the telegraph’s potential use for transcendentalist ends in a passage on the railroad from the “Sounds” chapter of Walden. “Astonished at the miracles [the railroad] has wrought,” he locates “something electrifying in the atmosphere” of the depot (118). By the time Thoreau was revising Walden, the railroad and the telegraph were intimately connected, and Thoreau’s use of “electrifying” evokes the presence of the new electronic technology along the railways. That “electrifying” something, he later indicates, is the railroad’s (and by extension, the telegraph’s) ability to provide a material vehicle to connect him with the rest of the world. In particular, Thoreau says that he is “refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles past me, and I smell the stores which go dispensing their odors all the

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A Citizen of Somewhere Else and a Citizen of the World: Hawthorne and Thoreau

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way from Long Wharf to Lake Champlain, reminding me of foreign parts, of coral reefs, and Indian oceans, and tropical climes, and the extent of the globe” (119). Lengthening his list of passing commodities, commenting on their histories, their origins, and their smells, for well over a page, Thoreau seems to become an apologist for commerce, as suggested by his stating that “What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery.” Yet, as his overarching critique of the economic materialism of capitalism indicates, what Thoreau finds most refreshing in commerce is that it provides something that its merchants do not anticipate, as they are “doing more even than they suspect” (118): through their electrifying presence, the railroad and the telegraph enable Thoreau to “feel more like a citizen of the world” (119), to feel more connected to the rest of the world through the material goods passing by his retreat. The way this passage echoes moments from Thoreau’s journals helps to flesh out the telegraphic connection. Speaking, in “Sounds,” of the trains as “bolts” shooting to “particular points of the compass,” Thoreau contends that these bolts make the people of Concord “steadier,” a positive effect because “The air is full of invisible bolts. Every path but your own is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then” (118). This idea of invisible bolts humming through the air calls to mind images of the spiritualist invisible telegraph, an image Thoreau more explicitly invokes in his journal on the occasion of the first telegraphic message being conveyed through Concord: “The atmosphere is full of telegraphs equally unobserved. We are not confined to Morse’s or House’s and Bain’s line.”73 “Atmosphere,” here, seems to correspond with its use in spiritualist conceptions of the universal telegraph. Yet the quotation from “Sounds,” where there is something “electrifying” in the “atmosphere” of the train depot, hints that that atmosphere might be the physical product of the actual technology and its commercial uses. Referring to the competing telegraphic systems of the age, and thus gesturing to the diverse ways the telegraph was conceived even within a primarily commercial sphere, Thoreau emphasizes the capitalist forces at work in the burgeoning telegraph industry, even as he hints at alternative uses of the form of communication. In particular, he locates the possibility of telegraphic intercourse with other people and their lifeways in his repeated celebrations of telegraphic wires becoming an Aeolian harp: it “prophesies finer senses, a finer life, a golden age” (3:342 [March 9, 1852]) and thus produces “the sound of a far-off glorious life, a supernal life, which came down to us, and vibrated the lattice-work of this life of ours” (2:450 [Sept. 3, 1851]). Drawing on a central image of British romanticism,



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Thoreau updates it for the telegraphic age, suggesting its connection to capitalist-technological developments. The telegraph may be designed as a commercial instrument, but “like the sparrows, which [he] perceive[s] use it extensively for a perch,” Thoreau and others can “make [their] own use of the telegraph, without consulting the directors” (2:498 [Sept. 12, 1851]). It is the open-ended possibilities of the telegraph, then, that allow it to “vibrate the lattice-work of this life of ours.” Vibrating the lattice work of our lives, refreshing and expanding the self, the telegraph, for Thoreau, hints at the porousness of the self Melville similarly links to telegraphy. While Thoreau and American Transcendentalism in general would seem to envision telegraphy as neglecting if not threatening the essence of true humanity, the inner conscience, he frequently imagines the self less as the coherent basis of experience than as the site of contradictory experiences, as he does in these passages on telegraphy. Doing so, he begins to suggest that the materiality of the self undermines any attempt to produce a unified self, thus challenging the bourgeois ideology of atomistic individualism. In “Solitude,” Thoreau insists that “We are not wholly involved in Nature.” Instead I may be either the drift-wood in the stream, or Indra in the sky looking down on it. I may be affected by a theatrical exhibition; on the other hand, I may not be affected by an actual event which appears to concern me much more. I only know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it; and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned. This doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends sometimes. (135)

Rather than celebrating the individual self, its interests, and its integrity, the inviolability of the subject, Thoreau describes the self as split at its very core, as the self becomes merely a site traversed by “thoughts and affections” that belong neither to that self nor to anyone else. At the same time, another element of that self stands outside of that experience, partaking in some sort of transcendent universality beyond personality and individuality as it is “no more I than it is you.” Echoing my description in the introduction of the movement of aesthetic experience, Thoreau defines the self as disinterested and engaged, as merely the scene of experiences detached from others yet universally applicable. That detachment removes the self, at

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times at least, from intense emotional attachment, for it questions the very notion of a self that would attach itself to another, as individual life itself becomes “a kind of fiction.” In this way, Thoreau suggestively distinguishes his aesthetic position from Hawthorne’s (anti-) aesthetic one. Where Hawthorne speaks of his artistic withdrawal from the world of politics into a “fairy-land” of the imagination as allowing him to become a “citizen of somewhere else,” Thoreau lauds the railroad and the telegraph for enabling him to feel “a citizen of the world.” Thoreau remains a detached observer of that world, but it is through contact, through the space where the individual meets the world, that the electric effects of aesthetics can take place. And where Hawthorne imagines his romances to be made of the material used in “castles in the air,” Thoreau insists that, while that “is where they [our castles] should be,” we must “now put the foundations under them” (Walden 324). Despite his frequent visions of some sort of transcendent wholeness accomplished through art or nature, Thoreau returns to a more materialist emphasis on creating some ground, some foundation under those castles of air. New technologies, then, place Thoreau within an imagined world community in a material fashion, mirroring the transcendent aesthetic experience he strives for. Unlike Hawthorne’s account of art and telegraphy as unidirectional technologies of domination, Thoreau begins to imagine both art and telegraphy as having a radically decentering power, as having the ability, as Walter Benjamin put it, to “burst this prison-world asunder.”74 Creating new desires, extending the body out in new directions, the telegraphic system within capitalism defies the idea of a natural, contained self; becoming a model for exploring the diffusion of the self through material forces, language, commodities, the body itself, electricity represents the potential of this new self. It is this new self and its reconfigured relations of body, society, and world, that lie at the heart of what I call aesthetic electricity. By recognizing how that aesthetic electricity unites figures as various as Percy Shelley, Herman Melville, and Henry David Thoreau, we can begin to recover American romanticism, and specifically transcendentalism, as an endeavor at grounding transcendence in the material, social, biological realities, and can thus open up our long-standing definitions to see the influence of American romanticism in new ways.

chapter three

Frederick Douglass’s Electric Words: Aesthetic Politics and the Limits of Identification

In his 1845 Narrative, Frederick Douglass speaks of a slave’s argument for freedom in The Columbian Orator as giving “tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul, which had frequently flashed through my mind, and died away for want of utterance.”1 Later, after being “broken” by Mr. Covey, Douglass comments that occasionally, still, “a flash of energetic freedom would dart through my soul, accompanied with a faint beam of hope” (58). These metaphors of flashing hopes and thoughts do not immediately have any specific referent, but with his description of the Christmas holidays acting as “conductors, or safety-valves, to carry off the rebellious spirit of enslaved humanity” (66), Douglass begins more clearly to evoke the discourse of electricity, and with his 1855 revised autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, he makes the allusion explicit when he refers to these conductors as “electric.”2 These various flashes may seem rather insignificant on their own. But Douglass’s direct invocation of electricity corresponds with the increasingly important role electrical technology and science, and especially the telegraph, played as evidence of political and social transformation for abolitionism in general and in Douglass’s thought in particular. As I have explored, “electric,” by 1855, could signify in a variety of ways for understanding or questioning the relations among politics, religion, physiology, and cultural production—a romantic idealism wherein electricity reveals or embodies an eternal truth of the dialectical nature of consciousness; a techno-utopian dream of electricity creating a material, economic bridge to unify all people by acculturating them to Western civilization; a spiritualist understanding of electricity as a dematerialized force flowing through and

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unifying all of creation; and a romantic aesthetic electricity that attempts to understand electricity both as an innate and universal element of human embodiment and consciousness and as a physical force capable of manipulation and reformulation by particular historical situations. Douglass draws on these various understandings in propounding his anti-slavery argument, in particular using the techno-utopian notion of electrical technology creating an harmonious union of all the peoples of the world. Significantly, however, Douglass’s increasing interest in technology leading to racial equality coincides with an intensifying exploration of the indeterminacy, specificity, and potential power of aesthetic experience. Especially in the decade following the publication of his Narrative, Douglass began to investigate how a kind of aesthetic stance might allow him simultaneously to express and suspend various tensions between the self and the other, humanity and nature, individual and society, freedom and slavery. As theorists such as Gayatri Spivak and David Lloyd have delineated, Kantian constructions of autonomous art, despite supposedly universal claims, replicated racist distinctions and cultural hierarchies, hierarchies perhaps most infamously reproduced in the American context by Thomas Jefferson’s dismissal of African-American poetic talents in the person of Phillis Wheatley.3 And as I have outlined, in the work of Schiller, Arnold, and others, aesthetics, through its notions of normative humanity based in Eurocentric ideals, mirrors a techno-utopian rhetoric of acculturation allowing non-Europeans to achieve full humanity. Yet rather than abandoning the potentially debilitating discourse of aesthetics, Douglass, I argue, takes up aesthetic claims, especially in his famous apostrophe to the ships on the Chesapeake, his account of slave songs, and his short story, “The Heroic Slave.” While the vast majority of Douglass’s pre–Civil War writings are, of course, polemical, clearly formulated to bring about the end of slavery, the aesthetic moments I explore refuse to offer specific political propositions in favor of engaging his readers on sensuous, formal grounds as they register both the constructedness of the racialized body and its inescapability as the basis of lived experience in the antebellum United States. Aesthetics, in other words, allows Douglass to delay, momentarily at least, the need for specific political solutions or reductive identifications as he explores the problematic intersection of race, culture, and politics. Douglass’s example stresses both the impossibility of basing a coherent, effective politics in aesthetic experience and the necessity for any politics to acknowledge an aesthetic dimension beyond its accounting. As a number of theorists and intellectual historians have recently argued, aesthetics func-



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tions as and originally emerged as a kind of pre-political arena, designed to compensate for the shortcomings of a political sphere organized around and understood in terms of individual and group interests, rationally derived, abstract rights and laws, and depersonalized institutions. Jonathan Hess has described, for example, how the notion of an autonomous aesthetic sphere emerges in late-eighteenth-century Germany, culminating in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, “in response to a crisis in precisely the institution Habermas idealizes as the modern public sphere.”4 Where, as Habermas famously outlines, the Enlightenment ideal of the public sphere de-emphasized the individual and his experience, especially his bodily experience, in positing a rational realm of public debate outside politics and economics, the move to view art as offering a distinctly different, subjective, yet universal, kind of experience served to re-introduce the troubling element of the sensuous body to the foundation of social life. In introducing the term aesthetic to modern discourse, in fact, Alexander Baumgarten designates “the science of perception” specifically as referring to things not “known by the superior faculty as the object[s] of logic.”5 The grounding of aesthetics outside logic in sensuous experience places it both outside of and fundamental to political discourse and commitment. It is in this light that I turn to Emerson in this chapter to expand the definition of aesthetic electricity I developed in the previous chapter. In recent decades, numerous critics have developed the coercive and/or enervating nature of Emerson’s thought. In contrast, I argue that we can discern what amounts to a nascent materialist aesthetics at work within Emerson’s idealism by attending to his use of electrical and technological imagery to figure aesthetic experience. Importantly, Emerson draws on this imagery to indicate the indirect relationship between aesthetics and politics. He suggests that the body and its senses are essential to judging political commitments while acknowledging that basing a politics on such a foundation largely disables mass political movements within the normative realm of American politics. Unlike critics such as John Carlos Rowe, who distinguish between Emerson’s “subordination of such urgent political and social issues [as slavery] to an aesthetic dissent” and Douglass’s “political practice,”6 I contend that, despite their clear differences, Douglass’s and Emerson’s approaches actually parallel one another in their attempts to reimagine society by thinking outside of the normative model of interest-based politics and by insisting on the irreducibility of individual experience. By engaging with aesthetics, Douglass risks losing control of his political message but potentially avoids having his life being merely subsumed into a

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narrative of universal humanism. Because it located a kind of transcendent and transformative experience within a physical universe largely determined by forces beyond the individual’s control, aesthetic electricity, as it emerges in Percy Shelley, Byron, and Thoreau, emphasized the inescapability of bodily existence, simultaneously acknowledging the centrality of socially enforced identities and their possible suspension. Formulating the body as electric not only allows authors such as Emerson to explore it as the site for a kind of sensuous experience that leads to a sense of transcendence, but also encourages the identification of the self with others, what “Von Blixum’s Heroic Experiment” mocks as the “intermingling and interchanging thought by silent, immediate felt communion” and that Whitman famously renders as “what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” (27). Yet, unlike a form of sentimental identification which turns upon the subsumption of otherness in recognizing similarity, an erasure or bracketing of difference in the affirmation of a common spirituality or sensibility, aesthetic electricity persistently insists on, rather than dismissing, central social divisions standing in the way of realizing the material and spiritual interconnectedness of all. In this way, Douglass’s use of aesthetic electricity parallels both a sentimental understanding of electrical bodies and electrical thought as transparent at work in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and a romantic aesthetic understanding, epitomized by Emerson, wherein electric connections only provide a momentary, unstable presentiment into the truth. Stowe suggests reading electricity as a particularly feminine or African characteristic, placing electricity outside historical developments, even as she uses electricity to locate sentiment at a bodily level. While similarly drawing on ideas about the electric body, Douglass turns to technological developments of electricity to describe the power of aesthetics, thus grounding his aesthetic explorations in sociohistorical conditions. At the same time, unlike techno-utopian accounts, Douglass implicitly acknowledges the indeterminate and, at times, racist uses of technology and sentiment. In refusing to do away with the body and its material history, in basing itself in particularized bodily experience, Douglass’s aesthetic electricity confronts rather than escapes from history. But unlike Melville’s darker vision of unfulfilled possibilities and misunderstanding, Douglass’s electric words offer the possibility of fostering connections, alliances, and recognition across racial lines without denying the real differences in experiences produced by such distinctions, thus foregrounding the aesthetic’s indeterminate yet powerful potential for reshaping racial politics and the ideas of racial identity around which they are constituted.



Frederick Douglass’s Electric Words

Electric Streams and Feeling Right: Stowe and Sentimental Abolitionism

 

 

 

 

As the quotations I began with suggest, Douglass used tropes of electric thought and electric feeling to figure some ineffable, essentially human desire for freedom (“rebellious spirit of enslaved humanity”) or a strong feeling or sudden thought (“flashed through my mind”) that seemingly comes out of nowhere, or deep out of the unconscious (“thoughts . . . which had frequently flashed through my mind and died away”), but which is capable of being captured or accessed through the written word (The Columbian Orator, in this case). As I’ve described in the first two chapters, electricity was used during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries to figure political liberty as a product of natural processes.7 At the same time, electricity more frequently described the instantaneity and impact of strong emotions or feelings, and while this sentimental use of electricity approaches that at work in romantic idealism and aesthetics and spiritualism, it offers its own unique configuration of the relationships among politics, spirituality, emotion, and the individual body. These connotations and their significance for anti-slavery thought are hinted at by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s description of liberty as an “electric word” in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.8 While she alludes to the political uses of electricity here, Stowe more often evokes electricity as a synonym for sentiment as part of her general project of drawing her readers towards empathizing with her slave characters. In the chapter “The Mother’s Struggle,” she directly appeals to the white mothers reading her novel as she describes Eliza’s escape towards the Ohio River with her son Harry. Asking her readers what “If it were your Harry, mother, or your Willie, that were going to be torn from you . . . how fast could you walk?” (105), Stowe depicts Eliza’s “maternal love” as “stronger than all” (104) by rendering her body electric: “It seemed to her as if strength poured into her in electric streams, from every gentle touch and movement of her sleeping, confiding child. Sublime is the dominion of the mind over the body, that, for a time, can make flesh and nerve impregnable, and string the sinews like steel, so that the weak can become so mighty” (105–106). At the moment when she most directly asks for her readers to identify with a slave, Stowe describes that slave as electric, a word that allows her to suggest the mysterious source of her strength, to materialize and spiritualize Eliza’s dominion over her own now-machine-like body, and to connect her heroine with her readers. Electricity then signifies first and foremost Eliza’s maternal love for Harry, but it is that shared maternal love that implicitly allows other mothers, who

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feel an electric bond with their own children, to form an electric connection with Eliza. Here, electric simply seems to refer to an intense emotion or love, and Stowe’s other uses of “electric” and “electricity” echo and expand this sentimental connotation. The novel implicitly locates these feelings in a reader’s body ensconced in her own home; however, these feelings have real physical consequences in the novel and are supposed to have significant consequences in the world of politics and economics. That is to say, as spiritualized as Stowe’s electricity may be, she imagines it in physiological and material terms. Over the past two decades as nineteenth-century American sentimentalism has been re-described and re-evaluated, literary criticism has continued to define it as a kind of idealism, a faith in either a spiritual reality or, at least, the primacy of nearly disembodied emotions.9 But as Gregg Camfield observes, the Scottish Common Sense philosophy that provided sentimentalism with one of its intellectual anchors located sentiment in the body, in “the idea that the senses and the emotions to which sensual indulgence gives rise were divinely designed to coax human beings to God.”10 Numerous critics have emphasized that sentimental texts were written to evoke physical and emotional reactions in their readers, what Marianne Noble has called the “sentimental wound.”11 Yet, as Glenn Hendler has noted, the historicization of sentimentalism has largely failed to “come to terms with the difference between our own conceptions of the experience of reading and those of writers and readers of the mid-nineteenth century.”12 While, as Noble puts it, we may now believe that “It is fundamentally impossible to bridge the gap separating one person’s experience from another’s,” sentimental culture was “premised on the possibility of a perfect intersubjectivity of affect, an ability to experience another’s anguish; at the same time, it is designed to elicit or incite the desire for such emotional transparency.”13 That intersubjectivity was not merely spiritual or emotional, but a physical connection between bodies, a connection running, like the spiritual telegraph, from one self to another. What this suggests is that sentiment is electric in Stowe’s novel because it becomes a physical force. The electric streams flowing into Eliza provide her with the strength to escape from slavery with her son, and those same electric streams of maternal love are supposed to be evoked by Stowe’s description of Eliza’s escape, causing her readers to identify with Eliza, and thus “feel right”—both physically and emotionally—about slavery, creating “an atmosphere of sympathetic influence” (624). Stowe’s description of Tom’s courage in the closing chapters elaborates the various sources of this



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strength and its course of influence. The “savage words” of Quimbo and Sambo fail to reach Tom’s ear because “a higher voice there was saying, ‘Fear not them that kill the body, and, after that, have no more than they can do.’” Almost repeating her description of Eliza’s transformation, Stowe continues: “Nerve and bone of that poor man’s body vibrated to those words, as if touched by the finger of God; and he felt the strength of a thousand souls in one” (581–582). While, with Eliza’s escape, this strength “seemed to come from a spirit within, that was no part of her” (105), here this strength, which vibrates the body, comes from God’s words, God’s voice, but more directly from Tom’s memory of hearing such words. In turn, Tom’s own “wondrous words and pious prayers” strike “upon the hearts” of Quimbo and Sambo, leading to their salvation (584). The spirit that is within Tom and Eliza, but is not part of them, their mechanical, enslaved bodies, is variously identified with God, electricity, liberty, and language. The emotional transparency of sentimentalism, these scenes suggest, corresponds to a linguistic transparency or determinacy, as words or images conjured up by words lead directly to emotional affect, and to a spiritual transparency, as these effects can lead directly to salvation. In this way, Stowe indicates her debt to a kind of spiritualized associationism I have already described at work in Morse’s thought. The sound of words, the scenes they describe or evoke, create physical, sensuous effects in the reader or listener, leading, if the reader or listener is not too coarsened or hardened, as Legree is, to specific emotional and spiritual consequences. Stowe gestures to this reading with her epigraph to the electric chains in Byron’s Childe Harold for the chapter “The Tokens”—“And slight, withal, may be the things that bring / Back on the heart the weight which it would fling . . . . Striking the electric chain wherewith we’re darkly bound.” As we have seen, and as I will return to in my discussion of Douglass, Byron’s lines trouble the determinacy of the spiritual associationism Stowe seems inclined to rely on. Within the novel itself, the tokens that mean so much to Tom—Eva’s lock of hair and George Shelby’s silver dollar—do not signify for Legree in the same way, but they nonetheless have potent effects as they remind him of his own mother and her Eva-like example of patient suffering.14 Words and other objects, then, have not only spiritual effects, but also material effects, which are then supposed to be mirrored in the bodies of the readers through their tears and actions. Significantly, in a scene often read as exemplifying the immateriality of Stowe’s sentimentalism, Stowe describes Tom’s final victory over the world of pain and suffering represented by Legree’s claims to his body and soul not only as religious tran-

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scendence but also in terms of the imagination and the nerves:

 

 

 

When a heavy weight presses the soul to the lowest level at which endurance is possible, there is an instant and desperate effort of every physical and moral nerve to throw off the weight; and hence the heaviest anguish often precedes a return tide of joy and courage. . . . Suddenly everything around him seemed [emphasis added] to fade, and a vision rose before him of one crowned with thorns, buffeted and bleeding. Tom gazed, in awe and wonder. . . . Those who have been familiar with the religious histories of the slave population know that relations like what we have narrated are very common among them. We have heard some from their own lips, of a very touching and affecting character. The psychologist tells us of a state, in which the affections and images of the mind become so dominant and overpowering, that they press into their service the outward imagining. (554–555)  

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Most often read as simply revealing Stowe’s commitment to a spiritual reality, this passage hints at the possibility that Tom’s conversion is largely a matter of the power of imagination, of, perhaps, a kind of aesthetic sensibility, and its impact on the physiological nerves. It is both his “physical and moral nerve[s]” that enable him to achieve a “vision,” a vision explained less by a strictly theological account than a psychological description of the mind’s power to shape reality. As Elizabeth Maddock Dillon has described, sentimentalism and aesthetics in the nineteenth-century United States similarly “participated in defining the terrain of liberal subjectivity,” by grounding themselves in bodily affect.15 According to Dillon, sentimentalism “has its roots in the same concerns with autonomy that define aesthetic theory” (498). For aesthetics, however, “the subjective feeling of freedom and personhood” are linked “to the ideal of human freedom and the (putatively) universal rights of man,” while “in related terms, sentimentalism links the capacity of individuals to feel deeply (often, to suffer) to an essential shared humanity” (500). In other words, aesthetics and sentimentalism attempt, in parallel ways, to move from the individual body’s sensuous experience of the world to some notion of universal humanity. Stowe suggests this connection, even as she takes care to elaborate the distinction, when she uses the term “aesthetic” to describe St. Clare’s character (239). Calling him a “poetical voluptuary” (253) like “Moore, Byron, Goethe” (440), Stowe hints that it is St. Clare’s “aesthetic” nature, something “akin to the softness of woman” (239), that saves him from the dissipation and corruption of the slave system and that provides the force behind his apotheosization of his mother. St. Clare’s aesthetic nature links him to both the “soft, poetic touches” (430) of the slaves, which reveal this “sensitive race” will create “new forms of art” (275), and Eva’s “poetic fancy,”



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which leads her to “yearn towards the unknown” (380). This poetic sensitivity, then, corresponds with an innate spirituality and seems to be part of Stowe’s romantic racialism, her portrayal of the African race as more feminine, spiritual, as displayed, supposedly, in “religious histories of the slave population.”16 Yet, according to Stowe’s version of sentimentalism, this sensibility, while specifically endowed to women, children, and Africans, is an element of all humans. Stowe’s project aims to produce sympathetic identification not just from more sensitive white women but from white men as well, as perhaps best exemplified in Senator Bird’s transformation from advocate for a fugitive slave law to assisting Eliza in escaping. St. Clare’s aestheticism, however, represents a distortion of Tom’s and Eva’s sympathetic sensibility. It is his aesthetic nature that leads him astray, that provides the basis for his laziness, his unwillingness to act in “real life” (241), his tendency to drink. The aesthetic, for Stowe, represents the possibility of a poetic nature perverted, of it leading St. Clare to a voluptuousness similar to the immorality of Byron. As Stowe describes it, “The gift to appreciate and the sense to feel the finer shades and relations of moral things, often seems an attribute of those whose whole life shows a careless disregard of them” (440). Aesthetics, from this perspective, leads one away from connecting and committing to others and towards a devotion to one’s self and one’s senses, essentially the diagnosis Stowe will later make of Byron in her defense of his wife.17 Sentimentalism, on the other hand, while similarly depending on the “gift to appreciate and the sense to feel the finer shades and relations of moral things,” turns on the reader’s ability to erase the difference between herself and the object (or person) of sympathetic identification. For Stowe, the end of slavery starts with people letting themselves “feel right” towards the slaves, which means, in essence, being able to feel with the slaves. The aesthete has the ability to feel right, to experience the pain others suffer, but, because of selfish, “careless” motives, refuses the call of identification in favor of dissipation and luxurious sensuality. The aesthete, in other words, wallows in his own senses rather than using his senses as a bridge to understand and sympathize with others. As Stowe’s Quakers insist, “what we are made for” is to “use [ourselves] to learn how to love [our] neighbor[s]” (220). Eliza’s electric body and Tom’s transcendence indicate how sentimental electricity captures this problematic, enabling the mother or slave to escape the limitations of her body and fostering the reader’s own erasure of her difference from the slaves as it figures sentimentalism’s tendency towards a kind of universal humanism. That humanism approximates that found in both techno-utopianism

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and the discourse of taste in its tendency to erase the mediating role of language, of the body, of the historical differences produced by race and slavery. As I will argue, it is in its refusal to dismiss the opacity of those media that Douglass finds aesthetic electricity a politically indeterminate but attractive alternative.

Our Ally Lightning: Douglass and Techno-Utopianism The October 8, 1852, edition of the Frederick Douglass’ Paper described Uncle Tom’s Cabin as “an electric message.”18 Later, in a January, 1855 lecture, Douglass spoke of the sublime power of “one flash from the heart-supplied intellect of Harriet Beecher Stowe.”19 As the allusions perhaps indicate, Douglass’s “flashes” and “electric” conductors function similarly to electricity in Stowe’s novel—they are meant to foster a recognition of commonality between reader and slave, a vicarious experience of his pain and suffering that registers on the reader’s body like an electric shock so, paradoxically, that the reader can bracket the bodily differences supposedly marked by race and embrace the other as a second self. Like Stowe, Douglass associates this electric feeling with the potential of the written word to create such experiences, repeatedly speaking of writing or literature in terms of electricity. In a speech on “The Present Condition and Future Prospects of the Negro People” from May, 1853, Douglass argues that “Men will write. Men will read. Men will think. Men will feel. And the result of all this is, men will speak. And it were as well to chain the lightning as to repress the moral convictions and humane prompting of enlightened human nature” (Life and Writings 2:251). Analogizing lightning and an innate human morality that leads to expression, he elsewhere relates this lightning to poetry in responding to Pope’s most famous line from his “Essay on Man,” “‘The proper study of mankind is man’ was a saying of which men never tired. It expressed a sublime truth, it came fresh to the ear every time repeated, and vibrated the soul like the lightning the wire; it was felt as well as thought; it was felt before it was thought.”20 Poetry, then, is electric in its ability to make written language come alive, its pre-rational capacity to create physical effects (vibrated, felt) on the bodies of readers or listeners. Written language, thus, can both capture and re-engage the sentiments, desires, and feelings that all humans share. For Stowe, as for Priestley and others influenced by the Scottish Enlightenment’s positing of an innate moral sense, this electrical identification



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[The telegraph] effect[s] a revolution in political and social life, by establishing a more intimate connexion between nation and nation, with race and race. . . . [through] the free and unobstructed interchange of each with all. How potent a power, then, is the telegraphic destined to become in the civilization of the world! This binds together by a vital cord all the nations of the earth. It is impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should longer exist, while such an instrument has been created for an exchange of thought between all the nations of the earth.22

 

 

Here, as in other commentary, the telegraph promotes the “civilization of the world” by encouraging the free exchange of thought and by unifying human “consciousness” “under the dominion of one science and one art.” This passage indicates, however, that the telegraph’s “civilization of the world” will include the dismantling of the “prejudices and hostilities” which have separated “race from race.”23 H. L. Wayland made an even more specific case for how the telegraph would lead to “the peaceful termination of slavery.”24 While “the horrors of slavery chiefly exist . . . on remote and unvisited plantations,” the telegraph’s “extension of the means of rapid

 

and its expression in language are products of God’s endowing humans with a particular moral sensibility and of the capacity of language to act directly upon that sensibility. Both bodies and language become transparent media for assimilating and incorporating the experience of the other. Stowe offers, or implies, a model of language working physically to register emotions on the bodies of readers, imagining the effect of her book in the hands of her readers, but neglects to explore how her words get to the readers at all. On the other hand, Douglass’s allusions to electricity most often appear in celebrations of new technologies, particularly the telegraph, for fostering or at least potentially enabling such connections and identifications, thus hinting at his concern with the socioeconomic structures enabling or disabling sympathy. Even in his use of electricity to figure the power of language, he turns, as above, to telegraphy, for poetic language is not simply electric but vibrates the soul “like the lightning the wire.” As discussed in previous chapters, new instruments of communication and transportation were frequently cited as proof of the forthcoming equality and harmony of all persons. Epitomizing this tendency, the anticipation and reaction to the first functioning transatlantic cable became a “celebration of the union of all the families of man under the dominion of one science and one art, made visible in steam locomotives and electric wires.”21 Often, commentators singled out the telegraph’s ability to overcome racial barriers:

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and universal communication gives every man who is injured an appeal to the tribunal of the whole civilized world” (798–799). Rather than having to call on God for salvation, Uncle Tom, Wayland seems to imply, will now be able to wire for help. For Wayland, the telegraph forwards the antislaver cause not only by linking the slave to the “civilized world,” but also by encouraging men of different nations “to palliate the faults and to appreciate the virtues of each other” (802). Where spiritual and sentimental electricity imagined a world joined through a common spirituality fostered through the feelings conjured up by reading about the experiences of others, Wayland and similar commentators echo the techno-utopian discourse discussed in chapter one by suggesting that the telegraph would end slavery both by disclosing hidden crimes and by uniting the interests of all humankind. Most of Douglass’s allusions to the telegraph or other forms of technology follow this line of thought.25 In an 1849 North Star article on international affairs, for example, he opined that “The power of international opinion is just beginning to be understood and appreciated. Steam-navigation, railroads and electric telegraphs are bearing on their flashing wings the power of intelligence to quarters hitherto insensible to the world about them. We live at a period which may be regarded as the dawn of that day when ‘the pen shall supercede the sword,’ and when mind shall be directed by intelligence, and not crushed and cramped by the iron hoofs of war and slavery.”26 New technologies, especially the telegraph, foster the accession of the pen, of thought and reason, to the throne of power, by spreading intelligence (in the form of flashes) throughout the world. Douglass similarly concludes the January, 1855, lecture in which he speaks of the “flash” from Stowe’s intellect by linking progress, nature, and abolitionism: “The growth of intelligence, the influence of commerce, steam, wind, and lightning, are our allies. It would be easy to amplify this summary, and to swell the vast conglomeration of our material forces; but there is a deeper and truer method of measuring the power of our cause. . . . The slave is bound to mankind, by the powerful and inextricable net-work of human brotherhood” (Life and Works 2:357). That network is both spiritual and material. It is spiritual in “the affinities recognized and established by the Almighty” (Life and Works 2:357) and exemplified by the universal desire for freedom. But that spiritual force is physically actuated by the material progress and connections created by telegraphs and railroads, connections that, in turn, contribute to the end of slavery and to the equality of all people by allowing all people to identify with one another through their similarly electric flashes of hope and desire.  

 

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In these various passages, Douglass seems to foreground a very utilitarian understanding of both writing and technology, and thus seems to offer an anti-aesthetic reading of electricity. Electricity and technology rather straightforwardly lead to particular political and moral outcomes, destroying the basis of slavery and connecting people together. The illustrations separating the two halves of My Bondage and My Freedom gesture to such a reading. While bondage is represented by darkly tinted scenes of a slave auction and a slave being pursued by a dog and a man on horseback, freedom is illustrated by depictions of a railroad and telegraph line as well as a market and a school. Education, technology, and the market place proclaim the end of slavery as they enlighten all of society. But as we have seen, technology and electricity were just as often used to bolster racist claims of white superiority as to champion ideas of common humanity, a fact that, as Lisa Brawley has pointed out, the illustrations from My Bondage and My Freedom reiterate through their absence of black faces in the depiction of “freedom.”27 Often, in fact, these two positions came together to suggest that only when the rest of the world rose to the status of the European races, through the diffusion of knowledge and power via the telegraph and railroads, would true equality be possible.28 In the same way that spiritual electricity proposed that the electrical union of humankind was based in particular bodies while emphasizing that that union would only take place in a realm shorn of bodies altogether, the techno-utopian discourse around the telegraph and electricity offered the possibility of a harmonious human union through an abstract common personhood but tended to base that dream on the idea of all humanity being raised up to Euro-American standards. Douglass begins to suggest this ambivalence when he speaks of the Christmas holidays as a kind of electric conductor. Implicitly, Douglass’s description of the Christmas holidays serves to explain why other slaves do not resist slavery as he did, as part of his task in the Narrative is to articulate the ways in which African-American slaves participate in a kind of universal humanity defined in liberal terms of a natural desire for freedom, even as they are dehumanized in such a way as to distort such a desire. Thus, with the merry-making at Christmas time, the “fiddling, dancing, and drinking whisky,” the masters are able to keep “down the spirit of insurrection” (66), a spirit described in My Bondage as electric (291). Here, electricity and the flash of Douglass’s thoughts of freedom connect Douglass (and other slaves) with normative Enlightenment notions of essential human freedom. Yet where Douglass celebrates technologies such as the telegraph for forging the material connections necessary for recognizing that common

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humanity, in this passage he describes a kind of Gramscian (or Genovesian) hegemonic domination that is able to re-direct those flashes. Returning to the passage from his March, 1853 lecture on “The Present Condition and Future Prospects of the Negro People,” we can trace this ambivalence about technology. In suggesting the ultimately undeniable march of freedom, “in every bar of railroad iron, in every electric wire, in every improvement,” Douglass contends that “it were as well to chain the lightning as to repress the moral convictions and humane prompting of enlightened human nature” (Life and Writings 2:251). As Douglass would certainly have known—his home of Rochester was one of the centers of the telegraphic industry—“chaining the lightning” was a widespread description of what the telegraph did. Enlightened humanity had, in fact, chained the lightning of electricity through the telegraph, and Douglass’s figure, along with his notion of electric conductors, indicates that the electricity of freedom is impossible to control completely but potentially can be conducted through “safety-valves” such as the Christmas holidays so as to leave the status quo untouched. Douglass’s rhetoric simultaneously acknowledges the ways in which natural forces (here, the naturally rebellious spirit of slaves) can be safely enslaved by human masters through a kind of technology and suggest that that force can never fully be enslaved, can never be contained fully by disciplinary technologies. The electric conductors serve both to differentiat the slaves from the rest of humanity, to make their lives unaccessible to others, and, by offering an account of that difference, to assimilate them to a universal humanity. For all of his celebration of the liberatory potential of new technologies, Douglass implicitly acknowledges how the conquest of nature easily becomes the conquest of natural persons, hinting, at times, at the ambivalence of technology for racial politics. As I will develop through the next sections, this ambivalence informs Douglass’s attempt to convey the particularity of his experience, to keep himself, his life, and that of other slaves from being reduced simply to evidence in a political cause.

Machinery & Transcendentalism Agree Well: Emersonian Aesthetics and Politics The ambivalence of Douglass’s electrical allusions distinguishes him from Stowe, for whom electricity seems to provide an unequivocally positive connection confirming a shared humanity. In the last chapter, I described how Melville’s Pierre offers a picture of the potential destructiveness, yet

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compelling attraction of imagining human connections and knowledge in terms of electricity. Of more importance here, Pierre begins to hint at the ambiguous political possibilities of an indeterminate network of electric sensation, knowledge, and community by engaging with the vexed field of America’s racial past. Significantly, as several critics over the past few decades have noted, Isabel comes to represent not just Pierre’s father’s sexual transgressions but also the racialized crimes of his forefathers, his grandfather’s slaveholding and degradation of his slaves as well as his greatgrandfather’s violent and questionable acquisition of the very lands where Pierre grows up.29 With her “dark, olive cheek” and “long hair” that resembles “ebon vines,” Isabel’s appearance, her illegitimacy, and her obscure past represent the possibility of racial mixture.30 But her race is less important than the mystery she provides for Pierre and for Pierre’s readers. Whether we—or Pierre—believe she is his half-sister or that she is from an oppressed group or class, her plight calls upon our sympathy even as her lack of a coherent identity leaves us little with which to sympathize. As such, she prefigures Melville’s later victims of American sympathy, Bartleby and Babo. By emphasizing his unwillingness, finally, to accept ethical responsibility for Isabel as Isabel and not merely as the imagined “sister [who] had been omitted from [his] text” (7), Pierre denies the very mystery of Isabel. Pierre is joined to Isabel, electrically, through “the universal subject world,” but that connection, that world, is not definable in terms of family relation or even in terms of common humanity, but rather is “eternally lock[ed] in mystery and in muteness.” Pierre, as I argued in the last chapter, does not dismiss the kind of electrical connection or electrical insight Pierre has, but rather describes the dangers of reifying such a connection or insight. The problem, in the terms I have laid out in this book, is to maintain the electrical fuzziness of that identification, to treat, in paraphrasing Melville, the temporary feeling of connection with the all or with another as significant but not defining of self or other. It is, in other words, to keep the ambiguities of electricity alive without them disabling any attempt to act. Despite Melville’s parodic portrait in Pierre of an Emersonian thinker in the person of Plotinus Plinlimmon, Melville’s ambivalence about electrical connections—bodily, literary, spiritual—parallels the central strain of electricity in Emerson’s thought. As outlined in the last chapter, Thoreau’s suggestive comments about the telegraph posit technology as a model for a dialectic between the ideal and the material that art itself foregrounds. Even more frequently than Thoreau, Emerson drew on the language of electricity and the uses of telegraphy to represent aesthetic experience and its poten-

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tial to transform society as well as individuals. Most prominently, in “The Poet,” he figures poetic inspiration and its ability to unify the poet with all of humanity, all of creation, as “that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity. Nothing walks, or creeps, or grows, or exists, which must not in turn arise and walk before him as exponent of his meaning.”31 Electric genius is the individual’s poetic power, but it negates the very idea of “limit and privacy,” rendering the individual simply a conductor of a power permeating all that exists. Similarly, in “The Transcendentalist,” Emerson juxtaposes the technologies exhibited at a Mechanics’ fair with “few finer instruments . . . [the] few persons of purer fire . . . persons of a fine, detecting instinct. . . . the exciters and monitors; collectors of the heavenly spark with power to convey the electricity to others” (208). The tension between Emerson’s celebration of these few finer persons and his emphasis on the universality of electricity epitomizes the ambivalence about the poet’s status running throughout his oeuvre. The poet or the transcendentalist merely conveys, through his writing, lectures, or life, some heavenly electricity. It is his job, then, to make that power apparent and conceivable for all other people, to shock others into a recognition of their radical continuity with the rest of the universe as well as their individual divinity. This is what Sharon Cameron has described as Emerson’s notion of the impersonal, his attempt to theorize the “radical commonness” of all humanity by refuting “the idea that the mind is one’s ‘property,’ that one’s relation to being is that of ownership, on the one hand, and separate identity, on the other.”32 Cameron argues that Emerson’s form of individualism is actually generated by his sense of the modern individual self as a fiction. According to Cameron, Emerson’s philosophy turns on overcoming the illusive “idea that we are separately existing entities,” in realizing our being radically coterminous with the world and other sensate humans (1). As she contends, the contest between personality, “the person with interests, needs, desires, will,” and the impersonal, the struggle or tension between remaining individual and “giv[ing] ourselves up to the involuntary. . . . takes the place of narrative or is the narrative of Emerson’s essays” (10). That tension appears in Emerson’s famous moment of transcendence from early in Nature—“Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space —all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The  

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name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances,—master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance” (Nature 10). Through the blithe air of nature, the individual is at once able to escape the physical and social world and at the same time to become enmeshed in physical existence. He stands on the bare ground, losing an interested self (egotism), even as some self remains (I am nothing, I am part) in melding with universal being. The current (suggestive of electricity) that flows through him enables him to transcend his mere body, his individual identity, but can only be felt by maintaining some connection to that singular body. Simultaneously the product of sensations registered on the individual body and giving rise to a sense of the limitations and fluid boundaries of the individual self, this kind of aesthetic experience is inherently paradoxical, blurring distinctions between self and community, sensuous and ideal. Yet, according to Cameron, Emerson’s notion of the impersonal finally fails because of “the missing sense of a person” (4) in his essays, his failure to recognize “that persons are not always the undifferentiated beings constructed by his prose” (24), that, in fact, they inhabit discrete bodies delimited by a multiplicity of historical forces. Emerson does not adequately acknowledge that relinquishing the self comes at potentially great cost and is, quite possibly, only an option for those already assured of the soci economic and political security of safely returning to that identity. The power of the impersonal is obscured by the “barbarous Idealism [that] infects all of [Emerson’s] writing” (24), an idealism that makes his thought approximate the ideas espoused by Taylor, Schiller, and Arnold. Emerson never abandons this idealism completely. But that is not to concur with John Carlos Rowe’s definition of an “Emersonian tradition of aesthetic dissent” as the “romantic idealist assumption that rigorous reflection on the processes of thought and representation constitutes in itself a critique of social reality and effects a transformation of the naïve realism that confuses truth with social convention.”33 Rather than fully embracing an idealism removing consciousness from sociopolitical reality and an ideal of a harmonious and static union of the self with the universal, Emerson’s aesthetic transcendentalism repeatedly emphasizes a productive (and disintegrating) tension between the individual and the whole grounded in sociohistorical materiality. In fact, Emerson frequently aligns his transcendentalist poetics with the potential of new technologies to revitalize and reconstruct both our views of the world and its sociopolitical organization.34 As he put it in an 1843 journal entry, “Machinery & Transcendental-

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ism agree well. Stage Coach & Rail Road are bursting the old legislation like green withes.”35 Just as transcendentalism challenges our old ways of understanding the world by foregrounding both the inescapability of subjective experience and the permeable nature of the subject, so new technologies foster a recognition of this indeterminacy, this dialectic between self and world, individual and society, a recognition that questions all laws, all preconceived ideas. In Nature, for example, Emerson concludes that traveling “by mechanical means” on a railroad reveals “the difference between the observer and the spectacle,—between man and nature. Hence arises a pleasure mixed with awe; I may say, a low degree of the sublime is felt,” which “In a higher manner, the poet communicates. . . . [when] he unfixes the land and the sea, makes them revolve around the axis of his primary thought, and disposes them anew. . . . tosses the creation like a bauble from hand to hand, and uses it to embody any caprice of thought that is uppermost in his mind” (34–35). Poetry and technology similarly destabilize the world and our ideas of it, enabling us to reconceive our relationship to the material world as well as to other humans. Electricity and electric technology bear particular weight in Emerson’s transcendentalism for their capacity to suggest the permeability of the self, the impersonal nature of existence, and the fluid boundary between matter and thought. As Eric Wilson has most fully described, throughout the 1830s and 1840s, Emerson used contemporary electro-magnetic science, especially the work of Michael Faraday on the interchangeability of magnetism and electricity, to provide his transcendentalist philosophy and aesthetics with a scientific basis. In particular, according to Wilson, electricity demonstrated for Emerson his idea that “things are not discrete and static but condensations of vast systems of force.”36 For Wilson, Emerson’s use of electric science suggests “an Emerson who remained unsatisfied with mere speculation about the animating principle of life, one who wanted hard scientific proof for the ideas of his Romantic predecessors” (11–12). In other words, Emerson materializes (or concretizes, as Wilson puts it) the thought of more idealist romantic thinkers such as Coleridge, revising “Coleridge’s ideal of the poem as plant into an ideal of the poem as a grain of water containing lightning” (45). Or, as Wilson later ventriloquizes Emerson’s thought, “Though Goethe and Coleridge were right in conjecturing that parts contain the whole, that the unifying force is polar, they remained too much in the mind and not enough in matter” (93). Wilson, then, offers a more materialistic (scientific) Emerson, an Emerson whose idealism is fully grounded in the most advanced understandings of electricity in the 1830s.  

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His work reveals an Emerson more in keeping with the aesthetic electricity of Shelley than the idealism of Coleridge. Yet in Wilson’s account, Emerson remains detached from social and political questions. Emerson’s notion of writing as electric (a long-standing trope, as I have noted) becomes the epitome of aesthetic distanciation from social questions, as its purpose is merely “to agitate readers as nature excited him, to shock and attract them into a recognition of the relationship between matter and spirit” (11). Such a project is clearly at the core of Emerson’s thought, but leaving it as such disregards Emerson’s concerns and interest in the material (economic, political, social) use of electricity. Most frequently, Emerson, like Thoreau, dismisses electronic technology as misguided, as too materialistic, in both the philosophical and economic sense. Also like Thoreau, Emerson seems more receptive to spiritualist understandings of the telegraph as emblematizing a medium for linking different peoples of different times and places and races. Yet Emerson also cites new technologies, the telegraph in particular, as material analogues of the power of poetry and of political change. In fact, as we have seen, just as the telegraphic sensorium violated the supposedly sacred boundaries of the individual personality, so Emerson’s ideal of the impersonal similarly negates the ground of the atomistic self. Through this invocation of electric technology, Emerson moves towards recognizing the social context of aesthetic transcendence, thus countering his idealistic tendencies. In “Poetry and Imagination,” for example, Emerson implicitly gestures to electrical understandings of the brain and nervous system when he describes poetry as “the little chamber in the brain where is generated the explosive force which, by gentle shocks, sets in action the intellectual world.”37 This possible connection to electrical physiology is given greater weight when a few pages later he describes the masses’ lack of poetry: “this multitude of vagabonds, hungry for eloquence, hungry for poetry, starving for symbols, perishing for want of electricity to vitalize this too much pasture, and in the long delay indemnifying themselves with the false wine of alcohol, of politics or of money” (70). Emerson here suggests not only that poetry is not political, but also that it is antithetical to politics, as he distinguishes poetry’s electric ability to revitalize humanity from the false hopes of alcohol, politics, and money. In gesturing to the poetry that will restore the intellectual world, however, Emerson returns to the social world, indicating that it is not just electrical science but also electrical technology that serves as an analogy— “The high poetry which shall thrill and agitate mankind, restore youth and health, dissipate the dreams under which men reel and stagger, and bring in

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the new thoughts, the sanity and heroic aims of nations, is deeper hid and longer postponed than was America or Australia, or the finding of steam or the galvanic battery” (73). Emerson contends that the hidden power of poetry remains more concealed, undetected, than the secrets of electricity and new continents, yet simultaneously uses the power of those discoveries to hint at the potentially revolutionary nature of poetry. The political implications of this conjunction of art and technology become clearer in Emerson’s anti-slavery lectures and writing, and thus lead us back to Douglass. In speaking against the Fugitive Slave Law, Emerson claims that he “cannot accept the railroad and telegraph in exchange for reason and charity,” yet he goes on to cite such technological wonders as evidence of the certainty of emancipation: “Nothing is impracticable to this nation. . . . By new arts the earth is subdued, roaded, tunneled, telegraphed, gas-lighted; vast amounts of old labor disused; the sinews of man being relieved by the sinews of steam. We are on the brink of more wonders.”38 While this celebration of material progress seems simply to replicate the techno-utopian idea of the human conquest of nature leading to a democratic, egalitarian society, Emerson refuses to accept technological improvements as substitutes for a moral revolution transforming human consciousness. He never relinquishes the idea that technology, in order to be truly revolutionary, must affect, in dialectical fashion, both the material conditions of society and individual consciousness. It is less the technologies themselves, in fact, that are revolutionary than the creative impulse behind both their invention and their reception. Thus, unlike mainstream techno-utopian discourse, which he does frequently mirror, Emerson most often insists on the telegraph not as expanding the reach of the individual mind but as troubling both the identification of individual with individual and the idea of the self-identical subject. Rather than serving to reinforce the substantiality of the individual and his power, art, working in a way akin to telegraphic technology and electrical forces, foregrounds the instability of the human subject. In “Poetry and Imagination,” for example, he insists that Faraday’s discoveries reveal that “everything is in flight” and that “This hint, however conveyed, upsets our politics, trade, customs, marriages, nay, the common sense side of religion and literature, which are founded on low nature” (5–6). In “The Transcendentalist,” Emerson goes so far as to envision the beginnings of a shift of the foundations of politics. Ascribing to the transcendentalist “a liberal, even an aesthetic spirit,” he acknowledges that “A reference to Beauty in  

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action sounds, to be sure, a little hollow and ridiculous in the ears of the old church. In politics, it has often sufficed, when they treated of justice, if they kept the bounds of selfish calculation. . . . But the justice which is now claimed for the black, and the pauper, and the drunkard is for Beauty,—is for a necessity to the soul of the agent, not of the beneficiary. I say, this is the tendency, not yet the realization” (206). A politics based in beauty does not, cannot, make sense in an era in which politics is grounded in individual identities and interests, within the “bounds of selfish calculation.” But the impersonal, the aesthetic sphere’s “reference to the central fact of the constant relation of the individual to the universal, and of their equally constant separation,” provides the very foundation of the most radical political movements of the era.39 It is in this way that poets become “liberating gods” (“The Poet” 461), as poetry “unlock[s] our chains, and admits us to a new scene” (463), providing “a point outside of our hodiernal circle, through which a new one may be described. The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it” (“Circles” 408). Like Coleridge, James Taylor, in The Useful and the Beautiful, views art as electric for its ability to bring the disparate into an affective relationship with a universal humanity; Emerson (like Shelley, Melville, and Thoreau) expands this idea to insist on the radical destabilization of our common ideas, our sense of our selves, that such a temporary connection allows. Art, poetry, is electric, for it is “never fixed, but always flowing” (“Art” 438), as it “throw[s] down the walls of circumstance on every side, awakening in the beholder the same sense of universal relation and power which the work evinced in the artist” (“Art” 437). True art, thus, “will raise to a divine use the railroad, the insurance office, the joint-stock company, our law, our primary assemblies, our commerce, the galvanic battery, the electric jar, the prism, and the chemist’s retort, in which we seek now only an economical use. . . . When its errands are noble and adequate, a steamboat bridging the Atlantic between Old and New England . . . is a step of man into harmony with nature” (“Art” 440). Poetry mirrors technology’s material transformation of the world, but it also reorients that transformation by foregrounding its radical implications for understanding the self and its relationship to the world. Because technology has both the ability to join humankind together and the capacity to shock us into new recognitions of our relationship with the world and with other humans, because literature and art are being transformed by technological innovations as

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well as providing alternative ways of viewing technology, Emerson connects art with technology, and specifically electric technology, in gesturing to the sociopolitical foundation and potential impact of aesthetics.

My Soul’s Complaint: Douglass’s Aesthetic Turn It is in this light that I want to return to Douglass’s use of electricity. Emerson’s aesthetic politics reject both a liberal politics based on calculation and a sentimental politics based on identification. Where Stowe calls on her readers to feel (and act) right by recognizing themselves in her slave characters, Emerson asks us to embrace our own alienation from ourselves and our world in order to envision the self and the world anew, a new vision he defines as liberating and, at times, anti-slavery. For Stowe (and Pierre, if not Pierre), the problem lies in identifying with an other without reducing that person to a projection of the self; for Emerson, the problem lies in creating the self without reifying the self, without making that self a model for all. These two problematics become central to Douglass’s political and aesthetic project. As Robert Fanuzzi has argued in reference to his oratory, by invoking the idea of the sublime in his rhetoric and in his very appearance as a black man embodying putatively white standards, Douglass “denied his audiences [the] pleasure” of seeing him as “a former version of themselves, or a promise of what they could become.”40 Because Douglass’s success as a speaker in the public sphere was, in fact, “predicated on the failure to establish the equivalency between subjects that was necessary for its own operation” (221), Douglass “could pose the challenge of aesthetics to the political discourse of modernity, making use of the specialized message of the sublime to reveal the failure of language, and alternately, the expression of that failure to fulfill the promise of communicability among avowedly literate citizens” (213). Douglass’s narratives similarly force the reader to confront the limitations of a universalized humanism by refusing to erase the essential incommensurability of individual lived experience while insisting on some sort of commonality as the ground for political reform. In order to avoid the pitfalls of sentimental identification epitomized by Stowe’s treatment of Eliza and Tom while still calling upon white sympathy, Douglass, I argue, draws on aesthetic discourse in reconstructing his own experiences in his writings. Rather than simply rendering his experience accessible for his readers, allowing them to take up his experience and



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make it their own, Douglass, most forcefully in the soliloquy to the ships on the Chesapeake and in his consideration of slave songs, refuses them the kind of empathic identification that would simply reduce his life to evidence of a kind of common humanity. Twice in the Narrative, in fact, Douglass explicitly declares that his readers cannot understand his feelings, after his fight with Covey—“He only can understand the deep satisfaction which I experienced, who has himself repelled by force the bloody arm of slavery” (65)—and when he gets his first job in the North—“the rapture of which can be understood only by those who have been slaves” (95). What Douglass accomplishes by drawing on aesthetics is to evoke a common humanity based in the individual body’s experience of the world while refusing to abandon the particularity of that individual’s experience. As I will suggest, it is this tension that Douglass, along the lines of Melville, Percy Shelley, and Emerson, characterizes as the electrical charge of both poetry and the desire for freedom. Douglass most fully theorizes the potential political ambivalence of this tension in his well-known account of slave songs. As a number of scholars have noted, Douglass’s meditation on the slave songs serves multiple purposes, figuring his dis/connection to his slave past and the slave community, the necessarily deceptive nature of slave culture and slave songs, the artistic humanity of the slaves.41 Douglass first emphasizes the potentially rebellious and emancipatory nature of the slave songs, their ability to work didactically in the larger world and to unify those within the slave community: “I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do.” Douglass almost immediately complicates this reading, however, by noting that the powerful, indescribable effect of the songs does not readily yield meaning: “The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and filled me with an ineffable sadness. . . . To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery.” Rather than producing conceptual clarity, the songs convey an ambiguous, indefinite emotion to the listener. The songs, while “full of meaning” to the slaves, “seem unmeaning jargon” to most ears, and Douglass, while “within the circle” could not fully “understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. . . . as those without might see and hear”(23–24). The power of the songs lies in their incoherence, their paradoxical nature, what Douglass refers to as the “double meaning” of slave songs in My Bondage and My Freedom (308)— “the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone, and the most

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rapturous sentiment in the most pathetic tone” (23). The meaning of the songs, in other words, lies not in some direct message about the horrors of slavery, but in some glimmering, ineffable emotion drawn directly from the experience of hearing them. This imprecise, impersonal emotional response is, as we have seen, exactly how aesthetic experience has been conceived from Baumgarten forward. Douglass’s apostrophe to the ships, I would suggest, represents his own slave song, giving voice to a not fully articulated longing for freedom that both supposedly unites him with all of humanity and defines his essential difference. That apostrophe only arises because, despite being “transformed into a brute,” “broken in body, soul, and spirit,” by Covey (58), occasionally, still, “a flash of energetic freedom would dart through my soul . . . . compel[ling] utterance” (58–59). In this section of the Narrative, Douglass emphasizes how his resistance to Covey leads to his spiritual and mental renewal. But while Douglass claims he knows not “from whence came the spirit” (64) to fight Covey, it is clear that it is the same “flash of energetic freedom” that gives rise to his “soul’s complaint,” an electric connection further suggested by Douglass’s description of the Christmas holidays as “conductors” immediately following his triumph over Covey. The apostrophe, then, provides our best indication of why and how Douglass saw both freedom and poetry as electric. Significantly, Douglass introduces this passage by using the rhetorical term “apostrophe,” explicitly positioning himself in a poetic tradition, something all apostrophe, according to Jonathan Culler, implicitly does:42  

 

 

I have often, in the deep stillness of a summer’s Sabbath, stood all alone upon the lofty banks of that noble bay, and traced . . . the countless number of sails moving off to the mighty ocean. . . . My thoughts would compel utterance; and there, with no audience but the Almighty, I would pour out my soul’s complaint, in my rude way, with an apostrophe to the moving multitude of ships:— “You are loosed from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and am a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, and I sadly before the bloody whip! You are freedom’s swift-winged angels, that fly round the world; I am confined in bands of iron! O that I were free! O, that I were on one of your gallant decks, and under your protecting wing!” (59)43  

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As Culler has argued, apostrophes act “as intensifiers, as images of invested passion,” as “a figure spontaneously adopted by passion” (138). Yet rather than actually appearing (or being) spontaneous, the apostrophe reveals itself as the height of artifice. Thus, as Culler contends, the apostrophe’s attempt “to constitute encounters with the world as relations between subjects” (141) becomes the poet’s attempt “to establish with an object a rela-



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tionship which helps to constitute him” as the “poet visionary” (142). The apostrophe manifests “the subject’s claim that in his verse he is not merely an empirical poet, a writer of verse, but the embodiment of poetic tradition and of the spirit of poesy” (143). Douglass’s apostrophe, it would follow, serves to enfranchise him as a member of the aesthetic community, as part of Melville’s brotherhood of genius, a point evidenced by Garrison’s citation of this passage in his introductory letter as “the most thrilling” of the “many passages of great eloquence and power” in the Narrative (8). Yet, as much as this scene in the text invites its readers to identify with Douglass’s situation and allows Douglass to claim his rightful place in a Western poetic tradition, thus assuring his full personhood, Douglass, especially in the 1855 version of this scene, subtly forestalls the assimilation of his individual experience to a narrative of universal human freedom or Western poetic traditions. Douglass emphasizes the difference of his relationship with the ships, as the ships, “so delightful to the eye of freemen . . . [like] so many shrouded ghosts . . . terrify and torment me with thoughts of my wretched condition” (59). To the extent that Douglass is able to identify with the ships by the end of the passage, he still distances himself from a common humanity, linking himself, instead, with the commercial movement of ships, underscoring how his continued subjection renders him a commodity himself. He further accentuates both the specificity of this experience and the artfulness of this passage through his self-quotation. Rather than giving us his voice speaking to the ships directly, Douglas , the author, mediates for us, placing, as it were, the whole scene in quotation marks. This self-quotation mirrors the distanciation in his reflection on the slave songs when he steps back from his description of the songs to narrate that “The mere recurrence to those songs, even now, afflicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an expression of feeling has already found its way down my cheek” (24). Jeffrey Steele picks up on this idea of feelings becoming physical to read this passage as one of the key moments where Douglass deploys sentimental rhetoric in order to “evoke a powerful emotional response that blurs the boundaries between independent self and others.”44 But instead of offering direct access to his experience, as sentimentalism would tend to promise, Douglass’s quotation of himself and his comment on his own reaction emphasize his own distance from the life he is narrating. Physically, he is no longer on the home plantation. He is located, presumably, in some sort of private space, writing, an activity that links that private space with the wider political and social world but cannot be reduced to

 

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simply political or social terms. Not only can his readers who have not lived as slaves not fully understand his emotions, but he, as a former slave, is also disconnected from this experience. Douglass stresses this point in the 1855 My Bondage and My Freedom. While he silently imports numerous passages from his original Narrative into the later autobiography, the Chesapeake soliloquy and the consideration of slave songs comprise two of the only four to which he calls attention by placing them in quotation marks.45 Following his lengthy quotation of the Chesapeake passage from the Narrative (267–269) in My Bondage and My Freedom, he concludes that “I shall never be able to narrate the mental experience through which it was my lot to pass during my stay at Covey’s” (269). Only through quotation, only through the fiction of recreating the experience in toto, can Douglass begin to re-live it himself; rather than exemplifying a shared human desire for freedom, the scene refuses to reduce Douglass’s lived experience to an abstract case proving some formal equivalence of human desires and rights. In this way, Douglass foregrounds the constructedness, the fictiveness, the imaginative element of his writing as well as refuses a model of immediate, empathic sentimental electricity. Culler deconstructs the apostrophe’s apparent attempt “to establish relations between the self and the other” as, “in fact . . . an act of radical interiorization and solipsism. Either it parcels out the self to fill the world . . . or else it internalizes what might have been thought external” (146). If we move away from Culler’s de-Manian sense of the materiality of language to the materiality Douglass attempts to conjure up through language, we can see how Douglass still attempts to move beyond a poetic self alienated from the world and other humans even as he foregrounds the specificity of his experience and the artificiality of his reconstruction of it. In particular, as David Van Leer has remarked, Douglass’s choice of the ships gestures to the very technology he would use to escape slavery at the same time that it alludes to the slave ships which introduced his ancestors into bondage in America.46 As with his technoutopian account of telegraphy, Douglass’s allusions to ships here and elsewhere emphasize the potentially liberatory capacity of them both materially and ideologically—the example of the ships impels Douglass to insist at the end of his apostrophe that he will “take to the water” and follow the “steamboats [which] steered in a north-east course . . . . to the head of the bay” (59). But like his qualifications of telegraphic techno-utopianism, he also cautions that this potential only torments those without access to their power. If, as I have argued, the apostrophe gives voice to the “flash of energetic  

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freedom would dart through my soul, accompanied with a faint beam of hope” (58) and corresponds to the electric desire for freedom safely conducted away by the Christmas holidays, it evokes not just technological materiality, but also the materiality of the body and its affect. Culler cites Percy Shelley’s idea from “On Life” that “the words I, you, they are not signs of any actual difference subsisting between the assemblage of thoughts thus indicated but are merely marks employed to denote the different modification of the one mind” (qtd. in Culler 148) in order to substantiate his conclusion about the apostrophe’s solipsism. But rather than speaking to a romantic impulse to project the self onto the world, Shelley’s point, here, is to suggest that “The difference is merely nominal between those two classes of thought, which are vulgarly distinguished by the names of ideas and of external objects,” such that “the existence of distinct individual minds, similar to that which is employed in now questioning its own nature, is likewise found to be a delusion.”47 As I argued in chapter two, Shelley frequently conceived of this tension between the “delusion” of the individual mind and its actual embeddedness in and connection to the material world in terms of electricity, and as I have delineated throughout this study, an electric understanding of the body offered the possibility of a nearly spiritual, yet still physical connection suffusing all of humanity. Unlike the electric body of Eliza in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, however, Douglass’s electric thoughts and feelings both invite his readers to identify with his feelings and insist on their specificity. Like Emerson’s allusions, Douglass’s apostrophe foregrounds the political ambivalence of an electric understanding of aesthetic experience and aesthetic connection. As with the slave songs, which yield only a mixed political result, providing evidence of the horrors of slavery and “evidence of their contentment and happiness,” serving to unify the slaves and express their “deepest sadness” and allowing them to forget their conditions in expressions of “highest joy” (23–24), Douglass concludes his commentary on the ships by remarking that his feelings “goaded” him “almost to madness” with his desire for freedom and at the next “reconciled” him to his “wretched lot” (60). Douglass’s electric apostrophe strikes an aesthetic pose not only in its invocation of a poetic voice but also in its balancing of his individual lived experience with some innate human commonality. Giving expression to the determination that leads to “the turning-point in [his] career as a slave” (65), the apostrophe remains in the in-between space of the aesthetic—it is a private moment, where Douglass speaks to “no audience but the Almighty,” yet it is a private moment only produced by his particular placement within the slave

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economy and his experience of the social world—specifically the ships on the Chesapeake. In this way, Douglass’s commitment to distinguishing the lived, bodily experience of himself and other slaves from his white audience while grounding that experience in physiological, technological, economic, and linguistic realms they share, in short, his aesthetic electricity, parallels Homi Bhabha’s account of the effect of a commitment to theory: “What the attention to rhetoric and writing reveals is the discursive ambivalence that makes ‘the political’ possible. . . . we are made excrutiatingly aware of the ambivalent juxtaposition, the dangerous interstitial relation of the factual and the projective, and, beyond that, of the crucial function of the textual and the rhetorical.”48 In itself, the apostrophe does nothing to help Douglass or other slaves achieve freedom, something that will only happen with concerted physical and political action. Yet, at the same time, the passage insists that without the “flash” that is given voice by the apostrophe Douglass would never have resisted Mr. Covey. Aesthetics cannot take the place of physical and political action, but such action, it seems, is impossible without the energizing potential of aesthetic experience or expression.  

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The Quivering Flash of Angry Lightning: “The Heroic Slave” In his only fictional piece, “The Heroic Slave,” Douglass similarly invokes electric imagery in suggesting an aesthetic model for holding in tension the specificity of embodied existence and an essential, universal humanity. As Eric Sundquist has argued, the story locates its hero, Madison Washington, “in the private, Romantic discourse of revolution as an act of imagination and cognition, and in the pragmatic public discourse of Douglass’s own antislavery career.”49 Douglass begins his description of Washington’s romantic impulse in terms of both the sublime and electricity: “Like a guiding star on a stormy night, he is seen through the parted clouds and the howling tempests; or, like the gray peak of a menacing rock on a perilous coast, he is seen by the quivering flash of angry lightning, and he again disappears covered with mystery.”50 Douglass uses lightning here to suggest Washington’s unconquerable spirit, his unquenchable thirst for freedom, but he also uses it to suggest the fleeting, nearly incommunicable nature of Washington’s story itself. Douglass can only provide “glimpses” of Washington’s story before “he again disappears covered with mystery” (132). Throughout the story Douglass draws on electrical metaphors both to reveal and to veil



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the experience of his heroic slave. He introduces Washington through a soliloquy that closely mirrors his apostrophe to the ships, substituting the freedom of the ships with birds who “fly where they list by day, and retire in freedom at night” (133). Like his own soliloquy, Douglass depicts Washington’s solitary speech both as having “flashed across his mind” and as being a product of the fact that he is “Goaded almost to madness” (135). Unbeknownst to Washington, this soliloquy is heard by a passer-by, named Listwell. As Washington’s words “vibrated through his entire frame” (135), Listwell is converted into an abolitionist, leading him to later help Washington twice escape from slavery. Listwell, in this way, stands in for the audience, who, too, should be moved by Washington’s story to act. Washington’s soliloquy is both effectual (it leads Listwell to political activity) and affective in an at least suggestively electric way (the words “vibrated through” Listwell’s body). This electric connection between affect and effectiveness is reiterated in the third part of the story. Beginning with an epigraph from Childe Harold—“—Know ye not / Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow”—Douglass describes how Washington, “by that mesmeric power which is the invariable accompaniment of genius, had already won the confidence of the gang” (153) of slaves he eventually leads in revolt aboard the Creole. Mesmerism, of course, was frequently equated with a type of spiritual or animal electricity or magnetism. The story links this charismatic and sublime force to the lightning at the beginning of the story through its description of the slave revolt taking place in the midst of a storm. As the revolt concludes, we can only see Washington “by the quick flashes of lightning” (162), to which Washington, in calm contrast to the storm, connects his desire for freedom: “you cannot write the bloody laws of slavery on those restless billows. The ocean, if not the land, is free” (162–163). Echoing the lines from a poem which Douglass may have written, wherein an eagle, standing in for the slave, longs “To brave the lightning’s lurid glare, / And talk with thunders in their dwelling,” “The Heroic Slave” draws on the sublimity of lightning, of electricity, to represent the unrestrainable, natural power of its main character and to suggest the way that power directly, sensuously affects others.51 Douglass’s story works didactically as a piece of abolitionist propaganda, outlining its potential impact through the reactions of Listwell and the slave-trading sailor Tom Grant, who becomes the sympathetic narrator of his revolt. At first glance, these characters’ transformations seem to suggest an unproblematic, determinate chain of electric effect leading from Washington’s electric sublimity to its electric effect on the bodies of Listwell and

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Grant to materially effectual political activity. The story, however, refuses such an easy set of linkages, denying readers the sentimental possibility of imaginatively inhabiting the experience of the slaves. In particular, it is telling that Douglass ends the story with Grant’s voice. While Grant—because of viewing Washington’s sublime power—“resolve[s] never to set my foot on the deck of a slave ship,” he nonetheless threatens anyone who calls him “an abolitionist” (159) and remains nearly as much a racist as ever at the end. His admiration for Washington means that he “forgot [Washington’s] blackness in the dignity of his manner, and the eloquence of his speech” (161). And, at the end, he insists that if Washington “had . . . been a white man, I would have followed [him] willingly and gladly,” as he espoused “the principles of 1776,” but concludes that he “could not bring myself to recognize their application to one whom I deemed my inferior” (163). Grant at once admits that Washington is a superior man and in the next moment refuses Washington any rights because of his race. Douglass clearly wants his readers to view Grant negatively, yet, by ending with Grant, he highlights the problems of creating a black hero, of fostering white identification with blackness in face of entrenched racism—only by erasing the mark of race completely can such a project succeed. Listwell represents another possible type of audience for Washington and Douglass. Although it is only with overhearing Washington’s soliloquy that Listwell commits himself to abolitionism, he “had long desired to sound the mysterious depths of the thoughts and feelings of a slave” (134). His desire parallels that of white audience members of minstrel shows as well as that encouraged by Stowe’s type of sentimentalism. And his efforts on Washington’s behalf, his commitment to abolitionism, reveal the potential for this kind of sympathetic identification. Yet his eavesdropping and his inability to “cry out against” slavery when he returns to Virginia (151) accentuate how very different his experience is from that of Washington. He may begin to understand Washington’s feelings, but those feelings will never become his own. He may commit himself to helping slaves but that should not be confused with fully understanding what it is to be a slave. As his name indicates, the key for Listwell is that he does listen well to Washington’s discourse, but his name also separates him from Washington, for like the birds in Washington’s opening soliloquy, who “fly where they list by day,” Listwell is similarly free to do as he lists. This incommensurability of experience, even as recitals of such experience can provoke physical and potentially political effects, appears most prominently, perhaps, in Washington’s account of the fire he escapes. Wash 

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ington tells the Listwells that he only fled from Virginia when a forest fire destroyed his hiding place. In a lengthy passage having little directly to do with the story’s didactic purposes, Douglass has Washington articulate an aesthetic, sublime perspective on the forest fire—“horribly and indescribably grand. . . . its frightful ravages . . . its savage magnificence. . . . was awful, thrilling, solemn, beyond compare. . . . The scene was overwhelming, stunning,—nothing was spared.” Washington concludes that “It was this grand conflagration that drove me hither; I ran alike from fire and slavery” (141). Linking the fire to slavery, both Washington and the Listwells are left “deeply moved” by his description, and it spurs Mr. Listwell to express how “deeply interested” they are in “everything which throw light on the hardships of persons escaping from slavery” (141–142). The sublime, aesthetic spectacle of the fire becomes symptomatic of Washington’s experiences in and out of slavery. While he can convey some sense of the horror and the beauty of both his fire and his life to his listeners, the conventionalized language of sublimity that he must use, that he cannot refrain from using, evidences the gap between his own experiences and those of his listeners. Treating the fire as an aesthetic spectacle—a sensuous experience leaving him less concerned about his bodily well-being that deeply reflective of his body’s relationship to the natural spectacle—Washington’s account serves to emphasize the potential of such an aesthetic description to encourage sympathy and political commitment as it promises yet refuses direct access to the experience of another. Through his repeated use of lightning and flashes to describe both the impossibility of capturing Washington’s story and his auratic charisma, Douglass metaphorizes those aesthetic effects in terms of electricity, in order to capture its shocking, sensuous nature, its indeterminate effect, and its socially revolutionary potential. Acting as a central allegory of the need for cross-racial cooperation in the fight against slavery, Douglass’s story—as with his speeches and autobiographies—emphasizes how aesthetic electricity provided a form and force through which he could delineate the problematic of an egalitarian union between whites and blacks that denies neither the body nor the need to transcend bodily limitations and embodied identities.52 Douglass’s interest in technological progress and his use of metaphors of electricity to figure aesthetic power hint not simply at the underlying technology of telegraphy that provided the ground for imagining a sympathetic “electric” union through literature but at the whole series of technological innovations in printing and transportation that allowed Douglass’s voice to gain such prominence and have such a material effect

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on the nation. His technological metaphors thus encode the ways his own texts worked with and as a technology itself. Playing with the materiality of language in order to insist both on the socioeconomic specificity of his experience and on a fundamental physiological commonality, his words, his artistry, do become electric in a sense very much paralleling the networks of telegraphic lines beginning to criss-cross the nation. Douglass’s allusions to electricity, then, represent both a techno-utopian dream of material progress leading to social and political equality and the possibility of a shared human desire for freedom and self-development which manifests itself in distinctly different and unassimilatable ways, both an electric understanding of the body that hinted at a more physiological understanding of human connection and racial equality (something picked up and emphasized by Whitman) and the bristling, indeterminate electricity of language itself. If, as Paul Gilroy has recently argued, the problem of the twenty-first century will be “imagining political culture beyond the color line,” Douglass’s nineteenth-century project indicates the importance of engaging with both aesthetic discourses and effect in imagining such possibilities.53 In Douglass’s hands, words become electric, serving both as a displacement of and as a corrective to a technological fantasy of union, imagining aesthetic production as a technologically inflected enterprise that, while not providing any solution to racial inequality, delineates more fully what it would take to unite people on a broader, more egalitarian basis.

chapter four

Mad Filaments: Walt Whitman’s Aesthetic Body Telegraphic

With the addition of the famous opening line “I sing the body electric” in 1867 to the poem previously called “Poem of the Body,” Walt Whitman made explicit his understanding of the body as electric, an understanding bound to related ideas about aesthetic experience, language, and society deeply rooted in romanticism. Surprisingly, relatively little attention has been paid to what Whitman might have meant or what his readers at the time would have extracted from his calling the body electric.1 Most critics have simply assumed that in proclaiming the body to be electric Whitman was spiritualizing it, mirroring his concluding line when he proclaims that the multifold parts of the body “are the soul!” Such readings are not so much wrong as inadequate or incomplete. Through his engagement with the discourses surrounding electricity and its uses, culminating in his new opening line of 1867, Whitman partakes in a discussion centrally concerned about the relationship between body and soul, and between materiality and thought, and draws on a very specific line of thought engaging with technology that, I have argued, can help us to re-conceive romantic aesthetics as re-imagining the nature of materiality and different conceptions, different determining elements, of the material world. In this chapter, I provide a close reading of Whitman’s poem, probably the most famous poetic allusion to electricity in American, if not Western, literature, in order to illustrate how attending to what I have called aesthetic materialism can yield provocative, alternative readings which refuse political reductiveness and formal escapism. From what I have argued, an aesthetic reading of the poem requires both giving considerable attention to the poem itself, to how the play of language and form work with and

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against one another in the text, and addressing the sociohistorical developments of electrical science and technology over the period Whitman was writing and re-writing this specific poem (1855–1867) and Leaves of Grass as a whole (1854–1881). In contrast to the clipped staccato of Dickinson’s broken lines, which might more easily bring to mind the telegraph, Whitman’s extensive lines, his attempts to enclose all, to elucidate fully, rather than suggesting with as few words as possible, would seem antithetical to a telegraphic aesthetic.2 Yet by examining Whitman’s use of electricity throughout his poetic oeuvre and his comments on telegraphy in his journalism and poetry, I contend that the technological development of electricity provides a key source for Whitman’s attempts at figuring the potentials and limitations of poetry. Even more essential to a reconsideration of Whitman’s use of electricity in this poem are his and others’ descriptions of the body and poetry as electric. Building on speculations about the electrical nature of the body and its implications for viewing that body as having porous boundaries, Margaret Fuller described a particularly feminine element, one suffusing all humans, as electric, suggesting the fluidity of racial and gender identities, and, for Fuller, playing an essential role in all poetry. It is with this description of electric identity and with the previous chapter’s work on Douglass and slavery in mind that I turn to the poem’s famous auction block scenes and the concluding catalogue of body parts. Where Whitman espouses a kind of Anglo-Saxon racism in his journalism and tends to envision womanhood only through the lens of sex and maternity, I argue that Whitman’s conception of his poetry—and of society, language, and the body—as electric opens his work to a more fluid conception of identity, creating a poetry that confronts and transcends dominant nineteenth-century ideas about race and gender. Whitman, in other words, does not yield a liberatory politics, but the aesthetics of his poetry provide a vision of the body, however it is identified in terms of race, gender, occupation, as the necessary if troubling basis for an egalitarian politics. As such, he emphasizes the necessity of first acknowledging the different histories, sensations, and pleasures of individuals’ bodies as a common, if never identical, ground for basing claims to equality that might not erase those very differences.3

“Always the procreant urge”: The Merge of Electric Sex The fifth untitled poem of the original 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, the poem that would become “I Sing the Body Electric,” opens “The bodies of



Walt Whitman’s Aesthetic Body Telegraphic

men and women engirth me, and I engirth them, / They will not let me off nor I them till I go with them and respond to them and love them.” While the poem does not explicitly allude to electricity until 1867 and electrical metaphors and allusions appear more frequently in the revisions and additions Whitman made to Leaves of Grass after the Civil War, the original 1855 edition of the book repeatedly mentions electricity, twice alluding to the telegraph.4 Above all, however, electricity seems to refer to the intensity of sexual connection, as suggested by his first use of electricity in Leaves of Grass, in what becomes the third section of “Song of Myself ”— Urge and urge and urge, Always the procreant urge of the world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Out of the dimness opposite equals advance . . . . Always substance and increase, Always a knit of identity . . . . always distinction . . . . always a breed of life.  

 

 

 

To elaborate is no avail . . . . Learned and unlearned feel that it is so. Sure as the most certain sure . . . . plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams, Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical, I and this mystery here we stand. (1855 version, lines 36–43, ellipses his)

 

 

Here, the poet refers to himself as electrical to capture his power, his volatility, his ability to form physical, specifically sexual (Whitman would later add “always sex” after “Always substance and increase”) connections. “Electrical” in line 42, however, could also modify the mystery of sex, or even the relationship between the “I” and “this mystery.” Although it would be harder to read this mystery as “Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty” than as “electrical,” the connections formed by the commas and by the “and” (in line 43) remain ambiguous. This ambiguity is underlined by the seeming redundancy of the “we.” Like the electricity of the procreant urge—which unites not only two individuals in one act but all of the world in one desire, “a breed of life,” even as individual particulars remain—the final line (line 43) maintains “I” and “this mystery” as distinct, separate entities yet simultaneously (or immediately) fuses them in the “we.” As I will explore later, electricity already begins to hint at the dynamic, volatile, and generative nature of both sex and language, as it is the incomplete intersection and interaction between the words that creates the suspended tension of meaning in the lines, indicating the fact that sex, like language, “always [involves] a knit of identity . . . . always distinction.” What is important to emphasize at this point is that characterizing his writing, his poetic persona, as electric does more than indicate the fluidity of language; it begins to suggest the

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historical and material grounding of that fluidity in the body and in the technological developments of electricity. Whitman elaborates the electrical nature of sex and delineates more fully how electricity figures the body’s relation to the world in what will become sections 27 and 28 of “Song of Myself.” Describing how he has “instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop, / They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me” (1855 version, 614–615) Whitman suggests the self ’s mediated encounter with the world. The body’s conductors at first seem to prevent exterior stimuli from affecting the self, as they, rather than the body itself, “seize every object,” leaving the “me” unharmed, unchanged. Yet, as with the opening lines of poem number 5, Whitman’s (or the poet’s) body as well as the bodies of others refuse to let him go, begin to overwhelm him and his sense of a discrete self.5 Immediately after he describes the conductors as leading every object “harmlessly through me,” he admits that while “merely [. . .] feel[ing] with my fingers” (616) makes him happy, such contact endangers the very self: “To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand” (617). In the erotic scene that follows, at once an auto-erotic encounter with the limits of the self and a rape, the poet recognizes that such contact “quiver[s] me to a new identity” (618). He is left “helpless” (634) as his “prurient provokers” (622), “what is hardly different from myself ” (621), offer him “No consideration, no regard for my draining strength or my anger [. . . . they] stand on a headland and worry me” (630, 632). Touch, “graz[ing] at the edges of ” (629) the self, leads to the suspension of the rational self, as “I talk wildly . . . . I have lost my wits” (637). Sex becomes electric as it leads to the creation of a new self through the interconnectedness of the body to all sorts of sensuous stimuli. In the process, the self is rendered permeable, as it loses control of its own boundaries, and unstable, as it becomes “the greatest traitor” (637) to itself.6 As is readily apparent from even the most casual perusal of any version of Leaves of Grass, Whitman draws on the embodied experience of sex to represent the loss of self and sense of communion he hopes his own poetry conjures up, to figure what I have been calling aesthetic experience. Both Whitman’s 1855 preface and his 1856 prefatory letter to Emerson suggest that poetry is electric in a specifically physical, potentially neurological, as well as sexual, sense. Leading up to his proclamation in the 1855 preface that with the proper life “your very flesh shall be a great poem,” Whitman grounds that poetry in the very physiology of the body itself—“All beauty  

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comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain” (11), a body through which “all things enter with electric swiftness softly and duly without confusion or jostling or jam” (10). Setting up the “instant conductors” passage from “Song of Myself,” Whitman describes the poet as the nexus of electrical stimuli, as a kind of intersection for various circuits to come together and fuse into one. In the letter a year later, Whitman demands that American literature must “be electric, fresh, lusty, to express the full-sized body, male and female” (1352). That body is so important because of the determining nature of the American physical form, a determinacy indicated by Whitman’s use of the nervous system as a metaphor—“Such character is the brain and spine to all, including literature, including poems” (1360). The American body electrified, sexualized, enables the merging of this “nation of nations” (1855 Preface 5), this “race of races” (7), into one body, the body of the American bard. Whitman’s sexual electricity implicitly draws on ideas of the body as electric, ideas, as I have argued, that were further fostered by the development of the telegraph. It follows that, as Whitman frequently describes sex in electrical terms, poetry would similarly become an electric medium, a medium akin to the telegraphic lines criss-crossing the nation and girdling the world. As Harold Aspiz has contended, Whitman’s 1872 preface, “As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free,” seems to figure Leaves of Grass in exactly this way, as a type of telegraphic instrument. Whitman echoes his 1856 figure of the American brain and spine by declaring that through “the chants of this volume” runs “the thread-voice, more or less audible, of an aggregated, inseparable, unprecedented, vast, composite, electric democratic nationality” (1028–1029).7 The combination of thread, voice, and electricity seems to suggest the telegraph, as further indicated by a passage from Rambles Among Words, a book Whitman helped William Swinton to write, in which the nervous system is read as a model for the telegraphic network—“Everywhere man finds himself, and builds on the ideals of his own mental structure. . . . his nervous system is repeated, after sublime proportions, in the electric threads with which he is now reticulating the planet.”8 As I have described in chapters one and two, the telegraphic network quickly became the central analogue to the nervous system for both laypersons and scientists. Whitman emphasizes the sensuous and sensual nature of the nervous system by focusing on the electric materiality of sex. At the same time, he draws on ideas of the electric body as telegraphic and the nervous system as a telegraphic network to figure the intersection of the social and the physi-

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ological in poetry. Building on ideas of the nervous system as working similarly to a telegraphic network, Whitman imagines the body, in its everyday existence as well as through sex, as part of a global electric network. The first way Whitman uses electricity is to describe the way that poetry, like sex, might become a vehicle, an act, of bodily connection shocking in its intensity and in its challenge to normative bodily boundaries. Electricity works to make this connection not only because it was imagined as a material force akin to the nervous impulse but also because it continued to represent some ideal, immaterial connection uniting all of creation. Whitman relies primarily on the idea of material electricity flowing through the body as sexual desire, but he also clearly wants that electricity to suggest some sort of universal identity, some sort of immaterial communion more akin to the ideas of electricity manifested in spiritualist discussions.9 In “Song of the Open Road” (1856, 1881), for example, Whitman describes happiness both as the “efflux of the soul” and as something which, “pervad[ing] the open air,” “flows unto us” when “we are rightly charged.” This “fluid and attaching character is the freshness and sweetness of man and woman” (lines 105–109), expressed both sexually and spiritually. Similarly, electricity figures a kind of happiness in “A Song of Joys” (1860, 1881) where “the joy of my spirit—it is uncaged—it darts like lightning!” (line 7), a joy again made fluid, “the joy of that vast elemental sympathy which only the human soul is capable of generating and emitting in steady and limitless floods” (line 23). This electrical, spiritual, pantheistic force is, as Whitman attests in the later “As They Draw to a Close” (1871, 1881), “what underlies the precedent songs [. . . .] Through Space and Time fused in a chant, and the flowing eternal identity, / To Nature encompassing these, encompassing God—to the joyous, electric all” (lines 2, 6–7). In these poems, electricity takes on a more dematerialized, spiritual character, as some sort of vital force permeating all of the universe and linking it all together. This notion of electricity as both spiritual and physical is at the center of Whitman’s concluding claim in “I Sing the Body Electric”—“O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul, / O I say now these are the soul!” (1867 version, lines 163–164). Returning to “A Song of Joys,” we can begin to see how the spiritualized electricity emerges from a physiological electricity that serves as a foundational figure for the production of both individual identity and poetry. Whitman contends that “The real life of my sense and flesh transcend[s] my senses and flesh” (100), but only after suggesting the soul’s dependence for its very identity on the senses  

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and their interaction with the material world—“O the joy of my soul leaning pois’d on itself, receiving identity through materials and loving them, observing characters and absorbing them, / My soul vibrated back to me from them, from sight, hearing, touch, reason, articulation, comparison, memory, and the like” (lines 98–99). This idea of a vibration creating the self through the senses reappears in a footnote to Specimen Days where Whitman advances a materialist idea of the mind—“Every molecule of matter in the whole universe is swinging to and fro; every particle of ether which fills space is in jelly-like vibration. Light is one kind of motion, heat another, electricity another, magnetism another, sound another. Every human sense is the result of motion; every perception, every thought is but motion of the molecules of the brain translated by that incomprehensible thing we call mind” (945). Whitman’s language recalls associationist psychology, but his poetics and his use of electricity foreground the indeterminacy of such associations and of the motion of mind and of the universe. Echoing the famous opening lines of “There Was a Child Went Forth” (1855)—“There was a child went forth every day, / And the first object he looked upon and received with wonder or pity or love or dread, that object he became, / And that object become part of him for the day or a certain part of the day . . . . or for many years or stretching cycles of years” (lines 1–3)—“A Song of Joys” describes the objectworld as forming individual identity. But where “There Was a Child” hints at imagining the self as a blank slate prior to its experience of the world, the soul precedes experience in “A Song of Joys,” acting and being acted upon by the sensuous stimuli vibrating through the body. It is that dynamic interaction, that vibratory oscillation between receiving and interpreting the world, that “uncage[s]” the spirit, electrifying it as “lightning.”

“As Brides and Bridegrooms”: Equality and Difference In these examples, Whitman invokes images of electricity to express the shocking, intense feeling of physical and spiritual connection. Elsewhere, especially in his post–Civil War poetry, he draws on the techno-utopian logic surrounding the telegraph, which I have described in earlier chapters, to suggest poetry’s potential to overcome time, space, difference. Employing the power of technology to produce the co-mingling of all of humanity, Whitman at once emphasizes the united brotherhood of man and the imperialistic project of the extension of telegraphic lines. In “Years of the

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Modern” (1865, 1881), for example, Whitman eulogizes “the steamship, the electric telegraph, the newspaper, the wholesale engines of war” (line 18) through which the average man “colonizes the Pacific, the archipelagoes” (17) and “interlinks all geography, all lands” (19). Rhetorically asking if this technology will not end in “the solidarity of races” (4)—“Are all nations communing? is there going to be but one heart to the globe?/ Is humanity forming en-masse?” (21–22)—Whitman continues a line of techno-utopian thinking that emphasized the idea of the telegraph creating one universal body. Unlike such thinking, however, Whitman’s sexualization of the connections imagined in both techno-utopian and spiritualist visions of such universal harmony hints at the irreducibility of individual bodies. In “Passage to India” (1871, 1881), Whitman gestures to the erotic, cross-racial potential of the telegraph ending in “humanity forming en-masse.” Envisioning the world linked together with “The seas inlaid with eloquent gentle wires” (line 7)—which not only transmit European progress to its colonies, “But myths and fables of eld, Asia’s, Africa’s fables” (20) back to Europe and America—Whitman imagines the telegraph as offering him access to “other” cultures. More important, through the same technologies he alludes to in “Years of the Modern,” he suggests a more material, in fact, bodily union of different peoples: “The earth to be spann’d, connected by network, / The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage, / The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near, / The lands to be welded together” (32–35). He repeats this matrimonial image later in the poem: “Year of the marriage of continents, climates and oceans [. . . .] Europe to Asia, Africa join’d, and they to the New World, / The lands, geographies, dancing before you, holding a festive garland, / As brides and bridegrooms hand in hand” (118, 121–123).10 The lines refuse to differentiate fully between what is literal and what is figurative, as the simile of brides and bridegrooms stands in for the continents, which are both personified and serve as metonyms for the races of those lands. In this way, Whitman’s poetry echoes the technoutopian vision of electricity, through the telegraph, creating a truly global movement whereby, in a return to Pangaea, the lands and races merge spiritually, culturally, physically, even as, linguistically and figuratively, it hints at the instability of this global network. The imperialist and racist tendencies of this line of thought about the telegraph are present in Whitman’s postbellum poems, but appear most explicitly in his antebellum journalism. In an 1858 editorial, Whitman celebrated the transatlantic cable for enabling different “nations to ‘join hands’  

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in amity,” as it is a “sentiment of union that makes the popular heart beat and quiver.” While he gestures outward to the world as a whole in its diversity, his enthusiasm focuses on the racial unity of the nations joined together—“It is the union of the great Anglo-Saxon race, henceforth forever to be a unit, that makes the States throb with tumultuous emotion and thrills every breast with admiration and triumph.”11 He even more explicitly embraces the Anglo-Saxon nationalism of the era in an editorial from earlier in 1858, where he applauds the provision in Oregon’s new constitution that “prohibits colored persons, either slave or free, from entering the State.”12 Asking “Who believes that the Whites and Blacks can ever amalgamate in America? Or who wishes it to happen? Nature has set an impassable seal against it. Besides, is not America for the Whites?,” Whitman seems to accept the importance of racial distinctions and the essentially white character of the United States.13 Here and elsewhere, in his journalism and prose, Whitman’s racist comments present perhaps the greatest obstacle to reconstructing him as a theorist or practitioner of democratic multiculturalism or cultural relativistic egalitarianism. Recent critics have offered a number of ways of explaining the tension between Whitman’s racialism and his egalitarianism. Dana Phillips, for example, in focusing on “Salut Au Monde!” (1856) and Democratic Vistas (1871), traces the way that Whitman’s egalitarianism is built on his acceptance of impermeable racial differences—what everyone shares, what unites all of humankind together, more than anything, is the fact that they all have racial identities. At the same time, however, this insistence on racial difference does not lead, according to Phillips, to any real recognition of cultural difference. Rather, in Whitman’s conception of a kind of universal American identity, all races blur into an essential American (and essentially Anglo-Saxon) model of manhood.14 Criticism focusing on issues of identity and politics has repeatedly made this kind of point, emphasizing either the ways that Whitman’s egalitarianism depends on negating the importance of difference (see Wai Chee Dimock and Philip Fisher) or, paradoxically, but relatedly, the ways his egalitarianism actually reinstates the racial and gender hierarchies it attempts to question (Phillips).15 To simplify this line of argument, Whitman attempts to imagine some sort of noncontingent (Dimock) identity that will allow every person equal access to full personhood, but in doing so only replicates a white, male, bourgeois ideal of abstract personhood (Fisher) that continues to relegate women and people of color—as women and people of color—to a kind of second-class status. Just as techno-utopian thought suggested that the telegraph and electric-

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ity might link all of humanity in bonds of equality but ended in a vision of humanity in which cultural and racial difference from European norms were dismissed, so in Whitman his egalitarianism masks the continuation of male Anglo-Saxon hegemony and the subsumption of racial and cultural difference to a heterogeneous, but finally unified, Americanism. Only by giving up difference, it seems, can equality become possible. This, I agree, is the central dilemma of Whitman’s poetry. And it is, in a way, the central problem of aesthetics, as I have described it. How do we imagine some kind of shared or common embodied experience without erasing the very bodies (and their differences) upon which, through which, such experience must take place? How, in other words, can we imagine some kind of sensuous response to be universal without universalizing our experience as the norm, without negating or pathologizing or denigrating the different experiences of others? As I have argued throughout this book, one of the central ways writers of the romantic era attempted to address such questions was through their invocation of electricity as a nearly immaterial physical force permeating the universe and serving as an emblem of the instability of both individual identity and language. By recognizing how Whitman draws on and departs from the spiritualist and technoutopia accounts of the telegraph and electricity, we can begin to see how his poetry might work through or, at least, elude this dilemma. It is, then, by addressing the different conceptions of language at work in different pieces, by returning to a more literary focus, to a focus on form and genre as they work within a particular historical moment, that we can better understand the contradictions in Whitman’s thought. n­

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“The Drift of It Everything”: Linguistic and Corporeal Gaps Spiritualist readings of the telegraph emphasized the interconnectedness of all of humanity across racial and national lines, but did so by imagining the transcendence of the body or, at least, the erasure of any medium separating one body from another. As the 1858 Atlantic story “An Evening with the Telegraph-Wires” suggests, the telegraph seemed to hold out the possibility of immediate and complete connection and understanding. In the story, a man discovers that by simply grasping the telegraphic wires with his hands its messages are directly “conveyed, magnetically, to [his] brain.” When he “reached [his] hand out to the iron thread[,] A confused sadness began to oppress [him]. A mother’s voice weeping over her sick child pulsed



Walt Whitman’s Aesthetic Body Telegraphic

along the wire.”16 The main character’s connection to others is physical, is enabled through the sensuous thrill of electricity being transmitted along the lines, through his body, to his brain. But, at the same time, this connection erases any physical boundaries separating the operator from the sender of the message. The telegraph seems to allow the reader to feel completely as the writer or sender does, to all but inhabit his or her body and emotions in a connection Whitman frequently figures as sexual. When Whitman describes his poetry as telegraphic or electric, he seems to be suggesting the unmediated, direct communication from his body to his readers’ bodies. But Whitman’s poetic persona refuses the spiritualist vision exemplified in The Atlantic story of the thread-voice of the telegraph (or poetry) enabling a kind of immediate, complete identification and connection between the receiver and the sender. The original opening lines of “I Sing the Body Electric” begin to suggest both a telegraphic model for the kind of connection Whitman strives to achieve and his sense that such complete knowledge, such thorough communication, is impossible. Commentators on the telegraph, including Whitman, frequently quoted Puck’s boast about his speed from Midsummer’s Night Dream that he could “put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes.”17 An 1865 article titled “The Girdle Round the Earth” repeatedly returns to this allusion in describing the telegraph’s “girdling the earth with wiry nerves, and bringing all the nations of the globe within speaking distance of each other.” This girdling of the world by Euro-American technology will, by creating transparent communication, lead to a world of peaceful understanding as “Intercourse between nations tends to rub off unjust and ignorant prejudices, to create good feeling and mutual respect, and to the establishment of peaceful relations.”18 Whitman doesn’t use the word “girdle,” but he opens “I Sing the Body Electric” with the closely related word—engirth—“The bodies of men and women engirth me, and I engirth them.”19 In Whitman’s use, this engirthment takes on a sexual connotation, as he accentuates the physical nature of the wrapping of bodies around one another. Although seldom explicitly sexualized, descriptions of the telegraph uniting the nation into one body were, as I argued in chapter one, fairly commonplace and often linked to racist and imperialist arguments about the superiority of the Euro-American race(s). With “The Girdle Round the Earth,” we again see how techno-utopian discourse imagined the globalization of commerce as peacefully leading to the assimilation and acculturation of the rest of the world to Euro-American standards. But as I have argued, the outcomes of the intersection of cultures, peoples, and products spurred

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by the telegraph were far less predictable. Where accounts of the nervous system as telegraphic and of the telegraph as a nervous system attempted to offer a rationalistic explanation of the body’s and the invention’s processes, of enabling the determination of causes and effects, I have argued that these accounts revealed the uncertainty of connection, the failure of comprehension, due to the specific sociohistorical situation and the material conditions within which telegraphy developed. Whitman’s account of the body’s relationship to stimuli through sex indicates a sensuous, in fact sensual, relationship that similarly evades rational control or predictability. While the line Whitman would add after the opening three lines to “I Sing the Body Electric” in 1860—“And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul”—reiterates the electrical nature of the engirthment in the original opening line, the original second line moves beyond the idea of speed suggested by most telegraphic allusions to Puck to indicate a particular structure of interaction—“They will not let me off nor I them till I go with them and respond to them and love them.” The Atlantic poem “The Telegraph” (1858) imagined “The vigor of the Northern brain” “nerv[ing]” the “outworn” geographies of Asia and Africa through the telegraph (see chapter one); the telegraph in Whitman, through sex, both unites bodies together as the very difference between the self and the other recedes and reiterates the difference between selves: “The bodies of men and women engirth me, and I engirth them.” The electrification of the body, the sexualization of poetry and electricity, refuses both a model of unification dependent on the erasure of the other and a model of clear domination of the other, the explicit and implicit models at work in technoutopian accounts. This sexualized innovation on the idea of the telegraph creating a universal language and universal body has its greatest implications due to its insistence on there being “always a knit of identity . . . . always distinction” in terms of bodies, language, and selves. Where, in The Atlantic story “An Evening with the Telegraph-Wires” neither electricity nor the telegraphic code create any interference, where they simply disappear as the telegraphic receiver’s body becomes a receptacle for the emotions felt by the person on the other end of the line, Whitman in “I Sing the Body Electric” famously contends that language cannot capture bodily experience, that “The expression of the body of man or woman balks account” (1855 version line 5). This inability of language to capture the body derives from the incompleteness of both language and the body. Whitman’s poetic persona is best-known for  

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his absorptive quality, his ability to “contain multitudes” (“Song of Myself ” 1881, line 1326), the fact that he “do[es] not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person” (line 845). Yet throughout Leaves of Grass in general and “I Sing the Body Electric” in particular, he recurs to the impossibility of full communion, an impossibility founded, in part, in the impossibility of transparent communication through language which poetry confronts. Even in a poem like “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (1856), where Whitman repeatedly imagines that “time nor place—distance avails not” (line 20), “distance avails not, and place avails not” (56) in separating the poet from his readers, an idea he could have taken directly from celebrations of the telegraph, he consistently insists on a kind of specific bodily experience as necessary for bringing his poetry to life. The ability of others to live through their bodies as he has, to “watch” and “see” and “feel,” enables him to imagine a transcendent connection to them. As Helen Vendler recently put it, “Whitman—insisting that the body is the soul—had to confer on the listener in futurity a real body carrying out real actions.”20 But such a connection depends upon his own self, and the selves of his potential readers, being “disintegrated, every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme” (“Crossing” line 7). Whitman’s understanding of his relationship to his reader through the medium of poetic language, then, suggests a distinctly different conception from that suggested by Coleridge or James W. Taylor of what it might mean for poetry to be electric. It is here that I think Phillips’s and similar readings of Whitman go off course. She contends that “we cannot hear what Whitman hears; we can only read what he wrote. As readers we have to take his words for granted. The reader’s subordinate role in the hierarchy of representation is a basic fact of Whitman’s poetics, one he tries to obviate by adopting a sort of hailfellow-well-met manner toward the poem’s ‘you’” (292). There is a certain truth to Phillips’s account—we cannot hear what Whitman hears, of course, and his voice tends to be overwhelming, rhetorically insisting on his ability to speak for us. But Whitman also recognizes, repeatedly, that he cannot hear what we hear. The connection he insists on must, paradoxically, be individuated and universal. This is a point a number of critics, working from quite different approaches, have made about Whitman’s poetics. As Betsy Erkkila argues in highlighting the politics of Whitman’s poetry, “Whitman’s insistence on the reader’s creative role was part of his revolutionary strategy, his attempt to collapse the traditionally authoritarian relation between poet and audience, text and reader by transferring the ultimate power of creation

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to the reader.”21 Or as Tenney Nathanson has described from a deconstructionist perspective, “Writing, Whitman tells us himself, neither produces nor implies an actual presence; it re-presents words spoken in another place and time and offers us only the representation of the actual presence to which speech attests.”22 Whitman takes it upon himself to speak for us all, but he simultaneously and forcefully insists that all experience—including his own—escapes his poetry’s attempt to capture it. Throughout his poetic and critical oeuvre, Whitman returns to the idea that his poetry is necessarily incomplete, that it requires an historically situated reader to produce any sort of meaning, a meaning that is never completely stable. As such, he offers a parallel to the readings of the telegraph as indicating the material limitations of communication that I elaborated in the second chapter. In “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads” (1888), for example, he states that the best word for describing his poetry is “Suggestiveness. . . . The reader will always have his or her part to do, just as much as I have had mine. I seek less to state or display any theme or thought, and more to bring you, reader, into the atmosphere of the theme or thought—there to pursue your own flight” (666–667). That suggestiveness brings to mind the manipulation of telegraphic code (see chapter two), its truncation, through puns, homonyms, cipher, to save money. For Whitman, the technologies of publication become part of the obstacle to any complete communication. In the 1855 version of the poem that would become “A Song for Occupations,” Whitman feels “chilled with the cold types and cylinder and wet paper between us. // I pass so poorly with paper and types” (lines 5–6); his poetry cannot capture what he wants it to convey, for “There is something” that “eludes discussion and print,” that “is not in this book,” but is grounded in the senses, “is no farther from you than your hearing and sight are from you” (lines 48–51). Similarly, in “A Song for the Rolling Earth” (1856), he explains that the “truths of the earth” are “calm, subtle, untransmissible by print” (lines 22–23), after contending that “Human bodies are words, myriads of words, / (In the best poems re-appears the body, man’s or woman’s, well-shaped, natural, gay, / Every part able, active, receptive, without shame or the need of shame.)” (lines 7–9). These passages reiterate Whitman’s sense that poetry both represents and cannot represent the body, that it depends on bodily reactions that it cannot fully account for, cannot fully predict, and that it only comes to fruition when it interacts with the individual reader’s body in a particularly compelling way, an interaction at once enabled by and limited by the printed word and its process of production.  

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This idea of suggestiveness implies that any individual poem is necessarily incomplete, is a fragment. As Friedrich Schlegel theorized it at the outset of the romantic era, the fragment captured a philosophical worldview, in which, as Marcus Bullock explicates, the world emerges “not as a fixed structure waiting to be uncovered, but something in infinite transformation which can never be apprehended directly or finally, and only approached in the endless process of representation.”23 Both the original edition of Leaves of Grass and Whitman’s repeated publication of the book in new forms, with new additions and arrangements, point to the applicability of this idea of fragmentariness. In the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, the various poems were not separately titled; the only markers suggesting the end of one poem and the beginning of another were page breaks or larger white spaces or the repetition of “Leaves of Grass” in larger font. With the last six poems, even these practices are discontinued, as poems are only separated by double lines or, between poems eight and nine (“Europe,” “Boston”) and ten and eleven (“There Was a Child,” “Who Learns My Lesson Complete”) with the page break that would have appeared with the flow of the poetry. It is not completely clear, in other words, whether the lines opening “The bodies of men and women engirth me” initiate a new poem or a new section, a new fragment of a poem. The fact that Whitman would revise these poems throughout the rest of his life further suggests reading each poem, in itself, as a fragment, as incomplete, as necessarily never complete. The fragmentary, incomplete nature of “I Sing the Body Electric” appears most clearly, perhaps, in what is, even for Whitman, its unusually large number of rhetorical questions.24 The third and fourth lines (in the 1855 version) are questions about the body—“Was it dreamed whether those who corrupted their own live bodies could conceal themselves? / And whether those who defiled the living were as bad as they who defiled the dead?”—and as he turns to more and more particularized bodies, specifically the bodies of slaves, immigrants, and prostitutes, each section features a number of questions. These rhetorical questions insist on the equality of all bodies, on the fact that “Each has his or her place in the procession” (line 77), but the interrogative form of these declarations—“Do you know so much that you call the slave or the dullface ignorant?” (80), “Do you think they are not there because they are not expressed in parlors and lecture-rooms?” (98), “Do you not see that these are exactly the same to all in all nations and times all over the earth?” (112)—foregrounds the possibility of a negative response. Whitman emphasizes the reader’s role through directly addressing a “you,” an addressee who must agree to the message he

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is attempting to convey, but the questions indicate his inability to be sure that he is communicating the message, that the individual on the other end of the poem is receiving. On the heels of his first two rhetorical questions, Whitman turns to the body as a medium for itself, stating that it cannot be truly sung, cannot be fully articulated by language (or economics), as “The expression of the body of man or woman balks account” (line 5). Yet even after acknowledging the impossibility of providing an account of the body in the first lines of the poem, Whitman continues to do exactly that, declaring that the body itself is the “expression” of the person, the best poem itself (lines 7–12). As numerous critics have noted, Whitman strives to make the poem itself into a body, offering the body as the center of all meaning, of all experience, as he attempts to “send no agent or medium” and “offer the value itself ” (“Song for Occupations,” 1855 line 47). In this way, as Nathanson has argued, Whitman’s poetry—and “I Sing the Body Electric” in particular—becomes less a song about the body electric (or, in 1856, a poem of the body) than a song about singing, a poem about the possibility (or impossibility) of poetry.25 “Sing” becomes a constructive, a performative, verb, as it creates the body as electric rather than simply being a mimetic description of an already-existing body. Instead of being a stable foundation for his poetry, the body, in this reading, becomes a product of his poetry, becomes the fungible point of intersecting meanings of electricity. This connection between the body’s radical porousness, the indeterminacy of his poetry, and electricity begins to emerge in poems such as “Shut Not Your Doors” (1865, 1881) and “Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances” (1860, 1867). In “Shut Not Your Doors,” for example, he claims both that he “bring[s]” to the libraries “that which was lacking on all your well-fill’d shelves” and that “The words of my book [are] nothing, the drift of it every thing,” averring that “you ye untold latencies will thrill to every page” (lines 2, 4, 6). Whitman imagines that his poetry does bring something new to the world, but that its final contribution depends upon the reader and the reader’s body, the fact that readers, too, have “instant conductors” covering their bodies. Although the latent thrill here is not explicitly electric, its suggestion of electricity to indicate both the latency in readers and in words echoes Whitman’s more explicit comments elsewhere, such as in “Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearance”—“When the subtle air, the impalpable, the sense that words and reason hold not, surround us and pervade us, / Then I am charged with untold and untellable wisdom, I am silent, I require nothing further” (lines 12–13). Reading more like a spiritualist account of the



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universal telegraph, this poem, appearing in the Calamus section, grounds itself in the body, and in the sexual relationship, but a sexual relationship that no longer fully unifies two selves into one, that does not hold out the spiritualist promise of complete identification and understanding, but that recognizes the constant gap between selves, a gap that neither sex nor language, no matter how electric, can bridge. Rather than offering a unitary figure for his poetry, the body electric disperses that body, opening it up to the world as a whole.

“All Diffused”: Organic Identity Recognizing Whitman’s emphasis on the irreducibility of individual difference has important consequences for understanding his poetry’s politics, particularly its engagement with the questions of racial and gender identities that have proven essential to so many of the insights of American literary criticism from the past few decades. Throughout his poetic oeuvre, Whitman cites his ability to cross racial and gender lines as epitomizing his ability to incorporate all into himself and his poems, his unwillingness to distinguish “The kept-woman” or “The heavy-lipp’d slave” from anyone else—“There shall be no difference between them and the rest” (“Song of Myself ” 1881 version, lines 375–377). At the same time, with the notable exceptions of Lucifer from the 1855 version of “The Sleepers,” the 1867 poem “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors,” and the twenty-ninth bather section of “Song of Myself,” Whitman very seldom gives direct voice to the thoughts and feelings of any women or of men of color. Several critics have read this absence as evidence of Whitman’s inability to imagine true equality without erasing difference or without reifying difference in such a way that undermines his egalitarianism. More specifically, given the central place of procreation and sex in general to his poetics, Dana Phillips and Vivian Pollak have both argued that Whitman’s egalitarian vision of racial difference collapses as he either re-figures or replaces racial and cultural difference with an implicitly hierarchical gender system.26 In the section from “Passage to India” I considered earlier, for example, a global technological-sexual connection unites all the continents of the world by insisting, through gender, on their remaining distinct as brides and bridegrooms; Whitman is able to imagine a kind of racial equality only by emphasizing gender differences in terms of sexual procreation. For Whitman, the electric force he celebrates for combining body and

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soul together, for jolting his readers into recognizing their (dis)connection with others, frequently becomes distinctly male, as it is most regularly equated with a male heterosexual desire, a sexual desire that at once erases the difference between male and female bodies (and, at times, different male bodies) and at the same time solidifies sexual distinctions by locating the electric “urge, urge, urge” for procreation almost exclusively in the male body. In particular, as Pollak has most fully detailed, Whitman’s vision of women often seems to relegate them to their essential calling as mothers or as the objects of male sexual desire. Such denigration appears in the slave scenes of “Body Electric” when the poet implicitly distinguishes between the male slave who contains “all reachings and aspirations” (97) and the female who embodies “the same old beautiful mystery” of “natal love” (109). In fact, despite its repeated attempts to grant male and female bodies and selves some sort of equal status—“The male is perfect and that of the female is perfect” (6)—“I Sing the Body Electric” seems repeatedly to differentiate between the female who “contains all qualities and tempers them [. . .] with perfect balance” (62) and the male who “too is all qualities” but is notably “action and power” (67). Even the line about the perfection of the male and the female seems to reinforce this distinction as it is the male who is perfect where it is the body of the woman (“that of the female”) that is perfect. Whitman’s poetry references sexual difference as a figure for all sorts of biological, social, and metaphysical differences, but, I want to insist, it moves inexorably towards not so much erasing as displacing, questioning, refiguring these differences. While Whitman’s poet most often takes on a distinctly masculine stance, physiology, and action, as he, in the words of the 1855 preface, is to “attract his own land body and soul to himself and hang on its neck with incomparable love and plunge his semitic muscle into its merits and demerits” (23), he also, at times, switches positions and becomes the passive (female) recipient of desire. While the twenty-ninth bather section in “Song of Myself ” most famously indicates Whitman’s identification with a female sexual desire, he elsewhere identifies with female sexuality, as in “The Sleepers” (1881 version, lines 46–59), where the poet becomes “she who adorn’d herself and folded her hair expectantly” (46), “resign[ing] [her]self to the dusk” (50), before “feel[ing] the hot moisture yet that he left me” (54). A similar more passive sexuality coded as feminine appears in the 1855 “Song of Myself ” :“Thruster holding me tight and that I hold tight! / We hurt each other as the bridegroom and the bride hurt each other. // You sea! I resign myself to you also . . . . I guess what you mean”  

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(lines 449–451). These moments seem to call for homoerotic readings, but as Michael Moon has argued in reference to the twenty-ninth bather, the androgyny of the poet’s identity, his sexual positioning, may speak equally to Whitman’s understanding of the fluidity of gender distinctions and gendered identity.27 Electricity is fundamentally sexual in Whitman’s use of it, but, as these moments hint, that sexuality is, despite his phallic celebrations of “jetting the stuff of far more arrogant republics” (“Song of Myself ” 1881 version, line 1007), difficult to pin down, is not reducible to either its homoerotic content or its eulogy to the life-giving powers of semen. In describing male sexuality—and poetry—in electric terms, Whitman revises (and reverses) the common, spiritualist association of a fluid, electric identity with femininity, if not always explicitly female sexuality.28 Margaret Fuller’s comments on an electric femininity, especially in Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), offers perhaps the fullest account of the aesthetic and gender implications of such an association, as she uses electricity to describe a particularly feminine, yet universal, poetic fluidity. In particular, Fuller contends that “the especial genius of woman,” her ability to read “the fine invisible links which connect the forms of life around them,” is “electrical in movement.” Analogous to their more “lyrical” poetic nature, this feminine electricity, according to Fuller, warms masculine intellect, so that “it rushes towards mother earth, and puts on the forms of beauty.”29 Fuller’s description of a feminine electricity can help us to understand the implications of Whitman’s revision of such thought. As the passage above indicates, Fuller, despite the radical nature of her feminism for the time, does not see gender distinctions as nonsensical or imaginary; they are written into the very fabric of material reality: “Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism” (293). According to Fuller, these masculine and feminine traits follow those delineated by the culture as a whole—Energy vs. Harmony, Power vs. Beauty, Intellect vs. Love (326)— or as she puts it slightly earlier, “the feminine side, the side of love, of beauty, of holiness” (246), “the intellect, cold, is ever more masculine than feminine” (285). “All soul,” the ultimate reality of her transcendentalism, may be “the same” (293), but, she insists, in the material world, “The growth of man [of humankind here] is two-fold, masculine and feminine” (326). Gender does have a reality, a reality similar to that represented in overly static, predominant conceptions of gender. Fuller, however, overturns ante bellum notions of gender by insisting that these categories are unstable. She continues her discussion of male and female traits by stating that “in

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fact, they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman. . . . Man partakes of the feminine in the Apollo, woman of the masculine as Minerva.” We are all a mixture of masculine and feminine: “it is no more the order of nature that [the feminine] should be incarnated pure in any form, than that the masculine energy should exist unmingled with it in any form” (293). In other words, while Fuller does not deny feminine and masculine traits or their relative primacy in men or women, she does argue that gender is a fluid category and that the growth of these traits in men and women cannot be precisely delineated along the lines of biological sex: “These two sides are supposed to be expressed in man and woman, that is, as the more and less, for the faculties have not been given pure to either, but only in preponderance” (326).30 It is this fluidity that Fuller identifies as electric, a fluidity essential to femininity and to poetry. According to her, “Wherever the poet or artist gave free course to his genius, he saw the truth, and expressed it in worthy forms, for these men especially share and need the feminine principle” (327). While true literature only will arise when the masculine and feminine elements within every individual are fully allowed to grow and are fully acknowledged, that growth and recognition already takes place in the realm of art, for “all men of genius[,] shared the feminine development” (292). Linking questions of gender equality to questions of aesthetics, Fuller identifies the realm of poetry, of aesthetics, as a place where the feminine element is already given full voice. Because of its fluid, harmonizing quality, the full expression of this feminine element, in turn, blurs gender boundaries themselves. While the constraints of antebellum culture meant, for Fuller, that most true poets were men, as they had more license to explore their masculine and feminine sides, she draws on the unstable nature of electricity to suggest that, if allowed, women will achieve the proper balance of womanly beauty and electricity and manly intellect: “allow room enough, and the electric fluid will be found to invigorate and embellish, not destroy life. Such women are the great actresses, the songsters” (285–286). Fuller figures this union as the blending together of body and soul, an aesthetic union that transcends gender distinctions, but she simultaneously argues that this union fulfills a particularly feminine need—felt by all people, male and female—for beauty, emotion, and poetry. Woman, in her “Femality,” the “lyrical . . . apprehensiveness of her being,” acts “as a harmonizer of the vehement elements” (292). Giving expression to the electric element  

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of femality, in other words, means transcending (or at least harmonizing) gender difference altogether, and this need for such transcendence or harmony leads to a kind of poetry that both exemplifies a particularly feminine beauty, and confounds those gendered boundaries between poem and poet, body and soul, sympathy and intellect, thus melding them together in a more transcendent whole. Fuller’s feminism locates this electricity in the female body (though not exclusively) and situates its development within the gendered nature of social structures, but she tends to disconnect this largely spiritual force from electrical technology. Whitman, on the other hand, begins to develop a corresponding idea about gender fluidity even as he emphasizes the relationship of identity to the physical body, to biology, and to the social world of technology. This potential understanding of electricity as a fluid, material force for figuring the instability of language and gendered identity emerges at the very moment in “I Sing the Body Electric” when Whitman records a distinctly masculine sexual response to “the female form” (46). With its “fierce undeniable attraction” (48), “all falls aside but myself and it” (49) as “Mad filaments, ungovernable shoots play out of it . . the response likewise ungovernable” (51).31 While “filaments” would not take on its specific electrical connotation until Edison’s significant improvements on the incandescent electric light bulb in 1879, Whitman speaks of electric filaments in “Salut Au Monde!” (1856). There, “filaments” works to capture the delicate wires of the telegraph which would circle and unite the world—“I see the electric telegraphs of the earth, / I see the filaments of the news of the wars, deaths, losses, gains, passions, of my race” (lines 82–83). A passage from Ramble Among Words probably written by Whitman emphasizes understanding filaments as referring to the telegraph and to language: “All words are primarily sympathetic. Words are born of a passionate yearning. And it is through the Senses that the mind goes out to nature: these the filaments and outreachings—these the subtle threads that link phenomena and the mind” (21–22). These outreachings, like the outreachings of the body itself, its instant conductors, yearn for contact with physical phenomena, but it is only the subtle threads of language and its sympathetic, imaginative, capacity that allow such connections. Words are the material links to the physical world, the connection between mind and the material phenomena, but their connection to that world is sympathetic rather than complete. As detailed in chapter one, electricity even in the mid-nineteenth century was frequently described as a subtle fluid or material. In Whitman’s hands, the

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mad, electric filaments—electrifying sex, language, and poetry—indicate both the potential of language, sex, technology to connect bodies together and the unconquerable resistance to yielding full knowledge, full connection. In 1855 and 1856, filament had two common meanings, a broader one suggesting simply a “minute fibre,” as in electrical uses, and a more specific botanical one referring to “the part of the stamen which supports the anther” (OED). This botanical definition returns us to the sexual electricity of sections 27 and 28 (“instant conductors”) of “Song of Myself.” The anther may be analogized to the testicles; it is the part of the stamen that produces the pollen that must find its way to the ovaries of the plant in order for fertilization to take place. As the “shoots” suggests, the mad filaments of “Body Electric” have both a botanical and sexual meaning. And this use of plants to figure the relationship between particular and whole, individual and mass, is, of course, central to Leaves of Grass, as its very title indicates. Botany and human sexuality come together to render the entire experience depicted in the “mad filaments” scene beyond anyone’s control, as the identities of the participants themselves becomes confused. The filaments make “the response likewise ungovernable” (51) as the body—“Hair, bosom, hips, bend of legs, negligent falling hands” (52)—becomes “all diffused . . . . mine too diffused” (52). The “all” and the “mine” reiterates the tension of the “we” and the I and this mystery from “Song of Myself ” where the mine remains separate yet part of the all. The line further indicates that the mine, the self, the body, lose definition, are both also diffused and too much diffused, as the sexual climax takes on a hyperbolized life of its own “Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous . . . . quivering jelly of love . . . white-blow and delirious juice” (54). Whitman’s double-alliterations—limitless, limpid, love; jets, jelly, juice—work against one another to capture the paradox of electricity and sex, at once infinite, boundary-less (limitless) and transparent (limpid) and therefore seemingly immaterial like love and at the same time precise, concentrated, opaque, semi-solid, and viscous. But the botanical meaning, evoking plant reproduction, where the stamen—the male reproductive organ—never meets the carpel (or pistil, the female part of the flower)—so that the pollen (Whitman’s father-stuff) requires an intermediary, whether the air or an insect, for consummation, suggests the limits of sexual contact, suggests the impossibility of full contact, even in this highly sexualized moment. At the same time, flowering plant reproduction emphasizes a type of hermaphroditism echoing the dif 

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fusion of body parts in Whitman’s account of the male sexual encounter with the female form. In most flowering plants, the flower contains both stamen and pistil, is exclusively neither male nor female but both. The body parts that become too diffused—“Hair, bosom, hips, bend of legs, negligent falling hands”—refuse to be identified as exclusively either male or female, even as the scene ends in a distinctly male orgasm. Even the mad filaments themselves seem indistinct; although they play out of “it,” the female form, the filaments seem less the product of the female body than the response of the male to the female. Rather than uniting two individuals or two bodies—myself and it—into one, the mad filaments, as with the “Song of Myself ” conductors, trouble the boundaries between selves while refusing to collapse them into one. Returning to Whitman’s use of “filaments” to speak of the telegraph, this reading suggests that, in parallel fashion, rather than becoming an instrument of domination, of dematerialized intellect, the electricity of the telegraph only works through the enforcement of mutual dependence, reception, potential, if limited, communication. As I argued in chapter two, despite its reliability, its quick appropriation by commercial and political powers, and its centralized control, the telegraph suggested the tenuous nature of communication, its dependence on unstable material structures—economic institutions, human bodies, codes and languages. Implicitly drawing on the telegraph’s highlighting of those elements of communication in the modernizing west, Whitman emphasizes that rather than simply providing a medium through which one person dominates or communicates or acts upon another, rather than girdling the world in the service of European or American economic and political ends, the telegraph, in becoming sexual, might trouble those very hierarchies. As the bodies of men and women engirth Whitman and he engirths them, sexual positions become confused as neither the poet nor the others dominate the other, their bodies become inseparable, even as his lines reinforce their distinctiveness—men, women, I. The Whitmanian self telegraphized accentuates its open boundaries, its imbrication in a material world of object and bodies that constantly are “quivering” the self to new identities. The botanical and technological connotations of filaments coincide in their sexual implications, configuring the electric body as porous, as open to the world in a way that specifically destabilizes gender definitions, leaving such categories of identity fluid yet material, unstable yet the product of the various forces—linguistic, social, biological—described as electric.

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“Not Express’d in Parlors and Lecture-Rooms”: The Auction Block Scenes

 

This confluence of biological and technological understandings of electricity and its implications for re-thinking identity manifests itself in Whitman’s experimental and open-ended form. As discussed earlier, Whitman describes the ambiguous, suggestive nature of his poetry in terms of its electric latency, its potential to shock readers in forming some sort of electrical, at times telegraphic, connection with Whitman, his poetry, and his body. As a number of critics—Martin Klammer, Ed Folsom, and Karen Sánchez-Eppler most notably—have recently reminded us, Whitman’s poetic experimentation with open lines coincides with his attempt to imagine himself as the poet of the slaves. In the earliest notebook entry in which he takes on a new open poetic form, Whitman writes “I am the poet of slaves and of the masters of slaves / I am the poet of the body.”32 Two things stand out immediately: that in regarding himself as the poet of both slaves and masters, as “stand[ing] between the masters and the slaves,” Whitman feels compelled to open up his poetic line and that in doing so he immediately grounds the connection he hopes to make in supposedly the very source of racial difference, the body. As Sánchez-Eppler has pointed out, in the antebellum United States, the African-American slave was the “quintessential instance of what it means for one’s identity to be entirely dependent upon one’s body,” and thus “the intense bodiliness of the slave . . . simultaneously initiates Whitman’s poetic project and poses the major obstacle to its achievement.”33 This correlation does not, however, necessarily point to any determinate relationship between writing about slaves and his experimental form. Yet the conjunction of the two helps to reveal further the politics—or suspended politics—of Whitman’s aesthetics, especially when contrasted with the more overtly political anti-slavery poetry of writers like John Greenleaf Whittier. While the lines from the notebook never became part of the published Leaves of Grass, many similar passages appear in both the prefaces and the poems themselves. In the 1855 Preface, for example, Whitman contends that he contains both “slavery and the tremulous spreading of hands to protect it, and the stern opposition to it which shall never cease till it ceases or the speaking of tongues and the moving of lips cease” (8). While here he seems more concerned with balancing the two sides of the slavery controversy, he later emphasizes, in the same preface, that “The attitude of great poets is to cheer up slaves and horrify despots” (17). In the poetry he  

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further attempts to imagine becoming the slave or speaking for the slave, and in one case—in the 1855 version of “The Sleepers”—even giving voice to a rebellious slave, Lucifer, who proclaims that “I hate him that oppresses me, / I will either destroy him, or he shall release me” (lines 128–129). Yet more frequently, Whitman insists that he both can and cannot fully access the bodies and experiences of African Americans. In “Song of Myself,” for example, he claims that “I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs, / Hell and despair are upon me [. . . .] I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person, / My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe” (1881 version, lines 838–839, 845–846). Echoing his earlier description of himself as “Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it” (line 79), Whitman’s comment on “lean[ing] on a cane and [merely] observ[ing],” even as he actually becomes the slave being “beat[en] [. . .] violently over the head with whipstocks” (line 843), emphasizes not only his duality as a poet, his identity both as a distinct human being, limited to his own body and experience, and as a poetic prophet capable of entering into, experiencing the reality of everyone and everything, but also the difficulties of overcoming racial distinctions in the antebellum United States, and, perhaps, Whitman’s own ambivalence about such distinctions.34 This tension receives its fullest treatment in the auction block scenes of “I Sing the Body Electric,” the final two sections of the original poem. Writing in 1989, Betsy Erkkila could contend that “critics have tended to treat [“I Sing the Body Electric”] as a fairly tedious enumeration of body parts, failing to note its ominous political prophecy and the fact that the body electric is also black.”35 But in the years since, the auction scenes have become central to renewed considerations of the relationship between Whitman’s poetry and the racist journalism I discussed earlier. Characterized by Michael Moon as the “most explicitly abolitionist or abolitionist-derived sections in the first Leaves of Grass,” and read by Erkkila and others as manifesting Whitman’s poetic commitment to racial egalitarianism and his desire to confront his readers with the undeniable sameness of all humanity, the passages have also been read as reflecting “much of the same ambiguity and ambivalence found in Whitman’s other writings on racial issues.”36 These readings, no matter their final evaluation of the poem, have tended to reverse the problem Erkkila identifies. In focusing on the fact that Whitman attempts to include black bodies at sale into his celebration of human corporeality, critics have had less to say about what electricity and poetry conceived in electrical terms might do to racial categories than about the

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racial politics of distinction or inclusion. Most readings of the slave auction scenes of “I Sing the Body Electric” ignore the fact that they appear in a poem that comes to be called “I Sing the Body Electric.” Most considerations of electricity in interpreting the poem reduce it simply to a force allowing the material, physical body and soul to be one. But as the previous chapter on Douglass emphasizes, electricity, electrical technologies, and electrical understandings of the self, the body, and language held important implications for thinking through racial identities and racial politics. As Ed Folsom has noted, Whitman gave “I Sing the Body Electric” the title “Slaves” in his notes for the original edition of Leaves of Grass.37 The placement of these two scenes at the end of the 1855 version further emphasizes the centrality of race and slavery to the entire poem’s conception. In presenting the slave’s body to his readers, Whitman recognizes that he risks simply reducing that body to a commodity, that he faces the danger of being seen as bringing that body to account. He acknowledges his complicity in slavery’s objectification of the black body as he “help[s] the auctioneer” even as he insists that “the sloven does not half know his business” for “Whatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high enough for him” (1855 version, lines 84, 86). Stripping the slave’s body, again placing himself in the role of the commoditizing auctioneer, Whitman attempts to emphasize the specificity of the body on display—“Exquisite senses, lifelit eyes, pluck, volition, / Flakes of breastmuscle, pliant backbone and neck, flesh not flabby, goodsized arms and legs” (93–94)—and its similarity to any other human, specifically white, bodies—“Within there runs his blood . . . . the same old blood . . the same red running blood; / There swells and jets his heart . . . There all passions and desires . . all reachings and aspirations” (96–97). These lines stress the black body’s sensitivity, its responsiveness to stimuli, foregrounding the experiential nature of individual and individuated life. But curling around these lines runs a narrative of this one slave’s existence as simply part of—and at this one moment, the culmination of—a universal history—“For him the globe lay preparing quintillions of years without one animal or plant, / For him the revolving cycles truly and steadily rolled” (87–88). Connecting him with the central figure of the first half of the poem—“I knew a man [. . .] he was the father of five sons . . . and in them were the fathers of sons . . . and in them were the fathers of sons” (29)—by noting that “This [the slave’s body] is not only one man. . . . he is the father of those who shall be fathers in their turns [. . . .] Of him countless immortal lives with countless embodiments and enjoyments” (99, 101), Whitman’s location of the slave within a multi-generational history underlines his commonality with  

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Whitman’s putatively white audience, a point he reiterates through the two rhetorical questions with which he ends the section—“How do you know who shall come from the offspring of his offspring through the centuries? / Who might you find you have come from yourself if you could trace back through the centuries?” (102–103). Hinting, at least, at the possibility that some of his readers may unknowingly be of mixed-race backgrounds, suggesting the indeterminacy of historical development, Whitman attempts to destabilize his readers’ own self-assured position in order to make them begin to imagine themselves as similar to the slave. At the same time, however, Whitman tries to keep his readers from too readily assuming that they can know the black body and its experiences, even as he calls upon them to realize how little truly separates them from the body on display, how much, physiologically, they share. As with Douglass’s use of electrical allusions to suggest the aesthetic body of the slave and its (dis)continuity with white bodies, Whitman focuses on a very specific body beyond his readers’ comprehension in attempting to make them aware of its vitality and reality. Even as he strips the body of the slave with the auctioneer so that “you may see” (92) his limbs, Whitman informs us that “In that head [lies] the allbaffling brain” (88) and that there are “wonders within there [his “flesh” (94)] yet” (95). Whitman cannot fully penetrate the slave’s brain—as Melville’s narrator cannot with the executed Babo in “Benito Cereno”—cannot even fully account, as he has stressed about bodies in general earlier in the poem, for the wonders of the flesh of the slave. After telling his readers that within the slave’s heart lie “all passions and desires . . all reachings and aspirations” (97), Whitman aggressively asks “Do you think they are not there because they are not expressed in parlors and lecture-rooms?” (98). While usually read as a critique of white bourgeois propriety, the question also potentially indicts the poem itself in suggesting the social conditions of all expression, oral and written. Whitman at once accuses his readers of having no conception of the slave experience and at the same time implicates the very space of his poem’s realization, its public or private reading. Here, the telegraphic nature of the body electric seems particularly apt, for Whitman’s question, in its critique of parlors and lecture-rooms and in its attempt to expand the reach of poetry and of such sites to include the inner lives of slaves, reiterates both the hopes that the telegraph would provide access to new experiences, new people and their bodies, and the recognition that all media are limited by their social and economic production. This aesthetic stance, this attempt both to evoke the black body at auc-

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tion as a sensuous, feeling self and to use it to conjure up a kind of aesthetic experience in his readers, complicates the politics of this section and strikingly contrasts, formally, thematically, and politically, with Whittier’s poetry. Where the attempt to read the politics of literary works has led critics in the past decades to pronounce, as Sacvan Bercovitch does regarding The Scarlet Letter, that in functioning primarily as a kind of “thick propaganda” they are not substantially different from that of Whittier’s poetry, Whittier’s poetry was explicitly political, forcefully and repeatedly calling for abolition and, in the years leading up to the Civil War, summoning support for the Republican Party and its candidates.38 In contrast, even in his celebrations of Lincoln, Whitman’s poetry attempts to rise above party conflict, partisan debate, and even war to make Lincoln a representative of the “immortal” nation, of “the greatest, best, most characteristic, artistic, moral personality” (“Death of President Lincoln,” Specimen Days 787–788). This difference manifests itself in the role telegraphy and electricity play in their poetry. In “The Panorama” (1856) and, more famously, in “Snow-Bound” (1866), Whittier invokes the techno-utopian premise that technological progress, epitomized by the telegraph, will necessarily lead to the end of anachronistic practices such as slavery, envisioning the telegraph as an instrument for eventually binding the nation together in freedom. Where in “SnowBound,” he prophesies that the end of the Civil War and the spread of education in the South will “radiate nerve-lines thence / [spreading] The quick wires of intelligence; / Till North and South together brought / Shall own the same electric thought,” in “The Panorama,” reacting to bloody Kansas, his showman reveals two fates for the western march of the nation, one where the United States has fulfilled its task as a “promised land” “with electric nerve, and fiery-brained, / With Nature’s forces to its chariot chained,” the other of plantations and villages of “slovenly repose,” where slave-traders “Sell all the virtues with his human stock, / The Christian graces on his auction-block.” Contrasting the capitalist, “hive-like” North with the “curses of unnatural toil,” Whittier embraces the progressive free-market, free-labor vision of the new Republican Party and the techno-utopianism we have repeatedly seen in response to the telegraph.39 The auction scene in “The Panorama” recalls Whittier’s fullest account of a slave auction in his poetry, “The Christian Slave” (1843). As with Whitman’s auction-block scene, Whittier emphasizes that the Christian slave embodies “God’s own image.” In the second and third stanzas, Whittier addresses God himself, wondering how “can such things be,” linking the slave to Christ in being “the jest-word of a mocking band, / Bound, sold, and



Walt Whitman’s Aesthetic Body Telegraphic

scourged again!” Where Whitman aligns himself with the auctioneer, even as he denigrates his ability, Whittier, in the next seven stanzas, mockingly lectures the slave-trader, counseling him to keep the word of God from “her [the slave’s] simple heart,” so as to keep her mind “darkened.” Contrasting celebrations of the emancipation of slaves from “Moslem thrall” with the Christian blindness to slavery in their midst, Whittier ends with three stanzas addressing God, inquiring “How long, O God, how long?” (3.86–89). Whittier’s poem works by calling upon his Christian readers to recognize a like soul in the Christian slave, while distinguishing their beliefs from the actions embodied by the so-called Christian slave-trader. Where Whitman calls on his readers to acknowledge a fluid similarity based on having similarly sensuous bodies, bodies beyond his capacity to represent fully, Whittier encapsulates his subject with one word—Christian—meant to bridge the ideological, structural, and racial gaps between his readers and Southern slaves. That bridge serves as the basis for a more straight-forward, more positive politics—we, as Christians, must, through Christ, recognize our commonality. That positive, direct connection is reiterated on the formal level, where his poetry mirrors the control and order he imagines the telegraph as providing in the social sphere. Whether the closed heroic couplets of “The Panorama,” the more open rhyming iambic tetrameter couplets of “Snow-Bound, or the rhyming quatrains of “The Christian Slave,” Whittier’s poetry moves forward inexorably, powerfully, rhythmically, as the poems themselves envision the forward progress of Christian civilization. The telegraph serves merely as an emblem of that progress, of its unstoppable movement that will overcome slavery, thus linking all of the nation, if not the world, in one electric thought. That link, then, gives credence to Whittier’s ability to speak for the slave, to stand outside the scene and allow us, as readers, to view both her and her tormentors from the objective light of God’s truth. In this way, in its depiction of the patient suffering of the slave under the whip of masters who receive the approval of a supposedly Christian nation, Whittier prefigures one of the central images of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and even more explicitly than Stowe, Whittier makes a very specific political point, that slavery must end, that it is unchristian and immoral. Whitman’s auction-block scenes similarly foster the readers’ identification with the slaves, and, as we have seen, Whitman, at various times in his poetry, also drew on the techno-utopian discourse surrounding telegraphy to figure a shared, universal knowledge, sensibility, or connection. Yet Whitman, especially in “I Sing the Body Electric,” repeatedly emphasizes

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the destabilizing, potentially radical implications of imagining the body, the self, their relationships to communities and the world, and poetry as electric. That emphasis parallels the fluidity of his poetic form and pushes him to maintain a political ambivalence Whittier renounces. Where Whittier uses rhetorical questions in addressing God in “The Christian Slave” to call forth his Christian readers’ dormant sympathy for the slaves, Whitman, as noted above, uses rhetorical questions to push the reader to address problems he cannot quite solve, to imagine experiences he cannot fully convey. In this specific section of “Body Electric,” the individual sentences (which are also stanzas) begin with a certain self-assuredness on the part of the poet, from the opening line simply announcing a topic—“A slave at auction!” (82)—to his appraisal of the slave in claiming that “Whatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high enough” (86). His ability to brush aside the auctioneer as a “sloven [who] does not half know his business” epitomizes the poet’s ability to see what others cannot see. But after proclaiming that he will strip the slave’s body to reveal its truth, the poet’s stanzas end with less and less certainty. There are “wonders within there yet” at the end of the next stanza, and while he has offered to reveal all, to supplement and correct the auctioneer’s faulty accounting, two stanzas later he notes that “of him countless immortal lives with countless embodiments and enjoyments” (101). One way Whitman attempts to give himself and his readers access to these “countless embodiments and enjoyments,” to account for the unaccountable nature of the multitudinous variety of bodies, is to join all people together through blood—“Within there runs his blood . . . . the same old blood . . the same red running blood” (96). As Sánchez-Eppler has argued, this line depends upon “dissolv[ing] the bodies out of which his poetry is made.”40 In reiterating the sameness of the blood within the black body on display and within the white reader’s body, Whitman bolsters his egalitarian claims but erases the very body he is trying to celebrate. This is finally the paradox that provides the foundation for Whitman’s poetry—and electric aesthetics as a whole—the inability to account for all the “countless embodiments and enjoyments” of not just this slave and his offspring but all people without negating the specific embodiment and enjoyments of those people. What Whitman pursues, then, is the possibility of rendering the slave the same while refusing to grant the reader (or himself) the idea of full knowledge of that other body. Whitman, I am suggesting, can maintain this duality, this ambiguity, can hold the two in balance, because of the poetic form he uses, because of its emphasis in his lines of unending pos 

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sibility, opening the lines up to the reader and himself (as discussed above) for interpretation, addition, negation. Whitman is able to imagine a kind of egalitarianism, a kind of inclusive American society in his poetry and poetic prefaces because, unlike his journalistic prose, its form abandons the mechanical structure of traditional rhyme and meter for the more dynamic, electric connections of free verse. That means that, unlike Whittier, all that Whitman can do is encourage, to shock, his readers with alternating stanzas or lines of questions and proclamations, to beginning to imagine the multitudinous, similarly different embodiments and enjoyments lying outside their parlors and lecture-rooms. Where Whittier, formally, thematically, politically, asks his reader to identify with the Christian slave as a Christian, Whitman stakes his claims to a limited type of identification on the much less stable, less politically reliable ground of bodies similarly, but not exactly, constituted by their place within the social world. Whitman’s form, in other words, works against any conclusive reading, consistently attempts to escape both his and the reader’s account. With the ellipses, the lines elongate, slowing the reader down, and speeding up the words that follow as the reader rushes to conclude the line. They also foster the reader’s reflection upon the words that come first, as in “Examine these limbs, red black or white . . . . they are very cunning in tendon and nerve” (91). Without commas, the three color adjectives adhere together, more strongly suggesting their similarities, the fact that perhaps all limbs are all three colors. The ellipsis then keeps the reader from moving on without wondering about the presence of white and red limbs in this description of a scene involving a presumably black slave. By not allowing the reader to settle in to a set meter or standard rhyme or even a regular stanzaic pattern, Whitman forces the reader’s body, his voice and ear, to adjust to the changes of the lines, to take on its own different embodiments and to experience at least the possibility of different kinds of aural, verbal enjoyments.41

“The Likes of the Parts of You”: The Final Catalogue This formal and thematic attempt at forcing the reader to confront his or her own body as a flawed model for understanding the embodiments and enjoyments of quite different bodies culminates in the catalogue of body parts Whitman adds to the poem in 1856. Often dismissed as unnecessary or as detracting from the poem’s power, the catalogue reiterates and clarifies Whitman’s bodily poetics in a way that begins to counter Sánchez-Eppler’s

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point about his use of blood in the first auction scene. It simultaneously emphasizes the analogy between the openness of language and of the body that the entire poem builds on and that substantiates the telegraphic and electrical tropes running through its lines. The first lines of the section, introducing the list of parts to follow, read

Reiterating several of the poem’s central claims and themes—the identity of the body and the soul and the identity of the body with poetry itself—these lines, with their repetition of “the likes of ” also gestures to the inexactness of equating any body or any part of the body or any soul or any experience of a particular poem with any other one. Where “the same red-running blood” of the first auction scene emphasizes the sameness of bodies, perhaps because the differences between bodies red black or white carried so much weight, the final catalogue insists on both similarity and difference, similarities and differences only hinted at in the list of identities in line 132—Man, women, child, etc.—all of which depend on their placement within the chain of defining relationships (of man to woman, of child to woman and to youth, etc.). Instead of blood and flesh being the same, in this catalogue Whitman speaks of “The thin red jellies within you or within me” (161) without implying their exact equivalence to one another. There are multiple potentially different jellies within you and within me. As Whitman’s similar terminology in the footnote to Specimen Days I cited earlier suggests—“Every molecule of matter in the whole universe is swinging to and fro; every particle of ether which fills space is in jelly-like vibration. . . . Every human sense is the result of motion; every perception, every thought is but motion of the molecules of the brain translated by the incomprehensible thing we call mind” (945)—these jellies, like the same red-running blood, indicate a radical commonality of human existence, the materiality of human thought, while refusing to erase potential differences in bodies and experiences. The catalogue does not attempt to capture completely the variety of human body parts. Rather with Whitman’s emphasis on “the likes of the

 

O my body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and women, nor the likes of the parts of you, I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of the soul, (and that they are the soul,) I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems, and that they are my poems, Man’s, woman’s, child’s, youth’s, wife’s, husband’s, mother’s, father’s, young man’s, young woman’s poems. (1867 version, lines 129–132)

 

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parts of you,” the specific parts that follow are synecdoches for similar, but never exactly the same, types of body parts. Whitman’s use of a variety of different linguistic registers, from the medical (tympan rather than eardrum [line 133], scapula rather than shoulder blade [line 138]) to figurative language drawing on botany (man-root [143]) and the technological (jaw-hinges [135], neck-slue [137]), suggests, as M. Jimmie Killingsworth argues, the inability of any language to record the majesty and variety of the body parts.42 This section provides a fuller account of how and why “the body itself balks account” (line 9) not only by emphasizing the limitations of language but also by suggesting that the various body-parts don’t add up to a whole. Whitman’s repetition of the same word as both noun and adjective for describing smaller parts—“Upper-arm, armpit, elbow-socket, lower-arm, arm-sinews, arm bones” (139), “forefinger, finger-joints, fingernails” (140), “Broad breast-front, curling hair of the breast, breast-bone, breast-side” (141)—hints that even delimiting the exact boundaries of arms, fingers, breasts is nearly impossible as the “likes of the parts” of each are potentially found throughout the body, in other sorts of “joints” or “nails” or “sides.” Instead of Whitman gesturing to the inability of language, due to its own incompleteness, to capture the reality of the body, the catalogue indicates that language is actually suggestive of the body’s own incompleteness, the fact that the body itself, like language, is “all diffused.” This possibility is given further weight by the fact that in the midst of his catalogue, following his list of the parts of woman—“The womb, the teats, nipples, breastmilk, tears, laughter, weeping, love-looks, love-perturbations and risings” (152)—and preceding his return to “The thin red jellies,” Whitman literally incorporates a list of physical activities, materials, and feelings that the body either produces, partakes in, or digests—not just “breast-milk” and “tears” or “whispering” and “shouting aloud” but also “love-perturbations” and “The curious sympathy one feels when feeling with the hand the naked meat of the body” (158). With its ambiguity about whether the meat of the body is part of the same body as the hand, this line sums up this point—the body does not end, is not limited to merely the body parts listed here, but extends outward to intersect with other bodies through the body’s activities and through the embodiments of emotions. In some ways Killingsworth is right when she reads this catalogue’s emphasis on the “ineffable nature of the body” as “undermin[ing] the effort, which comprises the overt purpose of the poem, to establish a political morality based on an awareness of the body as the irreducible core,

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the foundation of human life” (58–59). But in another way, she misses the point. The power and potential of Whitman’s poem as politics lies in its refusal of politics as normally conceived, in terms of shared interests, united identities. For Whitman, then, electricity and the telegraph become vehicles for imagining not simply new sorts of connections with different peoples around the world, but also the cultural and sexual disintegration of racial and sexual difference, as it creates an exchange between races which will unite them in brotherhood, a bodily, sexual exchange which will link the nation and the world into one mankind. That universal humanity is based, however, not on some idea of transcendent self, of a model of humanity, but on the aesthetic nature of all life, on the sensuous relationships that all persons have with the world and that simultaneously distinguishes them from every other person and his or her experience and allows for the communication of experience from one person to another. Whitman uses electricity and its various physiological, sexual, aesthetic, and technological uses and meanings to suggest exactly this kind of fragmentary existence not just for his poems but for the individual and his body. Whitman aligns poetry, telegraphy, and sex as similarly dissolving the self, as radically disintegrating the supposed differences separating black from white, man from woman, opening his lines and imagery to multiple interpretations and experiences while basing that imagery in the specific historical contexts of the nineteenth-century United States. Incompletely recording the specific experiences of an historical, individual, yet fragmented body, aspiring to transcendence, but succeeding only through its suggestiveness, his poetry epitomizes the potential of literary aesthetics to found itself and to founder in the materialities of its medium and of its imagery, the materialities of the historical situation of its reception and of the specific embodied experiences of reading.

Conclusion: Aesthetic Electricity Caged

Within a few years of Whitman adding the opening line “I Sing the Body Electric” to his famous poem, the material conditions of the telegraphic industry, one of the foundations for his aesthetics of embodied universalism, had drastically changed. In 1866, after merging with its main rivals, Western Union essentially gained monopolistic control over the telegraph industry in the United States. Beginning in 1869, through a series of telegraph acts passed by Parliament, the postal service in Britain took over private telegraph lines, creating a government monopoly. These consolidations in the Anglo-American world followed the creation of the International Telegraph Union (which continues as the International Telecommunications Union) in Paris, in May, 1865. Signed by twenty European states, this first international telegraph convention sought to integrate telegraphic systems across international borders by standardizing codes and rates. Part of that integration was made possible by the increasing dominance of the Morse system. Where Western Union originally used the technology of Royal E. House, by the end of the 1860s, the Morse system, including the standardized code, was all but universal. These developments accompanied changes in the workplace. If the telegraph industry, as many have noted, was the first modern monopoly, it was also one of the first industries to enforce strict labor practices to control and break the organizing of labor. As corporate leaders like James D. Reid saw it, in the postbellum years, “The telegraph service demands a rigorous discipline to which its earlier administration was unused.” Its workers needed to display “the precision and uniformity of mechanism.”1 Although women had worked in the telegraph industry from the outset, upper management began to bring more and more

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women into the work force, largely because of their perceived docility and their significantly lower wages. The downward pressure of wages and the increased regimentation of the profession spurred the growth of the telegraphic workers’ union in the late 1860s and were the main issues leading to two major strikes, in 1870 and 1883. Where different technological apparatuses and competing telegraphic companies jarred against one another, rendering the telegraph an unstable, fluid medium in its early decades, by 1870 or so, across the Anglo-American world and Europe, the telegraph was quickly assuming the centralized, industrialized form it was to hold into the twentieth century. Henry James’s In the Cage (1898), probably the most famous telegraphic story in the Anglo-American canon, reflects these economic, technological, and social changes. Doing so, it presents an extended consideration of the limits of an electric/telegraphic aesthetics. As an impressive array of critics have described, James’s novella interestingly speaks to the development of information systems, to the relationship between technology and realism, to the relationship between telegraphy and understandings of the nervous system, to the connections among sexuality, queer subject positions, and the regimes of modernity, and to the bureaucratization of women as mediators of exchange.2 What makes James’s story a fitting conclusion to this study are the ways it differs from the texts I’ve explored in reconstructing a theory of aesthetic materialism based in and figured through electrical science and technology. Where Percy Shelley, Emerson, Douglass, and Whitman found in electricity a force for articulating the possibility and limitations of imaginative connection with others, James’s novella moves in the direction of proto-modernist, solipsistic aestheticism, and formalism.3 By returning to the socioeconomic bases of this shift in metaphoric uses of electricity and telegraphy and by placing it within the broader literary history, I wish both to historicize the foreclosure of some of the aesthetic possibilities of an earlier moment and to illuminate the way that even with that foreclosure the potential for aesthetic connection, through new figures and forms, remains. James’s story centers on an unnamed telegraphist in London who pieces together the story of an illicit romance between Captain Everard and Lady Bradeen through the telegraphs they send through her office. James’s narration locates itself primarily through the telegraphist’s consciousness; as he notes in the preface to the New York edition, “The action of the drama is simply the girl’s ‘subjective’ adventure—that of her quite definitely winged intelligence.”4 As we’ve seen, figures like “winged intelligence” flourished



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in the years after the telegraph’s invention, and, in the novella itself, James frequently turns to telegraphic and electric images to describe the telegraphist’s imagination. The “expansion of her consciousness” results from “flashes” (373) of insight, “impulses of various kinds, alternately soft and severe, to which she was constitutionally accessible and which were determined by the smallest accidents” (388). Her insights, in fact, take on a distinctly sensuous cast, as they come with “a sharp taste of something . . . in her mouth” (377) or she feels them “with a thump that seemed somehow addressed straight to her heart. That organ literally beat faster” (380). The physicality of her imagination reaches its climax when she is able to correct Lady Bradeen in her composition of a coded message to Everard, an insertion of herself into the relationship that allows the telegraphist to feel “as if she had bodily leaped—cleared the top of the cage and alighted on her interlocutress” (426). Her “throbbing” (422) feelings of sympathy enabled a kind of “transcendent” (413) experience, allowing her to escape, if temporarily, her physical position within the cage. By “filling out some of the gaps, supplying the missing answers” of the limited correspondence she sees (424), “piec[ing] together all sorts of mysteries” (376), the telegraphist embodies what James characterizes as essential to the novelist’s genius in “The Art of Fiction,” “The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern.” In the same paragraph of that famous essay, James evokes a different mode of telegraphic discourse, the spiritualist idea of the universal telegraph, to explain how novelists’ experiences allow them this kind of insight: “Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spiderweb of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every airborne particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative—much more when it happens to be that of a man of genius—it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulse of the air into revelations.”5 As with Edward Hitchcock’s universal telegraph (see chapter one), James expands experience outward in connecting the novelistic genius with the wider world through the pulses of the air becoming caught in the suspended threads of consciousness. Both pulse and threads, here, are suggestive of the telegraphic network and its wires and of considerations of the human brain as a telegraphic network itself. With his description of her “whimsical mind and wonderful nerves . . . subject, in short, to sudden flickers of antipathy and sympathy” (371) and his repeated use of “flash” to mark the instantaneous, felt nature of the telegraphist’s

 

Conclusion

Conclusion

 

insights (431, 462, 469), James suggests seeing the telegraphist herself as a kind of sensitive telegraph instrument (see Clayton, Wicke). This figure of electrical insight, imagination, sensitivity, as we’ve seen throughout this study, frequently worked to link the telegraph’s potential to connect individuals and communities with the imagination’s energizing capacity to grant insight into others. However, through “the queer extension of her experience, the double life that, in the cage, she grew at last to lead” (386), the telegraphist’s imagination facilitates neither true mutual understanding nor the development of new communities nor individual change but simply a pleasure based in disconnection. As “her imaginative life [becomes] the life in which she spent most of her time” (373), it provides “a comfort to her . . . supplying that affinity with her nature that Mr. Mudge [her fiancé], deluded creature, would never supply” (419). From Lady Bradeen’s first telegraphs, the telegraphist realizes, as “it floated to her through the bars of the cage[,] that this at last was the high reality” (377). She knows that “people of her sort didn’t, in such cases, matter” (435), yet she invests more and more of herself in the affair and in Everard and Lady Bradeen somehow acknowledging the role she plays: “All our humble friend’s native distinction, her refinement of personal grain, of heredity, of pride, took refuge in this small throbbing spot; for when she was most conscious of the abjection of her vanity and the pitifulness of her little flutters and manoeuvres, then the consolation and the redemption were most sure to glow before her in some just discernible sign. He did like her!” (421–422). She has had the “folly” of “half-believing” that Everard might have noticed her and mentioned her to Lady Bradeen, but when she realizes he hasn’t, it “didn’t matter” and, in fact, “directly added to their splendour, gave the girl the sharpest impression she had yet received of the uplifted, the unattainable plains of heaven, and yet at the same time caused her to thrill with a sense of the high company she did somehow keep” (424). It is this distance from her patrons that spurs her imagination all the more, because this distance ensures the reality of the lives she attempts to access. And thus “she pressed the romance closer by reason of the very quantity of imagination it demanded and consumed” (383). James, in his preface, apologizes for the potentially implausible power of his “brooding telegraphist[’s]” imagination (xxi). Yet what is most notable about her imagination is how it misleads her and us. The very power of the telegraphist’s connection to the love affair lies in its fictive, yet still conceivable, quality. But this lack of any real contact—even when she meets Everard outside the office, she insists on not seeing him again except as  

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a public, impersonal servant—means that she simply misses much of the real story of the love affair. From the very beginning, from her immediate supposition that Everard must not be the lover’s real name (378), the telegraphist’s “divinations” (386), while correct about the existence of a love affair, lead her (and the reader) astray. With the conclusion, where we—and the telegraphist—learn that Mrs. Jordan will not be marrying Lord Rye but his butler Mr. Drake—and when we find out, via Mrs. Jordan’s connection with Mr. Drake, that the love affair between Lady Bradeen and Everard was not of the purely romantic nature we have been led to believe, “our heroine saw and felt for in the whole business was the vivid reflection of her own dreams and delusions and her own return to reality. Reality, for the poor things they both [she and Mrs. Jordan] were, could only be ugliness and obscurity, could never be the escape, the rise” (499). But this failure may be beside the point. Despite his return to this hard reality in the end of the novella, James seems to suggest that “It was not the main truth perhaps that most signified” (501). What signifies, as James puts it in “The Art of Fiction,” is the revelation of “a particular mind, different from others” (170). In this way, as Richard Menke has argued, James’s novella departs from a model of mid-Victorian telegraphic realism in which the telegraph represented the transparent, coherent vision of a third-person narrator able to link the disparate world together through an unbiased consciousness. This shift mirrors one in the larger popular discourse surrounding telegraphy and electricity and the socioeconomic changes I described at the beginning of this conclusion. In the antebellum period, articles and stories most frequently spoke of the telegraph as though it required no human operators at all, no person to mediate, with the telegraphic apparatus, between sender and receiver. Such figurations of the telegraph fed into and helped to revive long-standing speculations about the spiritual nature of electricity and about electricity as the vital force and/or the medium of nervous impulses. The stories and journalism of the postbellum years repeatedly examine the lives and working conditions of the people operating the telegraphic key, as spiritualist and Vitalist considerations receded (though not completely) with electrical technology becoming more commonplace. The telegraph rather than being a tool for re-imagining the possibilities of embodied communication at a distance became the center of an industrial, socioeconomic reality requiring its own objective analysis. In its break from realism, James’s novella does not reclaim the electric romanticism that has been my focus. Unlike the idealist celebration of the imagination in Coleridge, which similarly attempted to disentangle the

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imagination from the material realm, James’s apotheosis of the imagination accepts the final determination, in their own realms at least, of economic and physical realities. The telegraphist’s imagination has allowed her to transform her everyday tasks of merely counting words as units of commerce. Yet in the climactic moment of her involvement with the secret affair, the telegraphist reverses this transformation by merely repeating numbers. The final time she sees Everard, he frantically seeks to find out the contents—a series of numbers serving as a code for the lovers—of a message mistakenly sent months earlier by Lady Bradeen. In his desperation, Everard fails to show “a glimmer of reference or memory” (477) for the telegraphist, thus forcing her to recognize “how much she had missed in the gaps and blanks and absent answers—how much she had had to dispense with” (477) in constructing her own imagined narrative of the affair and her place within it. As much as the telegraphist’s ability to create a fantasy world of her own sets her apart from and above Mr. Mudge and his focus on economic calculation, in the end, the story comes down to hard numbers, the numbers of the code, the numbers representing the lack of wealth for Mrs. Jordan, Captain Everard, and the telegraphist that forces them all into marriages at the end of the story and that emphasizes that their realities “could only be ugliness and obscurity” (499). This emphasis in the concluding chapters on the hard, economic, numerical reality of the telegraphist’s life further distinguishes James’s fiction from the works I have considered at more length. With its figuration of a kind of electric imagination capable of misleading its most probing central characters, In the Cage seems to mirror Melville’s Pierre, a novel, I have argued, that draws on electricity to insist on the central, if unreliable, role of historically determined imagination and intuition in our experience of the world. Where Melville’s darker vision of this intersection of the mind with the world differs from that of those, like Percy Shelley or Emerson, who emphasize the sociopolitically revolutionary potential inherent in the imagination’s power to reshape the world, it, unlike James’s telegraphic imagination, remains committed to the interpenetrated nature of the imagination with the world. Reality and imagination remain tangled together, in a staticky, sometimes blindingly insightful tension, throughout Pierre, where James’s novella works to separate the two, to keep the humdrum reality of counting words separate from their imaginative potential. The revelation of the telegraphist’s misreadings ironically becomes central to James’s project of protecting the imagination from the quotidian life it allows us to escape. By displaying the sordid reality of life as distinct from the



Conclusion

 

 

beauty of the telegraphist’s imagination, James empowers himself to suggest his central moral about the imagination: “What may not, we can only moralise, take place in the quickened muffled perception of a young person with an ardent soul?” (421). Even as the ha’penny novels she reads may muffle the otherwise quick perception of the telegraphist, the story, finally, as James insists in his New York preface, is a “proper little monument” to the imagination and “its growth” (xx), a celebration of the ardent soul and quickened perception of a working-class girl. This depiction of the power of her mind potentially takes on sociopolitical implications that parallel Douglass’s use of electric flashes. The flashes in both cases indicate the imaginative power of persons economically and socially trapped. As James posited in his preface, the relevance of the story “will probably be found in any moral [the imagination] may pluck . . . from the vice of reading rank subtleties into simple souls and reckless expenditure into thrifty ones” (xx). But, while we as readers may feel saddened by the telegraphist’s dreary future, the novella in no way calls upon us to act or even to imagine the possibility of acting to change that future. In fact, as the telegraphist’s pleasure in reading and creating the story of the lovers largely derives from her lack of contact with them, so our pleasure emerges out of our own arm’s length relationship to the telegraphist. Her consciousness guides us through the story, and with her, we end up having to recognize our failures to read fully, correctly, a lesson that may work to train our (and her) imagination to be more supple, nuanced, but does not gesture to the possibility of creating a different social order based on that imagination. The telegraphist’s imagination, finally, simply echoes the cultural forms (specifically the cheap novels she reads) and social and economic structures of the world she inhabits. James’s story, in the end, locates its project not in the problem of the relationship between the imagination and the world, between limited subjective consciousness and physically grounded intersubjective recognition and understanding, but in the pleasures of the imagination itself. In meticulously detailing how the telegraphist’s fantasy of her position within the love affair compensates for the dreary reality of her own romantic life with the parsimonious Mr. Mudge, her everyday work of calculating the expense of words, and her family’s decline in social and economic status, James all but prefigures Herbert Marcuse’s definition of an affirmative culture, the idea that bourgeois art functions by positing “a world essentially different from the factual world of the daily struggle for existence” where the contradictions of daily life could be safely (and impotently) resolved.6

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In the Cage, then, evacuates the pre-political potential of electric aesthetics, its insistence on the possibility of sensuous intersubjectivity even as it emphasizes the distance between subject positions, in favor of distinguishing the realm of the imagination from the realm of reality. James’s novella suggests the exhaustion of the telegraph as a source for an aesthetic imagining of the potential of embodied connection across distance. Rather than the artist becoming the unacknowledged legislator of his community, his supreme achievement lies in simply revealing the quality of his mind at work in the creation of a work of art. Fredric Jameson has described a similar shift in terms of the movement from realism—the cultural dominant of market and early industrial capitalism—to modernism, the cultural dominant of monopoly or imperialistic capitalism.7 Jameson’s vision of modernity all but summarizes the telegraphist’s lot: while “the phenomenological experience of the individual subject” is “limited to a tiny corner of the social world, a fixed-camera view of a certain section of London,” “the truth of that experience no longer coincides with the place in which it takes place.” The truth, according to Jameson, is that, even as the entire political and economic system “determines the very quality of the individual’s subjective life,” “those structural coordinates are no longer accessible to immediate lived experience and are often not even conceptualizable for most people.”8 From this perspective, In the Cage represents the defeat of literary aesthetics as a vehicle for critical thinking, for imagining embodied experience as providing a way for re-thinking community in anything but alienated and alienating processes. Marking the end of the heroic stage of capitalism with its critique of older power structures, older forms of community and political organization, and older ideologies of time, space, and identity, the telegraph, the first truly nationalized monopoly, prefigures the foreclosing of the revolutionary potential of aesthetics for reimagining the self and its relationship to the world.9 With the transformation of operators into lower middle-class professionals, the regimentation and standardization of codes and instruments, and the thorough bureaucratization of the industry, the telegraph (and electricity more broadly) stands as a nearly perfect synecdoche for the material transformations of the nineteenth century. As compelling as Jameson’s periodization and description of the cultural dominants of different stages of capitalism is, its tendency towards totalization, its emphasis on canonical texts, and its lack of specificity reflect his more vulgar Marxist leanings of reducing material reality to the economic structuring of power. Despite his poststructuralist gestures, Jameson, in other words, largely refuses to grant cultural forms, media, including lan-



Conclusion

guage, or bodies their own, not fully determinable or determining, materialities. Ella Cheever Thayer’s Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes (1879) both underlines the determining power of the socioeconomic transformation of the telegraph industry on its imaginative uses and begins to suggest that James and Jameson disclose only part of the picture.10 In particular, Thayer’s novel indicates that different reading and writing communities may have been able to exploit or explore certain figures for imagining aesthetic experience or connection after they had lost their usefulness for dominant, elite ones. Framed as a tale for both telegraphic operators—its dedication and concluding lines are in Morse code—and lay-people, Wired Love centers on a romance between two telegraphers, joined together initially only by the telegraph wire connecting their offices. Where antebellum texts focused on the immediacy of the new medium to imagine the possibility of everyone being linked together, Wired Love exemplifies the shift in postbellum telegraphic literature towards understanding the technology in more personal, more romantic terms. The telegraph works, in fact, not to encourage a kind of universal understanding but to provide Nattie and Clem with exactly the kind of privacy (although that privacy is never complete) their romance needs in order to grow. It is, after all, the same “old, old story,” as the novel’s epigraph puts it, just in “a new, new way.” Even after Clem moves to Nattie’s city and lives in the same boarding house, the two return to using Morse code on numerous occasions in order to communicate without others being able to understand. Just as Everard and Lady Bradeen use their own telegraphic cipher, their own special language of love, so Nattie and Clem use Morse code as their own shared language. Wired Love retains the techno-utopian ideal of the telegraph enabling embodied understanding and connection, only, through the economic and social transformation of the medium, that ideal is now not utopian but romantic. In speaking the language of hearts, taking the place of Cupid, as in the picture Jo Norton produces of the two lovers, the keys, sounders, wires, and code become literally and figuratively immaterial. Yet the novel’s perverse inclination to interpose obstacles between the two lovers, to keep them using telegraphic machinery or, at a minimum, telegraphic code, seems to suggest the impossibility of the very conclusion the novel inevitably must end with. Where the antebellum techno-utopianist might gush about being able to feel exactly what someone on the other end of the line felt, postbellum, monopoly era telegraphic romances tended to describe the telegraph as unable to supply the real connection itself, as the medium

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itself tended to get in the way (even as it at times generated) the connection between individuals. This mediation allowed for a certain fluidity (or mystery) of identity, as Katherine Stubbs has noted, but the telegraphic fictions in which it appeared seemed to work inexorably towards abandoning the medium for the clarified (and normalized) relationship supposedly guaranteed by face-to-face contact.11 Thayer’s novel works somewhat differently, however. Even after they live close to one another, Nattie “sometimes felt that a certain something that had been on the wire was lacking now; that Clem, while realizing all her old expectations of ‘C,’ was not exactly what ‘C’ had been to her” (170). This disappointment leads Clem to string a wire between their rooms in the boarding house “since a wire is so necessary to our happiness” (174). As Mark Goble sums it up, “Clem and Nattie might believe that medium and message are ontologically distinct, that ‘wired’ love is not ‘genuine,’ but Thayer, it would seem, knows better.”12 With its concluding lines written in Morse code, Thayer’s novel, like James’s, seems to reiterate the material opacity of the medium and the failure of telegraphy to deliver on its utopian promises. Wired Love, however, simultaneously suggests the inadequacy of reading the telegraphic romance or a kind of telegraphic modernity as fully exemplifying the literary aesthetic potentials of the late 1800s. First, through its romance plot, the novel seems intent, despite all the barriers it raises, to imagine electronic texts, supplemented by face-to-face contact, as leading to a kind of mutual understanding. While largely limited to a secret form of communication between the two lovers, this telegraphic union spreads outward, as other members of their Bohemian circle of friends in their boarding house—especially Cyn—begin to learn Morse code and to use the wires for forming an alternative community to the conventionality represented by Miss Kling, their landlady. Although the novel may never allow Nattie and Clem to “make love like common mortals,” to be physically united in that “pure, unalloyed article, genuine love” (256), in its place it stages the creation of an egalitarian community of largely atomized, orphaned individuals. Further, as Stubbs and Goble have noted, like many telegraphic fictions of the era, the novel—and the labor conditions it represents—opens the door to gender masquerade and the reconfiguration of gender identities. Because of the alternative reality occasioned by telegraphic communication, Nattie can escape, if temporarily, the limitations of Victorian American ideals about womanly decorum, and doing so fosters her growing friendship with Cyn, whose role as a public performer more overtly excites the disdain of Kling. All of this, finally, seems to work towards Nattie herself becoming



Conclusion

a public performer of sorts, as a writer striving for a professional career that, it is at least hinted, culminates in the production of the novel itself. In a different mode, with a different audience, the telegraph, in Thayer’s novel, seems to offer continued, if limited, possibilities for reimagining physical, subjective connections at a distance that James’s text largely dismisses.13 In its final removal of its lovers from the circuit—Clem has quit the telegraph office and Nattie seems fated to becoming a wife and a writer—and its depiction of the claustrophobic labor conditions of the telegraph operator, Thayer’s novel underlines the increasing socioeconomic, political, and cultural limitations of telegraphy. Yet in using those limited resources to imagine the possibility of new sensations and the development of new community formations, it exemplifies the continued potential of opening the gaps and spaces of electrical development for envisioning the subjective universality of aesthetic experience. Electricity, as Tim Armstrong and Carolyn de la Peña have shown, would continue to function within high modernism and popular electrical medicine as a key figure for blurring the distinction between metaphor and the material well into the twentieth century. Generally, however, by the end of the nineteenth century, the potentials inherent to electrical figures due to their material grounds had largely dissipated. Any form, image, phenomenon, can be played out, can lose its efficacy as a concrete figure for aesthetic experience, through a combination of material transformations, including its development within the socioeconomic realm, new discoveries and improvements in science and technology, and changes in the cultural marketplace involving new audiences or new tropes. But the continued expansion of capitalism, technology, and science into new forms of communication, sensation, experience, and phenomena has repeatedly enabled the refiguration of aesthetic experience as offering a brief, and potentially subversive, if indeterminate, glimpse outside the limits of the normalized bourgeois self. As Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer would argue in the 1920s and 1930s, the capitalist development of film would open the unstable ground of human interconnection to new pleasures and new communities, even as it reinforced the disciplines of the state and the marketplace. And with the creation of the internet, the expansion of computer ownership and access, and the genetic revolution, a new techno-utopianism has resurfaced, eerily similar to that at play in early responses to the telegraph. While we should be wary of that view’s claims, of its erasure of the material differences that have been summed up as “the digital divide,” we should also recognize the way that new technologies

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of communication offer not just new ways of building communities and thinking about the self but also the potential for new kinds of sensuous experiences that emphasize the subjective universality of aesthetic experience, experiences that, once again, can destabilize dominant ideologies of the body, the self, and identity, leaving us with the task of reconstructing the world and society in the political realm. Aesthetics cannot take the place of that work, but it can help to remind us of the possibilities and the problems of that work, of the necessity of addressing the human body as both the site of difference and the ground of commonality.

reference matter

Notes

Introduction 1. Elizabeth Peabody, “The Word ‘Aesthetic,’ ” Aesthetic Papers, ed. Elizabeth Peabody (Boston: Peabody, 1849) 1. 2. See Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s riff on this problem and the circular thinking it can lead to in Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1988) 34–35. Herrnstein Smith’s list of the various forces that interact in creating aesthetic value parallels, to some extent, the different forms of materialities I engage later in this introduction; see Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value 38. 3. Robert Kaufman, “Red Kant, or The Persistence of the Third Critique in Adorno and Jameson,” Critical Inquiry 26.4 (summer 2000): 683. 4. On the new formalism, see Marjorie Levinson’s review essay “What is New Formalism?” PMLA 122.2 (March 2007): 558–569. Recent idealist defenses of the aesthetic, which reject, as a whole, the need to treat aesthetic experience as the product of particular sociohistorical conditions, include Martha C. Nussbaum’s Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995); Mark Edmundson’s Literature Against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida: A Defence of Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995); Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999); and the essays in Michael P. Clark’s Revenge of the Aesthetic: The Place of Literature in Theory Today (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2000). My desire is to build on, rather than reject, the insights of cultural studies and cultural materialism in returning to the aesthetic. 5. See, for example, [Anon.], Review of Kavanagh, a Tale, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The North American Review 69 (July 1849): 209. Throughout the antebellum era, the term was regularly linked to its source in German philosophy— “aesthetics, a favorite term with the Germans, first introduced by Baumgarten, and now in general use, designating the philosophy of the fine arts, poetry, and elegant prose”; [Anon.], “German Universities,” The North American Review 27 (October 1828): 329–330. The OED provides 1830 as the date for “aesthetic” first denoting



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“the study of the beautiful” in common English usage. But the first use of the term “aesthetic” in this sense that I have found in an American publication actually appears earlier, in an 1821 review of Schiller, [Anon.], “German Authors—Schiller,” The New-York Literary Journal, and Belles-Lettres Repository 4 (April 1821): 353. 6. [Anon.], Review of Papers on Literature and Art, by S. Margaret Fuller, The American Whig Review 4 (November 1846): 516, 515, 518. 7. Winfried Fluck, “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies,” Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age, ed. Emory Elliott, Louis Freitas Caton, and Jeffrey Rhyne (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002) 84–85: W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1954) 6. 8. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Affective Fallacy” (1949), The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, gen. ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York: Norton, 2001) 1399. Interestingly, this passage is omitted in the version of the essay reproduced in The Verbal Icon. 9. For historical accounts of this connection, see Jerome Stolnitz, “On the Origins of ‘Aesthetic Disinterestedness,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 20.2 (winter 1961): 131–143, and Dabney Townsend, “From Shaftesbury to Kant: The Development of the Concept of Aesthetic Experience,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48.2 (April–June 1987): 287–305. Two of the most prominent critics of aesthetic judgment and aesthetic value, John Guillory and Pierre Bourdieu, intimate that their critiques do not account for the experience of the aesthetic object. In The Rules of Art, Bourdieu explores the creation of a literary field wherein certain aesthetic experiences can take place, a realm defined not so much by its political effectiveness (although tied to privilege) as by its distance from politics; see Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996). At the end of Cultural Capital, Guillory recognizes that “insofar as the debate on the canon has tended to discredit aesthetic judgment, or to express a certain embarrassment with its metaphysical pretensions and its political biases, it has quite missed the point. The point is not to make judgment disappear but to reform the conditions of its practice. . . . Socializing the means of production and consumption would be the condition of an aestheticism unbound, not its overcoming”; John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993) 340. See also Jonathan Loesberg’s comments on the return to experience in recent revivals of aesthetics and his consideration of Bourdieu’s ambivalent relationship to aesthetics in A Return to Aesthetics: Autonomy, Indifference, and Postmodernism (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2005). 10. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (1790: Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987) 51 § 5, 44 § 1. Further citations will be given parenthetically. 11. Henry T. Tuckerman, Artist Life; or Sketches by American Painters (New York: 1847), quoted in [Anon.] “The Fine Arts in America,” Southern Quarterly Review 15 (July 1849): 342. 12. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet” (1844), Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: The Library of America, 1983) 467; Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), The Portable Margaret Fuller, ed. Mary Kelley (New

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York: Penguin, 1994) 293; Edgar Allan Poe, “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn (New York: Library of America, 1984) 388. 13. [Anon.], Rev. of Electro-Physiology and Electro-Therapeutics: Showing the Rules and Methods for the Employment of Galvanism in Nervous Diseases, etc. The Atlantic Monthly 8 (November 1861): 646. 14. Paul de Man, “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1996) 88–89, 83. 15. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1986) 11. 16. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990) 10. Further citations will be given parenthetically. 17. Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) 16. 18. Raymond Williams, “Problems of Materialism,” Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (London: New Left Books, 1980) 103. 19. See Raymond Williams, “Materialism,” Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985) 197–201, for more on this problem from a historical materialist perspective. 20. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward an Investigation),” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971) 166. 21. Michael Walzer, “The Concept of Civil Society,” Toward a Global Civil Society, ed. Michael Walzer (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1995) 7. 22. Ian Hunter, “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies,” Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992) 351, 357. Drawing on the idea of a Weberian ethos and a Foucauldian technology of the self, Hunter argues for taking aesthetics as a material practice of the self, a “means by which individuals have come to form themselves as the subjects of various kinds of experience and action and to endow their lives with particular kinds of significance and shape” (359). 23. Along with Hunter’s essay, I am specifically thinking of Michèle Barrett, Imagination in Theory: Culture, Writing, Words, and Things (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1999), and Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic. Wai Chee Dimock’s recent work pursues this point in a slightly different vein, arguing that literature extends across a global horizon and through deep time. See Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2006). 24. See Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982) for the most famous account of this two stage process, one I have found useful if not fully convincing. 1. Idealist Aesthetics and the Republican Telegraph





1. Thomas Carlyle, “Signs of the Times” (1829), Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, vol. 14 of The Works of Thomas Carlyle (New York: P. F. Collier, 1897) 466, 468. 2. For overviews of Naturphilosophie and its relationship to romanticism and

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the development of electrical science, see H. A. M. Snelders, “Romanticism and Naturphilosophie and the Inorganic Natural Sciences, 1797–1840: An Introductory Survey,” Studies in Romanticism 9 (summer 1970): 193–215, and H. A. M. Snelders, “Oersted’s Discovery of Electromagnetism,” Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990) 228–240. 3. Iwan Rhys Morus, Frankenstein’s Children: Electricity, Exhibition, and Experiment in Early-Nineteenth-Century London (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998) 9. As Philip Ritterbush has shown, the notion of electricity as a unifying force, potentially related to the spark of life itself, was deployed throughout the eighteenth century by thinkers interested in finding some immanent force, some proof “that interrelated subtle fluids caused all physical and vital phenomena”; Philip C. Ritterbush, Overtures to Biology: The Speculations of Eighteenth-Century Naturalists (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1964) 17. This attempt to find in electricity a unifying source explaining all sorts of phenomena is exemplified by the title of an 1802 book by T. Gale—Electricity or Ethereal Fire, Considered Naturally, as the Agent of Animal and Vegetable Life, Astronomically, or as the agent of gravitation and motion, medically, or its artificial use in diseases. Comprehending Both the Theory and Practice of Medical Electricity; and Demonstrated to be an Infallible Cure of Fever, Inflammation, and Many Other Diseases: Constituting the Best Family Physician Ever Extant (Troy: Moffitt and Lyon, 1802). At the center of Gale’s speculations is the idea that electricity is “the analogy between the natural and spiritual world” (4), as “this latent, mysterious and powerful agent, pervades all creation, is capable of assuming such a variety of appearances, and of producing such a variety of effects, both in the animate and inanimate creation” (3). Gale goes so far, in fact, as to propose that “such is the extreme fineness, velocity and expansiveness of this active principle, that all other matter seems to be only the body, and this the soul of the universe” (13), a notion he repeats later (25). As the soul of the universe, “exist[ing] in all places and in all bodies,” electricity in itself is “sufficient” to “produce and support life throughout all nature” (13–14). For more on Gale and his humanitarian electricity as a contrast to dominant Enlightenment understandings of electricity, see James Delbourgo, “Electrical Humanitarianism,” A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ. Press, 2006) 200–238. 4. Barbara Giusti Doran, “Origins and Consolidation of Field Theory in Nineteenth Century Britain: From the Mechanical to the Electromagnetic View of Nature,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 6 (1975): 134. 5. Isaac Newton, Opticks, or a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light 4th ed. (1730; New York: Dover, 1952) 349, 353–354. 6. Patricia Fara, An Entertainment for Angels: Electricity in the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2002) 107. See also J. L. Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries: A Study of Early Modern Physics (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1979). 7. As Walter Ong puts it, associationism “rose to the ascendancy which it enjoyed in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries on a wave of mathematical and mechanistic interest whose force it would be difficult to exaggerate”; Walter

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J. Ong, “Psyche and the Geometers: Associationist Critical Theory,” Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1971) 219. 8. James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1981) 65, 67. 9. David Hartley, Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations. In Two Parts (1749; New York: Garland Publishing, 1971) 1.6. 10. Martin Kallich, “The Association of Ideas and Critical Theory: Hobbes, Locke, and Addison,” ELH 12.4 (December 1945): 291, 292. See also, Walter Jackson Bate, From Classic to Romantic: Premises of Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1946). 11. David Hartley, Observations on Man 1.28. 12. Patricia Fara, Entertainment for Angels 117, 119–120. 13. Joseph Priestley, Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air, 3 vols., 2nd ed. (London: J. Johnson, 1775) 1.xii. 14. Joseph Priestley, Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air 1.xiv. 15. James Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders 141. See especially chap ter four, “Electric Politics and Political Electricity” 129–164. 16. See Isaac Kramnick, “Eighteenth-Century Science and Radical Social Theory: The Case of Joseph Priestley’s Scientific Liberalism,” The Journal of British Studies 25.1 (January 1986): 1–30. As Christopher Lawrence notes, “Chemical pronouncements about the nature of matter and spirit when made by such men as the political radical, theologian and chemist Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) were recognized by contemporaries as utterances that questioned the structure of society itself ”; Christopher Lawrence, “The Power and The Glory: Humphry Davy and Romanticism,” Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990) 214. One of the most interesting cases of political electricity involves a young Robespierre acting as an attorney to defend the use of lightning rods against traditional beliefs concerning the weather as a manifestation of God’s pleasure or displeasure. See Jessica Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2002). 17. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Sonnet: To William Godwin,” The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, gen. ed. Kathleen Coburn, 16 vols. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969–2001) 16. 1:1:166, lines 1–4. Further citations to Coleridge will be to this edition. 18. Joseph Priestley, The History and Present State of Electricity, With Original Experiments, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (1775; New York: Johnson Reprint Corp. 1966) 1:436. 19. See Peter J. Kitson, “ ‘The Electric Fluid of Truth’: The Ideology of the Com monswealthman in Coleridge’s The Plot Discovered,” Coleridge and the Armoury of the Human Mind: Essays on His Prose Writing, ed. Peter J. Kitson and Thomas N. Corns (London: Frank Cass, 1991) 52–53, and more broadly Peter J. Kitson, “Polit ical Thinker,” The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge, ed. Lucy Newlyn (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002) 156–169, and John Morrow, Coleridge’s Political Thought: Property, Morality and the Limits of Traditional Discourse (London: Macmillan, 1990).

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20. Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments: A New Edition of Fran lin’s Experiments and Observations on Electricity, ed. I. Bernard Cohen (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ. Press, 1941) 388. Cohen’s introduction provides a thorough overview of Franklin’s contributions to electrical science and the importance of this book. For a broader view of Franklin as a scientist, see I. Bernard Cohen, Benjamin Franklin’s Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990). More recently, Philip Dray has detailed the significance of Franklin’s electrical studies in Stealing God’s Thunder: Benjamin Franklin’s Lightning Rod and the Invention of America (New York: Random House, 2005). 21. Philip Dray posits that “Perhaps this was the appeal of Franklin’s electrical ideas for progressive minds: They described not a cold, mechanical process but one that seemed alive, one in which nature seemed to act with purpose and restraint, as though out of some innate sensibility, to achieve balance”; Philip Dray, Stealing God’s Thunder 139. 22. Letter to Cadwallader Colden, 23 April 1752, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 4 (July 1, 1750–June 30, 1753), ed. Leonard W. Labaree (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1961) 298–299. 23. Patricia Fara, Entertainment for Angels 114. On the physiocrats, see Philip Dray, Stealing God’s Thunder 139. 24. Benjamin Franklin, A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper-Currency (1729), Writings, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay (New York: Library of America, 1987) 126. Further citations to this work will be given parenthetically. 25. See the essays in The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992), a volume comprising Haskell’s two-part essay on “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility,” responses by David Brion Davis and John Ashworth, and Haskell’s reply to their responses. 26. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004) 13–14. 27. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1850 (1958; New York: Harper and Row, 1966) 36, 42. 28. See Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987). 29. As Mark Kipperman has recently explored, Coleridge’s move away from the implications of Davy’s science paralleled his retreat from his earlier radical politics, as organic wholeness and formal idealism, with a strict distinction between an immaterial consciousness and a material world, took the place of a focus on dynamic, fluid process. See Mark Kipperman, “Coleridge, Shelley, Davy, and Science’s Millennium,” Criticism 40.3 (summer 1998): 409–436. 30. Maria M. Tatar, Spellbound: Studies on Mesmerism and Literature (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1978) 71. 31. Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983) 67, 91; further citations will be given parenthetically. 32. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwood, 1990) 3, 9. Further citations will be given parenthetically. 33. Eagleton, for example, refers to Schiller’s aesthetic as “Gramsci’s ‘hegemony’

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in a different key”; Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic 106. See, in particular, Paul de Man’s lecture on “Kant and Schiller” in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1996) 129–162; and David Lloyd, “Arnold, Ferguson, Schiller: Aesthetic Culture and the Politics of Aesthetics,” Cultural Critique 2 (winter 1986): 137–169. 34. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, In a Series of Letters, ed. and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (1793–1794; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967) 139. Further citations will be given parenthetically. 35. See Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988) and Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics trans. Herbert Marcuse and Erica Sherover (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978). 36. As Paul Hamilton puts it, in Schiller’s development of Kantian aesthetics, “culture [takes on] the role of preserving a civil society lying behind the state apparatuses or executive institutions of the State”; Paul Hamilton, Metaromanticism: Aesthetics, Literature, Theory (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003) 26. See also Jonathan Hess’s claim that for Schiller “Art represents in this context not a denial of the political but an endeavor to construct the aesthetic as an alternative sphere of political agency”; Jonathan M. Hess, Reconstituting the Body Politic: Enlightenment, Public Culture and the Invention of Aesthetic Autonomy (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1999) 80. 37. Josef Chytry, The Aesthetic State: A Quest in Modern German Thought (Berkeley: Univ of California Press, 1989) 73; Kitson, “ ‘The Electric Fluid of Truth’ ” 57. Michael John Kooy, in the most extensive study of the relationship between Schiller’s aesthetic education and Coleridge’s clerisy, summarizes that “the claims Coleridge makes on behalf of the imagination imply an educative imperative best understood in terms of ‘cultivation’ or Bildung, according to which the experience of art as undetermined feeling indirectly results in real, though unspecified, moral and social benefits. . . . Coleridge reworks Schiller’s thesis in the Aesthetic Letters”; Michael John Kooy, Coleridge, Schiller, and Aesthetic Education (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2002) 1. 38. The literature on republicanism in the Revolutionary Era and the transformation to a liberal society is immense. For a summation of the republican thesis as consolidated most famously by J. G. A. Pocock, Bernard Bailyn, and Gordon Wood in the late 1960s and early 1970s, see Robert E. Shalhope, “Toward a Republican Synthesis: The Emergence of an Understanding of Republicanism in American Historiography,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 29.1 (January 1972): 49– 80. This interpretation of the founding of the new nation stresses the force of ideals of disinterested, virtuous control, by those sufficiently removed from the temptations of the market, as the key to political stability and the protection of property rights, against a liberalism which would emphasize self-interested pursuit of wealth and individual rights. For accounts of the ways republicanism and liberalism were intertwined even in the Revolutionary Era, see the essays in Joyce Oldham Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992). On the 1790s as a turning point in the United States, see Gordon S. Wood, “The Enemy is Us: Democratic Capitalism in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 16.2 (summer 1996): 293–308.

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39. Alfred Cobban makes the strongest connection in Edmund Burke and the Revolt against the Eighteenth Century: A Study of the Political and Social Thinking of Burke, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1929). 40. J. G. A. Pocock, “The Political Economy of Burke’s Analysis of the French Revolution,” Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985) 205. 41. Edmund Burke, Second Letter on a Regicide Peace (1796), vol. 9 of The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, gen. ed. Paul Langford, 9 vols. to date (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) 292. Further citations will be given parenthetically. 42. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987) 139. 43. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), Collected Works 47 vols. (New York: International 1976) 6:487. 44. See J. G. A. Pocock, “The Political Economy of Burke’s Analysis of the French Revolution” 193–212. This essay, Pocock contends, adds to his earlier analysis which emphasized Burke’s roots in commonwealth constitutionalism, “Burke and the Ancient Constitution: A Problem in the History of Ideas,” Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (1971; Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989) 202–232. 45. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), ed. J. T. Boulton (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958) 11, 13. Further citations will be given parenthetically. 46. Tom Furniss, Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993) 108. 47. Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990) 99. 48. John Morrow contrasts Coleridge with Burke by noting that “The growth of commerce and the pervasive influence of its intellectual and moral corollaries had made the basis of the traditional aristocratic order outmoded and inadequate, and Coleridge’s mature political theory attempted to provide a substitute for it”; John Morrow, Coleridge’s Political Thought 161. 49. Jerome Christensen, Coleridge’s Blessed Machine of Language (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981) 184, 243. 50. As his most recent biographer notes, in the 1820s, Morse was “New York City’s, perhaps the nation’s, chief spokesman for American art”; Kenneth Silverman, Lightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse (New York: Knopf, 2003) 85. Other important biographies include Carleton Mabee, The American Leonardo, A Life of Samuel F. B. Morse (1943; New York: Octagon Books, 1969) and Oliver W. Larkin, Samuel F. B. Morse and American Democratic Art (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1954). 51. Marshall Foletta, Coming to Terms with Democracy: Federalist Intellectuals and the Shaping of an American Culture (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 2001) 3, 4. See also William C. Dowling, Poetry and Ideology in Revolutionary Connecticut (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1990) and Linda K. Kerber, Federalists in Dissent: Imagery and Ideology in Jeffersonian America (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1970). 52. Lewis P. Simpson, “Federalism and the Crisis of Literary Order,” American Literature 32.3 (November 1960): 253.

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53. Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments 194. 54. Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography (1791), Writings 1341, 1397. 55. Benjamin Franklin, “Information to Those Who Would Remove to America” (1784), Writings 975–976. 56. Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990) 129. 57. See Laura Rigal, The American Manufactory: Art, Labor, and the World of Things in the Early Republic (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998). 58. Benjamin Rush, “Of the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic,” Essays, Literary, Moral and Philosophical, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Thomas and William Bradford, 1806) 15. 59. Benjamin Rush, “Of the Mode of Education” 14–15, 8, 14. 60. On Rush’s indebtedness to Hartleian associationism, see Donald J. D’Elia, “Benjamin Rush, David Hartley, and the Revolutionary Use of Psychology,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 114.2 (April, 1970): 109–118. 61. As Rigal puts it, such “metaphors were not coincidental; they indicate the deep structure of American federalism,” which was “both artifact and agent of the changing technologies of American manufacturing itself ”; this productivist, technological model of literature was linked to “the federalist and republican—and the Federalist and Republican—projects of collective self-making,” the creation of the nation and of selves in technological terms; Laura Rigal, The American Manufactory 9, 120. 62. On The North American Review, its neoclassicism, and its importance to early American literary criticism, see George E. De Mille, Literary Criticism in America: A Preliminary Survey (New York: Russell and Russell, 1931); M. F. Heiser, “The Decline of Neoclassicism, 1801–1848,” Transitions in American Literary History, ed. Harry Hayden Clark (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1953) 91–160; and William Charvat, The Origins of American Critical Thought, 1810–1835 (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1936). As Leon Jackson has argued, through his sponsorship of The Panoplist and through his geographies, the elder Morse both worked against and became a key figure in the emergence of a new kind of literary marketplace in early-nineteenth-century New England. See Leon Jackson, “Jedediah Morse and the Transformation of Print Culture in New England, 1784–1826,” Early American Literature 34.1 (1999): 2–31. 63. Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture: From Revolution Through Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986) 44. See also G. Harrison Orians, “The Rise of Romanticism, 1805–1855,” Transitions in American Literary History, ed. Harry Hayden Clark (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1953) 163–244. 64. On this “synthesis,” see Foletta, Coming to Terms with Democracy, especially 120–125. 65. For a reading of Cooper’s most famous novel in terms of his late republicanism, see Robert A. Ferguson, “The Last Early Republican Text,” Reading the Early Republic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2004) 254–281. 66. Samuel F. B. Morse: His Letters and Journals, ed. Edward Lind Morse, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1914) 2: 26. Further citations will appear parenthetically.

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67. Samuel F. B. Morse, Academies of Art. A Discourse, Delivered on Thursday, May 3, 1827, in the Chapel of Columbia College, before the National Academy of Design, on its first anniversary (New York: G. and C. Carvill, 1827) 23. Further citations to this work will be given parenthetically. 68. Morse, letter to parents, dated 3 May 1815, quoted in Paul Staiti, “Samuel F. B. Morse and the Grand Style,” Samuel F. B. Morse, Grey Art Gallery and Study Center NYU Sept. 14–Oct 23, 1982 24. 69. Samuel F. B. Morse, Lectures on the Affinity of Painting with the Other Fine Arts, ed. Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr. (Columbia, Univ of Missouri Press, 1983) 72. 70. Terence Martin, The Instructed Vision: The Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and the Origins of American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1961) 110. 71. On the other hand, the associationist foundation in individual experience seemed to suggest the potential incompatibility of different persons’ associations, and hence their thoughts, tastes, values, thus undermining the basis of neoclassical theory and giving rise to the romantic emphasis on the individual, subjective nature of our interaction with the world. On the connection between the associationist empirical emphasis on experience and romantic individualism, see, for example, Walter Ong’s comment on “the very real historical connection between associationist criticism and that concern with individuality which makes so much of the singular (person or experience) and generates the subjectivism coincident with the romantic movement” (Walter Ong, “Psyche and the Geometers” 224) or Walter Jackson Bate’s contention that many associationist ideas “later served as the main foundation for many of the familiar tenets of English romantic poets and critics” (Walter Jackson Bate, From Classic to Romantic 102). 72. Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, vol. 2 of The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980) 132. The quotation is from section 23 of Canto 4, lines 202–203, 207. 73. As Nicolai Cikovsky summarizes, Morse’s thought was more “revisionary than revolutionary” in its challenge to eighteenth-century precepts; Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., ed. Lectures on the Affinity of Painting with the Other Fine Arts by Samuel F. B. Morse (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1983) 26. 74. Daniel J. Czitrom, Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1982) 3. 75. As Paul Staiti summarizes it, both painting and technology were “Christian instruments, redeeming and unifying society”; Paul J. Staiti, Samuel F. B. Morse (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989) 223. See also Brooke Hindle, “From Art to Technology and Science,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Soc. 96.1 (1986): 25–37. 76. As Ben Knights emphasizes, “The development of the idea of the clerisy is inseparable from the war against mechanist philosophy and associationist psychology”; Ben Knights, The Idea of the Clerisy in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978) 41. 77. On this broader point, see especially John F. Kasson, Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776–1900 (1976; New York: Penguin, 1977). 78. Kenneth Silverman, Lightning Man 80.







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79. Samuel F. B. Morse, Fine Arts. A Reply to Article X, no. LVIII, in the North American Review, entitled ‘Academies of Art,’ &c. (New York: G & C Carvill, 1828) 9–10. 80. Oliver Larkin, Samuel F. B. Morse 88. 81. Kenneth Silverman, Lightning Man 13. 82. James Delbourgo’s A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders focuses on these two competing (but interdependent) uses and understandings of electricity. According to Delbourgo, the American Enlightenment embraced both scientific understandings of electricity in rational terms and more popular experiments and conceptions emphasizing it as “ecstatic and antinomian: it embraced nonrational experience as a positive good in an entrepreneurial and anticentralist culture awash in a sea of personal meanings” (10–11). In this chapter, I focus on Morse’s attempt to delimit this “nonrational” and “ecstatic” experience. Delbourgo’s study of the antinomian strain of early American electricity could be read as the pre-history to the later romanticism I focus on. 83. Alexander Jones, Historical Sketch of the Electric Telegraph: Including its Rise and Progress in the United States (New York: George P. Putnam, 1852) 5. 84. James W. Carey, “Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph,” Prospects 8 (1983): 307. 85. Ezra Gannett, The Atlantic Telegraph: A Discourse Delivered in the First Church (Boston: Crosby, Nicholas, and Co., 1858) 17. 86. Charles F. Briggs and Augustus Maverick, The Story of the Telegraph, and A History of the Great Atlantic Cable (New York: Rudd and Carlton, 1858) 13. 87. [Anon.], “Telegraphs and Progress—The Cause,” Littell’s Living Age 3 January 1857, 58; George Fitzhugh, “The Atlantic Telegraph, Ancient Art, and Modern Progress,” DeBow’s Review 25 (November 1858): 508. 88. Edward Hitchcock, “The Telegraphic System of the Universe,” The Religion of Geology and its Connected Sciences (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, and Company, 1852) 410. 89. Edward Hitchcock, “Telegraphic System of the Universe” 423, 439. 90. Jeffrey Sconce, “Mediums and Media,” Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2000) 25–26. For more on mesmerism in the nineteenth century, see Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998). On spiritualism and feminism, see especially Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: Beacon Press,1989). 91. As Werner Sollors has shown, the idea of the atmospheric telegraph was also used to conjure up Native American figures; Werner Sollors, “Dr. Benjamin Franklin’s Celestial Telegraph, or Indian Blessings to Gas-Lit American Drawing Rooms,” American Quarterly 35.5 (winter 1983): 459–480. 92. Edward Hitchcock, “Telegraphic System of the Universe” 413, quoting Charles Babbage, The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, A Fragment, 2d ed. (London, 1838) 116–118. 93. [Anon.], “Atmospheric (Subterranean) Telegraph vs. the ‘Underground Railroad,’ ” American Telegraph Magazine 1 (July 1853): 277. As Russ Castronovo has pointed out, notions of spiritual electricity, as evoked in séances and mesmerism,

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provided important tropes for some abolitionists to imagine a kind of disembodied, inter-racial union. See Russ Castronovo, “The Antislavery Unconscious: Mesmerism, Vodun, and ‘Equality,’ ” Mississippi Quarterly 53.1 (winter 1999–2000): 41–56. 94. James W. Carey and John J. Quirk, “The Mythos of the Electronic Revolution,” American Scholar 39 (spring 1970) 228. 95. James Carey and John Quirk, “Mythos of the Electronic Revolution” 228, 234. 96. For a discussion of the emergence of the Western Union monopoly, see Robert Luther Thompson, Wiring a Continent: The History of the Telegraph Industry in the United States, 1832–1866 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press 1947). For the impact of the telegraphic industry on the transformation to corporate-sponsored research, see Paul Israel, From Machine Shop to Industrial Laboratory: Telegraphy and the Changing Context of American Invention, 1830–1920 (Baltimore: John Hopkins Univ. Press, 1992). For the importance of the telegraphic industry on legal issues, see Lester G. Lindley, The Impact of the Telegraph on Contract Law (New York: Garland, 1990). 97. On imperialism and the telegraph see Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981); Bruce J. Hunt, “Doing Science in a Global Empire: Cable Telegraphy and Electrical Physics in Victorian Britain,” Victorian Science in Context, ed. Bernard Lightman (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997) 312–333; Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989); and Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-Century America (1979; New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990). 98. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, Collected Works 5:36. 99. Karl Marx, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof,” Capital vol. 1 (New York: International, 1967) 79. 100. See Menahem Blondheim, News Over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844–1897 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1994). 101. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Bread and the Newspaper,” The Atlantic Monthly 8.47 (September 1861): 348. 102. William F. Channing, Notes on the Medical Application of Electricity (Boston: Daniel Davis, Jr., 1849) 1. William Francis Channing was the son of the elder William Ellery Channing, the influential Unitarian minister, and cousin of William Ellery Channing, the Transcendentalist poet. 103. William F. Channing, “On the Municipal Electric Telegraph; especially in its application to Fire Alarms,” American Journal of Science and Arts 2nd ser., 13 (January 1852): 58–59. 104. S. Littell, “On the Influence of Electrical Fluctuations as a Cause of Disease,” Littell’s Living Age 10 October 1857:66. 105. [Anon.], “What are the Nerves?” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 24 (May 1862): 758–759. 106. George Fitzhugh, “The Atlantic Telegraph” 509. 107. [Anon.] “The Nerve of the Continent,” Philadelphia North American, 15 January 1846, quoted in Daniel Czitrom, Media and the American Mind 12.

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108. [Anon.] “Influence of the Telegraph upon Literature,” United States Democratic Review 22 (May 1848): 411. 109. [Anon.] “The Telegraph,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 47 (August 1873): 334. Further citations will be given parenthetically. 110. J. W. Moore, “The Telegraph,” DeBow’s Review 16 (March 1854): 261, 254. Moore’s article appeared in four installments from August, 1853, to March, 1854, in volume 15, numbers 2 and 5 (pages 109–128, 460–471), and volume 16, numbers 2 and 3 (pages 159–170, 251–262). Further references to this four-part article will appear parenthetically with volume and page number. 111. [Anon.] “The Telegraph,” The Atlantic Monthly 2 (October 1858): 591–592. 112. Ezra Gannett, The Atlantic Telegraph 7. 113. [Anon.] “Morse’s Electro-Magnetic Telegraph,” DeBow’s Review 1 (February 1846): 134, 133. 114. Kenneth Silverman, Lightning Man 103–104. 115. James W. Taylor, The Useful and the Beautiful—Their Relations and their Harmony: An Address Delivered Before the Alpha Delta Phi Society of Hamilton College, at its Twelfth Anniversary (Utica: R. W. Roberts, 1844) 15. Further citations will be given parenthetically. 116. For a discussion of this lineage in terms of Coleridge’s idea of the clerisy discussed above, see Ben Knights, The Idea of the Clerisy in the Nineteenth Century. 117. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. Samuel Lipman (1869; New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1994) 32–33. Further citations will be given parenthetically. 2. Aesthetic Electricity







 

 







1. Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854; Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971) 52. Further citations will be given parenthetically. 2. See Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964) 242–265. 3. Mark Kipperman summarizes that while “Coleridge came to see scientific knowledge, in the fashion of Naturphilosophie, as knowledge that implied the reconciliation of material polarities in the ideal absolute. . . . Shelley’s is a world of ideal, but essentially immanent, forces evolving with an inner necessity, an organic purposiveness Coleridge associated with pantheism. Moreover, Shelley’s social hopes were linked to such immanent forces, since these unfold in a real time and within a human history that progressively comprehends and harnesses them.” Mark Kipperman, “Coleridge, Shelley, Davy, and Science’s Millennium,” Criticism 40.3 (summer 1998): 410. 4. F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1941) 6. 5. T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, 3rd ed. (London: Methuen, 1932) 1, 2. 6. Andrews Norton, “The New School in Literature and Religion” (1838), The Transcendentalists, An Anthology, ed. Perry Miller (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1950) 193.

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7. Andrews Norton, “Lord Byron’s Character and Writings,” The North American Review 21 (October 1825): 349. 8. Frederic Henry Hedge, “Schiller” (1834), The Transcendentalists, ed. Perry Miller 80. 9. A. H. Everett, Review of Life and Writings of Schiller, The North American Review 16 (April 1823): 401, 403. 10. Orestes Brownson, “Education of the People” (1836), The Transcendentalists, ed. Perry Miller, 102. 11. Orestes Brownson, New Views of Christianity, Society, and the Church (1836), The Transcendentalists, ed Perry Miller, 120, 121, 120. 12. George Bancroft, “On the Progress of Civilization, or Reasons Why the Natural Association of Men of Letters Is with the Democracy” (1838), The Transcendentalists, ed. Perry Miller, 426. 13. As Anne Mellor has described at length, for Byron and Shelley, Schlegel’s notion of romantic irony, with its “denial of any absolute order in natural or human events,” its view “that the universe is essentially chaotic,” provides an important alternative to the natural supernaturalism of Coleridge and Wordsworth grounded in German naturphilosophie and German idealism; Anne K. Mellor, English Romantic Irony (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press 1980) 7. 14. John Abernethy, An Enquiry into the Probability and Rationality of Mr. Hunter’s ‘Theory of Life’ (1814), qtd. in Marilyn Butler, “Introduction,” Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus, the 1818 Text, by Mary Shelley (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994) xviii–xix. See Butler’s introduction for a thorough account of the Vitalism debate in the context of Frankenstein’s composition and the Shelleys’ interest in radical science. 15. For more on the Vitalism controversy and its relationship to British romanticism, see Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001); Edward S. Reed, From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychology from Erasmus Darwin to William James (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1997); and Owsei Temkin, “Basic Science, Medicine, and the Romantic Era,” The Double Face of Janus and Other Essays in the History of Medicine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1977) 345–372. 16. For a discussion of Coleridge’s take on the debate between Abernethy and Lawrence, see Trevor H. Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981). For an overview of the relationship between medicine and electricity, see Margaret Rowbottom and Charles Susskind, Electricity and Medicine: History of their Interaction (San Francisco: San Francisco Press, 1984). 17. George Gordon Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, vol. 2 of The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980) 132, lines 202–214. Further citations will be to this edition of Byron’s work and will cite line numbers. 18. As numerous commentators (see Temkin 360–363) have noted, Lawrence was a vitalist in the sense that he saw organic structure itself as supplying the lifeforce which dead body parts themselves lacked. One central influence on Lawrence was the German naturalist J. F. Blumenbach, whose vital materialism, as Timothy Lenoir has termed it, was deeply indebted to Kant’s consideration of teleology in

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Critique of Judgment. See Timothy Lenoir, “Kant, Blumenbach, and Vital Materialism in German Biology,” Isis 71.1 (March 1980): 77–108. Percy Shelley’s own underformulated vital materialism, it seems, may be as indirectly indebted to Kant as his aesthetics. On Erasmus Darwin’s broader influence on romantic poetry, see Desmond King-Hele, Erasmus Darwin and the Romantic Poets (New York: St. Martin’s 1986). 19. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, 10 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926–1930) 7:122. Unless otherwise noted, all references to Percy Shelley will be to this edition by volume and page number. 20. Marc Redfield, The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2003) 171. 21. Friedrich Schlegel, “On Incomprehensibility [Über die Unverständlichkeit]” (1800), The Origins of Modern Critical Thought: German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism from Lessing to Hegel, ed. David Simpson (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988) 185–186. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy argue for the importance of German romanticism, specifically the Schlegels, as a predecessor of the concerns and ideas of poststructuralism in The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988). 22. Edward Reed, From Soul to Mind 14–16. Alan Richardson notes of Darwin and the other leading thinkers on the mind that “They all emphasize that the mind is an active processor, rather than passive register, of experience, holding this in common with German idealist philosophy and with Scottish ‘common sense’ psychology but uniquely seeking to elucidate the active mind in neurological terms,” so that “they also share a biological rather than mechanistic conception of physiological and mental functioning, here (as in their active conception of mind) departing from Hartley and Locke”; Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind 6. As Carl Grabo pointed out decades ago, in Prometheus Bound, “The identification of life, love, and electricity is implicit,” an identification related to Shelley’s understanding of electricity both as a fluid, an ether, and as a, if not, the vital force; Carl Grabo, A Newton Among Poets: Shelley’s Use of Science in Prometheus Unbound (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1930) 132. 23. See Robert Kaufman, “Legislators of the Post-Everything World: Shelley’s Defence of Adorno,” ELH 63.3 (fall 1996): 707–733. 24. On Percy Shelley’s relationship to associationist thought, see Bryan Keith Shelley, “The Synthetic Imagination: Shelley and Associationism,” Wordsworth Circle 14.1 (winter 1983): 68–73. 25. Karl Kroeber, Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of the Mind (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1994) 125. 26. Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind 152. 27. See Marc Redfield, Politics of Aesthetics, Paul Hamilton, Metaromanticism: Aesthetics, Literature, Theory (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003); Robert Kaufman, “Legislators of the Post-Everything World.” 28. Thomas Jefferson Hogg, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1933) 51, 52.

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29. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or The Whale (1851; Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1988) 165, 166. Further citations will be provided parenthetically. 30. Herman Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860 (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1987) 249. 31. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850; Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1962) 36–37. Further citations will be given parenthetically. 32. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Artist of the Beautiful,” Mosses from an Old Manse (1846; Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1974) 475. 33. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (1851; Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1965) 263–264. Further citations will be given parenthetically. 34. Samuel Chase Coale, “Mysteries of Mesmerism: Hawthorne’s Haunted House,” A Historical Guide to Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Larry J. Reynolds (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001) 49. See also, Samuel Chase Coale, Mesmerism and Hawthorne: Mediums of American Romance (Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1998) and Taylor Stoehr, Hawthorne’s Mad Scientists: Pseudoscience and Social Science in Nineteenth-Century Life and Letters (Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String, 1978). Perhaps the most insightful reading of mesmerism in the novel comes from Gillian Brown, “Women’s Work and Bodies in The House of the Seven Gables,” Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1990) 63–95. 35. Nathaniel Hawthorne to Sophia Peabody, 18 October 1841, The Letters, 1813– 1843, ed. Thomas Woodson, L. Neal Smith, and Norman Holmes Pearson (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1984) 588. 36. Gerald Graff, “Co-optation,” The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989) 175. 37. Sacvan Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge, 1993) 58 fn, 59. Needless to say, while I would largely agree with Bercovitch’s account of the politics of Hawthorne’s novels, I dissent from his blanket statement about American romantics. 38. James W. Carey, “Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph,” Prospects 8 (1983): 309. Further citations will be given parenthetically. 39. Karl Marx, Capital, vol.1, ed. Frederick Engels (New York: International Publishers, 1967) 72–73. 40. Orestes Brownson’s The Spirit-Rapper; An Autobiography (Boston: Little, Brown, 1854) provides a similar, more famous attack linking transcendentalism, spiritualism, and radical politics. 41. Henry W. Parker, “Von Blixum’s Heroic Experiment,” The American Whig Review 3 (March 1846): 290. Further citations will be given parenthetically. 42. See Henry W. Parker, The Spirit of Beauty; Essays Scientific and Aesthetic (New York: J. B. Alden, 1888). 43. Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. With a Sequel (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1857) 172. For an account of the controversy surrounding Vestiges, see James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000). 44. [Anon.], “Thoughts on Reading,” The American Whig Review 1 (May 1845): 490.

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45. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), Collected Works 47 vols. (New York: International 1976) 6:488, 487, 493. 46. My discussion here builds on the focus on bodies in Moby-Dick, in criticism such as Samuel Otter’s “Getting Inside Heads in Moby-Dick,” Melville’s Anatomies (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1999) 101–171; Sharon Cameron’s The Corporeal Self: Allegories of the Body in Melville and Hawthorne (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1981); and Doran Larson’s “Of Blood and Words: Ahab’s Rhetorical Body,” Modern Language Studies 25.2 (spring 1995): 18–33. 47. Herman Melville, Mardi and A Voyage Thither (1849; Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1970) 538. 48. Herman Melville, Pierre, or The Ambiguities (1852; Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1971) 157. Further citations will be to the Northwestern-Newberry edition and will appear parenthetically. 49. Menahem Blondheim, News Over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844–1897 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1994). 50. As David Hochfelder has described, “The telegraph performed three fundamental operations upon the language: compression, encryption, and standardization”; David Hochfelder, “Electrical Communication, Language, and Self,” Technohistory: Using the History of American Technology in Interdisciplinary Research, ed. Chris Hables Gray (Malabar, Flor: Kriedger, 1996) 123. 51. Edwin Gabler, The American Telegrapher: A Social History, 1860–1900 (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1988), especially 79–80. 52. [Anon.], “The Telegraph,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 47 (August 1873): 334. 53. “The Telegraph” 358. 54. Ella Cheever Thayer, Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes (New York: G. W. Carleton 1879) 67–68. 55. Adam Frank has suggested that Charles Peirce’s definition of the index may derive from his experience with the telegraph in the U.S. Coast Survey: “Perceptions of telegraph may be crucial to Peirce’s theoretical elaborations, and via Poe as well as Peirce, to Derrida’s”; Adam Frank, “Valdemar’s Tongue, Poe’s Telegraphy,” ELH 72.3 (fall 2005): 639. 56. Lester G. Lindley, The Constitution Faces Technology: The Relationship of the National Government to the Telegraph, 1866–1884 (1971; New York: Arno Press, 1975) 16–17. 57. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969) 236–237. 58. Rachman argues that “In Pierre, -ness puts into words not only the sensation of exhaustion but the structure of exhausted experience. As a suffix it implies that any word can become a condition, and thus part of a complex of stimulation (tinglingness) and depletion (deathful faintness, whirlingness). . . . symptoms of fatigue are caught up in a transpersonal cultural dynamic in which feelings are connected to categories of feeling, part culturally constructed and in part culturally determined”; Stephen Rachman, “Melville’s Pierre and Nervous Exhaustion; or ‘The Vacant Whirlingness of the Bewilderingness,’ ” Literature and Medicine 16.2 (fall 1997): 237.

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59. According to the OED, tingling originally was synonymous with tinkling, with a ringing in the ears, yet by the time Melville was writing it had shifted to signify primarily a thrilling or stinging sensation or emotion. 60. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: New Left Books, 1977) 34. 61. Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” October 62 (fall 1992): 5. In the American context, John Dewey provides a parallel and contemporaneous argument to Benjamin’s. He contends that the basic human, biological need for life to attain a type of equilibrium within its environment “reach[es] to the roots of the esthetic in experience”: “In a world like ours, every living creature that attains sensibility welcomes order with a response of harmonious feeling whenever it finds a congruous order about it”; John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934; New York: Perigree, 1980) 14–15. 62. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Bread and the Newspaper,” The Atlantic Monthly 8.47 (September 1861): 348. 63. Laura Otis, “The Metaphoric Circuit: Organic and Technological Communication in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Ideas 63.1 (Jan 2002): 105–128 and “The Other End of the Wire: Uncertainties of Organic and Telegraphic Communication,” Configurations 9.2 (spring 2001): 181–206. Otis quotes DuBoisReymond’s 1851 statement that “ ‘the wonder of our time, electrical telegraphy, was long ago modeled in the animal machine. But the similarity between the two apparatus, the nervous system and the electric telegraph, has a much deeper foundation. It is more than similarity; it is a kinship between the two, an agreement not merely of the effects, but also perhaps of the causes’ ” (“Metaphoric Circuit” 105). See also Laura Otis, Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2001); Timothy Lenoir, “Helmholtz and the Materialities of Communication,” Osiris 2nd series, 9 (1994): 185–207; and John D. Spillane, The Doctrine of the Nerves: Chapters in the History of Neurology (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981). 64. Laura Otis, “The Metaphoric Circuit” 118. 65. Laura Otis, “The Other End of the Wire” 184. 66. On this point, see Wai Chee Dimock, Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1989) 153–154. 67. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Collected Works 6:487. 68. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983) 33–34. 69. See Patricia Fara’s discussion in An Entertainment for Angels: Electricity in the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2002) 139–144. For more on Melville’s use of torpedo-fish imagery here and elsewhere, see Harold Aspiz, “The ‘Lurch of the Torpedo-Fish’: Electrical Concepts in Billy Budd,” ESQ 26 (1980): 127–136. 70. Herman Melville, Correspondence (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1993) 190–194. 71. For an insightful account of the role of reading and writing in the novel, see Edgar A. Dryden, “The Entangled Text: Melville’s Pierre and the Problem of Read

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ing,” Herman Melville: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Myra Jehlen (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1994) 100–115. 72. For a reading of this passage in the context of Melville’s critique of idealistic psychology, see Michael S. Kearns, “Phantoms of the Mind: Melville’s Criticism of Idealistic Psychology,” ESQ 30 (1984): 40–50. 73. Henry David Thoreau, The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Bradford Torrey, 14 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906) 2:442 (Sept. 2, 1851). Further references to Thoreau’s journal will be given parenthetically with volume and page number and date. 74. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” 236. 3. Frederick Douglass’s Electric Words











n­

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1. Frederick Douglass, The Narrative of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (1845), Autobiographies (New York: The Library of America, 1994) 42. Further citations will be given parenthetically. 2. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Autobiographies 291. Further citations will be given parenthetically. 3. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1787; New York: Norton, 1982) 140. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999); David Lloyd, “Race under Representation,” Culture/Contexture: Explorations in Anthropology and Literary Studies, ed. E. Valentine Daniel and Jeffrey M. Peck (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1996) 249–272; and David Lloyd, “Arnold, Ferguson, Schiller: Aesthetic Culture and the Politics of Aesthetics,” Cultural Critique 2 (winter 1986): 137–169. 4. Jonathan M. Hess, Reconstituting the Body Politic: Enlightenment, Public Culture and the Invention of Aesthetic Autonomy (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1999) 26. 5. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry (1735), trans. Karl Asch e brenner and William B. Holther (Berkeley: Univ. of California, 1954) 78. 6. John Carlos Rowe, At Emerson’s Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1997) 5, 11. 7. See James Delbourgo, “Electric Politics and Political Electricity,” A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ. Press, 2006) 129–164. 8. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin or, Life Among the Lowly (1852: New York: Penguin 1981) 544. Further citations will be given parenthetically. 9. Jane Tompkins perhaps most forcefully and famously articulates this understanding of sentimentalism as embracing a kind of spiritualist worldview; see Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford, 1985). 10. Gregg Camfield, “The Moral Aesthetics of Sentimentality: A Missing Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 43.3 (December 1988): 325. See also June Howard, “What is Sentimentality?” American Literary History 11.1 (spring 1999): 63–81.



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11. Marianne Noble, “The Ecstasies of Sentimental Wounding in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Yale Journal of Criticism 10.2 (1997): 295–320, and Marianne Noble, The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000). See also Karen Sánchez-Eppler, “Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhetorics of Feminism and Abolitionism,” Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism and the Politics of the Body (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1993) 14–49, and Shirley Samuels, “The Identity of Slavery,” The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Shirley Samuels (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992) 157–171. 12. Glenn Hendler, “The Structure of Sentimental Experience,” Yale Journal of Criticism 12.1 (spring 1999): 148. 13. Marianne Noble, “The Ecstasies of Sentimental Wounding” 304; Glenn Hendler, “The Structure of Sentimental Experience” 146. 14. See Lori Merish, Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2000) on the importance of sentimental objects to mid-century literary sentimentalism. 15. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, “Sentimental Aesthetics,” American Literature 76.3 (September 2004): 498. Further citations will be given parenthetically. 16. For the classic definition of romantic racialism, see George M. Fredrickson, “Uncle Tom and the Anglo-Saxons: Romantic Racialism in the North,” The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971) 97–129. 17. See Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lady Byron Vindicated (1870). 18. [Anon.], Rev. of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 8 October 1852:1. 19. Frederick Douglass, “The Anti-Slavery Movement,” The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, ed. Philip S. Foner, 5 vols. (New York: International Publishers, 1950–1975) 2:356. 20. Frederick Douglass, “The Trials and Triumphs of Self-Made Men: An Address Delivered in Halifax, England, on 4 January 1860,” The Frederick Douglass Papers. Series One: Speeches, Debates, Interviews, ed. John W. Blassingame and John R. McKivigan. 5 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979–1992) 3:292. 21. [Anon.], “Telegraphs and Progress—The Cause,” Littell’s Living Age, 3 January 1857, 58. As Hugo Meier has pointed out, the Atlantic telegraph became “in the popular mind the keynote of peace and international brotherhood”; Hugo Meier, “American Technology and the Nineteenth-Century World,” American Quarterly 10.2.1 (summer 1958): 126. 22. Charles F. Briggs and Augustus Maverick, The Story of the Telegraph, and A History of the Great Atlantic Cable (New York: Rudd and Carlton, 1858) 21–22. 23. The authors’ two references to “all the nations of the earth” suggests that they have in mind not simply the American and English “races” (as George Stocking notes, this was a “period when almost any human group . . . might be called a ‘race’”), but the emerging pseudo-scientific, biological notion of “race”; George Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (New York: The Free Press, 1968) 65. Briggs was a literary celebratory, the author of the novel Harry Franco: A  

 



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Tale of the Great Panic (1839). More significant, he was one of the editors of Putnam’s Monthly, the magazine that published Melville’s “Benito Cereno.” 24. H. L. Wayland, “Results of the Increased Facility and Celerity of InterCommunication,” New Englander 16 (November 1858): 797. Further citations will be given parenthetically. 25. Russ Castronovo points out the role technology played in Douglass’s consideration of “cultural intermixing” in the postbellum era: “Douglass’s appreciation for the modern pathways of communication . . . . focuses attention on the ways in which political states endanger their own cultural sovereignty as they come into contact with the embodiments of cultural difference”; “ ‘As to Nation, I Belong to None’: Ambivalence, Diaspora, and Frederick Douglass,” American Transcendental Quarterly 9.3 (September 1995): 256–257. 26. Frederick Douglass, “The Sultan and the Czar,” The North Star 9 November 1849. 27. Lisa Brawley, “Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom and the Fugitive Tourist Industry,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 30.1 (fall 1996): 120. 28. I develop these tensions at more length in my “The Telegraph in Black and White,” ELH 69.3 (fall 2002): 805–833. 29. This is a point suggested, in reference to slaves, by Carolyn Karcher, Shadow Over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and Violence in Melville’s America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1980) 101–102, and in reference to American Indians, by Michael Paul Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (New York: Knopf, 1983) 167, and developed at more length by, respectively, Robert S. Levine’s “Pierre’s Blackened Hand,” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 1.1 (March 1999): 23–44 (although he emphasizes the ambiguity of Pierre’s racial status) and Yukiko Oshima’s “Isabel as a Native American Ghost in Saddle Meadows: The Background of Pierre’s Race,” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 5.2 (October 2003): 5–17. 30. Herman Melville, Pierre, or The Ambiguities (1852; Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1971) 46, 362. Further citations will be given parenthetically. 31. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet” (1844), Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: The Library of America, 1983) 467. Further citations to Emerson, unless otherwise noted, will be to this edition and will be given parenthetically. 32. Sharon Cameron, “The Way of Life by Abandonment: Emerson’s Impersonal,” Critical Inquiry 25.1 (autumn 1998): 6 fn 10. Further citations will be given parenthetically. 33. Rowe continues by contending that Emersonian aesthetic dissent provides “the basis of the literary modernism that would find its primary critical function in the aesthetic irony practiced by the high moderns and theorized by Anglo-American New Criticism”; John Carlos Rowe, At Emerson’s Tomb 1. 34. For more on Emerson’s ideas about technology, science, and art, see my “Mechanical Means: Emersonian Aesthetic Transcendence and Antebellum Technology,” MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 65.2 (June 2004): 245–268; Laura Dassow Walls, “The Anatomy of Truth: Emerson’s Poetic Science,” Configurations 5.3 (fall 1997): 425–561; and Leonard N. Neufeldt, “The Science of Power: Emerson’s

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Views on Science and Technology in America,” Journal of the History of Ideas 38.2 (April–June 1977): 329–344. 35. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman et al. 16 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960–1982) 8:397. 36. Eric Wilson, Emerson’s Sublime Science (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999) 11. Further citations will be given parenthetically. 37. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Poetry and Imagination,” The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 12 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904) 8:64. Further citations to this essay will be to this edition and will be given parenthetically. 38. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Address to the Citizens of Concord on the Fugitive Slave Law” (1851), Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, ed. Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1995) 56, 69. 39. Elizabeth Peabody, “The Word ‘Aesthetic,’ ” Aesthetic Papers (Boston: Peabody, 1849) 1–2. 40. Robert Fanuzzi, Abolition’s Public Sphere (Minneapolis: Univ of Minnesota Press, 2003) 245. Further citations will be given parenthetically. 41. See, in particular, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987) 96–97; Albert E. Stone “Identity and Art in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative,” CLA Journal 17 (1973): 203; Sterling Stuckey, “ ‘Ironic Tenacity’: Frederick Douglass’s Seizure of the Dialectic,” Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990) 36–40; and David Van Leer, “Reading Slavery: The Anxiety of Ethnicity in Douglass’s Narrative,” Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990) 129. 42. Jonathan Culler, “Apostrophe,” The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981) 143–144. Further citations will be given parenthetically. 43. There is, of course, extensive commentary on this passage. See, in particular, Houston A. Baker, Jr., The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980) 35; Robert S. Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Doug lass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1997) 138–139; Wilson J. Moses, “Writing Freely?: Frederick Douglass and the Constraints of Racialized Writing,” Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990) 75; Albert Stone “Identity and Art” 208; David Van Leer, “Reading Slavery” 120. 44. Jeffrey Steele, “Douglass and Sentimental Rhetoric,” Approaches to Teaching Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, ed. James C. Hall (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1999) 68. Steele cites the slave songs scene and Douglass’s meditation on his grandmother along with the Chesapeake soliloquy as examples of Douglass’s sentimental rhetoric. The fact that all three are quoted in My Bondage and My Freedom (the other scene Douglass places in quotations marks is his description of work conditions in Baltimore) suggests Douglass’s continued interest in deploying sentimental rhetoric and his attempt to distance himself from the kind of assimilative identification that plagued sentimentalism. 45. On this self-quotation, see, among others, William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free

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Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1986) 280; Lisa Brawley, “Fugitive Tourist Industry” 115–116; Thomas De Pietro, “Vision and Revision in the Autobiographies of Frederick Douglass,” CLA Journal 26.4 (June 1983): 388; Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993) 91–93; and Priscilla Wald, Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1995) 97–98. 46. David Van Leer, “Reading Slavery” 120. 47. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “On Life” (c. 1815), The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, 10 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926–1930) 6:196. The sentence Culler quotes follows immediately. 48. Homi Bhabha, “The Commitment to Theory,” The Location of Culture (London: Routledge 1994) 24. 49. Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations 118. 50. Frederick Douglass, “The Heroic Slave” (1853), The Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader, ed. William L. Andrews (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996) 132. 51. Frederick Douglass, “Love of God, Love of Man, Love of Country: An Address Delivered in Syracuse, New York, on 24 September 1847,” Frederick Douglass Papers 2:104. In a later address, Douglass makes this connection himself, quoting from another part of this poem (“Give Me Freedom: A Fragment”) in introducing his discussion of Madison Washington; see Frederick Douglass, “Slavery, The Slumbering Volcano: An Address Delivered in New York, New York, on 23 April 1849,” Frederick Douglass Papers 2:152–153. 52. For more on “The Heroic Slave” ’s cross-racial politics, see Maggie Sale, “To Make the Past Useful: Frederick Douglass’ Politics of Solidarity,” Arizona Quarterly 51.3 (autumn 1995): 25–60; for more on the framing narratives, see Eric Sundquist, To Wake the Nations 119. 53. See Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2000) 4. Walt Whitman’s Aesthetic Body Telegraphic

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1. The most extensive commentary comes from Harold Aspiz, Walt Whitman and the Body Beautiful (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1980) and Joseph Beaver, Walt Whitman—Poet of Science (1951; New York: Octagon, 1974). Robert Coskren represents the tendency to read electricity as simply referring to the spiritual nature of materiality—“The ‘body electric’ is the human body in movement, in a motion paralleling the recurrent motion of the universe itself ”; Robert Coskren, “A Reading of Whitman’s ‘I Sing the Body Electric,’ ” Walt Whitman Review 22 (1976): 126. For all of their insights, the most recent extended readings of the poem—in Betsy Erkkila, Whitman: The Political Poet (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989); Christopher Beach, The Politics of Distinction: Whitman and the Discourses of NineteenthCentury America (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1996) 68–72, 177–180; and M. Jimmie Killing worth, Whitman’s Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics, and the Text (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1989) 1–15, 57–61—barely discuss what electricity might mean in the poem.

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2. See Jerusha Hall McCormack, “Domesticating Delphi: Emily Dickinson and the Electro-Magnetic Telegraph,” American Quarterly 55.4 (December 2003): 569– 601; for a reading of Poe’s interest in the telegraph and its impact on his poetics, see Adam Frank, “Valdemar’s Tongue, Poe’s Telegraphy,” ELH 72.3 (fall 2005): 635–662. Although she doesn’t discuss the telegraph itself at any length, Eliza Richards makes a similar metaphorical connection with women poets in Poe’s circle; Eliza Richards, “Lyric Telegraphy: Women Poets, Spiritualist Poetics, and the ‘Phantom Voice’ of Poe,” Yale Journal of Criticism 12.2 (fall 1999): 269–294. 3. My reading of the politics of “I Sing the Body Electric” positions itself somewhere in between Betsy Erkkila’s reading of the poem’s “radical vision” (Whitman: The Political Poet 150) of racial egalitarianism and Christopher Beach’s reading of its racial “ambivalence” (The Politics of Distinction 70). Where Beach attempts to align “I Sing the Body Electric” with Whitman’s journalism and Erkkila attempts to separate them by tracing an historical trajectory of Whitman retreating from the radicalism of the 1855 volume, I focus on the difference in genre and form to explain the apparent gap between the journalism and the poetry. 4. References to Whitman’s poetry will be to Walt Whitman, Poetry and Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1996). Whitman mentions the telegraph twice in the 1855 version of Leaves (“Song of Occupations” line 154; “Great Are the Myths” line 49). Citations will be to the line number of the final version of the poem, unless otherwise noted. 5. This idea of the electric self being particular perceptive or open to experience reappears twice in “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” (1860, 1881) where Whitman speaks of having an “electric self ” (lines 7 and 17). Dates refer to the initial publication and final version of the poem. 6. David Reynolds unconvincingly reads this section as participating in the antionanistic discourse of the era; David Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America; A Cultural Biography (New York: Vintage, 1995) 200. Similar, more clearly positive, electric imagery of desire reappears in the short Calamus poem “O You Whom I Often and Silently Come” (1860, 1867): “As I walk by your side or sit near, or remain in the same room with you, / Little you know the subtle electric fire that for your sake is playing within me” (lines 2–3). 7. See Aspiz, Walt Whitman and the Body Beautiful 144. 8. William Swinton, Rambles Among Words: Their Poetry, History and Wisdom (New York: Scribner’s 1859) 21. C. Carroll Hollis argues that “Whitman was the ghostwriter of much of Swinton’s first and most popular book”; C. Carroll Hollis, “Whitman and William Swinton: A Co-operative Friendship,” American Literature 30.4 (Jan. 1959): 425. 9. See Harold Aspiz, “The Body Electric,” Walt Whitman and the Body Beautiful 143–179, for a full discussion of the influence of spiritualist conceptions of electricity on Whitman. 10. These lines echo those found in “The Sleepers” (1855), where the unconscious, seemingly disembodied experience of dreaming and the only-slightly conscious but intensely physical experience of sex allow the poet to unite with the world at night—“They flow hand in hand over the whole earth from east to west as they lie unclothed ;/ The Asiatic and African are hand in hand. . . . the European and  

 



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American are hand in hand” (lines 180–181). In the postbellum poems, the telegraph more explicitly begins to figure a “flow” of electricity uniting all of these people together. 11. Walt Whitman, “The Moral Effect of the Cable” (20 August 1858), I Sit and Look Out: Editorials from the Brooklyn Daily Times, ed. Emory Holloway and Vernolian Schwarz (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1932) 159–160. 12. On Anglo-Saxonism, see Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1981). 13. Walt Whitman, “Prohibition of Colored Persons” (6 May 1858), I Sit and Look Out 90. 14. Dana Phillips, “Nineteenth-Century Racial Thought and Whitman’s ‘Democratic Ethnology of the Future,’ ” Nineteenth-Century Literature 49.3 (December 1994): 289–320. Further citations will appear parenthetically. 15. See Wai Chee Dimock, “Whitman, Syntax, and Political Theory,” Breaking Bounds: Whitman and American Cultural Studies, ed. Betsy Erkkila and Jay Grossman (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996) 62–79, and Philip Fisher, “Democratic Social Space: Whitman, Melville, and the Promise of American Transparency,” Representations 24 (fall 1988): 60–101. 16. [Anon.], “An Evening with the Telegraph-Wires,” The Atlantic Monthly 2 (September 1858): 491. 17. For Whitman’s quotation of the lines from Midsummer’s Night Dream, see Walt Whitman, “The Press—Its Future” (31 July 1858), I Sit and Look Out 39. 18. [Anon.] “The Girdle Round the Earth,” Hours at Home 1 (August 1865): 361, 368. 19. Joseph Beaver argues that this line is “clearly derived from electricity and magnetism”; Joseph Beaver, Walt Whitman—Poet of Science 88. 20. Helen Vendler, Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashberry (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2005) 44. 21. Betsy Erkkila, Whitman: The Political Poet 91. 22. Tenney Nathanson, Whitman’s Presence: Body, Voice, and Writing in Leaves of Grass (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1992) 14. 23. Marcus Paul Bullock, Romanticism and Marxism: The Philosophical Development of Literary Theory and Literary History in Walter Benjamin and Friedrich Schlegel (New York: Peter Lang, 1987) 5. 24. For more on the rhetorical questions of “I Sing the Body Electric,” see Betsy Erkkila, Whitman: The Political Poet 125, and Harold J. Waskow, Whitman: Explorations in Form (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1966) 84–85. 25. See Tenney Nathanson, Whitman’s Presence 288–289. 26. See Vivian R. Pollak, “ ‘In Loftiest Spheres’: Whitman’s Visionary Feminism,” Breaking Bounds: Whitman and American Cultural Studies, ed. Betsy Erkkila and Jay Grossman (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996) 92–111. 27. Michael Moon, Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in Leaves of Grass (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991) 36–47. My reading of Leaves of Grass and of its implications for embodied identity parallels Moon’s emphasis on fluidity. 28. As Pollak puts it elsewhere, Whitman “associated ‘the artist race’ with his

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own feminization”; Vivian R. Pollak, The Erotic Whitman (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2000) xvi. For reconstructions of the notion that spiritual electricity was distinctly feminine, see Jeffrey Sconce, “Mediums and Media,” Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2000) 21–58, and Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: Beacon Press,1989). 29. Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), The Portable Margaret Fuller, ed. Mary Kelley (New York: Penguin, 1994) 285, 321, 285. Further citations will be given parenthetically. 30. This paragraph derives from my “ ‘The Poetical Side of Existence’: Margaret Fuller, Early Mass Culture, and Aesthetic Transcendence,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 47.1 (2001): 59–87. 31. Other poems from the Children of Adam section (of which “I Sing” would become a part in the 1860 edition) also suggest electricity as a figure for sexual desire. In the first poem of the section, “To the Garden the World,” Whitman repeats the sexually suggestive word “quivering” in describing the “fire” of desire which passes through the body—“Amorous, mature, all beautiful to me, all wondrous, / My limbs and the quivering fire that ever plays through them, for reasons, most wondrous” (lines 6–7). Similarly, in “One Hour to Madness and Joy,” Whitman parallels sexual desire with the fury and intensity of lightning: “One hour to madness and joy! O furious! O confine me not! / (What is this that frees me so in storms? / What do my shouts amid lightnings and raging winds mean?)” (lines 1–3). 32. Walt Whitman, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, ed. Edward F. Grier, 2 parts (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1984) 1: 67. See Martin Klammer, Whitman, Slavery, and the Emergence of Leaves of Grass (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1993); Ed Folsom, “Lucifer and Ethiopia: Whitman, Race, and Poetics Before the Civil War and After,” A Historical Guide to Walt Whitman, ed. David S. Reynolds (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000) 45–95; Karen Sánchez-Eppler, “To Stand Between: Walt Whitman’s Poetics of Merger and Embodiment,” Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1993) 50–82, specifically 54–57. 33. Karen Sánchez-Eppler, “To Stand Between” 55–56. 34. As Mitchell Breitweiser has described, throughout Leaves of Grass there are two Walt Whitmans, the poetic Whitman able to transcend time and distance and individual identity and the actual Whitman who, like us all, is confined to his limited body; see Mitchel Breitweiser, “Who Speaks in Whitman’s Poems?” The American Renaissance: New Dimensions, ed. Harry R. Garvin (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1983) 121–143. 35. Betsy Erkkila, Whitman: The Political Poet 125 36. Michael Moon, Disseminating Whitman 81; Christopher Beach, Politics of Distinction 70. See also Betsy Erkkila, Whitman: The Political Poet 125–127; for a reading of the woman at auction as a prostitute, see M. Jimmie Killingsworth, Whitman’s Poetry of the Body 10. 37. Ed Folsom, “Lucifer and Ethiopia” 47. 38. Sacvan Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge, 1993) 226–227. For an overview of the

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Conclusion







1. Quoted in Edwin Gabler, The American Telegrapher: A Social History, 1860– 1900 (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1988) 67. Gabler’s history provides the basis for much of my overview here. 2. See, respectively, N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2005) 62–71; Richard Menke, “Telegraphic Realism: Henry James’s In the Cage,” PMLA 115.5 (October 2000): 975–990; Laura Otis, “Two Telegraphers Unhappy with Their Nerves,” Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2001) 147–179; Jay Clayton, “The Voice in the Machine: Hazlitt, Hardy, James,” Language Machines: Technologies of Literary and Cultural Production, ed. Jeffrey Masten, Peter Stallybrass, and Nancy Vickers (New York: Routledge, 1997) 209–232; Jennifer Wicke, “Henry James’s Second Wave” Henry James Review 10.2 (spring 1989): 146–151. 3. See Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1990) for James’s complex relationship to aestheticism, and Mark McGurl, The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction After Henry James (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2001) and Dorothy J. Hale, Social Formalism: The Novel in Theory from Henry James to the Present (Stan-

t­







specific political contexts of Whittier’s poems, see Osborn T. Smallwood, “The Historical Significance of Whittier’s Anti-Slavery Poems as Reflected by Their Political and Social Background,” Journal of Negro History 35.2 (April 1950): 150–173. 39. John Greenleaf Whittier, The Writings of John Greenleaf Whittier, 7 vols. (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1888) 2: 151, 3: 195, 3: 198–199, 3: 195. See James L. Huston, “Abolitionists, Political Economists, and Capitalism,” Journal of the Early Republic 20.3 (autumn 2000): 487–521 on Whittier’s use of Adam Smith in his antislavery prose and David Grant, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Triumph of Republican Rhetoric,” The New England Quarterly 71.3 (September 1998): 429–448 on Whittier’s relationship to Republican (party) ideology. 40. Karen Sánchez-Eppler, “To Stand Between” 56. 41. See Susan Stewart’s recent work on poetics for a more detailed, general accoun of what I am gesturing to here. As she puts it, “As metered language, language that retains and projects the force of individual sense experience and yet reaches toward intersubjective meaning, poetry sustains and transforms the threshold between individual and social existence. . . . Poetic form made of language relies on rhythm and musical effects that are known with our entire bodies, carried forward by poets working out of tradition and carried over by listeners receiving the work”; Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2002) 2, 12. 42. See M. Jimmie Killingsworth, Whitman’s Poetry of the Body 58. See also Christopher Beach, Politics of Distinction 174–180, who emphasizes Whitman’s coinage of terms to escape poetic traditions of the body, and Tenney Nathanson, Whitman’s Presence 288–289, who agrees that the catalogue fails to capture the reality of the body, but reads Whitman as failing to address, rather than acknowledging, the inadequacies of language and its power to construct reality.

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Notes to Conclusion ford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1998) for accounts of the centrality of James to formal defenses of the novel in the twentieth century. 4. Henry James, The Novels and Tales of Henry James, New York edition, vol. XI (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908) xxi. All future references to In the Cage and the preface will be to this edition. 5. Henry James, “The Art of Fiction” (1884, 1888), The Art of Criticism: Henry James and the Theory and the Practice of Fiction, ed. William Veeder and Susan M. Griffin (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986) 172. Further citations will appear parenthetically. 6. Herbert Marcuse, “The Affirmative Character of Culture,” Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (London: Free Association Books, 1988) 95. 7. In this way, it seems to reflect Raymond Williams’s characterization of the transition from romanticism, as a literary/cultural mode critical of the sociopolitical world, to modernism, whose solipsistic emphasis on form and on art itself as a distinct realm negates the real world; see, in particular, Culture and Society: 1780–1950 (1958; New York: Harper and Row, 1966) 30–48. 8. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1991) 411. 9. This view shares some ground with Tim Armstrong’s account of how electricity, at the turn of the century, largely came to represent the containment of power by state apparatuses. Armstrong also emphasizes the continuing possibilities of electricity, as I do below. See Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998). See also Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988). 10. Citations will be given parenthetically and refer to Ella Cheever Thayer, Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes (New York: G. W. Carleton, 1879). 11. See Katherine Stubbs, “Telegraphy’s Corporeal Fictions,” New Media, 1740– 1915, ed. Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003) 91–111. 12. Mark Goble, “Wired Love: Pleasure at a Distance in Henry James and Others,” ELH 74.2 (summer 2007): 409. 13. And in this respect it offers a nice parallel to the history of late-nineteenth, early-twentieth century popular electrical medicine reconstructed by Carolyn Thomas de la Peña, The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American (New York: New York Univ. Press, 2003).

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235

Index

Abernethy, John, 69–70, 72 Adorno, Theodor, 74 Aesthetic experience, defining, 2–13, 16–17 Aesthetics: and aestheticism, 9, 16, 78, 80, 118–119, 182–183; and aestheticization, 2, 9, 178; and capitalism, 29–30, 85–86, 108; and class, 2, 11–12, 33, 37–38; defining 1, 4, 191n5; and the body, 8, 9, 10, 15–16, 22, 29–30, 75, 127; and electricity, 6–7, 12,14–16, 29, 138, 172; history of term in United States, 2–4; and idealism, 3, 8–9, 22, 32, 67, 82; ideological critique of, 1–2, 8–9, 12, 14, 17, 32–33; and materiality, 2, 8, 9–10, 17; as politically conservative, 1–2, 5, 33, 159, 184, 188; as politically liberatory, 11–12, 15, 97, 131–132, 140; politics of, as indeterminate, 11–12, 15, 17, 76–77, 112–114, 137–138; as pre-political, 17, 29–30, 76–77, 152, 173, 184, 188; and race, 112, 132–133, 135–137, 139–142, 159, 166–174; and sentimentalism 118–119; subjective universality 5, 10–11, 12, 15, 21, 33; and technology, 14–15, 60–66, 86; universality 2, 4, 6, 14 Alison, Archibald, 44 Althusser, Louis, 9

American Whig Review, 3, 83–84 Anti-slavery politics, 15, 29, 111–112, 115, 122, 130, 132, 139–140, 166–167 Armstrong, Isobel, 9 Armstrong, Tim, 187 Arnold, Matthew, 22, 62–63, 104, 112, 127 Aspiz, Harold, 147 Associated Press, 53, 90 Associationism, 24–27, 30, 56, 60, 62, 149, 194n7, 200n71; and Burke, 36–39; and Byron, 70–72; and Cole­ ridge, 20, 30, 38–39; Idealist associationism, 38–39, 49, 71, 117; and Percy Shelley, 72–75; in the United States, 42–45 Aurora borealis, 26–28, 31 Babbage, Charles, 51 Bancroft, George, 69 Baumgarten, Alexander, 2–3, 113, 134 Benjamin, Walter, 94, 97–99, 110, 187 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 81, 170 Bhabha, Homi, 138 Bloch, Ernst, 34 Blondheim, Menahem, 53, 90–91 Bourdieu, Pierre, 192n9 Brawley, Lisa, 123 Briggs, Charles F., and Augustus Maverick, 50

Index Coxe, Tench, 42 Culler, Jonathan, 134, 136–137 Currency, and electricity, 28, 30, 37 Czitrom, Daniel, 46

Brownson, Orestes, 68–69 Buck-Morss, Susan, 97–98 Buell, Lawrence, 43 Bullock, Marcus, 157 Burke, Edmund, 21, 33–38 Lord Byron, George Gordon, 32, 65, 79, 81, 85, 96, 107, 114; aestheticism, 118–119; Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 45, 70–72, 96, 117, 139; and electrical imagery, 69–72; influence on American writers, 45, 68–69 Cameron, Sharon, 126–127 Camfield, Gregg, 116 Campbell, Colin, 30 Capitalism, 7, 13, 15–16, 20–21, 28, 42–43, 102–103, 110, 184, 187; and aesthetics, 29–30, 85–86, 108; and anti-slavery politics, 170; and art as commodity, 47, 49; and language, 37, 39–40; and telegraphy, 52–53, 60–61, 64, 66, 78–79, 85–86, 89–91, 108, 153; and sympathy, 29, 108 Carey, James W., 50, 52–53, 82–83, 85 Carlyle, Thomas, 19, 47, 62, 77 Chambers, Robert, 84 Channing, William F., 54 Christensen, Jerome, 38 Chytry, Josef, 34 Civil society, 11, 80 Class: and aesthetics, 2, 11–12, 33, 37–38; and Melville, 102–103, 125; and tele graphy, 82–83, 86, 183–184 Coale, Samuel 80 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 13–14, 20–22, 33, 44, 46, 60, 62, 75, 131, 155, 181; and American romanticism, 67–68, 128–129; and associationism, 24, 30– 31, 38–39, 45, 71; and Burke, 35–36, 38; and clerisy, 38, 47, 49, 59; and electrical imagery, 26–27, 30–32, 73; idealism of, 31, 39–40, 43, 65, 67, 70, 75; on political revolution, 26–27, 30–32, 34–35; republicanism, 34 Cooper, James Fenimore, 43

Darwin, Erasmus, 69, 72, 74 Davy, Humphry, 20, 27 De la Peña, Carolyn, 187 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, 102–104 De Man, Paul, 8–9, 73, 136 Delbourgo, James, 25–26, 201n82 Dewey, John, 208n61 Dickinson, Emily, 14 Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock, 118 Dimock, Wai Chee, 151, 193n23 Doran, Barbara Giusti, 23 Douglass, Frederick 15, 111–115, 120–124, 132–142, 144, 168, 178, 183; and aesthetics, 132–133, 135–137, 139–142; and electrical imagery, 111–112, 120–124, 136–139; slave songs, 133–134; techno-utopianism, 120–124. Works: “The Heroic Slave,” 138–142; My Bondage and My Freedom, 111, 123, 133, 135–136; Narrative of Frederick Douglass, 111–112, 123, 133–136 DuBois-Reymond, Emile, 98

­

238

Eagleton, Terry, 8–10, 33, 37 Edison, Thomas, 91, 163 Electrical science, 6, 12–13, 22–26 Electricity: and aesthetics, 6–7, 10, 12, 14–16, 29, 138, 172; and capitalism, 7, 80, 110; competing understandings of, 6, 13, 22–26; and divinity, 25, 46, 58, 170–173; and emotion, 29, 116, 120, 136; as feminine, 51, 161–163; and the fluidity of language, 95, 100–101, 129, 143, 146, 152, 158–159; and gender, 159–165; as general equivalent, 28; and the human body, 29, 48, 54–56, 70, 78, 87, 97–98, 113, 116, 143–148, 158–159, 169, 176; and imagination, 7, 39, 71–72, 76,



l­

y­

84–85, 126, 135; as immaterial, 7, 25, 31, 123, 143, 148, 181; and materiality, 74, 143; metaphors of, 5–6, 13, 26, 70–72, 83–84, 87, 103–104 , 111–116, 120–121, 124–127, 170–171, 178; metaphors of, rooted in material under standings, 7, 142, 146–147; metaphors of, derived from telegraphy, 61, 147, 154, 163–164, 169, 171, 176, 178, 181; and poetry, 120–121, 133, 144–145, 155, 161–162, 166–167, 176; of nervous system, 6–7, 14–15, 23– 24, 55 –56, 72, 147–148; and politics, 26–28, 31, 115–116, 122, 124–125, 133, 139–141; as sexual, 95–96, 145–147, 150, 153, 159–161; and telegraphy 6–7, 13, 15; and transparency, 114, 117, 153; as universal language, 55–57, 61. See also Lightning; Telegraphy Eliot, T. S., 11, 67 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 13, 15, 67, 113, 133, 146, 178, 182; and anti-slavery politics, 130–133; and electrical imager , 5, 125–126, 128–132; and idea ism 113, 127, 129; and technology, 127–132 Engell, James, 24 Engels, Friedrich, 36, 85, 101–110 The Enlightenment, 29, 73, 75–76, 89–90, 113, 120, 123, 201n82 Erkkila, Betsy, 155, 167 Everett, Alexander H., 68 Fanuzzi, Robert, 132 Fara, Patricia, 25, 28 Faraday, Michael, 22–23, 102, 128, 130 Fisher, Philip, 151 Fitzhugh, George, 54 Fluck, Winfried, 3 Folsom, Ed, 166, 168 Frank, Adam, 93 Franklin, Benjamin, 20, 21, 27–28, 40–41, 62, 64, 73–74 Fuller, Margaret, 3, 6, 13, 83, 144, 161–163 Furniss, Tom, 37

­

Index Gabler, Edwin, 91 Gale, T., 194n3 Galvani, Luigi, 22–23, 25, 48 Garrison, William Lloyd, 135 Gender, 11, 51, 90, 144, 151, 159–165, 175, 186 Gilroy, Paul, 142 Goble, Mark, 186 Godwin, William, 20, 26–27, 31, 74 von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 106, 118, 128 Goux, Jean-Joseph, 37, 39 Graff, Gerald, 81 Guillory, John, 192n9 Habermas, Jürgen, 76, 113 Hamilton, Alexander, 42 Hamilton, Paul, 76 Hartley, David, 20, 24–27, 30–31 Haskell, Thomas, 29 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 15, 66–67, 83, 103–104, 106, 170; and aestheticism, 78, 80–81, 100–101, 110; and mesmerism, 78–82, 89; and technology, 78–79, 83, 89, 106, 110 Hedge, Frederic Henry, 68 Hegel, G. W. F., 2, 8 Helmholtz, Hermann, 98 Hendler, Glenn, 116 Hess, Jonathan, 113 Hitchcock, Edward, 51, 179 Hobbes, Thomas, 24 Hogg, Thomas Jefferson, 77 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 54 Humanism, 12, 26, 36, 60, 65, 75, 114, 119 Hutcheson, Frances, 36 Idealism, 39, 49, 66, 75, 82, 115–116; and aesthetics 3, 8–9, 82; and associationism, 44; and Coleridgean romanticism, 14, 21–22, 32, 35, 40, 43, 47, 62, 65–72 passim, 128, 181; and Emerson, 112–113, 115–116, 127–129 James, Henry, 16, 178–187 Jameson, Fredric, 184–185

239

240

Index Jefferson, Thomas, 112 Johnson, Cave, 49 Jones, Alexander, 50 Lord Kames, Henry Home, 44 Kant, Immanuel, 2, 4–5, 8, 24, 33, 63, 74, 86, 112–113 Kasson, John, 64 Kaufman, Robert, 2, 4, 74, 76 Killingsworth, M. Jimmie, 175 Kinnersley, Ebenezer, 40 Kitson, Peter, 27, 34 Klammer, Martin, 166 Kracauer, Siegfried, 187 Kroeber, Karl, 75 Language: and capitalism 37, 39–40, 89; and electricity, 55–57, 73–75, 129, 144–145, 152; fluidity of, 93, 102–103, 142, 146, 155–159, 163, 174–175; limits of, 120, 154–156, 169; as material, 76, 82, 136, 142, 163–164; and the sublime, 36–38; and telegraphy, 55–57, 65, 89; as transparent, 55–56, 61, 89–90, 121, 155 Lawrence, William, 69–70, 72 Lightning, as metaphor of thought, 70, 72–76 passim, 95–96, 100–101, 105–106, 120–122, 124, 138–139, 141, 148–149 Lindley, Lester, 93 Lloyd, David, 112 Locke, John, 24, 35–36 Marcuse, Herbert, 34, 183 Marx, Karl, 28, 34, 36, 53, 74, 82, 85, 101–102 Marx, Leo, 65 Marxism, 8, 10, 76, 184 Martin, Terence, 44 Materialism, 8–10, 64–66; defining, problems of, 9; mechanical materialism, 24–25, 74; and romanticism, 69–75; and sentimentalism,116 Materiality: of aesthetics, 2, 8–10, 17;

different kinds of, 8–10; of electricity, 5–7, 74, 143; of language, 76, 82, 136, 142, 163–164; of mind, 26, 84–85, 98–99, 129, 137, 149, 154, 179; of self, 109, 127–131, 149, 176 Matthiessen, F. O., 67 McGann, Jerome, 32 Melville, Herman, 13, 66–67, 109, 114, 131, 133, 135, 169, 182; and electrical imagery, 77–78, 86–89, 94–96, 99–101, 103–1o4, 107–108; and indeterminacy, 96–97, 106–7. Works: Moby-Dick, 77–78, 87; Pierre, 15, 86, 88–89, 94–97, 99–107, 124, 132 Menke, Richard, 181 Mesmer, Franz Anton, 25 Mesmerism, 49–50, 69, 78–81, 89, 139 Miller, Perry, 68 Modernism, 184, 187 Moon, Michael, 161, 167 Moore, J. W., 57–58 Morse Code, 56, 90–93, 98–99, 156, 177, 185–186 Morse, Jedediah, 40, 42 Morse, Samuel F. B., 14, 20–22, 40, 64–65, 117; art criticism 43–45, 47– 49; electrical metaphors, 45, 48–49, 56, 59, 62, 64; and language, 56, 89– 90; National Academy of Design, 41, 43 47–48; origins of telegraph, 45–47; racism, 59–60 Morus, Iwan, 23 Nathanson, Tenney, 156, 158 Naturphilosophie, 22, 32, 45, 73 Neal, John, 86 Neoclassicisim, 41–44, 46, 68 Nervous system: as electric, 6–7, 14–15, 23–24, 55–56, 72, 147–148; and materialized mind, 26, 98–99, 129, 154, 179; telegraph, analogous to, 54–56, 88, 91, 97–99, 147, 154, 178–179 New Criticism, 2–3 Newton, Isaac, 20, 23–24 Newtonian physics, 7, 23–26, 28, 42, 73 Noble, Marianne, 116



Index

North American Review, 43, 68, 84, 199n62 Norton, Andrews, 68

62, 63; and capitalism, 20, 30–32, 39, 81; and electricity, 5, 13, 26, 39, 49, 69–70, 72–73, 152; and idealism, 14, 21–22, 32, 35, 47, 60, 62, 72, 111, 128, 181; and materialism, 63, 65, 69; and neoclassicism, 43–44, 60; and science/technology, 19–20, 22, 108–110, 128; in the United States, 42–45, 49, 67–69, 81, 85. See also specific authors Rowe, John Carlos, 113, 127 Rush, Benjamin, 42, 62

Oersted, Hans Christian, 22 Otis, Laura, 98–99 Parker, Henry, 66, 83–86 Peabody, Elizabeth, 1, 3–4 Peirce, Charles, 93 Phillips, Dana, 151, 155, 159 Pocock, J. G. A., 34–36 Poe, Edgar Allan, 6, 67, 84 Pollak, Vivian, 159–160 Priestley, Joseph, 20, 25–27, 39–40, 72, 74, 120 Public Sphere, 76, 113, 132. See also Civil Society

Race 15; and aesthetics, 112, 132–133, 135–137, 139–142, 159, 166–174; and sentimentalism, 118–120; and telegra phy, 51–52, 57–60, 120–125. See also Racism Rachman, Stephen, 95 Racism, 57–60, 140, 144, 150–151, 153 Railroads, 14, 64, 80, 93, 107–108, 110, 122–124, 128, 130–131 Rancière, Jacques, 29–30 Rankin, Robert, 46 Realism, 178, 181, 184 Redfield, Marc, 73, 76 Reed, Edward, 74 Reid, James D., 177 Relativity, Theory of, 23 Republicanism, 14, 20, 27, 34–35, 40– 47 passim, 89–90, 197n38 Richardson, Alan, 75 Rigal, Laura, 42 Romanticism: and aesthetics, 2–3, 20, 30, 114, 143; American and British, relationship between, 13–14, 42–45, 67–70, 81, 85–86, 128–129; and American techno-utopianism,

­

Quirk, John, 52–53

Sánchez-Eppler, Karen, 166, 172–173 Schiller, Friedrich, 2, 22, 33–34, 63, 68, 81, 103–104, 112, 127 Schlegel, Friedrich, 73, 76, 97, 157 Sconce, Jeffrey, 51 Semaphore, 46 Sentimentalism: and aesthetics, 118– 120; and anti-slavery politics, 115, 117–118, 121, 132, 135–136, 140; and Christianity, 116–117, 170–173; and electrical imagery, 114–120 passim; and transparency 114, 116–117, 121 Shelley, Mary, 65, 69 Shelley, Percy, 14–15, 32, 65–66, 68, 107, 114, 178, 182`and American romanticism, 85, 96; and electrical imagery, 72–75, 133; and indeterminacy, 73– 74, 131; and materialism, 72, 74–76, 137; and politics of poetry, 76–77 Silverman, Kenneth, 59 Simpson, Lewis, 40 Slavery 15, 51–52, 59–60, 77, 111–124, 130–142, 144, 159, 166–172 Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 191n2 Southey, Robert, 26, 68 Spiritualism 14, 21, 65–66, 69, 96, 108, 111, 115, 148, 158–159, 179, 181; and anti-slavery politics, 51–52; and feminism 51, 161; and techno-utopianism, 55, 60, 62–63, 77–79, 89, 150; and telegraphy, 50–53, 82–86, 108, 152–153 Spivak, Gayatri, 112 Steele, Jeffrey, 135

241

242

Index Stewart, Dugald, 44 Stewart, Susan, 217n41 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 15, 114–121, 124, 132, 137, 140, 171 Stubbs, Katherine, 186 Subjective universality, 5, 11–12, 33, 86, 187–188 Sundquist, Eric, 138 Swinton, William, 147

152–153; transatlantic cable, 121, 150; women workers in, 177–178; workplace discipline in, 177–178 Thayer, Ella Cheever, 92–93, 185–187 Thoreau, Henry David, 15, 64–67, 107–110, 114, 125, 129, 131 Transcendentalism, 2–3, 12–14, 64–69, 84, 107, 110, 126–130, 161 Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques, 27

Taste, as objective standard, 48–49, 62–63, 77, 81, 104, 120 Tatar, Maria, 32 Taylor, James W., 14, 21–22, 60–63, 64, 77, 81, 104, 127, 131, 155 Techno-utopianism, 14, 21, 64–66, 82–83, 86, 89, 100, 185, 187; and aesthetics, 60–63; and anti-slavery politics, 111–112, 114, 119–124, 136, 142, 170–171; and humanity as unified body, 53–55, 77–79, 98; and language, 55–57, 89; and racism, 57–60, 149–152, 154; and spiritualism, 55, 60, 62–63, 77–79, 89, 150 Telegraphy, 145, 176–187; and aesthetics, 14–15, 64–66, 86; and capitalism, 52–53, 60–61, 78–79, 85–86, 89–91, 101–102, 153; competing views of, 64–66, and disembodiment, 45–46, 50- 52, 55, 108, 152–153; and electricity, 6–7, 13, 15; and gender, 51, 186; and the human body, 15, 48–49, 65, 79, 87, 94, 136, 145, 163–165; and imagination, 179–182; and imperialism, 149–150, 153–154; invention of, 45–47; and language, 55–58, 65, 88; and law, 93; and the nervous system, 54–56, 88, 91–92, 97–99, 147, 154, 178–179; and racism, 57–60; and the railroad, 107–108, 122–123; and romanticism, 20, 64–66; and spiritualism, 49–53, 77, 79, 82–86, 108,

U. S. Congress, 49 Van Leer, David, 136 Vendler, Helen, 155 Vitalism, 69–70, 87, 181 Volta, Allessandro, 22 Warner, Michael, 41 Wayland, H. L., 121–122 Western Union, 52, 91, 177 Wheatley, Phillis, 112 Whitman, Walt, 5–6, 15–16, 142, 143–161, 163–176, 178; and the body 143–144, 146–147, 149, 153–154, 157–158, 160, 163, 172–175; fragmentariness 157–158; and gender, 159–161, 163–165; poetic form and language, 155–158, 172–173; and racism, 144, 150–152; use of rhetorical questions, 157–158; and sex, 145–147, 150, 153–154, 159–161, 164–165; and slavery, 159, 166–173; and telegraphy, 144–145, 147, 149–151, 153–154, 163–165, 171 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 166, 170–173 Williams, Raymond, 9, 10, 30 Wilson, Eric, 128–129 Wimsatt, W. K., and Monroe Beardsley, 3 Wordsworth, William, 24, 32, 39, 6769